Esoteric Lacan 9781786609700, 9781786609717, 1786609703

Citation preview

E S O T E R I C L A C A N

Reframing Continental Philosophy of Religion Series Editors Steven Shakespeare, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Liverpool Hope University Duane Williams, Senior Lecturer, Liverpool Hope University Reframing Continental Philosophy of Religion aims to revitalise continental philosophy of religion. It challenges the standard Western Christian framework which has dominated philosophy of religion in the academy. It provides a platform for voices, theories and traditions which have been suppressed or marginalised by that framework, and offers genuinely new and constructive openings in the field. It is motivated by an imperative to liberate original thinking about religion from the legacy of Empire. The series is experimental, creative, subversive and risky. It promotes work which brings continental philosophy of religion into fruitful dialogue with postcolonial theory; Islamic studies; heretical, esoteric or mystical or otherwise marginalised Western traditions; non-Western philosophical traditions; and critical studies of power, race, gender and sexuality. Taking seriously the fertility of European philosophy, it does not, however, merely subject ‘other’ discourses to a European gaze, but allows different discourses to interact and mutate one another on a mutual basis. Reframing Continental Philosophy of Religion will not leave continental philosophy of religion as it finds it. The series is published in partnership with the Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion at Liverpool Hope University.

Titles in the Series Speculation, Heresy, and Gnosis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion: The Enigmatic Absolute Edited by Joshua Ramey and Matthew S. Haar Farris Simone Weil and Continental Philosophy Edited by A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone The Art of Anatheism Edited by Matthew Clemente and Richard Kearney Theology and Contemporary Continental Philosophy: The Centrality of a Negative Dialectic Colby Dickinson Esoteric Lacan Edited by Philipp Valentini and Mahdi Tourage

E S O T E R I C L A C A N Edited by Philipp Valentini and Mahdi Tourage

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd 6 Tinworth Street, London, SE11 5AL www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Selection and editorial matter © 2020 by Philipp Valentini and Mahdi Tourage Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-970-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-78660-970-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78660-971-7 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Esotericism? 

1

Philipp Valentini and Mahdi Tourage PART I: OCCULTED STRUCTURES OF DESIRE 1 “Solid Hatred Addressed to Being”: Lacan’s Gnostic Uses of Judaism

13 15

Agata Bielik-Robson 2 The Will of the American God: Anti-Blackness, Jouissance-Sacrifice, and the Structuration of das Ding 47 Calvin Warren 3 Lacan and Sufism: Paths for Moving Beyond Pre- and Postmodern Subjectivities

59

Mahdi Tourage 4 Jacques Lacan, Wilfred Bion, and the Inverted Kabbalah

77

Bruce Rosenstock

v

vi

C ontents

PART II: LOGICS OF THE MASTER 5 The Capitalist Exception: Discourse, Sexuation, and Infinity

97 99

John Holland 6 Assassination and Judgement

119

Miroslav Griško 7 The Devil’s Choice: Slavery and the Logic of the Vel141 Jared Sexton and Sora Han PART III: IN NOTHINGNESS WHERE NAMES AND MEANINGS GUSH FORTH

161

8 Experiences of Transcendence in the Borromean Knot

163

Janina Maris Hofer 9 Freedom and Nothingness, between Theodicy and Anthropodicy: Lacan and (Un)Orthodox Perspectives

183

Davor Džalto 10  The Most Mysterious of Effusions: On the Presence of Jacques Lacan in the Work of Benny Lévy

199

Gilles Hanus (Translated by John Holland) 11  Meaning and Emptiness: Re-introducing Ibn ‘Arabī to Late Modern Minds

215

Philipp Valentini Index235 About the Authors

243

INTRODUCTION Esotericism? Philipp Valentini and Mahdi Tourage

Among

the French theorists of the twentieth century, Jacques Lacan seems to be the most interested in taking a critical non-European stance to his own thoughts. Firmly rooted in the writings of Freud and Saussure, he first suggested a theory that would interpret the unconscious as a structure that can be sketched and analysed as a language. However, this only works with certain languages. French, for example, translates sounds into words that are written, while the whole meaning of the sentence is only given retrospectively when the entire sentence has been heard from the start to its end. The subject who speaks the language is disjoined from her material context as well as from her own body.1 Here, the subject belongs to a language with its univocal grammar and multiple assonances that allow the analyst to follow the slip of meanings that occur in the mouth of the patient. The univocity of its grammar seeks to close the multiple meanings that can emerge.2 On 11 January 1977, Lacan taught that: It is, I believe, quite gripping that in what I call the structure of the unconscious, grammar must be eliminated. Logic must not be eliminated, but grammar must be eliminated. In French there is too much grammar. In German there is still more. In English, there is a different one that is in a way implicit. Grammar must be implicit to have its proper weight.3

Lacan’s fine knowledge of the Chinese language and his fascination for the different forms of Japanese Buddhism made him aware of the limits 1

2

PHILIPP VALENTINI AND MAHDI TOURAGE

of an account of the unconscious based on a language such as French, encouraging him to re-examine the fundaments of the subject. In the Chinese language, there are two ways of conveying meaning: either meaning is translated into ideograms and pictograms or spoken sounds are translated into words (as in French). Whereas in French the analyst can only comprehend the patient through the singular reference to the language’s grammar and assonances, in Chinese the patient can refer either to a word that names something or to a reference to an idealised and highly codified meaning of the object described in a set of ideograms and pictograms. The Chinese subject thus escapes the hermeneutical frame of psychoanalysis precisely because she does not belong entirely to only one of these two ways of forging a meaning—that is, meanings that are drawn and meanings that are heard. Lacan told his audience on 12 May 1965: It would be a great mistake to believe that there is the slightest thing to be expected from the Freudian exploration of the unconscious that would in a way rejoin, echo, corroborate what has been produced by these traditions that we qualify, that we label—I detest the term—oriental, of something which is not from the tradition which has elaborated the function of the subject.4

When Lacan looked for an outside-of-psychoanalysis that can be performed and transmitted to other persons, he did not only focus his attention on China, but also Japan. The biographer of Lacan, Elisabeth Roudinesco, reports that Lacan went to Japan in 1963, four years after his philosophical master Alexandre Kojève.5 There, he learned how, in Kojève’s words, the “snobbish” formalism of Japanese civilisation could be subjectively enacted in the End of Times.6 In fact, it can also be argued that the philosophical drive of Lacan’s last years are a development of Kojève’s own insights.7 According to Lacan’s philosophical master, history having ended, human beings would behave according to the rules of politeness or courtesy—that is, a “pure form” opposed to any content. Lacan thus “acquired the habit of indulging in the ceremony of tea.”8 It is precisely this kind of pure formalism that Kojève refers to when he meditates on the formalism of those who live in the End of Times. On the contrary, the part of humanity that would not behave as such would fall into the state of idiotic beasts and perpetuate an “American way of life.”9 Through such formalism, one can see Lacan’s attempt to build an esoteric doctrine of his own. It hints precisely at a worldview in which the subject is a “pure form” without any intentional and historical content. The subject is no more an “I” (we bid farewell to any remnant of German idealism) nor a

I ntroduction

3

surface on which different sets of affects run (we bid farewell to all forms of, revolutionary or liberal, Spinozism), but, in fact, a “pure form” that can be drawn or performed (as in the Tea Ceremony), yet not communicated within the grammar and pace of an articulated spoken discourse that is necessarily moved by the exotericism of desire and sexual differentiation. Pressed by the task to sketch the forms that the subject can take while knotting together the Real (that which is absent from our representations of the world) with the Imaginary (the illusion that all our representations of the world possess the character of a given totality) and the Symbolic (the power to constantly attribute new meanings to the things that populate our representations), Lacan vanished in the last years of his life into the abstract world of mathematical topologies10—that is, attempts to geometrically show how paradoxes and discontinuities emerge in a space that is continuous. If language as such cannot convey what belongs to the abyss—Jakob Böhme’s Ungrund11—of any subjectivity, it is precisely because language is already inside the gaze of the Master. On the contrary, mathematical drawings can show how the “scrap of waste” that is outside the gaze of the Master is the “True Man”: The subject from which we have to begin is the piece which is lacking to a knowledge that is conditioned by ignorance and what is involved in its regard, if it is through it that we have to find man, is always in a position of a scrap of waste (déchet) with respect to his representation. And in this measure one can say that until psychoanalysis, the world was always represented without the true man, without taking account of the place where he is as subject, the place in which there would be no representation, very precisely because the representation would not have a representative in the world.12

Here, the presence of the formula “True Man” may refer either to the secret teachings of Taoism or to the Japanese-inspired teachings of Kojève. If we read it according to the Taoist tradition, then it indicates the one “who can return to that which produced (him) as if he had not yet acquired [physical] form. . . . The True Man is he who has not yet begun to differentiate himself from the Great Unity.”13 Should we read it through a Japanese-inspired Kojève, then it refers to the emptiness of the void that establishes the True Man as the one who receives “the revelation of an emptiness, the presence of the absence of a reality, (that) is something essentially different from the desired thing, something other than a thing, than a static and given real being that stays eternally identical to itself.”14 In both cases, the “True Man”

4

PHILIPP VALENTINI AND MAHDI TOURAGE

constantly eludes the analytical practice of the psychoanalyst herself, as the latter is also stuck inside the grammar and assonances of the language she speaks, a language that is necessarily moved by desire and thus sexual differentiation itself. Recalling a Zen tradition, Lacan taught that to step out of the “infernal business” of jouissance, one should be barked at.15 This would break down the process of thinking and thus bring forth the fundamental emptiness of any subjectivity. In other words, the psychoanalyst already belongs to the domain of (exoteric) representations and not to the (esoteric) nonrepresented point that shapes the forms of our (exoteric) representations. In order to show intuitively how this metaphysical point of non-representation shapes our (linguistically inherited) given representations that are spoken, Lacan needed to stop speaking. He thus started drawing topological forms such as Cross-caps, Möbius strips or Borromean knots on the blackboard. Lacan’s mutism became so intense that in 1978, during his last teaching, he turned from the blackboard back to his audience and became confused. Roudinesco writes: “He spoke of his mistake and then left the room.”16 Lacan’s thoughts on the point of non-representation set into motion a field of investigation that is relatively outside of the strict field of psychoanalysis—it is “esoteric” as it investigates not what is said, but rather that which cannot be said, yet must equally be communicated.17 What we gain from this initial reflection on the presence of an esoteric thinking that is intertwined with Lacan’s exoteric teachings is the following. Lacan’s exoteric problem may be formulated as such: “What is the structure of the language that is constantly reconfigured by the unconscious?” This exoteric question and its investigation, performed by the West European French Doctor inside the walls of prestigious schools of the French Republic, inevitably strengthens the Western Subject, who through the universalisation of its “university discourse,” has required the colonised subject to abide to the same biographical scenario as her colonial masters. In contrast, Lacan’s esoteric question might well be the following: “How does the non-representation that moves the shapes of the subject’s apprehension of the world relate to our (spiritual and political) representations of the world?” It takes the position of the point of non-representation in order to undo the fiction upon which the Western European subject builds its contagious imperialism. In his Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969–1970), Lacan describes the subjectivity of three patients from Togo who had become medical doctors in Paris in the times of colonisation: Very shortly after the last war—I had been born a long time before—I took into analysis three people from the high country of Togo, who had spent their

I ntroduction

5

childhood there. Now, I was not able, in their analysis, to find any trace of tribal practices and beliefs. They had not forgotten them but they only knew them from the point of view of ethnography. It has to be said that everything was designed to separate it from them, given what they were, courageous little doctors who were trying to make their way into the medical hierarchy of France, and do not forget we were still at the colonial stage. What they knew about it then from the point of view of the ethnographer was more or less what you find in the newspapers, but their unconscious functioned according to the good old rules of the Oedipus complex. This was the unconscious that they had been sold along with the laws of colonisation, an exotic, regressive form of the discourse of the Master, in the face of the capitalism described as imperialism. Their unconscious was not that of their childhood memories—you could feel that—but their childhood was retroactively experienced in our fam-il-ial categories—write the word the way I taught you to last year. I defy any analyst to contradict me, even if he were to go out into the field. Not that psychoanalysis is of any use in carrying out an ethnographical enquiry. That having been said, this enquiry has no chance of coinciding with native knowledge, except by referring to the discourse of science. And unfortunately, this enquiry has not the slightest idea of this reference, because it would have to relativise it. When I say that it is not through psychoanalysis that one can get into an ethnographical enquiry, I certainly have the agreement of every ethnographer. I will perhaps have less when I tell them that, to get a little idea of the relativisation of the discourse of science, namely, to have perhaps a small chance of carrying out a correct ethnographical enquiry, it is necessary, I repeat, not to proceed by way of psychoanalysis, but perhaps, if that exists, to be a psychoanalyst.18

One last note on “esotericism” is necessary. This book, Esoteric Lacan, is not an explicit philological search for a supposed esoteric doctrine within Lacan’s work, as, for instance, we find in the work of the Italian philosopher Giovanni Reale on the unsaid teaching of Plato.19 It also does not understand esotericism as it is studied by the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism founded by Wouter Hanegraaff––the historical study of those forms of knowledge that have been discarded by the very foundation of the European Academy in Early Modern times.20 Although such a conception of esotericism does feature in some articles of this book, it never becomes the core of their reflections. Rather, “esotericism” as it is implied here comes closer to Yvon Belaval’s remark on Leo Strauss’s use of the term: “between two contradictory statements, it is the most secretive—the one that is in less conformity with common sense—which reflects the true thought of the author.”21 We firmly believe that focusing on the (spiritual and political) distance between the exoteric Lacan and the esoteric Lacan can breathe new life

6

PHILIPP VALENTINI AND MAHDI TOURAGE

into the fields of philosophy and studies of religion. The authors have thus questioned the stiff, stationary aspects of their own disciplines from the standpoint of this inner twist inside Lacanian teachings. However, this book is not organised around these disciplines. A similar structure would only reify the gaze of the Master that emits the “university discourse” since the eighteenth century. Instead, we have preferred to arrange the contributions around the following interrelated concepts decisive to Lacan’s thought— desire, the Master, and names/meaning. The volume’s first part examines “Occulted Structures of Desire.” Desire is driven by hidden dynamics that either push the subject toward the secret of the Real or to the perpetuation of the order of being. Yet the latter entails that humans live in a shattered creation that is driven by the violence of fratricidal murder. Perhaps only a miracle has the power to bring forth new subjectivities that are not willing to sustain the illusion of being. The opening chapter of this book is written by Agata Bielik-Robson. By following closely the trajectory of the signifier “Judaism” in Lacan’s teachings, she contends that a strong gnostic trend runs through Lacan’s thoughts. This tendency affirms that “being as such may provoke a sense of hatred.” Throughout the years, Lacan identifies “Judaism” with the feminine sexuation that enlivens the sense of nextness between beings in a pure presence of the Real. This is then opposed to the Greek and Christian Aristotelian-Thomistic ontology that the French Doctor qualifies as a masculine sexuation which constantly makes room for the absolute and sovereign exception of the divine hyper-existence, but also blocks all possibilities for any other explanation of reality to occur. The second chapter belongs to Calvin Warren who argues that it is the will of the “White, Western god-man idol” to destroy black bodies without ever fulfilling their complete annihilation. The incessant destruction of black bodies to accomplish this purity is tantamount to a Lacanian drive. Through an analysis of the Trayvon Martin case, this idol as drive is shown to pursue an impossible object until death, such that anti-blackness becomes its own form of worship. Only a miracle can stop the occult jouissance that structures this ontological order of how things should be. The third chapter, by Mahdi Tourage, indicates in what ways Lacan’s thoughts on desire are esoteric. They are precisely esoteric because the conviction that truth can only be half-said (mi-dire) implies that a relation through language to an outside-of-language is possible. Tourage argues, then, that Lacanian theory, once cleared from its Eurocentric gravity, can guide late modern man towards a new understanding of the centrality of

I ntroduction

7

secrecy in the life of pre-modern Muslims such as Rumi, especially when it comes to his frequent use of bawdy tales. Bruce Rosenstock traces the influence of Kabbalistic themes on the psychoanalytical theories and practices of Lacan and Wilfrid Bion. Whereas Bion takes the Kabbalistic framework in a different direction from that of Lacan, unlike the Kabbalists, both were not interested in “repairing” a broken world by harmonising the male and female sides of the Primal Man. Instead, Rosenstock argues, they envisioned psychoanalytic practice as the “inversion” of the Kabbalists’ task: Lacan and Bion did not appeal to a theological conceptualisation of creation from nothing, but formulated desire as a rejoicing in the gap or “rupture” in the infinite, which initiates all finite symbolic systems. The second part of this book is webbed by three contributions on the “Logics of the Master.” Lacan’s reflections on desire were closely related to his concept of the Master, even going to the point to affirm that the Master can never entirely actualise himself, as this would mean the erasure of the body of the slave.22 Accordingly, in Lacan, one finds a much more nuanced account of the concept, as the Master emits a series of semblances and exceptions to his authoritative function so nefarious that they even can be said take on an occult significance: “But, on the whole, as I told you before, hell is something that knows us much too well. It is everyday life. A curious thing, people know it, people say it, people say nothing but that.”23 John Holland’s chapter examines the relation between the discourse of the capitalist and sexuation. Lacan’s fifth discourse assumes a particular importance, for the capitalist discourse is the only form of discourse that falls within the problematic of sexuation. The capitalist, who inhabits the S1, is not the castrated master; the capitalist is rather a particular instantiation of the masculine exception, which forecloses castration and had therefore been excluded from the other discourses. This yields an almost occult bond between the discourse of the capitalist and a concept of infinity. The chapter by Miroslav Griško re-constructs the argument of Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau’s 1976 L’Ange through an eschatologisation of Lacanian ontological incompleteness. Following a path of “Lacanian pessimism” whereby every revolt only brings forth a new Master, Jambet and Lardreau suggest a more insidious Master in the form of a Rebel who is the semblance of a Master: A Master who can be understood as not-all. Yet this not-all of the Master can also bring us before the Outside, which refers to the Angel that puts an end to this “ersatz void” by destroying its vanity in the name of a strong monotheistic God for whom the Angel is a messenger.

8

PHILIPP VALENTINI AND MAHDI TOURAGE

Since its emergence, Afro-pessimism has consistently mobilised Lacanian concepts. Jared Sexton and Sora Han explore this interchange by approaching the logic of the Master through the logic of slavery. Using Lacan’s concept of vel, the authors describe a luciferian false freedom of choice. The late modern black woman/man has a body on which the impasse of any formalisation (aesthetic, political or ontological) is inscribed as the expelled Real of our present representations of what being is. Concluding with a close analysis of Rita Dove’s adaptation of the Oedipus Rex myth, they show how slavery necessarily is deprived of any complete victory over the Master, as the black slave has no access to a Name-of-the-Father of his own. The title of the volume’s final section draws in part from Lacan’s argumentation in favour of creatio ex nihilo:24 “In Nothingness Where Names and Meanings Gush Forth.” When the patient has lost the object of desire (objet petit a) that made it possible for her to, wrongly, believe that she possesses a fixed and closed identity, she is put in front of an empty space inside the form of her subjectivity. She learns to leave the riddle of her existence unresolved: waiting for new names and meanings to rise from the emptiness of her despair. The last chapters of this book may be read as attempts to give some examples by which new names and meanings may rise from this nothingness.25 In her chapter “Experiences of Transcendence in the Borromean Knot,” Janina Maris Hofer focuses on the introduction of the Borromean knot in Lacan’s psychoanalytical thinking. She offers an understanding of Lacan’s concept of the Sinthome by recourse to Thomas Luckmann’s “experiences of transcendence.” Lacan claimed that the human psyche is the Borromean knot, which further added to the ambiguity of the term jouissance. The introduction of Luckmann’s concept into the Borromean knot not only diminishes this ambiguity and clarifies the relation between jouissance and the Sinthome, Hofer argues, but also potentially describes mystical and other supramundane experiences. Davor Džalto examines the possibilities and limitations of the comparative analysis of some of the foundational ideas of Orthodox Christianity, particularly the figure of the Divine Father, and those of Lacan. He starts by relating Lacan’s understanding of the figure of the (Divine) father with the Christian dogma of the Trinity. He develops a comparative reading of Lacan’s “mirror stage” and icons, according to which through the function of the icon the concept of God the Father in Orthodox theology allows for overcoming the “tyranny” of nature through the affirmation of a free existence. The usefulness of Lacan’s “mirror stage” for Džalto’s analysis is in its capacity to create a reality out of some potentiality.

I ntroduction

9

Gilles Hanus starts by pondering whether anecdotal mention of Lacan in Benny Lévy’s work is enough to constitute a presence. Lacan and Lévy’s thought show a similarity in several aspects. Both are concerned with the question of the link between speech and writing. Both take oral teachings seriously, Lacan in his Seminars and Lévy in his four yearly seminars. However, Hanus asserts that these two forms of teaching complete each other even though their oral teachings are considered to be subordinate to their written texts. By reading the thoughts of Lacan and Lévy together, Hanus draws our attention to “the truth of generation,” the very place where paternity and prophecy are concretely knotted together. In his chapter, “Meaning and Emptiness: Introducing Ibn ‘Arabī to Late Modern Minds,” Philipp Valentini begins by arguing that the great Muslim mystic Ibn ‘Arabī was not a Plotinian Neoplatonist and thus must be detached from his modern occultist reception. The same horror of emptiness that characterised Plotinian Neoplatonism is shared by a modern occultism that posits the quest for a Guru to enact the Name-of-the-Father and embody a stable possession of the whole-of-knowledge. With the removal of the Name-of the-Father the belief in Being, too, is removed. However, Lacan never entirely overcomes the need to belong to the Name-of-the-Father. Valentini thus shows how Ibn ‘Arabī’s meditations on meaning and emptiness explore a mysticism of the Law, of which Lacan was aware, but did not fully contemplate. NOTES 1. Clarisse Herrenschmidt, Les trois écritures: Langue, nombre, code (Paris: Gallimard, Paris, 2007), 33–40. 2. Articulated using other Lacanian concepts: Grammar reproduces a masculine power as the symbolic function of the phallus is precisely to establish the fantasy that there is something that a part of humanity does not have and thus requires to be closed. In contrast, the plurivocity of the assonances refers to a feminine power by which the negativity carried by the one-that-does-not-have-the-phallus escapes any attempts of totalisation and enclosement in a fixed meaning. 3. Jacques Lacan, “Seminar 4: Wednesday 11 January 1977,” Final Sessions, trans. Cormac Gallagher. http:​//www​.laca​ninir​eland​.com/​web/w​p-con​tent/​uploa​ ds/20​10/06​/insu​-Semi​nar-X​XIV-F​inal-​Sessi​ons-1​-12-1​976-1​977.p​df, accessed 13 April 2019. 4. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XII: Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (1964– 1965), http:​//www​.laca​ninir​eland​.com/​web/w​p-con​tent/​uploa​ds/20​10/06​/12-C​rucia​ l-pro​blems​-for-​psych​oanal​ysis.​pdf, accessed 4 April 2019.

10

PHILIPP VALENTINI AND MAHDI TOURAGE

5. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 436. Elisabeth Roudinesco also links Lacan’s trip to Japan in 1963 with Kojève’s own travel to Japan four years earlier. See Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan: Esquisse d’une vie, histoire d’un système de pensée (Paris: Fayard, 1993), 459; Elisabeth Roudinesco, Lacan: In Spite of Everything, trans. Greory Elliott (New York: Verso: 2014), 118. 6. Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, 436. 7. Lacan discovered not only Hegel’s dialectics through Kojève but found in him a teacher that taught him how to think. His admiration for Kojève, after the death of the Hegelian philosopher, motivated him to look in his master’s library for Kojève’s annotated copy of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Lacan hoped to finally grasp in these annotations the esoteric doctrine of his master; see La fine della storia: Saggio sul pensiero di Kojève (Milano: Jaca Book, 1998), 81 fn. 20. 8. Roudinesco, Lacan: In Spite of Everything, 119. 9. Kojève, Introduction à la Lecture de Hegel, 436. 10. Ju Fei, “Le Yijing et la topologie de Lacan,” in Lacanchine.com. https://www. lacanchine.com/Ju_01fr.html, accessed 10 April 2019. 11. Dany Robert-Dufour, Lacan et le miroir sophianique de Boehme (Paris: EPL, 1998). 12. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XII, Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (1964– 1965), trans. Cormac Gallagher, emphasis added. http:​//www​.laca​ninir​eland​.com/​ web/w​p-con​tent/​uploa​ds/20​10/06​/12-C​rucia​l-pro​blems​-for-​psych​oanal​ysis.​pdf, accessed 9 April 2019. 13. Charles Le Blanc, Huai-Nan Tzu, Philosophical Synthesis in Early Han Thought (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1985), 114. 14. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1969), 5; see also Thierry Simonelli, “Kojève ou Lacan,” in psychanalyse.lu. http:​//www​.psyc​hanal​yse.l​u/art​icles​/Simo​nelli​Kojev​eLaca​n.htm​, accessed 10 April 2019. Kojève himself received the revelation of his philosophical vocation in a Polish Library in 1917 while contemplating a conversation between a torso of Descartes and a statuette of Buddha; see Alexandre Kojève, Tagebuch eines Philosophen (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2015), chapter “Descartes und Buddha,” dated 18 June 1917 in the city of Warsaw. 15. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX, Encore (1972–1973), trans. Cormac Gallagher, session of 8 May 1973. “What is best in Buddhism is Zen, Zen consists in answering you with a bark, my little friend! That is the best thing when one naturally wants to get out of this infernal business, as Freud said.” http:​//www​.laca​ninir​eland​.com/​ web/w​p-con​tent/​uploa​ds/20​10/06​/Book​-20-E​ncore​.pdf,​ accessed 11 April 2019. I thank warmly Guy Flecher for all these references on Lacan and his relations with China and Japan. 16. Roudinesco, Lacan: In Spite of Everything, 151. 17. If in the different mystical traditions of the Far East, Lacan found the acts by which a process of thought can be stopped, his interest in formulating an esoteric teaching is also clear when we look at his treatment of different Jewish currents. In other words, having individually found the fundamental emptiness

I ntroduction

11

of our subjectivity, we need to go back to language and social interactions. On 16 June 1954, he sets himself the task of finding in Maimonides’s Guide to the Perplexed an “esoteric message,” without ever explicitly finishing this endeavour. After 1962, Lacan approximates always more the mathematical drawing he sketches of the fundamental shapes of the subject with an enquiry into the different Jewish understandings of the Torah. He pushes forward this proximity to the extent that he accepts to be named “Kabbalist” (that suggests the mystical drawings of the tree of life) but not a “Christian Kabbalist” (as he wishes to depart from the idea that God should be entirely identified with the figure of the Father). See Chronologie des références de Lacan à la Cabale. https​://ww​w.idi​xa.ne​t/Pix​a/pag​ixa-0​60604​2351.​ html,​accessed 9 April 2019; Gérard Haddad, Le péché original de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 2007); also see the paper by Agata Bielik-Robson in the present volume. 18. Jacques Lacan, Book XVII, Psychoanalysis Upside Down/The Reverse Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Cormac Gallagher, p. 123. https​://ww​w.val​as.fr​/IMG/​pdf/ T​HE-SE​MINAR​-OF-J​ACQUE​S-LAC​AN-XV​II_l_​enver​s_de_​la_P.​pdf, accessed 9 April 2019. Also quoted by Azeen Khan, “Lacan and Race,” in After Lacan, Literature: Theory and Psychoanalysis, ed. Ankhi Mukherjee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 148–67. For the original French version, see Jacques Lacan, Séminaire XVII, L’envers de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 104. 19. Giovanni Reale, Per una nuova interpretazione di Platone alla luce delle dottrine non scritte (Milano: Bompiani, 2010). 20. Wouter Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 21. Yvon Belaval, “Pour une sociologie de la philosophie,” Critique 9, no. 77 (October 1953): 852–66. 22. See Pierre Naveau, “Le névrosé et le maître,” La cause freudienne 68, no. 1 (2008): 201–209. 23. Jacques Lacan, Seminaire XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre, 1968–1969, ed. Patrick Valas. “Mais, dans l’ensemble, je vous ai fait remarquer que l’enfer ça nous connaît, c’est la vie de tous les jours. Chose curieuse: on le sait, on le dit, on ne dit même que ça.” https​://ww​w.val​as.fr​/IMG/​pdf/s​16_d_​un_au​tre._​.pdf,​ accessed 15 April 2019. Translation is ours. 24. “The idea of creation is cosubstantial with your thought. You cannot think, no one can think except in creationist terms. What you take to be the most familiar model of your thought, namely, evolutionism, is with you, as with all your contemporaries, a form of defense, of clinging to religious ideals.” Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Routledge, 1992), 126, 122. 25. See also: Alain Didier-Weill, Un mystère plus lointain que l’inconscient (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), chapter “L’invention du réel par Lacan, et le ‘oui’ originaire.”

I OCCULTED STRUCTURES OF DESIRE

1 “SOLID HATRED ADDRESSED TO BEING” Lacan’s Gnostic Uses of Judaism Agata Bielik-Robson God has not yet made his exit. . . . On the subject of hatred, we’re so deadened (etouffées) that no one realizes that a hatred, a solid hatred, is addressed to being.1 —Jacques Lacan Concerning the praxis which is analysis, I have sought to articulate how I seek it, and how I lay hold on it. Its truth is mobile, disappointing, slippery. Are you not up to understanding that this is because the praxis of analysis is obliged to advance toward a conquest of the truth via the paths of deception? For the transference is nothing else than the transference into what has no name in the place of the Other.2 —Jacques Lacan

Judaism is Lacan’s constant companion. From the very beginning, it serves him as the paradigm of the severe monotheistic religion of the law, based on the powerful nom-du-père, the Name-of-the-Father, which marks the moment of the violent initiation into the symbolic sphere. For Lacan, especially in his earlier phase, the Judaic tradition is a great code of the theory of subjectification: the emergence of the subject in the unescapable ambivalence of sujet always already subjected to the Other. Judaism emerges also as the leading theme in Seminar X, called L’angoisse (1962–1963), where Lacan conducts a close reading of Theodor Reik’s essay, “The Shofar,” 15

16

A gata B ieli k - R obson

especially in the context of anxiety, which now shows a more ambivalent face: still a sign of the fear of castration, it also bears the repressed remnants of the “filial rebelliousness” in which the Sons killed the Primal Father in order to participate in his forbidden jouissance. The first monotheism, therefore, appears to be torn by a deep ambivalence between the longing after the Father and the simultaneous wish for the death of God. This ambivalence cannot be solved logically—that is, within the symbolic order founded on this very ambivalence, but it can nonetheless be evaded or circumvented: highly aware of the ambiguous yoke of the law, the Jewish messianic tradition, of which Pauline Christianity is an offshoot, develops the notion of love. This is Lacan’s main focus in his twentieth seminar on feminine sexuality, called Encore, where he delves deeply into the Jewish esoteric tradition which for ages has been dreaming about the figure of a Female Messiah. By concentrating on these two crucial seminars—Seminar X: L’angoisse and Seminar XX: Encore—I want to prove Lacan’s lifelong fascination with Judaic themes, both orthodox and esoteric, as well as its inner evolution, which happens to coincide with the transformation of Judaism itself, ultimately aiming at the messianic sublation of law into love. THE GNOSTIC CLINAMEN Yet, the Lacanian love—the “real love”—comes with a twist. Unlike in Saint Paul, for whom love is a pure sentiment of grace, leaving all negativity behind, in Lacan, love is a complex reverse/accomplice of the “solid hatred addressed to being”3—Lacan’s stubborn, undying, and very rarely explored leitmotif which this chapter wants to focus on. It is indeed surprising that we are so deeply deadened and deafened on the subject of hatred in Lacan; something he was constantly declaring for years, yet none of his leading commentators ever wanted to elaborate upon. This silencing is even more surprising than the one which angered Gérard Haddad, who accused the Lacanian acolytes of hushing up his religious interests in Judaism.4 The possible reasons are twofold. On the one hand, Jacques-Alain Miller has chosen to continue a secular and scientist version of the Lacanian teaching, which Haddad attributes to the general spirit of the French laicité. On the other, however, Slavoj Žižek, usually more attuned to Lacan’s religious commitment, has completely neglected—in fact, openly denied—Lacan’s Gnostic leanings, by sporting his own, highly idiosyncratic, concept of Gnosticism as an essentially pagan notion of a “harmonious self,” which he delegates to the Jungian school, radically opposed to Lacanian psychoanalysis.5

“ S olid H atred A ddressed to B eing ”

17

In consequence, Lacan’s emphatic rejection of being as a trap constructed by the symbolic order of the Other acting as the Archon of the fictional world could never get any proper attention. In this chapter, I would like to break this silence and reveal the ample evidence of Lacan’s profound Gnostic sensibility, where Judaism, Kabbalah, Christianity—in all mystical and esoteric variants—serve one goal: to strengthen his fundamentally negative position according to which “being as such may provoke hatred.”6 According to the classic definitions of Gnosticism, delivered by Hans Jonas, Jacob Taubes, Gershom Scholem, and Hans Blumenberg, it is precisely this “solid hatred”—the unflinching constant No thrown against the whole of reality as such, experienced as an oppressive “iron cage”— which makes for a true Gnostic: not some theosophic desire of an ultimate knowledge/gnosis that would magically solve all the mysteries of the universe (rightly denounced by Lacan who always leans towards docta ingnorantia and the “limits of knowledge,” as the subtitle to the Encore seminar announces), but a determined rejection of being as the fundamental critique of creation which, by having produced finite beings destined to misery and death, can only be called a failure or, even stronger, a cosmic catastrophe.7 The Gnostic, therefore, in his absolute hatred for this being, aims at the decreation or the destitution of the ontological order. He wishes to undo the error of created reality by returning to the primordial pleroma of non-being, filled with unperturbed peace and infinite jouissance: to learn this strategy of undoing is the only knowledge/gnosis he wants to possess. By insisting on the solution—however impossible from the perspective of the reality principle (which, in Lacan, is also the pleasure principle of ontological seduction)—the Gnostic differs from a simple nihilist who just negates: There is still a remnant, some residue in the soul (or the body), which resists alienation into the system of the Archon, responsible for the botched creation, and thus can be used in the process of the decreational reversio. To be saved by knowledge means here to be able to escape the snare of being with the help of this uncontaminated remnant—in contrast to the pistic belief that salvation can come only from the outside, offered as a pure gift by God in whom we trust (the Hebrew term for faith/pistis is emunah, indicating primarily a trusting attitude). This distinction however—between the Gnostics and the Pistists, the rebellious being-deniers and the meek followers of the monotheistic God—has never been so clearcut. The “solid hatred addressed to being” is an existential sentiment which can emerge solely within monotheism, because only a strong doctrine of creation can give rise to the creaturely accusation—the first and paradigmatic instance of which is the Book of Job, often adopted and read in the

18

A gata B ieli k - R obson

Gnostic manner as the instance of the “subterranean Bible” led by the Wisdom of the Serpent.8 Lacan has always been on the side of the Serpent, which also determined his perception of Judaism. From the first seminars onward, The Jewish God serves as the mythic example of the Name-of-the-Father which castrates the son, deprives him of his jouissance, throws him into the nets of language and the frustrations of unattainable desire, and—eventually—teaches the subject that “he is dead already”: That in order to enter the symbolic sphere of the paternal law, he had to sacrifice his life. This whole cycle, based on the gradual inversion of the ladder of desire and ending with the inevitable discovery of one’s own death which first marked the subject’s submission to the Other, now however offers itself as his only chance of liberation: The subject says “No!” to this intersubjective game of hunt-the-slipper in which desire makes itself recognized for a moment, only to become lost in a will that is will of the other. Patiently, the subject withdraws his precarious life from the sheeplike conglomerations of the Eros of the symbol in order to affirm it at the last in an unspoken curse. So when we wish to attain in the subject what was before the serial articulations of speech, and what is primordial to the birth of symbols, we find it in death, from which his existence takes all the meaning it has.9

But what is this “unspoken curse”? Usually silent, mute as the dead drive itself, it gets nonetheless articulated in the forbidden moment of jouissance, when the great and liberating joy finally acquires a clear voice and says: “I am in the place from which a voice is heard clamouring: the universe is a defect in the purity of Non-Being.”10 Lacan quotes here Paul Valéry’s poem The Sketch of a Serpent, in which the demonic snake, personifying the force of death in the garden of Paradise, speaks with the voice of yet another Serpent, the Goethean Mephisto: “Then better ‘twere that naught should be/Thus all the elements which ye/Destruction, Sin, or briefly, Evil, name/ As my peculiar element I claim.”11 So, if this still is Judeo-Christianity, it is now interpreted in the radically negative Gnostic terms of the “Bible of the Serpent”: The only redemptive scenario for a human being is to identify with the “spirit who always says no” and “patiently withdraw” from so-called being. The total rebellion against the unfair predicament of existence, arranged by the Jewish Archon called Yahweh, is the only possible defense: by rejecting the false spectacle of the “the sheeplike conglomerations of the Eros” and “the hunt-the-slipper game” of seductive appearances, the subject/slave is finally liberated. The stake here is no longer the

“ S olid H atred A ddressed to B eing ”

19

fullness of life—a paradise forever lost of the original jouissance, never to be regained—but only freedom, which, as all Gnostics believed, can be achieved solely by a perfect death or the absolute refusal to participate in the universe as “the defect in the purity of Non-Being.” In the hands of the Living God, we are all dead already—and the only way to go is via death or, more precisely, through the “tremendous power of the negative”12 hidden in the death drive. This is also a very Jewish configuration, when seen from Saint Paul’s perspective: There is only law, sin/desire, and death—and the only way out of it is to turn death against the fusion of the former two and thus explode the lure of the paternal law into nothingness: “for the path toward death is nothing other than what is called jouissance.”13 This apology of the death drive finding its regressive path back to the original jouissance is not, to repeat, a nihilistic position: the hatred for being, which the destructive Thanatos puts into operation, does not serve some abstract nothingness. It is rather the Freudian Nirvana which happens to coincide with the most intense joy, so powerful that it inevitably breaks the psychic vessel: “jouissance implies precisely the acceptance of death.”14 In the Gnostic tradition, this form of ultimate Joy is associated not with death per se, but with the “alien Life” which accepts death insofar as such Life cannot be lived in the creaturely conditions of time and decay, and which, because of that, can only be recalled on the path of reversio— that is, the path of the death drive that inverts the ladder of desire. Take, for instance, Jacob Taubes’s portrayal of the Mandeans, the Middle-Eastern Gnostic sect which, for Taubes, represent the purest case of the “Jewish Gnosis,” characteristic of the spirit of early Judaism: The general introduction to almost all Mandean writings begins: “In the name of that great, first, alien Life from the exalted worlds of light, that stands above all works.” This introduction contains the key for understanding the apocalyptic and Gnostic approach to life.  .  .  . The common ground is God’s alienation from the world, and the resulting self-alienation experienced by mankind. To be alien means: to come from elsewhere, not to be at home in this world. The here and now is the state of alienation and un-canny. Life spent here is a life of exile and we are subject to the fate of exiles. “Exiled life,” which does not know its way around here, gets lost in this strange world; it wanders aimlessly about. However, it may be that “exiled life” accommodates this all too well, forgetting its actual strangeness; it gets lost in this strange world by succumbing to it. . . . The way back begins with the act of recalling that “life” is a stranger in this world, and of recognizing exile for what it really is. The awakening of homesickness signals the start of our homecoming.

20

A gata B ieli k - R obson

When “a life in exile” perceives that it has erred into the unknown, it is possible not to be led astray again. It recognizes that the world is a constant turning hither and thither in suffering, and that being ruled by necessity means being exposed to suffering. . . . Life is exiled in the world; the homeland of life is beyond the world.15

There is no evidence whatsoever that Lacan knew Taubes, but he knew some Kabbalah,16 of which Scholem used to say that it constitutes a powerful return of Jewish Gnosis in early modernity.17 The unique theme of Jewish Gnosticism, which is of particular interest to us here, is life: The Great Life full of infinite joy, which, due to some cosmic cataclysm, gets lost and exiled into the alien universe of matter, time, and death, where it errs and wanders in the form of a distorted remnant, endangered by self-oblivion, until it becomes recalled and awakened. The life is thus a stranger in the strange world: it is, to use Lacan’s formula, “the other of the Other”—the radical antithesis to the alienating process of “othering” which engenders the world and, as such, stands above all works of the Archon/Demiurge (it well may be that the A originally signifying the Big Other in Lacan stands also for another Grand Autrui, l’ Archon). The once infinite jouissance “without limits” (in kabbalistic terms: Ein-sof) is lost: disturbed, limited and thus negated/repressed, it now takes the exilic, wandering, shape of the drive—Trieb—which Lacan defines as “the drift of jouissance”18 While “erring into the unknown,” as Taubes describes it, it attaches itself to the material objects of the world and fixates into the erroneous form of the object-oriented desire; but the moment it is awakened by the psychoanalyst to its true destiny—the non-existent, non-objectifiable objet a—it no longer invests in the universe of suffering run by the seemingly iron rule of Necessity (hermaimene). The Trieb, now recollecting its “otherworldly” origin, gives up on the “sheeplike conglomerations of Eros” and “turns back” on “the inverted ladder of desire”;19 even if the drive cannot fully return to the lost pleroma of the Great Life (which, in Lacan’s terms, is “the impossible”), it can nonetheless partly regain its joyful peace, by becoming self-sufficient and self-sustained, with no desirous attachment to any object. The storyette—the term with which Lacan refers to cryptic stories containing a secret message—is, therefore, very similar. What obviously differs is that Lacan uses it “scientifically,” without giving much credit to the Gnostic ruling fantasy of a grand homecoming: just as the “Great Life from the exalted worlds of light” is an idealising retroactive projection of the “life lost,” so too is the utopian vision of the paradise regained. Also, there is no malice in the archontic construction of language, no evil

“ S olid H atred A ddressed to B eing ”

21

intention behind the linguistic “othering” of the psyche as the impersonal mechanism of inevitable socialisation: “The Other is the site where ‘it’— ça—speaks.”20 Yet, the very dynamic of loss, exile, and—at least—partial recuperation stays the same, although in a much more cooled manner. The Lacanian equivalent of pneuma—the remnant/splinter of the original pleroma—is a “cold flame”21 in which love and hate, hope and violence, grace and destruction, march tightly together in the alliance against the “iron cage” of Necessity.22 Love for the Real can only manifest itself as hatred for being—the rule which the Gnostic tradition perceives as definitive for its antinomian practices of challenging the law and order of the seemingly harmonious and benign creation: The relation of being to being is not the relation of harmony that was prepared for us throughout the ages, though we don’t really know why, by a whole tradition in which Aristotle, who saw therein only supreme jouissance, converges with Christianity, for which it is beatitude. . . . Isn’t it in love’s approach to being that something emerges that makes being into what is only sustained by the fact of missing each other? . . . Doesn’t the extreme of love, true love, reside in the approach to being? And true love . . . gives way to hatred.23

It is precisely this “giving way to hatred” that should be seen as the final purpose of Lacan’s psychoanalysis: the hatred of being, first revealed in the monotheistic religion as its immediately repressed—hidden and unconscious—treasure, which the Lacanian therapy wishes to recover against the ages of misinterpretation, administered by the archontic lures of Aristotle and Saint Thomas, and then used as the means of the “subjective destitution,” which can be seen as the psychoanalytic equivalent of the cosmic decreation (the Impossible against the Necessary). Love and hate here go hand in hand: Love for the Real, the remnants of which can be spotted in the scattered nebula of objets a—where “object a is no being”24—can only come to the fore in the refutation or, as Taubes calls it, “letting go down” of “the world, the world of being, full of knowledge, [being] but a dream, a dream of the body insofar as it speaks.”25 This niederkommen, “falling down,” of which Lacan speaks in his seminar on Anxiety,26 does not have to take the overt apocalyptic form of the universe in flames; it suffices that the subject falls from the seductive enjoyments of the symbolic order and withdraws her “spiritual investment in the world as it is.”27 No longer propelled by the desire that orients the libido towards objects and lures it into an illusion of objective fulfilment, the subject undergoes a destitution: It is reduced to the dimension of her own symptom, in which the drive circles

22

A gata B ieli k - R obson

around the non-existent objet a, this little “other of the Other” that still carries the spark of the primordial pleroma of non-being. In the twenty-third seminar called Sinthome (the saint homme circling around his symptom), Lacan quite openly describes the final goal of his therapy by reaching for the theological idiom of the Gnostic reversio: “Psychoanalysis is, in the end, a help which one could describe in the terms of Genesis, as a turning-back. That the other of the Other, that little hole, can provide a help.”28 The figure of “the other of the Other,” which is a little a opposed to the grand A/Autrui who constitutes the symbolic/ontological order, chimes here with the double negation implied by the reversal: If the Other negates the original pleromatic jouissance, by introducing the chartering system of language, the other of this Other negates the negation and brings in the restorative moment of jouissance partly regained. For Lacan, it is thus first of all language which is the locus of the alienating imposition, the most scandalous “joke of God” (Kafka), which goes strangely unnoticed, while it should only inspire the most intense antinomian hate: “Language [la parole] is a parasite; it is a veneer; it is in the form of cancer which afflicts the human being. Why does the so-called normal man not notice this?”29 The reason for this misperception is the age-long agenda of the official theology which, especially in its use of Aristotle, turned towards the absolute affirmation of being as parlêtre (the term implying both the linguistic genesis of the created reality by the divine/archontic fiat and the illusory status of beings produced in that manner) and thus repressed the Gnostic subversion.30 In order to elucidate his version of the ontological difference, Lacan borrows the distinction between existence and subsistence from the Thomistic lexicon: “the symbolic bears only ex-sistence” as opposed to “what subsists”31 and what, in this manner, retains the traces of the original Real: With a trifling change, the dire constitutes Dieu. And as long as things are said, the God hypothesis will persist.  .  .  . It is impossible to say anything without immediately making Him subsist in the form of the Other . . . hatred is what comes closest to being what I call “ex-sisting.” Nothing concentrates more hatred than that act of saying in which ex-sistence is situated.32

This is precisely the moment when Judaism comes in—as the first and unique religion of the hatred of God, which masks, but also defends against, the more primordial “hatred of being.” In the most important paragraph in the Encore seminar, Lacan suggests that the fundamentally negative affect against being as such can only be born within the monotheistic matrix, even if it becomes momentarily repressed:

“ S olid H atred A ddressed to B eing ”

23

That being as such may provoke hatred cannot be ruled out. Certainly, Aristotle’s whole concern was, on the contrary, to conceive of being as that by which beings with less being participate in the highest of beings. And Saint Thomas succeeded in reintroducing that into the Christian tradition. . . . But do people realize that everything in the Jewish tradition goes against that? The dividing line does not run from the most perfect to the least perfect. The least perfect there is quite simply what it is, namely radically imperfect, and one must obey with the finger and the eye, if I dare express myself thus, he who bears the name Yahweh, and several other names to boot. The latter chose his people and one cannot go against that. It is revealed therein that it is far better to betray him occasionally than to “be-thrate” him (l’être-haïr), the former being what the Jews obviously did not deprive themselves of doing. They couldn’t work it out (en sortir) any other way.33

I will return to this fragment again in the last section, but what is most important now is that the very emergence of monotheism—the Jewish revelation—is coupled by Lacan with the possibility of the simultaneous coming to the fore and the instantaneous suppression of the supreme passion which for him is the “hatred addressed to being.”34 The Jewish compromise solution to this issue is to prefer occasional outbursts of the “filial rebelliousness” over l’être-haïr, the constant being-in-hatred, characteristic of the Gnostic sensibility, which cannot be openly and continuously maintained “for good reason.”35 Christianity, as we soon learn, participates in this compromise formation as well, but also presses it towards a sacrificial crisis which saves God by reinvigorating a hatred for him. In a paragraph that could come straight from the writings of Marcion—the second century Christian Gnostic who radically opposed Christ, “the alien God” of redemption, to the worldly God of creation, called Yahweh—Lacan praises Christianity for both fuelling and articulating the rejection of the God of This World, which—because of its ultimately subversive nature—tends to get “muted”: The misfortune of Christ is explained to us by the idea of saving men. I find, rather, that the idea was to save God by giving a little presence and actuality back to the hatred of God regarding which we are, and for good reason, rather indecisive (mous) .  .  . Christians—well, it’s the same with psychoanalysis— abhor what was revealed to them. And they are right.36

In this sense, Freud, who sees the origins of the monotheistic religion in the foundational act of the murder of the Father of the Primal Horde, also “saves the Father once again. In that respect he imitates Jesus Christ. Modestly, no doubt, since he doesn’t pull out all the stops. But he contributes

24

A gata B ieli k - R obson

thereto, playing his little part as a good Jew who was not entirely up-todate.”37 For, to be up-to-date would be to follow Lacan’s Gnostic Christianity, which goes beyond the limits of the Judaic “defiant obedience” (Reik) and blows the creaturely fuse altogether. This “way out” (sortie) is the model offered by Jesus, the first sinthome, or the first saint man destituted/ reduced to his symptom, who successfully expressed his hatred for being with the love for the Real. The Jews, according to Lacan, have plenty of the former—but they lack the latter. Let’s see if he’s right. THE TRANSCENDENTAL SEDUCTION For Lacan, Judaism is the paradigmatic religion of the Other, arranged around the unspeakable extimate centre: the encounter with the Thing itself, the absolute alterity which penetrates to the core of the psychic life and shapes it according to its enigmatic desire: “something entirely different,” “the first outside,” and “the absolute Other of the subject.”38 It is only due to this decisive influence that the pre-subjective psycho-physical material becomes formatted into a being; without the Other, it would have remained an imperturbed no-thing. This fundamental rule is best expressed by Franz Kafka’s striking aphorism: Das Wort ‘Sein’ bedeutet im Deutschen beides: Dasein und Ihmgehören (“The word ‘to be’ means in German both things: to be and to belong to Him”). Being is the sole domain of God: To enter existence means “to be-His,” to belong to the Other’s desire, to be at His disposal, to abandon my-self forever, and to irreversibly exchange my subsistence for the ex-propriating and alienating ex-sistence. The Other destroys this “mineness” by pulling me, like a glove, inside out. Slavoj Žižek, particularly attentive to the theological dimension of Lacan’s teaching (his Gnostic clinamen strangely excluded), perceives Judaism as the great code defining the first influence which irreparably “others” (autrifier) the psyche: That is the overwhelming argument for the intimate link between Judaism and psychoanalysis: in both cases, the focus is on the traumatic encounter with the abyss of the desiring Other—the Jewish people’s encounter with their God whose impenetrable Call derails the routine of daily existence; the child’s encounter with the enigma of the Other’s jouissance. This feature seems to distinguish the Jewish-psychoanalytic “paradigm” not only from any version of paganism and Gnosticism (with their emphasis on inner spiritual self-purification, on virtue as the realization of one’s innermost potential), but

“ S olid H atred A ddressed to B eing ”

25

no less also from Christianity—does the latter not “overcome” the Otherness of the Jewish God through the principle of Love, the reconciliation/unification of God and Man in the becoming-man of God?39

This commentary, deriving from Žižek’s essay, “The Fear of Four Words,” is a good point of departure to analyse a complex knot of Judaism, Gnosticism, and Christianity—a hermetic Traumnagel—which lies at the heart of Lacan’s writings. Apart from the idiosyncratic understanding of “the standard Gnostic problematics” as a New Age magic of the “inner spiritual journey,”40 which indeed may be attributed to Jung, Žižek very rightly points to Jewish monotheism as “hooked” on the crucial moment of expropriation caused by the traumatic encounter with the Other, which he, following Jean Laplanche, also calls “transcendental seduction.”41 It is precisely due to the a priori mechanism of the transcendental seduction that the Other becomes elevated to the status of God: Adonai echad, One Lord, a Master Signifier of all the dimensions of alterity, which the psyche is going to encounter in her development. The monotheistic specification—echad, one and unique—is not accidental here, because it accounts for the very process of creation: God is One—il y a del’Un, “There’s such a thing as One”42—and he evokes every entity into being by “calling it One”: “the signifier ‘One’ is not just any old signifier. It is a signifying order itself.”43 In that manner, the primordial chaos of the “fragmented body”—the inconsistent heterogeneous mess which, as Lacan insists, gets born “mixed” with all its “envelopes”44—becomes cut into a “unit,” or what Nicholas of Cusa, one of Lacan’s favourite theologians, names unum: the basic constituent of creation, equipped with singular identity and form. God as One cuts out his creatures according to his image and likeness into “the buzzing signifying swarm,”45 by leaving behind all non-identifiable inconsistency of the material chaos that the Bible names tohu va vohu. This also happens to be the model of masculine sexuation of which Judaism is paradigmatic: the necessary condition of createdness is the cut/ castration which renounces the originary “pound of flesh” and turns every new member of the covenant into a “unit,” simultaneously limited and defined. The key to this procedure is limitation (or what the Jewish tradition calls tsimtsum): Since, as Spinoza already stated, omnia determinatio est negatio, the finite One can be created solely through the negation of infinity—which, for Lacan, is always the negation of the original jouissance.46 It is only women who—neglected and abandoned by the Judaic scheme of creation/sexuation—can evade this logic and maintain themselves in the indefinite pre-creational state; the Woman, representing “the other of the

26

A gata B ieli k - R obson

Other” simply “cannot be added to the One”: “it is from the perspective of the One-missing (l’Une-en-moins) that she must be taken up.”47 Thus, while the male body becomes a “speaking body” which can only enjoy the “insufficient jouissance constituted by the fact that the man speaks,”48 the female body draws on the “supplementary jouissance” which has not drifted into the symbolic system, but still belongs to the Abyss of the Real, Tehom, that precedes the act of creation. While the male jouissance “drifts” and wanders into the realms of limitation, castration, and exile, the female jouissance stays unmoved, as Joyce’s Molly in her bed, in the timeless “waters of chaos.” As we shall yet see, this contrast between the chosen Man and the abandoned Woman belongs to the kabbalistic subversion of orthodox Judaism, in which Jewish Gnosis makes its grand return, by inventing a female messianic figure of Shekhinah, the “abandoned bride” (agunah). But still, Judaism, both ortho- and heterodox, remains for Lacan a constant reference point. Unlike the Jewish founding fathers—Sigmund Freud, Theodor Reik, Otto Rank, Karl Abraham—who often feel embarrassed about the religion of their descent, Lacan stays loyal to Judaism, far more interested in its conditioning influence on psychoanalysis (even if he wishes to surpass it). He certainly does not buy the dismissive idea of Judaism as an “archaic mentality” aiming at the fearful re-establishment of the domination of the destroyed father-god.49 Judaism for him is a privileged locus of the elementary affect of subjectivity, which, for Lacan, is anxiety: l’angoisse as the insoluble mix of love and hate, obedience and defiance, submission and resistance, which the Jewish God paradigmatically inspires. His is the trace of the “dark God” in our unconscious, as well as the most enigmatic, mindboggling, suffocating question: Che vuoi? What does He want from me?50 Pace Reik, therefore, who apologises for Judaism’s “archaic mental life,” this is precisely what Lacan finds fascinating: the never-healed, neverworked-through trauma of the first encounter with the Other. Because of that, for him, Judaism is also a Religion of the Real: the Real which sometimes emerges under the Shakespearean cryptonym of the “pound of flesh,” recollecting the primordial fragmented body which has been “othered,” wronged, and colonised in its transformation towards a “speaking body.” By referring to Shylock’s hyperliteral demand of the “pound of flesh,” which the Jewish merchant of Venice stubbornly repeats in the trial against his aristocratic and treacherously well-spoken clients, capable to spin any legal fiction thanks to the magic of language, Lacan says: Between the subject here, which is I might say “othered” (autrifié) in its fictional structure, and the non-authentifiable Other, never completely, what

“ S olid H atred A ddressed to B eing ”

27

emerges is this remainder a; it is the pound of flesh, ($ in A), which means, I think—you know who I am quoting—one can make all the borrowings one wishes to plug the holes of desire and of melancholy; there is here the Jew who, for his part, knows something about balancing accounts and who demands at the end: the pound of flesh.51

Shylock’s insistence on “balancing accounts” chimes here well with Lacan’s conviction that, in the end, “mathematization alone reaches a real,”52 which means that “the mathematical formalization of signifierness runs counter to meaning, I almost said a contre-sens,”53 thus enabling the “impossible” evasion of the linguistic/ontological order of saying. As noted by those commentators worried about Shakespeare’s antisemitism, compared to the elaborate rhetorical flairs of Antonio and Portia, Shylock barely speaks in his interventions, thus situating him firmly in the Real with its “cold” mechanical balances. The short Anglo-Saxon monosyllables of if you prick us, do we not bleed?—as opposed to the complex Romanised grammar of Shylock’s opponents—signal that here we indeed have a Jew who, for his part, knows something about the Real and will never exchange it for the dubious currency of the Symbolic. The pound of flesh, the little bodily remainder forming the elusive object a, is a severed and discarded piece of foreskin, which every Jewish male has to give up in the act of the ritual circumcision/castration. A sacrifice he will never forget, and thus will never stop hating his God, always demanding something in return.54 “THE LAST OF THE KABBALISTIC CHRISTIANS”? According to Gérard Haddad, “there is not a single seminar by Lacan which does not contain more or less consistent explorations of Judaism, Freud’s Jewish identity, and the history of the Jewish people,”55 but the Seminar X: L’angoisse, conducted in 1962–1963, truly stands out among the rest in its persistent scattered references to Judaic themes.56 In the first definition of anxiety, which he attempts in this seminar, Lacan associates it with a surplus of the libidinal reserve, with the something which is not projected, with the something which  is not cathected at the level of the specular  image, for the  reason that it remains  profoundly cathected, irreducible at  the level  of one’s own body, at the level of primary narcissism, at the level of what is called erotism, at the level of an autistic jouissance.57

28

A gata B ieli k - R obson

For Lacan, however, who opposes Freud’s “metabolistic”58 view of the libido turning, when unused, into a sour vinegar, anxiety is strictly linked to the relation with the Other: it is caused by “the lack of the lack”59 in the world of specular images, which make no room for the profoundly autocathected singular “autistic jouissance” and present themselves as everything the subject could ever desire. It is, therefore, not the lack of the object resulting in the rise of anxiety, but the very opposite; a fake fullness of the specular fulfilment which denies the lack and, with it, the non-representable iconoclastic element of the original autoerotic joy: “what everything starts from is the imaginary castration, that there is no—and for good reason—image of the lack.”60 The imaginary castration is the lack in the symbolic system of the Other, in which the subject desperately looks for the justification of his singularity, but it is also, on another level, the excess of the “libido reserve” which cannot be projected on any specular image: the very core of “mineness,” radical haecceitas, autistic jouissance cathected on the objet a which eludes the system of the Big Other and which is, in fact, no object at all—rather an estranged part of my jouissance which, because of the expropriating encounter with the Other, became torn away from its original pleroma and thrown into the world of objects, alienated and distorted. Being not even a “partial object,” objet a is what is nonobjectual—as well as abjectual, uncanny—in the object of desire itself; this “something” which refuses any outward projection but nonetheless shines as das Unheimliche through the most familiar objects. And it is absolutely essential that this remnant can—and should—be mobilised in defiance against the absolute expropriation by the Other. It is the Encore seminar wherein the messianic thrust of Lacan comes most visibly to the fore, but it is nonetheless in Seminar X that Lacan refers to himself as “the last of the kabbalistic Christians.”61 This is not meant lightly, not at all. For the scheme of the possible redemption, which Lacan envisages in his therapy, is structurally almost identical to the four-stage Gnostic/ messianic scenario as imagined by the Lurianic Kabbalah, the rudiments of which he learned from Elie Benamozegh’s Israel and Mankind, and which he also saw repeated in the philosophical translation in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: Ein-Sof [the infinite], tsimtsum [contraction], shevirat hakelim [breaking of the vessels], and finally tikkun [return or dealienation]. The first phase, of Ein-Sof or “without limits” (which can also be translated as “not-All” because of the lack of the de/fining circumference) refers here to the undifferentiated state of primary narcissism in which the protosubject, called here the “Ancient One,” is not yet aware of any distinction— between itself and the other, the inside and the outside, the fantasy and the

“ S olid H atred A ddressed to B eing ”

29

reality, the child and the mother—and enjoys a fullness of the auto-erotic “autistic jouissance.” Indeed, according to Isaac the Blind, the divine pleroma of Ein-Sof retains itself in a timeless nunc stans of perpetual orgasm, because it is the orgasm—and not the dry doctrine of causa sui—which is truly auto-telic and thus divine: “jouissance is what serves no purpose.”62 The next stage, that of tsimtsum, marks the first withdrawal of the “oceanic feeling,” which Freud associates with the primary narcissism, or the first contraction of the proto-subject, which, as the kabbalists imply, retreats under the severity of Judgement. This retreat is caused by the disbalance in the Tree of Life, which suddenly overpowers the sephira of Din—and which Lacan associates with the sudden intervention of the paternal gaze. Tsimtsum, therefore, is the cut—the first invasion of the Other into the Thing, the disturbance and the crisis: Israel Sarug, Luria’s pupil, talks here about the primary “irritation” which fuels the Din, the faculty of the severe judgement pressing for the Ur-teil—that is, the separation of “I” and “not-I.” It is precisely this first split, following the encroachment of otherness, which produces the “ideal image” of the “I,” called the Short Face (the proper God named YHWH), as well as the remnant of the original deity, objet a, which resists projection in the form of the specular image. Tsimtsum can also be explained as the topological operation of exteriorization,63 or, in Lacanese, of turning a glove inside out, or a switch of planes on the Möbius strip, caused by the critical relation to the Other. This emptying-out—the Pauline kenosis—indicates simultaneously: The Fall/Incarnation into the world of objects/ images, which exteriorises the original jouissance into the sitra ahra, “the other side,” where it gets scattered and lost. The Other, as it were, sucks out the auto-telic, autistic, pre-relational “mineness” which, by becoming a signifier for the Other (defined as “I” on the conditions of the Other) loses its simple self-same presence (metziut). And while this simple presence is the only possible element of joy, it also loses jouissance. The third stage, of the breaking of the vessels, seals the process of expropriation initiated by tsimtsum: it spells the dramatic shattering of the original intimacy of joy by the alienating influence of the Other, here imagined in the Gnostic manner as an Archon whose enigmatic desire stands behind the worldly spectacle made of “specular images”; this is where the traumatic seduction by the Other takes place and breaks the vessel of the psychic life. In consequence, the broken vessel pours out its libidinal content which is now projected outward, away from its missing centre, into the alien world of material objects, where it becomes imprisoned by the demiurgic alien desire: most of it freezes and fuses with matter. In psychoanalytic terms, it means that the libido falls: Intercepted and cathected by the

30

A gata B ieli k - R obson

specular images offered—or, as Lacan says, even more gnostically, “staged” (the motif of the world as a frame, stage, or theatrum mundi emerges throughout all seminar L’angoisse)—by the spectacle of the world. In the “Seminar on The Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father,” Lacan says: “The a, the object, falls. That fall is primal. The diversity of forms taken by that object of the fall ought to be related to the manner in which the desire of the Other is apprehended by the subject.”64 Yet, even if it falls, a is still the “remnant” of the “libido in reserve,” which resists attachment to the fake fullness of objects offering themselves as lawful fulfilments of desire, because it stays “profoundly cathected” on a different level—a little portion of libidinal energy, or a “spark” (nitzotz), which, although thrown into the world, did not fuse with the “shards” of material images. It is precisely this spark that lends an auratic halo to the libidinal object of choice, which, in fact, has nothing to do with its “fallen” material objectness. Lacan calls these dispersed sparks/splinters of the original jouissance objets a (which derive from Freud’s “part objects” precisely because they are only splinters of the broken whole), while the kabbalists call them by the collective term of Shekhinah, the female counterpart of the divine phallus,65 disjointed and scattered all over the creation, intercepted by the Archon of the World. The objets a, therefore, are objects only insofar as they partly fall into the symbolic order, but they are also “outside any possible definition of objectivity”66 as the remnants/traces (reshimu) of the Real, or the “Ancient One.” They cannot be seen or experienced directly: only via the distortion of things in which they dwell “asleep,”—that is, only when, in Žižek’s felicitous phrase, “looked awry.”67 In terms of objectual images, they are nothing: a void, a slip, a lack, an inexplicable uncanniness. When they appear, anxiety signals for us the particularity of their status. These objects prior to the constitution of the status of the common object, of the communicable object, of the socialised object, this is what is involved in the a.68 As long as Shekhinah remains in the state of dispersion, distortion, and exile (galuth), the original divine jouissance of the “Ancient One” cannot be enjoyed: The Phallic God Yahweh (also sometimes called, for the reason of his permanent sexual frustration, the Irascible One) is without his Bride who errs through the world in the state of self-oblivion and confusion as the agunah, an abandoned wife without husband. When, however, all the sparks will have been gathered—all objets a collected and put back into the puzzle—the spell of the powerful Other can be counteracted and restitutio ad integrum of the whole of joy regained. And just as the wise men are destined to “lift the sparks” in order to prepare the messianic finale of tikkun or the grand return of the estranged “daughters” to the original pleroma,

“ S olid H atred A ddressed to B eing ”

31

so too is the task of psychoanalysts to find all the shiny spots in the pictureworld of every patient—a scattered bit here or there, in the breast, face, gaze or the voice—and draw a line between them, so they can form the one—absolutely, “autistically” unique, echad—Gestalt of my symptom, my jouissance. This is not a full return to the paradise lost, but, at least, a partial recuperation within the hostile conditions of the world. Only connect!—as says Forster, says Joyce, says Lacan.69 GOD MUST DIE: JUDAISM AND THE “FILIAL REBELLIOUSNESS” All the cards of this esoteric game are first laid out in the seminar on Anxiety in which Lacan begins to meditate on the possible strategies of subversion “giving way to hatred”—the “solid hatred addressed to being.” It is here where Lacan, truly for the first time, and visibly overcoming his own angoisse in front of the law-giving Father, decides to challenge Freud on the grounds of his own religion: “more directly than Freud, because, coming after him, I question his God: ‘Che vuoi?’”70 It is precisely in this context that Lacan remarks on Theodor Reik’s essay called “The Shofar,” devoted to the psychoanalytic interpretation of the only musical element of the Judaic liturgy—the blowing of the horn at the conclusion of the Yom Kippur ceremony, the Day of Wrath and Atonement. According to Reik, who closely follows Freud’s Totem and Taboo, the sound of the Shofar is the cry of the dying totemic Bull/Yahweh which is then followed by the ritual feast consisting in the communal consuming of the remnants of the murdered God. While analysing da Vinci’s sculpture of Moses adorned with horns, he points to the identificatory moment of the prophet becoming God/bull who himself becomes slain in the figure of the Golden Calf. The moment Moses receives the commandments—the codex of the Law strictly formatting (but also limiting/negating) the Jewish life— he falls into rage: he breaks the tablets and kills the God the Lawgiver, by tearing his effigy apart and grounding it to powder, which the whole community then consumes in a totem meal: The recognition of the psychological identity of Yahweh and the golden image of the bull furnishes the key to an understanding of the whole tale. . . . In grinding the golden bull to powder, Moses destroys not an idol but Yahweh himself. . . . When Moses breaks up the holy tablets he actually destroys God, the primeval stone-god, just as he destroys God when he pulverises the animal totem, i.e. the golden calf.71

32

A gata B ieli k - R obson

Full of admiration for the boldness of Reik’s claims, Lacan comments: How, along what path, how does it happen that no barrier stops Reik in his analysis to prevent him at the end from identifying Yahweh with the golden calf? Moses coming down from Sinai, radiating with the sublimity of the love of the father, had already killed him, and the proof, he tells us, is what he becomes: this veritable enraged being who is going to destroy the golden calf and make the Hebrews eat it in a powdered form. In this, of course, you will recognise the dimension of the totemic meal . . . everything is consumed in a sort of self-destruction.72

It is indeed a frenzy of self-destruction in which the fragile foundation of monotheism founders, by giving way to absolute murderous hostility on both parts: God’s hatred for his chosen people and, vice versa, Jews’ hatred for their God. What the sound of the Shofar commemorates is “the remembrance of the Akedah,”73 in which Abraham was ready to sacrifice Isaac in response to God’s wish to kill him (hence also the substitution of the totemic bull for the sacrificial ram). In the crisis of Yom Kippur, therefore, the whole subtle edifice of sublimation, in which sacrifice becomes encoded and metaphorised (as, most of all, circumcision), is crumbling down and leaves only the deadly frenzy: the primal scene from the Totem and Taboo where the sons/creatures raise their battle cry—either Him, or us! For, if being means, as in Kafka, Ihmgehören, He is the only One who can say I Am That I Am (YHWH), and thus steals all the being “jealously” for Himself, then how can any of His subjects claim that “I am” too? What Reik shows in his deliberately literalising—indeed, Shylockian—reduction, which brings down Judaism’s symbolic efforts back to the concrete “pound of flesh,” is that this elaborate and painstaking work of sublimation, which extolls the ethical world of the law, must periodically break down into psychotic pieces and consume everything in the “fury of destruction”: While God wants to kill his sons, as it happened in the story of akedah, the sons also plot how to get away with the Father, as it happens in the ritual feast of the Golden Calf, which Reik, in the most daring association, identifies with Yahweh himself. Thus, while normally, through the whole Jewish year, from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, the series of defensive substitutions somehow works, leaving only a trace of anxiety behind—which means that circumcision is not castration, akedah in the end is not sacrifice, and the Passover seder is not theophagia—the Kol Nidre, the Day of Wrath, signifies the periodic moment of crisis which ruins the precarious sublimatory construction and all lands in des voix égarées de la psychose, “scattered voices of the psychosis,” which

“ S olid H atred A ddressed to B eing ”

33

once again literalise all those symbols. The voice of Yahweh himself—the zikkronot of the Shofar or the roar of the “felled bull”74—reminds the sons that they killed Him in order to survive, but it also awakens God from his lethal slumber; summons Him from the dead so He once again assumes His terrifying living presence. But this awakening happens only in a vertiginous flash. The alliance, which is being renewed, is not struck between the Living God and the Israeli tribe, as the official story goes. It is struck between the Dead/Murdered God, now only summoned back from the dead for merely a critical moment. For the sons can live only if He does not live any longer. This is what Reik calls a symptom of the “defiant obedience”75 which is the only “way out” (sortie) Judaism invented in order to negotiate the “hatred for God” and his ontological order of the law/language/being. But Lacan’s intuition does not follow the line of the “filial rebelliousness” represented by all the apostate Messiahs (like Sabbatai Zevi) and romantic antinomian revolutionaries (like Milton’s Satan). For Lacan, the golden road to a minimal self-sufficiency leads not through rebellion, but through evasion. Enter femina. MYSTICAL NOMINALISM: WOMEN, OR THE MYSTERIOUS PARADE OF CREATURES The whole stake of Lacan’s discussion on masculine and feminine sexuation is the status of the exception, which can take two very distinct forms: Either of the Sovereign (the enigma of God the Creator) or of the Remnant (the mystery of each and every creature). Both are present in the Jewish tradition, centred around the riddle of the echad—the oneness in the sense of uniqueness and exceptionality—which it solves in a twofold manner. While in the masculine model of being as “belonging to Him,” the exceptional status is granted only to one absolutely unique entity—be it God or the Father of the Primal Horde—in the feminine model of becoming, “banned” from the immediate election (Jewish women being included only through exclusion), exception becomes a rule: it attaches itself to every single member of the group which grows inductively, including its parts one by one, outside the system of sonship. The sovereign exception tolerates no equals; God is the absolutely pleromatic echad, one and unique, who steals being for himself and, in the extreme crisis of the covenantal relation, appears as a direct existential threat to the lives of his believers: either Him or us. D. W. Winnicott, in his

34

A gata B ieli k - R obson

essay on “Sum, I AM,” rightly points to the ambivalent anxiety which surrounds ego sum (as opposed to the effectively neutral ego cogito): It is difficult for us to remember how modern is the concept of a human individual. The struggle to reach to this concept is reflected, perhaps, in the early Hebrew name for God. Monotheism seems to be closely linked to the name I AM. I am that I am.  .  .  . Does not this name (I AM) given to God reflect the danger that the individual feels he or she is in on reaching the state of individual being? If I am, then I have gathered together this and that and have claimed it as me, and I have repudiated everything else; in repudiating the not-me I have, so to speak, insulted the world, and I must expect to be attacked. So when people first came to the concept of individuality, they quickly put it up in the sky and gave it a voice that only a Moses could hear. This accurately portrays the anxiety that is inherent in the arrival of every human being who gets there at the I AM stage.76

Indeed, Simone Weil fully confirms the absolutely exceptional nature of the divine name: “Only God has the right to say ‘I am.’ ‘I am’ is for ever and only God’s unique name.”77 Also Kant grants the “I am” a status of an exception in his system, the only sentence which somehow evades the phenomenal category of being and cuts straight to the noumenal thing in itself: “In the synthetic original unity of apperception, I am conscious of myself not as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am.”78 “I am” is not a neutral enunciation like all others; it refers to a sacred treasure, perhaps even the taboo, the place of the highest and most intense “supreme jouissance,” the most powerful (shadday) sentiment of existence, which only God can truly claim a right to, an exceptional pronouncement: There is no other meaning to be given that I am other than its being the name I am .  .  . concerning which may be said what I have gradually accustomed you to understand: That a God is something one encounters in the real, inaccessible. It is indicated by what doesn’t deceive—anxiety. The God who manifested himself to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but first of all to Abraham, manifested himself by a name by which the Elohim of the burning bush calls him, and that I have written here. It is read: El Shadday.79

“I am” goes deeper than any concept of reality, which rules the world of appearances: It penetrates to the Kantian Ding an sich, which subsists before any process of symbolisation. The difference between Lacan and Winnicott is that while the latter associates “I am” with the process of the phenomenal individuation (I am this and not the other part of the world, this particular sum of things), the former understands it in the Kantian

“ S olid H atred A ddressed to B eing ”

35

manner of breaking with the order of appearances and going deeper, beneath the surface of “I think” into the kingdom of the Real.80 Being offered by the Creator is not the original life, it is its negation—hence the anxiety, the constant uncanny remembrance of the life lost, the true and only element of “I am.” We have seen in Reik/Lacan’s interpretation of Yom Kippur that the renewal of the brith/Covenant consists in forcing a distance, which is also bought with the renunciation on the part of the sons who once again decide not to be like God, to be lo bashamayim, “not-in-heaven,” and delegate all the exceptional attributes to the One who, at the same time, is made as distant and inoperative as to be practically dead (according to the theological nomenclature, deus otiosus or, as the Lurianic Kabbalah calls him, tsimtsum: withdrawn and inactive).81 This is precisely how the masculine sexuation proceeds according to Lacan: All the libidinal jouissance, all the infinite joy of omnipotence is granted to the sovereign exception of the paternal function, while the community of sons founds itself on the law of its renunciation. Child becomes man in a process which exactly mirrors the psychoanalytic vision of the foundational act of Judaism: The binding of the Covenant of Sons on the dead body of the Heavenly Father. “The result of the limit . . . is that jouissance dries up for everybody.”82 But there is also another possibility implied by the very notion of exception, going beyond the logic of the dead Father: In the system which operates on the basis of the one sovereign exception, there will always emerge an attempt to make it, in a Derridean phrase, plus d’Un, “more than One.” This is the paradox of exception: It always lends itself to dissemination— exactly the moment when it “keeps itself from the Other.”83 The Jewish God, therefore, utters two contradictory injunctions simultaneously: “Do not be like me” and “Be like me.”84 The former is a threat which founds the legal system lo bashamayim (“no longer in heaven,” as the Talmud often emphasises), where the sons agree to relinquish any semblance to the divine echad—the latter is a promise which founds all messianic hopes and dreams, secretly staking on the logic of tselem, becoming-like-God according to his image and likeness, the radical mysterious echad. It is precisely this dynamic dialectics which cannot—and should not—be blunted by the Thomistic principle of analogy. Aquinas’s analogia entis, which he elaborates on the basis of Aristotelian philosophy, makes room for the absolute and sovereign exception of the divine hyper-existence, but it also blocks all the possibilities of rivalry: The Aristotelian hierarchy of being, which grants every being a chance of self-perfection only according to its nature, kata phusein, neutralises the vertiginous potentialities of tselem and condemns

36

A gata B ieli k - R obson

them as demonic. It is, after all, the Serpent who, in the Garden of Eden, promises the first people that if they eat from the Tree of Knowledge, they will become “like Gods,” sicut Dei. But while the Thomistic tradition (to which Lacan belongs via his Catholicism) unambiguously calls this a false promise and Satanic temptation, the Jewish messianic tradition, following what Ernst Bloch dubs as the “subterranean Bible,” often takes the side of the Serpent—and this is also, as we have seen, Lacan’s choice. Thus, while man, initiated into manhood via male sexuation, gets stuck in the insoluble ambivalence of submission and rebellion, woman somehow evades it—and it is precisely this evasion or clinamen from the logic of the sovereign exception (at once “be like me” and “do not be like me”), which interests Lacan most. When Lacan announces that “the woman is more real,” plus vrais and plus réelle,85 he means that she is more likely to exercise her right to be “what she simply is”86—a democratic exception of every singular being able to claim “that I Am” and thus participate in the portion of the original undistorted jouissance. Already in the seminar on anxiety, Lacan grants to woman that she enjoys a “simplified relationship with the desire of the Other,” in which “she does not hold to it as essentially as man does as regards the nature of jouissance”;87 more than that, in her desire, woman is not completely barred from jouissance, as it happens in the case of man whose desire is constituted in “the zone which separates jouissance and desire from one another and which is the break (la faille) where anxiety is produced.”88 Being in that way “superior,”89 woman is less prone towards the anxiety which marks the castratory cut between desire and the true joy. The famous line from the Encore seminar, stating that “Woman does not exist” does not plunge her into nothingness or irrelevance; it merely problematises her relation to being as the symbolic category which she manages to escape. The woman, therefore, lacks being, so she can be full of the Real Thing: “she is not not at all there. She is there in full (à plein). But there is something more (en plus).”90 Woman is thus the pivot of the crucial messianic reversal in which lack turns into pleromatic excess. This is precisely where the Jewish “mystical nominalism” comes in, where God, as the Psalms say, calls his creatures by their names.91 He calls them, but it does not mean that he knows them: their uniqueness (echad) as singular beings is a secret, even to the Maker himself. The symbolic sphere is based on what nominalists call cognitive conventions, if not simply errors (flatus voci), whereas the Real is made of the infinite series of singulars— pounds of flesh—that can claim the right to say “I am” in a univocal manner with God. God is—just as his creatures are; they all belong together to the Kingdom of the Real.92

“ S olid H atred A ddressed to B eing ”

37

This is a slightly different—and more hopeful—vision than the Gnostic one which culminates in Lacan’s seventh seminar on Antigone and the sublime freedom from being and life, granted solely by the death drive: in the Jewish-nominalistic metaphysics, the Real world is made by God who calls his creatures by their proper names and lets them be—a strong contrast to the cruel law-making Creon/Archon of the Symbolic order whose letter kills. Without ordering anything, this God—“the Other of the Other”—watches over the chaos or “swarm”93 of innumerable individuals stepping into the open of the Real one by one, precisely as the parade of creatures which crowns the Book of Job and leaves both, God and Job alike, with the deep sense of uncanniness. They are not just “One” in terms of the defined/limited unit of being: They are also, and more predominantly, exceptional and unique, taking on the other aspect of God’s likeness, the other meaning of echad. This most unheimlich image, which beguiled Gilbert Chesterton (and then, Žižek), announces the radical shift in the relations between Creator and his creatures, which transforms from the extreme traumatic encounter—God versus Job or the law-giver of the universe versus the singular creature demanding justice within the symbolic order created by the Big Other—into a horizontal co-emergence where God and Job just watch together all those strange beings step in one by one, in a limitless bizarre sequence, and thus meeting their common “limits of knowledge.” There is no possibility of either submission or rebellion here, because God himself does not know or he is no longer in the position of the Master who is supposed-to-know: Once he let the Real be, all those beings enter the open beyond anybody’s intentional control. Whatever he wanted his creation to be—it necessarily got out of hand, precisely because it came to be; this time, however, not in the sense of the category of being, but in the sense of the Real: the Freudian Thing, but also the Kantian Ding an sich. While standing next to God—neither below nor above, neither worse nor better—Job silently witnesses the enigma of the Real and—just as Antigone, focused on her sublime defiance, becomes a man—he becomes a woman. He no longer asks the question about the meaning of all this, as the man facing his God would do. He knows that there is no answer: To startle man, God becomes for an instant a blasphemer; one might almost say that God becomes for an instant an atheist. He unrolls before Job a long panorama of created things, the horse, the eagle, the raven, the wild ass, the peacock, the ostrich, the crocodile. He so describes each of them that it sounds like a monster walking in the sun. The whole is a sort of psalm or

38

A gata B ieli k - R obson

rhapsody of the sense of wonder. The maker of all things is astonished at the things he has Himself made.94

For Žižek, the moment in which God becomes an atheist and himself negates his divine absolutist position very precisely defines the passage from the masculine to the feminine type of sexuation: God performs here what Lacan calls a point de capiton: he resolves the riddle by way of supplanting it by an even more radical riddle, by way of redoubling the riddle, by way of transposing the riddle from Job’s mind to the ‘thing itself.’ God himself comes to share Job’s astonishment at the chaotic madness of the created universe . . . it is the ‘totality’ of the rational causal order itself which is inconsistent, ‘irrational,’ not-All.95

Or, in Lacan’s own words: “The hitch is that the Other, the locus, knows nothing. One can no longer hate God if he himself knows nothing.”96 The enigma wanders into each and every single creature, as echad—inscrutably unique—as God himself. This is a different, much more modest kind of Jewish messianism which does not stake on theosis—God-Becoming-Man—or the full “appropriation of the paternal attributes”97 in all their imagined glory of the Absolute (infinity, immortality, invulnerability, indemnity, omnipotence, or whatever the masculine subject may desire). It rather consists in the opposite manoeuvre: in depriving God himself of all the glory; in making him stand next to Job, his creature, in the awesome wonder of all these beings large and small that spring into existence (even if he himself initiated the process). If, therefore, here God must also die, it is not because He, the AllPowerful Father, will be killed/defeated by His sons in the repeated acts of “fillial rebelliousness”; it is because he himself dies as God the Absolute, becomes “God without the sacred” (Žižek) or, as Chesterton puts it, an auto-blasphemer and an atheist. In the order of the Real, inspired by the doctrine of radical Jewish nominalism, there is no hierarchy: no divine position understood in the Greco-Christian terms of the Arche/Absolute. There are only neighbours standing next to one another, taking-place in the place-giving space (makom). On the level of the feminine sexuation which produces women one by one, the chain remains strictly horizontal and metonymic through the relation of nextness: It grows ad infinitum through the family resemblance of the great covenant of creatures who have only one thing in common and, at the same nothing in common—just the fact that they “simply are,”98 or, as kabbalists would say, that they enjoy

“ S olid H atred A ddressed to B eing ”

39

(literally) their “simple presence” (metziut). Lacanian not-All means just that: Nobody and nothing controls the process of things becoming Real; there is no higher purpose to be realised, no ultimate sense, no providential plan. The Real is full and simple. “It is clear that privation can only be situated with respect to the symbolic, for as far as anything real is concerned, nothing can be lacking—what is real is real.”99 The metaphysical perspective of such “mystical nominalism,” in which the divine sovereign exception wanders into a riddle embodied in every creature, no longer represents the ontological order; its vantage point is not the Supreme Being but the “lack of being” inverted into an excess of the Real—the objet a, now at least partly returned to its proper element of not-All. It is what survives and what Lacan identifies with the “remnant”— Isaiah’s sh’erit—the word he even scribes in Hebrew during his seminar on anxiety: [I]t is something which survives the ordeal of the division of the field of the Other by the presence of the subject—something which, in a particular biblical passage, is formally metaphorised in the image of the stump, of the cut trunk from which a new trunk re-emerges, in this living function in the name of Isaiah’s second son Shear-Jashub, a remainder, a remnant . . . in this Sh’erit [resides] the function of the remainder, the irreducible function, the one which survives every ordeal of the encounter with the pure signifier.100

Sh’erit becomes thus also a model for the destitution of the subject, which now can be captured not in terms of the sublime death (as in the case of Antigone), but rather in terms of survival (as in the case of Job). Sh’erit is the ultimate survivor who bears the stigma of absolute submission, but also of an equally absolute defiance/evasion—just as Job, who indeed “survives every ordeal of the encounter with the pure signifier,” comes out of it strangely victorious, the way the Woman emerges in the process of feminine sexuation. After all, he-she, standing next to God, can also claim the right to the unpronounceable name of God: The exceptional “I Am that I Am,” which cannot be uttered in any language forming the symbolic order, but can nonetheless be expressed in the more primordial linguistic matrix of lalangue. Encore explores a shadowy leftover of the Covenant of Sons; the softer underbelly of Judaism, which opens towards messianic hopes, one of them being Christianity, with the effeminate gentle Jesus as the figure of the Messiah. Esoteric messianic strains of Judaism also put forth images of a female Messiah: Jacob Frank, the seventeenth-century Polish follower

40

A gata B ieli k - R obson

of the Sabbatean heresy that he modified into an extremely antinomian movement called Frankism, granted the redemptive potential to the female fallen counterpart of God, Shekhinah, and saw her incarnation in his own daughter, Eva Frank (who, according to the syncretic, Juedo-Christian nature of the Frankist movement, also happened to be a reincarnation of the Virgin Mary).101 Although Eva Frank is the only female claimant to the role of the Jewish Messiah in the long history of similar claims, her case nonetheless demonstrates an inherent potentiality of Judaism itself to produce such a figure; indeed, the kabbalistic messianism of Shekhinah has been a frequent phenomenon blossoming in the non-orthodox outskirts and margins, in what Bruno Schulz, the Polish-Jewish writer often drawing on the Frankist heritage, named the “regions of the grand heresy.” And even if Lacan may not know much about this soft hidden core of Judaism, his esoteric intuitions are, as usual, quite right: By attaching his messianic hopes to the figure of a Woman, who—unlike Man—is capable of retaining some portion of the undistorted jouissance, Lacan repeats the gesture of the kabbalists who saw in Shekhinah the only earthly vessel still containing the sparks of the original divine fire. In Lacan’s reading, therefore, Judaism appears as split along the gender divide. While the role of Man is to keep God safely dead and enter an alliance as the guardians of the sovereign exception, the role of Woman is to resurrect the exceptional sparks of the divine joy of “I am” scattered among the not-All that “simply is.” NOTES 1. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. Jacques-Allain Miller, trans. B. Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 84, 99. 2. Jacques Lacan, “Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father Seminar,” in Television, ed. Joan Copjec (London: W. W. Norton, 1990), 95. 3. Lacan, Seminar XX, 99. 4. Gérard Haddad, “Judaism in the Life and Work of Jacques Lacan: A Preliminary Study,” trans. Noah Guym, Yale French Studies, no. 85 (Discourses of Jewish Identity in Twentieth-Century France) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 202. 5. Slavoj Žižek, “The Fear of Four Words: A Modest Plea for the Hegelian Reading of Christianity,” in The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 37. 6. Lacan, Seminar XX, 99. 7. Compare Hans Blumenberg’s concise description of the relation between the original plenitude and the created universe: “The Gnostic pleroma draws all

“ S olid H atred A ddressed to B eing ”

41

the predicates of existence to itself and allows the world to be degraded to a mere appearance of nothing, to the demiurge’s deception.” Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 148. 8. See most of all, Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, trans. J. T. Swann (London: Verso, 2009), 97. 9. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1989), 104–105, emphasis added. 10. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, 316. 11. J. W. Goethe, Faust: Part I, trans. Anna Swanwick (New York: Dover, 2013), 42. 12. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Arnold Vincent Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 9. 13. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 18. 14. Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), 189. 15. Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, trans. David Ratmoko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 26–27. 16. According to Haddad, already in the 1930s Lacan became acquainted with a modern kabbalistic tractate of Elie Benamozegh called Israël et l’humanité: Étude sur le problème de la religion universelle et sa solution (published posthumously in 1914) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1980). 17. “Both the orthodox Kabbalah of Luria and the heretical Kabbalah of Nathan of Gaza (1644–80), prophet and theologian of Sabbatai Zevi, the Kabbalistic Messiah, provide amazingly complete examples of gnostic myth formation within or on the fringe of Rabbinical Judaism.” Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken, 1969), 109. 18. Lacan, Seminar XX, 112. 19. See again Lacan, Écrits, 104–105. 20. Lacan, “Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father Seminar,” 87. 21. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXIII. Le sinthome, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Ornicar? no. 12/13 (1976–1977): 46. 22. Compare also Hans Jonas: “Generally speaking, the pneumatic morality is determined by hostility toward the world and contempt for all mundane ties. . . . The law of ‘Thou shalt’ and ‘Thou shalt not’ promulgated by the Creator is just one more form of the ‘cosmic’ tyranny. . . . This antinomian libertinism exhibits more forcefully than the ascetic version the nihilistic element contained in gnostic acosmism.” Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion. The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 46, emphasis added. 23. Lacan, Seminar XX, 145–46. 24. Lacan, Seminar XX, 126. 25. Lacan, Seminar XX, 126.

42

A gata B ieli k - R obson

26. Jacques Lacan, Seminar X. Anxiety, trans. Cormac Gallagher (online); I often modify this translation by consulting the French original, Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 98. 27. This is a cryptoquotation from Taubes who famously declared: “I can imagine as an apocalyptic: let it go down. I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is.” Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Holänder (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 103. Of all Lacan’s commentators, usually too deluded by the appeasing therapeutic rhetoric to see clearly the depths of the Lacanian negativity, only Žižek can grasp the connotations of the “violent love” revealing itself in the “solid hatred addressed to being” or, simply, the revolutionary passage into act. See Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf. The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 31–32. 28. Lacan, Seminar XXIII, 53. 29. Lacan, Seminar XXIII, 42. 30. Compare: “Knowledge is an enigma . . . People could have noticed that a long time ago, because in tracing out the pathways of knowledge they were doing nothing but articulating things, centring them for a long time in being. Now it is obvious that nothing is, if not insofar as it is said that it is.” Lacan, Seminar XX, 125, emphasis added. 31. Lacan, Seminar XX, 119. 32. Lacan, Seminar XX, 45, 121. 33. Lacan, Seminar XX, 99. 34. A finding fully confirmed by Gershom Scholem in his early commentaries on the Book of Job, where the Hebrew kinah—the accusatory lamentation addressed to the creaturely being in totality and, eventually, to its Maker—appears as the most fundamental vehicle of the revelation: a possibility of Klage/Anklage, lament/compliant, suddenly revealed, if only to be silenced and repressed in almost the same move. Gershom Scholem, “Über Klage und Klagelied,” in Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen bis 1923: Zweiter Halbband 1917–1923 (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000), 128–33. 35. Lacan, Seminar XX, 98. 36. Lacan, Seminar XX, 98, 114. 37. Lacan, Seminar XX, 109. 38. Lacan, Seminar VII, 52. 39. Slavoj Žižek, “The Fear of Four Words,” 37. 40. Žižek, “The Fear of Four Words,” 37. 41. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 20. 42. Lacan, Seminar XX, 143. 43. Lacan, Seminar XX, 143. 44. Lacan, Seminar XX, 143. 45. Lacan, Seminar XX, 143. 46. Compare Fink cryptoquoting Saint Paul: “The law inevitably exceeds its authority: the symbolic order kills the living being or organism in us, rewriting it or overwriting it with signifiers, such that being dies (‘the letter kills’) and only

“ S olid H atred A ddressed to B eing ”

43

the signifier lives on. Limit, lack, loss these are central to Lacanian logic, and they constitute what Lacan refers to as castration.” Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 101; see also Lacan himself, for whom jouissance is either infinite or nothing at all: “The result of the limit . . . is that jouissance dried up for everybody.” Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIV: The Logic of Phantasy, 1966–67, trans. Cormac Galagher (London: Karnac Books, 1967), 124, quoted in Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 101. 47. Lacan, Seminar XX, 129. 48. Lacan, Seminar XX, 105. 49. Theodor Reik, “The Shofar (The Ram’s Horn),” in Theodor Reik, The Ritual. Psychoanalytic Studies, prefaced by Sigmund Freud (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1970), 352, 354. 50. The “dark God” is the one who demands sacrifice which, according to Lacan, is a conditio sine qua non of the creative passage to being: “The fascination of the sacrifice in itself—the sacrifice signifies that, in the object of our desires, we try to find the evidence for the presence of desire of this Other that I call here the dark God.” Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), 274–75, original emphasis. 51. Lacan, Seminar X, 111. 52. Lacan, Seminar XX, 131. 53. Lacan, Seminar XX, 93. 54. In Seminar VII, 172, Lacan associates the monotheistic message with the opposition against the “numenous proliferation” of the pagan sacred which “weaves human experience together” into the holistic world of appearances. Monotheism comes to punctuate this phenomenal sacred bubble and let in a new signifier— coming from “the essentially hidden God” calling himself, in a deliberately cryptic manner, “I am what I am,” (Lacan, Seminar VII, 173) which, for the first time in human religious history, introduced the intimation of the Real: “Moses the Midianite seems to pose a problem of his own—I would like to know whom or what he faced on Sinai and on Horeb. But after all, since he couldn’t bear the brilliance of the face of him who said ‘I am what I am,’ we will simply say at this point that the burning bush was Moses’s Thing” (Lacan, Seminar VII, 174). The monotheistic break with the pagan cosmoeroticism is also emphasised in “The Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father Seminar:” “The Hebrew hates the metaphysico-sexual rites which unite in celebration the community to God’s erotic bliss. He accords special value to the gap separating desire and fulfilment. The symbol of that gap we find in the same context of El Shadday’s relation to Abraham, in which, primordially, is born the law of circumcision, which gives as a sign of the covenant between the people and the desire of he who has chosen them what?—that little piece of flesh sliced off” (Lacan, Television, 94). On Lacan’s reading of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, see the brilliant commentary by Kenneth Reinhard, “Lacan and Monotheism: Psychoanalysis and the Traversal of Cultural Fantasy,” Jouvert 3, no. 2 (1999): 1–28, especially 20–21.

44

A gata B ieli k - R obson

55. Haddad, “Judaism in the Life and Work of Jacques Lacan,” 205; See also, Gérard Haddad, Le Péché originel de la psychanalyse, Lacan et la question juive (Paris: Seuil, 2007). 56. Haddad sees the main achievement of the seminar in enriching the theory of objet a by the new context of the “voice of God,” which, after Reik, Lacan identifies with the sound of the Jewish ritual horn, the shofar: “It is precisely here, in this commentary that the voice object emerges. The sound of the shofar is the voice of the imaginary father, of the ram sacrificed by Abraham in place of his son Isaac.” Haddad also adds that Lacan intended to continue his Jewish theme via the revised conception of the Name-of-the-Father in 1964, but “the ‘excommunication’ of Lacan interrupted this project,” and because of that we are only left with one session of the intended seminar (Haddad, “Judaism in the Life and Work of Jacques Lacan,” 207). 57. Lacan, Seminar X, 38, emphasis added. 58. Lacan, Seminar X, 38. 59. Lacan, Seminar X, 35. 60. Lacan, Seminar X, 35. 61. “One of those who are evoked here—and it is really not designating anybody in my audience—called me one day in a private note the last of the kabbalistic Christians” (Lacan, Seminar X, 72). Cryptic as usual, Lacan does not avow whether the person in question was right. 62. Lacan, Seminar XX, 3. 63. Hegel’s Entaüsserung, “emptying-out,” derives from Luther’s translation of the Pauline kenosis, which also indicates the Fall and Incarnation of the divine spirit into the worldly flesh. 64. Lacan, Television, 85. 65. The lowest sephira of Yod/foundation constitutes the penis of Adam Kadmon who delivers a blueprint for the Tree of Life. 66. Lacan, Seminar X, 75. 67. See Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 68. Lacan, Seminar X, 80. 69. Compare Sanford Drob on the affinities between Lacan and Isaac Luria: “Or consider Ein-sof, the Kabbalist’s term for the infinite unknowable God, the source of all energy, will and interest. Ein-sof has its analogue in the notion of a primal unknowable unconscious, what Jacques Lacan sometimes refers to as ‘little a,’ that primitive scintilla of desire which exists outside of the symbolic order and about which we therefore cannot speak .  .  . and tikkun ha-olam, the process by which man raises the sparks of divine light which have been trapped in the ‘other side.’” Sanford Drob, “This Is Gold: Freud, Psychotherapy and the Lurianic Kabbalah.” http:​//www​.newk​abbal​ah.co​m/Kab​Psych​.html​, accessed 9 April, 2019. 70. Lacan, Seminar X, 72. According to Haddad, none of Lacan’s official students understood the hermetico-messianic aspect of Lacan’s teaching: “The project of finding a way out of the dead-end which psychoanalysis constructed in the ‘ideal father’ or ‘dead father’ proves to be an illusion. None of his students would make

“ S olid H atred A ddressed to B eing ”

45

it through this bottleneck, this ‘gully,’ for the simple reason that not one of them truly understood the project. Those who might have had an inkling, in spite of everything, were quickly brought to their senses by the little clique of ‘students’ who held the keys to the academy.” Haddad, “Judaism in the Life and Work of Jacques Lacan,” 211. 71. Reik, “The Shofar,” 321, 350, emphasis added. 72. Lacan, Seminar X, 228, emphasis added. 73. Lacan, Seminar X, 231–32. 74. Lacan, Seminar X, 235. 75. Reik, “The Shofar,” 302. 76. Donald Woods Winnicott, Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst (London: Penguin Books, 1986), 56–57, emphasis added. Indeed, YHWH in Hebrew has a buoyant, boisterous, hypervital, and capricious overtone of “I will be whenever I will be,” which the scholastic formula of “I Am that I Am,” aiming to designate the impersonal ontological coincidence of essence and existence, completely omits. Compare also Lacan himself: “Augustine himself, who is able to formulate the thing in opposition to every form of intellectual piety, flinches nonetheless, to the point of translating Ehieh asher ehieh—which I have long since taught you to read—by an Ego sum qui sum: I am the one who am. Augustine was a very good writer, but in Latin as in French, that sounds false and awkward. That God affirms himself as identical to Being leads to a pure absurdity.” Lacan, Television, 85. 77. Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity Among the Greeks, trans. Elisabeth Chas Geissbuhler (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1957), 72. 78. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 259, emphasis added. 79. Lacan, Television, 90. 80. This Kantian dualism of thinking and being is very much in accordance with another aphorism of Paul Valéry who in his variations on Descartes wrote: “Sometime I think; and sometime I am.” (Parfois, je pense, et parfois je suis) Paul Valéry, Tel Quel: Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 500. 81. The lo bashamayim motif appears in the famous Talmudic aggadah in Baba Metzia 59b, where Rabbis exclude God’s living voice from the scholarly interpretation of the Torah, on which Žižek comments: “Such a Jewish art of endless interpretation of the letter of the Law is thus profoundly materialist, its implication (and maybe even true goal) being (to make sure) that God is (and remains) dead. This is why Christianity could emerge only after and from within Judaism: its central theme of the death of Christ only posits as such, ‘for itself,’ the death of God which, ‘in itself,’ takes place already in Judaism.” Slavoj Žižek, “The Clarity of Dialectics versus the Misty Paradox,” in Monstrosity of Christ, 269–70. 82. On the impasse of the Covenant of Sons, see also Lacan’s commentary from The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, during the meeting tellingly titled “The Death of God”: “All the mystery is in that act. It is designed to hide something, namely, that not only does the murder of the father not open the path to jouissance that the presence of the father was supposed to prohibit, but it, in fact, strengthens the

46

A gata B ieli k - R obson

prohibition. The whole problem is there; that’s where, in fact as well as in theory, the fault lies. Although the obstacle is removed as a result of the murder, jouissance is still prohibited; not only that, but the prohibition is reinforced.” Lacan, Seminar VII, 176. 83. See Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 100. 84. See Reik, “The Shofar,” 276. 85. Lacan, Seminar X, 213. 86. Lacan, Seminar XX, 99. 87. Lacan, Seminar X, 215. 88. Lacan, Seminar X, 213. 89. Lacan, Seminar X, 215. 90. Lacan, Seminar XX, 74. 91. “He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.” (Psalm 147:4) The term “mystical nominalism” derives from Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia, where it is attributed to the Jewish form of messianism. Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony Nassar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 27. 92. The obvious difference between this version of Jewish nominalism, which interests Lacan, and the Scholastic nominalism of the classical opponent of Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, is that in the latter version God knows: By nominating the creatures, God bestows them with their particular form called haecceitas or “thisness,” which can be captured only by Him. Against the whole Greco-Christian Neoplatonic tradition of the hierarchy of the universals, Scotus claims that God creates all singular creatures directly. The only truly existing forms are thus “thisnesses”— the rest—that is, the general concepts and categories of language, is created by our mind which, unlike God’s infinite nous, cannot register the multitude of beings and must use “cognitive conventions” (universale post rem). 93. Lacan, Seminar XX, 143. 94. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, “Introduction to Book of Job,” in Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Book of Job (London: Palmer & Hayward, 1916), xvi. 95. Slavoj Žižek, “The Ambiguity of the Utopian Gaze,” Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious, issue on Utopia (2008), 63, 65. 96. Lacan, Seminar XX, 98, emphasis added. 97. Reik, “The Shofar,” 317. 98. Lacan, Seminar XX, 98. 99. Lacan, Seminar XVII, 124–25, emphasis added. 100. Lacan, Seminar X, 202, emphasis added. 101. On the figure of the female Messiah as the specific difference and daring innovation of the Frankist movement, see Paweł Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude. Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

2 THE WILL OF THE AMERICAN GOD Anti-Blackness, Jouissance-Sacrifice, and the Structuration of das Ding Calvin Warren Masochism and sadism are devoted respectively to the anxiety and the jouissance of God.1 —Jacques Lacan [The] function of the religious centrally involves establishing an economy of jouissance that is triangulated between the little and big Others.2 —Richard Boothby The white, western-god-man is an idol that seeks to determine what is normal. It is a norm by which society governs the body politic or regulates, measures, and indeed judges what is proper or improper . . . it is this idol, the idol of the “American god” that is the symbolic figure Zimmerman identified himself with and in relation judged Trayvon Martin as, in effect, religiously wanting—wanting in proper citizenship, and ultimately wanting in humanity.3 —J. Kameron Carter

How might anti-black violence become a set of religious rituals or a perverse form of worship? Can the repetitive, and interminable, structure of black-death be thought of as religious sacrifice? Might anti-blackness serve as a libidinal economy, regulating jouissance through black-death? Is our lack of an answer to the “why” of black-death (Why are blacks killed 47

48

C al v in W arren

repeatedly and gratuitously?) aligned with the Other’s lack or wanting? These inquiries present a certain lack within the field of religion—the unanswered, or unanswerable, question of black-death, God’s goodness, and the purpose of evil. Indeed, thinking about anti-blackness as a peculiar religious formation recasts violence as aligned with the sacred—a terrifying and unsettling proposition. I use the words “terrifying” and “unsettling” to foreground the anxiety produced by intellectual lack—the lack of a signifier and the lack within the signifier. If we think of the signifier as the “answer” black theologians proffer to the question, the intransigent “why?” of black-death, we either experience the absence of an answer (no one knows with apodictic certainty why blacks are killed repeatedly) or the deficiency of the answer, since the theories of black liberation theology are unable to eradicate anti-black violence. Moreover, since every religious signifier traffics excess within/without its structure—an unanswerable or ineffable question from the Other—black theology labours with a great deal of anxiety and uneasiness in relation to this lack. The desire for a master signifier is urgent, given the current climate. If, however, the signifier must lack, will black-death continue without end because we lack a solution-signifier? Dylann Roof, an unabashed white supremacist for example, entered a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, to commence a race war. According to Roof, blacks were “raping our women and taking over our country, so [they] have to go.”4 The tragedy presented a question mark within black theology: If we consider white supremacy an evil, how do we address evil itself to stop its violence? Can you regulate evil or legislate it away? In other words, if white supremacy is an economy of enjoyment, evil as jouissance, is a traversal at all possible (traversal as salvation)? Many understand this massacre of devoted saints, worshipping in their church, as a pure act of hatred. But how might our analysis change if we think of this massacre as religious practice? In other words, did the massacre have to occur within a church for Roof to justify the violence? Did the church enable him to re-enact, or stage, “another scene”? A scene in which the Other demands the eradication of black rape and political encroachment, as its unbearable jouissance? This chapter meditates on these difficult questions within the crevice of theological lack and the tragic death of Trayvon Martin. I open up a dialogic space between black theology and a Lacanian perspective on religion to think through the repetitive structure of anti-black violence and blackdeath. I argue, ultimately, that blacks constitute the neighbour-Thing, the topology of insatiable lack, within an anti-black world. Anti-black sadism, as a repetitive structure of injury and death, is an attempt to regulate the

T he W ill of the A merican god

49

triangulation between the subject, the little other, and The Big Other. Richard Boothby understands this triangulation as a religious structure, and I borrow this structure to rethink Trayvon Martin’s murder, not just as an act of hatred, but also as a sadistic sacrifice, an offering of jouissance to the American god-idol. LACAN, JOUISSANCE, AND RELIGION Freud left us with the problem of a gap once again at the level of das Ding, which is that of religious men and mystics.5 —Jacques Lacan

In “The No-Thing of God: Psychoanalysis of Religion After Lacan,” Boothby presents an innovative interpretation of Lacan and religion. Building on Freud’s preoccupation with the subject of belief, rather than the object of belief, Kant’s Ding-an-sich, and Hegelian Aufhebung, Boothby argues that religion constitutes an economy of regulation, one designed to manage the lack in the other, and accession to the jouissance of the Other. The essay aims to address the tension within traditional Lacanian analyses of religion: Either God is a facet of the “unthinkable real. Divinity is to be situated in a domain beyond human experience, a zone that forever outstrips all capacities to name it”;6 or God is situated as ultimate symbolic assurance, the confirmation of our faith in the legitimacy of mastersignifiers, sustaining the Symbolic. Or as Lacan says, “The subject supposed to know, is God, full stop, nothing else.”7 For Boothby, the choice between the Real or the Symbolic placement of God neglects the nodal point, or knotting, of the registers. In this sense, one needn’t choose between the registers but can understand religion as the interlocking work of registers through Lacan’s concept das Ding. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis introduces Lacan’s das Ding as “a primordial function, which is located at the level of the initial establishment of the gravitation of the unconscious Vorstellungen.”8 Boothby reads this established gravitation through Kant’s Ding-an-sich, as “the unthinkable kernel of external things, not merely as they appear to us, but as they are in themselves.”9 Reading Lacan through the Kantian problematic of Reason enables an encounter with the mystery things contain, which are beyond our understanding and cannot be known with apodictic certainty. For Kant, we could never truly know the thing-in-itself, and as such, it places a necessary limit on Reason—ultimately, allowing for the existence of God through

50

C al v in W arren

faith.10 In short, excess presents itself as both mystery and an unanswered question for the subject. Indeed, if we can never know the things of God, as Christian theology teaches us, then this unknowing, its ineffable schematic, is a facet of this mystery. Freud describes this excess as a feature of Nebenmensch, or the neighbour, entailing a spilt between human resemblance (or what I know or understand) and an unbearable unknown. This split becomes the model of cognition and the inevitable limit of cognition.11 In Lacan’s rereading of this Freudian split, he introduces an unbearable anxiety: “Not only is [anxiety] not without object, but it very likely designates the most, as it were, profound object, the ultimate object, the Thing.”12 For Boothby, the significance of Lacan’s intervention is not only that the Thing stimulates anxiety, but that it becomes the basis for subjectivity—how one thinks of the self as an object of such excess in relation to the (O)other. Lacan also provides another significant intervention in psychoanalysis with this concept: The Thing is also linguistic excess, the unsaid in every signifier. A “ceded object” (or a lost object) inhabits language, something the subject has given up for meaning. This something constitutes anxiety for the subject according to Lacan: [T]his manifestation of anxiety coincides with the very emergence in the world of he who is going to be the subject. This manifestation is his cry . . . this first effect of cession .  .  . the nursling can’t do anything about the cry that slips out of him. He has yielded something and nothing will ever conjoin it again.13

This “lack-of-signifier” presents itself as an unasked question, or the topology of das Ding, within which the subject experiences tremendous anxiety in relation to the Neighbour-Thing (other) and the Other. The Question of (from) the Other in relation to the subject’s own question (own lack) provides the stage for fantasy, symptom, and enjoyment. With this Lacanian interpretation, Boothby thinks of religion as an economy regulating this mystery, this surplus enjoyment, and the unbearable anxiety the Thing induces. Religion attempts to stage an answer to the ineffable. If we think of religion as the organization of neighbours, with rituals, practices, and protocols, then its fundamental purpose is to manage the unknown Thing within the neighbour, establishing the possibility of congregation. But how is this accomplished? Lacan states: This neighbor, is it what I have called the [big] Other, what I make use of to make function the presence of the signifying articulation in the unconscious? Certainly not. The neighbor is the intolerable imminence of enjoyment. The

T he W ill of the A merican god

51

[big] Other is only its cleared out terreplein. . . . It is precisely that, it is a terrain cleared of enjoyment.14

For Boothby, this clearing of enjoyment from the Other enables the subject to manage the intolerable of the neighbour. God is precisely this clearing, providing both assurance for the Symbolic and a scene of a projected enjoyment. Boothby suggests, [R]eligious belief presents us with the spectacle of a congregation of human beings, gathered in the common cause of controlling too raw an exposure to another’s enjoyment in favor of devotion to another, imagined subjectivity in the form of a deity who controls access to enjoyment in accordance with sacred dictates.15

The Other (as God), the neighbour (as other), and the subject triangulate a relation of regulating enjoyment and Thing management. The “sacred dictates” of God provide the guidelines for addressing the unbearable in the neighbour, keeping the enigma of the neighbour at a safe distance, while simultaneously receiving an answer to this enigma in the form of jouissance. But what are these dictates? Obedience to these dictates, I argue, constitutes religious worship. Within the triangulation of anxiety, religious dictates not only determine the “proper” and the “norm,” as J. Kameron Carter avers, but also legitimate enjoyment. It is within the clearing of the Other’s jouissance that we find an unbounded terrain of practices and rituals. What happens, then, when anti-blackness is placed in this clearing, as a projected form of jouissance? What if the Other demands black-death, burning crosses to spread the gospel, castrated penises, or unending police shootings as perverse sacraments? Moreover, what if the congregation requires its own extimate, an ultimate neighbour, outside its structure but most intimate to it? Boothby’s Lacanian analysis brings us to the precipice of unanswerable questions, or stimulates a theological anxiety, for which the signifier is inadequate to address. Understanding anti-blackness as the repository of American religious dictates—including lynching, shooting, and the violation of black bodies—recasts anti-black violence as the unbearable demand of the Other. THE ANTI-BLACK SADISM, THE AMERICAN IDOL, AND TRAYVON MARTIN AS ULTIMATE NEIGHBOUR The sadist, for his part, seeks to make himself the instrument of the big Other’s enjoyment.16 —Richard Boothby

52

C al v in W arren

After his acquittal, George Zimmerman appeared on Sean Hannity’s television show to provide perspective and answer inquires. In response to Hannity’s question, “Do you have any regrets about anything?” Zimmerman resolutely answered, no: “It was part of God’s plan” (it was God’s will).17 God’s will eliminates lack in the subject since it provides an answer to the unbearable question of regret. If, indeed, every signifier presents an excess, I’d like to imagine, or stage, Zimmerman’s excess in this interview, using my own Lacanian translation of these signifiers (or let’s think of the interview as a psychoanalytic session): Sean Hannity: How did you manage the unbearable question, the agonizing lack, Trayvon Martin presented in his menacing, excessive blackness? George Zimmerman: I offered myself as a vessel for divine enjoyment, his will, and I murdered Trayvon Martin (the Thing) out of religious necessity. My actions manifested a divine plan—manifesting divine jouissance as black-death.

Richard Wright suggested, “the law is white”; the whiteness of the Symbolic requires support in the form of anti-black violence and a destructive response to the Other’s demand.18 Distinguished theologian Anthea Butler provides a name for this Law and the sadistic jouissance of black-death: God ain’t good all of the time. In fact, sometimes, God is not for us. As a black woman in a nation that has taken too many pains to remind me that I am not a white man, and am not capable of taking care of my reproductive rights, or my voting rights, I know that this American god ain’t my god. As a matter of fact, I think he’s a white racist god with a problem. More importantly, he is carrying a gun and stalking young black men. I have to ask: Is God the old white male racist looking down from heaven, ready to bless me if I just believe the white men like Rick Perry who say the Zimmerman case has nothing to do with race?19

The problem the white racist god (American god) has is nothing other than his jouissance. Carrying a gun and stalking young black men assume a sacred status within this other scene. The problem of the Thing, as blackness, is resolved by killing it—the unceasing attempt to eradicate it from the congregation of human beings. This ideal congregation, purged of the contamination of blackness, is what Rich Benjamin might call a “whitopia”—the mythic community of white utopian impulses or safety.20 What I am suggesting here is that we must supplement both Lacan’s and Boothby’s analyses of religion: The Thing not only presents anxiety the Other is called upon to regulate between neighbours, but the Thing also forges an anti-black solidarity (an ideal congregation) for which the Other mandates

T he W ill of the A merican god

53

protection as jouissance and demand. That anti-blackness consolidates neighbourhoods as congregations in service of anti-black jouissance is a psychoanalytic perspective black theology can offer. George Zimmerman’s panicked call to the 911 dispatcher casts Martin as a peculiar das Ding within Zimmerman’s congregation-neighbourhood: Dispatcher: Sanford Police Department. Zimmerman: Hey we’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there’s a real suspicious guy . . . this guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about. Dispatcher: OK, and this guy is he white, black, or Hispanic? Zimmerman: He looks black. Dispatcher: OK, he’s just walking around the area. Zimmerman: . . . looking at all the houses. Dispatcher: OK. Zimmerman: Now he’s just staring at me. . . . Yeah, now he’s coming toward me. Dispatcher: OK. Zimmerman: He’s got his hand in his waistband. And he’s a black male.  .  .  . Something’s wrong with him. Yup, he’s coming to check me out, he’s got something in his hands, I don’t know what his deal is.21

Throughout the call, Zimmerman repeats the word “something” as a placeholder for the unbearable question, or opening, within the black-Thing. This something causes anxiety, since it limits reason and is bereft of a signifier, “I don’t know what his deal is.” Trayvon Martin’s “deal” is precisely this mystery, this unmanageable piece of the Real that Zimmerman both pursues (he stalks Martin against the injunction of the dispatcher) and fears getting too close to, “Yeah, he’s coming toward me.” Lacan has taught us that the signifier is bifurcated with both meaning and an unknowable excess. A psychoanalytic reading of this primal scene suggests the signifier “something” is twined—both providing a sense of danger the dispatcher can understand and containing an unknown, a limit, that frightens. The bifurcation of this signifier consistently fails Zimmerman: What does this black boy want? What is his deal? As Boothby reminds us, The Thing is the site of a fundamental blind spot, the subject’s primitive acknowledgement of a zone of something unknown. The spectre of the Thing results from a kind of primitive projection which essentially says, ‘there is

54

C al v in W arren

something here, I know not what.’ The Thing is thus a reality for the subject alone. It marks the space of an open question.22

Trayvon Martin punctures the congregation with an opening, an unanswerable question: He looks like he’s “up to no good,” like he’s “on drugs or something.” This “something” dockets the excess of Martin. An excess out of place, like the Real itself, causing anxiety within the good neighbour, who is helpless to manage the unknown. We can think of this call to the dispatcher as a prayer (or appeal) to the Other (the American god)—to protect and safeguard the Symbolic against the encroachment of the other’s enjoyment. It is this encroachment, the propinquity of the other, that sends Zimmerman into a frenzy. In this sense, the appeal is a plea for answers to the unknown—the ultimate neighbour for which every signifier is insufficient. Zimmerman, then, is asking the dispatcher (a placeholder for the Other) to provide a signifier saturated with meaning—but he gets lack instead. Reflecting on Zimmerman’s trial, theologian Carter avers: But more than just deputizing himself to act with police power (and this is the crucial point of Dr. Butler’s reflection), he deputized himself to stand in the place of god, to act in god’s name and with divine sovereign power, and finally not just to act as god but to be a god, a god who could judge and act with the power of life and death—or more accurately, with the power of death and under the protection of law.23

Acting in god’s name, assuming his place, exercising divine, sovereign power is precisely the aim of the sadist in relation to the Other. “The sadist, for his part, seeks to make himself the instrument of the big Other’s enjoyment.”24 Reading Carter through Boothby, we can suggest that killing Trayvon Martin was an offering from Zimmerman—Martin (as sacrifice) and himself as vessel of the Other’s enjoyment. If the jouissance of the Other demands anti-black sadism, killing unarmed black teens, then Zimmerman, as sadist and anti-black saint, acquiesces to the demand of the Other.25 The famed Lacanian reversal of Dostoyevsky insists, “if God exists then everything is permitted.”26 If the white-western-racist god (the American idol) exists, as an encrusted feature of the unconscious, then there isn’t a prohibition—everything is permitted. The rituals of castration, burning, lynching, torture, and unbounded racial terrorism evince the existence of Zimmerman’s divinity. The “racist god with a problem,” to return to Butler’s analysis, requires the obscene as sacred work. Blacks, then, are the embodiments of a certain drive—an unrelenting determination to destroy.

T he W ill of the A merican god

55

ATHEISM, TRAVERSAL, AND MIRACLES If anti-black violence constitutes a repository of religious practices, rituals, and protocols, then the black theologian is pressed to provide a signifier, an answer to the question, “what is to be done about this?” Upon what ground does one contest the legitimacy and existence of this American god? How does one contend with political disavowal, which constantly denies both the existence of the American god and faithfully serves this god’s demand for black flesh? It is a similar question that the analytic session presents: How does the analysand contend with the overwhelming enjoyment of the symptom? Carter suggests, “the ‘god’ of (or that is) whiteness is a god toward which we must be thoroughgoing atheists and religionless.”27 What does such atheism entail? A psychoanalytic translation of this atheism consists of a traversal of enjoyment (America’s jouissance in black-death). It would expose the inherent lack in the Other—a religious perversity of sorts. Within this atheism, the Other is presented as fraudulent, so that the true Other can resume its rightful place. Lacan’s formula of atheism, however, presents a certain conundrum: “The true formula of atheism is not God is dead—even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder, Freud protects the father— the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious.”28 Is there, then, any escape from this idol’s jouissance? Taking an atheistic stand against the American idol does not equate to its eradication; rather, the idol is preserved through repression within the political unconscious. The problem, then, is that anti-black violence remains on all sides of the fundamental fantasy: It is lodged deeply in the political unconscious, it supports an antiblack Symbolic and protects the Master signifiers of Whiteness, and consolidates the white imaginary ego. If we expect the Real, or the “subject of the unconscious,” to provide the traumatic knowledge to disrupt anti-black fantasies and symbolic identity, we set ourselves up for tremendous disappointment. The Real will not save us. Black theology, then, must rely on the power of perversity—the exposure of the Other’s fraudulence—to reinstate a more just Other. It must write and meditate within the lack of the Other. The theological aim is not to discredit the space of the Other, but to support a different opening and sustain different fantasies/demands. Given the ubiquity of anti-blackness, we might suggest that a “miracle” is required.29 This is not necessarily Lacanian “love”—the solution to the lack of a sexual relationship—but a divine intervention (divine violence) to penetrate the registers and reshape the unconscious. Perhaps this is

56

C al v in W arren

tantamount to a psychoanalytic “cure,” but integration does not equate to the overcoming of anti-blackness. It is this miracle, as divine intervention, that animates black theology. What is the psychoanalytic theory of miracles? What would a black theological analysis of the interminable session and the problem of jouissance entail? Hope in miracles, overcoming the American idol, and the reinstatement of the true Other might not have definitive places in Lacanian psychoanalysis, but a continued conversation between black theology and psychoanalysis is fecund with possibility. Given the terror of the Thing, the unrelenting jouissance of the Other, and the saturation of anti-blackness within the Symbolic, we must admit: Only a miracle can save us. NOTES 1. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, ed. Jacques Alain Miller (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2014), 163. 2. Richard Boothby, “The No-Thing of God: Psychoanalysis of Religion After Lacan,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard G. T. Gipps and Michael Lacewing (2018). http:​//www​.oxfo​rdhan​dbook​s.com​/view​ /10.1​093/o​xford​hb/97​80198​78970​3.001​.0001​/oxfo​rdhb-​97801​98789​703-e​-35. 3. J. Kameron Carter, “Christian Atheism: The Only Response Worth Its Salt to the Zimmerman Verdict,” Religion Dispatches (23 July 2013). http:​//rel​igion​ dispa​tches​.org/​chris​tian-​athei​sm-th​e-onl​y-res​ponse​-wort​h-its​-salt​-to-t​he-zi​mmerm​ an-ve​rdict​/, accessed 11 April 2019, emphasis added. 4. https​ : //th​ i nkpr​ o gres​ s .org​ / alle​ g ed-m​ a nife​ s to-o​ f -dyl​ a nn-r​ o of-c​ o nfir​ m s -mo​tivat​ion-f​or-so​uth-c​aroli​na-mu​rders​-105f​84c92​44c/,​ accessed 11 April 2019. 5. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). 6. Boothby, “The No-Thing of God,” 574. 7. As quoted in Boothby, “The No-Thing of God.” 8. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 62. 9. Boothby, “The No-Thing of God.” 10. In the preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant wants to place limits on Reason “to make room for faith.” See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 11. Sigmund Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” (unpublished), quoted in Boothby “The No-Thing of God.” 12. Lacan, Anxiety, 331. 13. Lacan, Anxiety, 326. 14. As quoted in Boothby, “The No-Thing of God,” 580. 15. Boothby, “The No-Thing of God,” 580.

T he W ill of the A merican god

57

16. Boothby, “The No-Thing of God,” 581. 17. https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=Cjh​xXwbt​8E8, accessed 11 April 2019. 18. Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 19. Anthea Butler, “The Zimmerman Acquittal: America’s Racist God,” Religion Dispatchers (16 July 2013). http:​//rel​igion​dispa​tches​.org/​the-z​immer​man-a​cquit​tal -a​meric​as-ra​cist-​god/,​ accessed 11 April 2019. 20. See Rich Benjamin, Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America (New York: Hatchett Books, 2009). 21. https ​ : //ww ​ w .doc ​ u ment ​ c loud ​ . org/ ​ d ocum​ e nts/​ 3 2670​ 0 -ful​ l -tra​ n scri​ p tzi​mmerm​an.ht​ml, accessed 11 April 2019, emphasis added. 22. Boothby, “The No-Thing of God,” 585. 23. Carter, “Christian Atheism.” 24. Boothby, “The No-Thing of God,” 581. 25. Ku Klux Klan rituals of lynching, castration, and torture were often commenced under “cross lightings” (formerly known as cross burnings). The Ku Klux Klan considers its organization Christian and lighting crosses is a sign of faith (“Jesus is the light of the world”). The castration of the black penis or the torture of black women, then, is situated in a historical schema of sadistic jouissance. Rituals of black torment are often intertwined with religious justifications. 26. Slavoj Žižek and Boris Gunjević, God in Pain: Inversion of the Apocalypse (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 27. 27. Carter, “Christian Atheism,” original emphasis. 28. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 59, original emphasis. 29. In his discussion of love, Žižek suggests Lacan’s “Real as impossible” means that the impossible does happen, that “miracles” like love do occur. From “impossible to happen” we thus pass to “the impossible happens”—this, and not the structural obstacle forever deferring the final resolution is the most difficult thing to accept: “We’d forgotten how to be in readiness for miracles.” Black theology, then, cultivates a certain readiness for miracle reception. See Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (New York: Routledge, 2001), 84.

3 LACAN AND SUFISM Paths for Moving Beyond  Pre- and Postmodern Subjectivities Mahdi Tourage

This chapter offers a conversation between Jacques Lacan’s theoretical work and Sufism, especially through the works of Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273), the thirteenth-century mystic of the Perso-Islamic world. Its intended audience are mainly those who are more familiar with Islamic studies and Sufism than Lacanian psychoanalysis. Therefore I will begin with briefly contextualising the relationship between psychoanalysis and studies of Islam and Muslims before a discussion of Lacan’s unique relevance to studying Sufism. With reference to specific passages from Rumi’s work and the Qur’an I aim to demonstrate two interrelated points. First, I intend to show the relevance of Lacan’s insights to fresh understandings of Islam’s religious texts, especially Sufism. My goal is not to turn these texts into postmodern theoretical works, but to  dispute the dominant scholarship that assumes a single interpretive modality and a stable foundation for Islamic discourse. To that end, I will argue against fixed boundaries between post- and premodern subjectivities.  Second, I will discuss the relevance of some of the resources of Sufism for a better understanding of Lacan’s work. This is not to  transform Lacan’s writing into a form of occult mysticism rooted in premodern times. My goal is to broaden the conversation between Lacan’s work and Sufism in order to open up ways of differently imagining subjectivities, and in the process to unsettle the need for maintaining a spatial or epistemological other against whom Europe or Islam can conveniently define themselves. 59

60

M a h di T o u r a g e

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ISLAM Psychoanalytical thinking in the Muslim world is often tied to colonialism and Eurocentric secular liberalism. Those who write from a psychoanalytical perspective are often dismissed as “native informers,” mindlessly enamoured with European theories. For example, Joseph Massad points to the construction of the category “Islam” as the other of Euro-America in order for the latter to constitute itself as modern and civilised. In Massad’s estimation, certain Muslim writers’ strong fascination with theories originating in Europe is a “defeatist” approach, uncritically adopting these theories and their claim of universal applicability.1 A significant effort of these Muslims writers, according to Massad, involves their psychoanalysing Muslim resistance to their civilising mission. Any resistance to their demand that the Muslim world be remade in the image of Western liberalism or be condemned as anti-modern, is then pathologised as a form of neurosis that must be psychoanalysed.2 Despite his broad generalisations and his selective choice of scholars, Massad has a point: that like any other discourse, psychoanalysis can be ideologised as a totalising metanarrative of universality in the service of Western liberal hegemonic goals. For the most part it was the political context of colonial relations that prevented psychoanalysis from receiving a favourable reception in Islamic studies in general, and in Sufi studies in particular. What is relevant to the aim of this chapter, however, is that psychoanalysis has also been utilised by Muslim scholars for fruitful projects that evaluate constructions of self and its relationship to others. For example, Omnia El Shakry writes: “Indeed, the story of the elaboration of modern languages of the self in twentiethcentury Egypt moves us away from models of selfhood as either modern or traditional, Western or non-Western, autonomous or heteronomous, and unsettles the assumption of an alleged incommensurability between psychoanalysis and Islam.”3 The picture painted by El Shakry of the interaction between Egyptian writers and psychoanalytic traditions is in sharp contrast with Massad’s assessment of the same period. Whereas in Massad’s estimation the European trained Arab psychoanalysts and psychoanalytical thinkers focusing on “Islam” were narcissistic Europeanised Arabs facing the failed prospects of the project of Europeanisation,4 El Shakry shows that the new science of the self emerged by drawing both from psychoanalysis as well as from key classical Muslim thinkers, such as Avicenna (d. 1037) al-Ghazali (d. 1111), and especially and most extensively, Ibn ‘Arabī (d. 1240). The result was not capitulation to European hegemony but a hybrid “theory of the self that was at once in concert with and heterogeneous to

L acan and S U F I S M

61

European analytic thought.”5 Arguing against the rigid oppositional binaries of East and West, she focuses on “the points of intersection, articulation, and commensurability between Islamic discourses and modern social scientific thought.”6 Similarly, but in a non-Arab context we can point to Gohar Homayounpour’s book describing her clinical psychoanalytic practice in Iran.7 She argues against claims of an Islamic resistance to psychoanalysis and demonstrates that articulations of modern language of the self and models of selfhood are not bound by the rigid categories of Western or non-Western, modern or traditional. Without ignoring the significance of cultural differences, she observes that psychoanalysis was “transplanted” to Iran, but it surely found “a very fertile ground within the culture of Iranian thought.”8 Closer to the goals of this chapter are the studies that take Lacanian theory as an epistemic ground of mutuality for creative conceptual engagements with various aspects of Sufism. Several studies have shown the relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis to studying various aspects of Sufism, from textual analysis to modern master-disciple relationships and the eroticism in Sufism.9 For example, Ian Almond has argued that the echoes of Ibn ‘Arabī’s explanation of the unknowable Divine Essence can be found in the Lacanian concept of the Real (discussed next).10 In the context of Persian mystical poetry, which contains the bulk of the Islamic tradition of mystical poetry, Michael Glünz has pointed out the relevance of Lacan to premodern Persian poetry.11 And Claudia Yaghoobi has masterfully studied transgression in Persian Sufism through Lacan’s conceptualisation of jouissance.12 LACAN AND SUFISM Tina Beattie argues that Lacan is unique in his engagement with medieval literature and philosophy.13 In her book, Lacan’s Medievalism, Erin Felicia Labbie argues that Lacan is a medievalist, because he follows medieval scholastic scholars “who sought to determine the potential for the human subject to know and to represent real universal categories.”14 In Labbie’s estimation Lacan is “a Thomist in the strictest sense” because he demonstrates the importance of medieval texts and psyche for understanding the operations of desire and the unconscious. We can add that Lacan was also fascinated by Occultism, as discussed in the introduction to this monograph as well as the chapters by Bielik-Robson, Rosenstock, and Valentini. To be sure Lacan is not the only European theorist whose work is relevant

62

M a h di T o u r a g e

to the studies of Sufism. For example, Sadiyya Shaikh’s excellent study draws on contemporary philosophers to explain Ibn ‘Arabī’s understating of language and metaphor.15 What makes Lacan uniquely relevant to projects of engaging Sufi texts (beyond his fascination with medieval literature and philosophy), is the “esoteric” nature of his theories. The evidence of his esoteric undertones can be gleaned from his commentators’ words that describe his writings as “so obscure and enigmatic that for the uninitiated it constitutes a kind of rebus in itself.”16 This “hermeneutical obscurity” is of course not simply a matter of style, which mimics the subject matter, but a matter of substance. The substance of Lacan’s work is concerned with the unconscious, an entity that eludes rational discourse and direct representation. The unconscious is not a physical or an abstract and metaphysical entity; nor is it a substantial entity lying hidden in some inaccessible corner of the individual psyche. In other words, the unconscious is not interior to the subject, it is rather “transindividual.”17 The unconscious is not simply the unknown, it is that which cannot be known, except when indications of it emerge in language. That is why Lacan famously asserts: “God is unconscious,” and “the unconscious is structured like a language.”18 The first assertion evokes the affinity between God (a metaphor for the big Other) and the demands of the unconscious, which become ever more powerful once the modern demise of God is declared.19 The second assertion is more relevant here. “Language” is not a reference to a particular language but to a system of signification composed of signifiers that refer to other signifiers in a signifying chain. Signifying chains are like rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings.20 Signifiers could be words or non-linguistic things such as objects, relationships, gestures, and body language—and as we will see in the study of Sufi texts, even silence. Signifiers never refer to the signified (their corresponding conceptual content), but to other signifiers. Therefore the signified is not captured in any signifier or a particular association of signifiers in a chain. As Lacan explains, meaning never consists in language, it insists in the chain of signifiers; a signifier represents a subject for another signifier, but it never represents the signified.21 This brief summary of Lacan’s formulations of unconscious and language should suffice to demonstrate the uncanny similarities between his theory and mystical premises of Sufism. The unknowable Signified (written with the uppercase “S” to indicate the ontological understanding of it by Sufi authors) is not so different from the Essence that Sufis speak of. In what seems to be a chicken and egg question we can ask: Is the signified the effect of the play of signifiers as Lacan holds, or is the Signified the

L acan and S U F I S M

63

originator of signifiers as Sufis believe? What makes this question rhetorical is that neither Lacan nor Sufi authorities are committed to defining the nature of the S/signified. In fact, Muslims are specifically discouraged by a Prophet’s saying to contemplate God’s Essence, which remains unknown, and only to contemplate God’s attributes.22 What can be known of God are attributes and attributions, or in Qur’anic terms, “Divine Names” that can never intimate the Essence as such. Here we can add Ibn ‘Arabī’s understanding of language as encompassing all of reality. In their ideologically motivated sweeping generalisation, some modern presenters of Ibn ‘Arabī such as William Chittick dismiss similarities between Ibn ‘Arabī and the contemporary theorists, calling the latter “reductionist.”23 But Lacan’s formulation of language as the single paradigm of all structures brings him close to Sufis and makes his work “esoteric” (as will be discussed next). With the burgeoning Greek-influenced Arabic-Islamic culture (and technological advancement in paper production) and ascendency of writing over speech, medieval Muslim metaphysicians saw the entire cosmos as a text. This phenomenon has been overlooked in the study of later Islamicate societies due to the “occultophobic bias” that followed the Enlightenment and Victorian-era privileging of “science” over “occult” (and also served as the theoretical basis of European colonialism).24 It is in this context that the tension between Muslim theologians and Sufis over their common concern with knowing God could be understood. Despite repeating formal theological content of the creed in Sufi texts to ostensibly demonstrate their adherence to orthodoxy, and despite significant overlaps and interactions, theology and mysticism were separated as distinct disciplines.25 Whereas Muslim theologians employed hair-splitting rational debate as a mode of discourse to speak of God, Sufis paradoxically spoke of “the language of unsaying” in reference to the awesome God who is irreducible to any language.26 Interestingly, in their dismissal of what they viewed as a reified articulation of God in speculative theological language, Sufis would agree with Lacan’s claim that “only theologians can be truly atheistic, namely, those who speak of God.”27 It is unfruitful to get into the discussion of the origins of language. Is it from God or is it produced through human relations? Lacan, like Rumi, is not concerned with the question of the origins of language, or the nature of the signified. The Signified for the Sufis is on the side of the Real, one of the three psychic registers that constitutes the subject for Lacan. The other two are the Symbolic (the order of language, signifiers), and the Imaginary (the order of the visual). The Real is not captured or controlled by the other two orders. There is nothing missing or absent in the Real, unlike the Symbolic

64

M a h di T o u r a g e

in which something may be always missing because it is based on the opposition between presence and absence.28 The relevance of the Lacanian concept of the Real to Sufism in general has been pointed out by Michael Sells and James Webb.29 Most importantly, the Real, like the Essence that Sufis speak of, is inassimilable in language and impossible to symbolise; the Real is “that which resists symbolization absolutely.”30 The occult quality of the Real is captured in its characterisation in religious terms: it is a truth claim referring to an unknowable entity which by necessity requires an act of faith.31 In this “religious” sense the Real even has the necessary elasticity to be a possible alternative to theologically loaded terms like God or Allah.32 The impossibility of the symbolisation of the Real gives the encounter with it a traumatic quality, which explains why Sufis’ numinous experience of it is described as utter bewilderment and awe. We can describe mystical experience as nothing but this traumatic experience that resists assimilation into any language: “mystical experience might also be understood as overwhelming the individual’s symbolic-discursive resources, giving rise to paradoxical and indirect communications at the boundaries of discourse.”33 Conversely, an inauthentic mystical experience can be described as fetishism, a case of the Imaginary imposing itself upon the Symbolic, or to put it differently, “an imaginary fixation on literalized ideal entities and related symbols and practices.”34 In other words, what is relevant is not the nature of the Signified or the origins of language, but their effects. For Lacan there is a radical break between signifier and signified, a lack (manque) which is at the heart of the process of signification. Therefore it is not the signified that takes centre stage, but the process of producing “effects” (signification, i.e., meaning production). We can study the effects of the signified, which means that the meaning of language cannot be known with certainty. In a Sufi context we can see this in the work of Rumi whose copious amount of mystical poetry is a testimony to the effect of the Signified on mystical language. Many a time he resorts to simply staying silent, or “mutely eloquent” as he puts it, an indication of the lack of a definite referent in the process of signification.35 For Rumi this intrinsic radical break, the lack, is the source of a dynamic process of creativity that spontaneously produces volumes of mystical poetry in a vain attempt to intimate the object of his desire. DESIRE AND ESOTERIC SECRETS Extending the range of Freud’s “dream analysis” to the linguistic realm puts desire at “the very centre of Lacan’s thought.”36 The four features of

L acan and S U F I S M

65

Freudian dream analysis or symptom production (condensation, displacement, representation, and secondary revision) explain the ways in which unfulfilled desires, often marked as forbidden by social and moral constraints, are repressed in the unconscious. They resurface in condensed, displaced, and symbolic forms, for example in dreams, or symptoms that need careful analysis.37 In the Lacanian semiotic model the return of desire is through creative linguistic representational processes. For example, condensation, displacement, and representation correspond to the linguistic processes of metaphor, metonymy, and symbolisation respectively. It is helpful to remember that desires are unsatisfied needs that are alienated from the subject, because in order to be articulated they must be turned into “signifying forms,” which means they must submit to the exigencies of language.38 They remain unsatisfied, never to be fulfilled, because they are not aiming to reach a particular destination in a climactic moment, but to reproduce desire as such by circling “around their object,” finding real enjoyment in the “repetitive movement of their closed circuit.”39 That is why in Lacan’s formulation, desire is not desire of the subject, but “the desire of the Other.”40 Lacan’s semiotic framework is an apt conceptual tool for the study of mystical texts where the concealed communication of esoteric secrets is the main concern.41 Like desires, esoteric secrets are essentially incompatible with language. In the mystical context of Sufism, it is imperative to conceal the secrets in order to preserve the hidden nature of secrecy (and for pragmatic considerations of protecting Sufis against the ever-present danger of persecution). It is also imperative to reveal the secrets, but only in condensed symbolic forms intelligible only to initiated insiders. Just as desire requires recognition, secrecy requires communication. This leads to the importance of communicative cultural resources that can reveal and conceal the secrets. The deferral of the fulfilment of desires, or postponement of the revealing secrets in a mystical context is described by such actions as the metonymic “word-to-word” combination of signifiers, one word displacing another in a signifying chain. As Lacan articulates it: “desire is metonymy.”42 It is in the context of this paradoxical impulse of disclosing the secrets in their concealment, which is not possible unless they are concealed in their disclosure, that we get the mystical language of unsaying. The articulation of esoteric secrets in the symbolic language of Sufis is only a partial dissemination of the repressed content of secrecy. Lacan’s schema can be mapped onto the operations of the revelation and concealment of esoteric secrets, especially considering Lacan’s perplexing formulation of desire as an absent causality that appears ex nihilo. Labbie

66

M a h di T o u r a g e

writes: “indeed, the lack of causality foundational to Lacan’s theory of desire resembles the Thomistic identification of God as causality more than one might think, since in the scene of desire the presence (corporeal or incorporeal) of two beings is not only necessary but fundamental.”43 Secrets operate like the psychoanalytical articulation of desire in language, making God like the Real of the unconscious. This explains why the mystic does not lament the inaccessibility of the Signified. Put in terms that resonate with the Freudian definition of melancholy, the mystic does not lament the loss of the object of his mad love (sawda’ in Arabic and Persian, which literally translates as “melancholy”), but celebrates that which makes him desire that object. This is depicted in Sufi literature, for example, in the story of Majnun, the ideal mystic-lover, who shows no interest in the physical presence of his beloved Layla because he is in love with the love itself. We can even say that the entire esoteric enterprise of a mystic like Rumi revolves around the elaboration of lack as the cause of desire for the object of his love. It is indeed the lack that is celebrated as the reason for existence, bringing it ever closer to Lacan’s emphasis on lack as an overvaluation, to the point of turning it into the meaning of signification.44 This is embracing the lack, locating oneself within it. Is this not also the goal of psychoanalysis, to bring the subject to accept her location within the Symbolic and recognise the truth about her desire (instead of covering over the intrinsic lack)? This is how Lacanian psychoanalysis explains the aim of clinical intervention: Not to produce a well-adjusted subject pursuing a happy life, but “only the advent of true speech and the subject’s realisation of his history in its relation to a future.”45 THE PHALLUS AS THE SIGNIFIER OF DESIRE AND ESOTERIC SECRETS Lacan is emphatic that the phallus is not imaginary or a fantasy. It is not the penis (or clitoris) either, but a symbolic configuration that actively determines the nature of desire. It is the signifier of desire.46 Lacan goes further and claims that the phallus is the privileged signifier which has no signified. What can be added here to Lacan’s insight is that in order to fulfil its signifying function the phallus must be veiled.47 In certain mystical contexts, the phallus could be the signifier of esoteric secrets not through a simple substitution of one term for another, but as discussed above, because of the epistemological underpinnings that connect the operations of desire and secrets in psychoanalytical and mystical contexts respectively.

L acan and S U F I S M

67

In some passages of the Qur’an and the mystical poetry of Rumi there are instances where the function of the phallus as an esoteric symbol is evident. Although in the broadest sense premodern Islamic thought in general and Sufism in particular are phallocentric,48 Rumi seems to be the only mystic who specifically employs the phallus as an esoteric symbol. This is perhaps because he is the only mystic who uses bawdy tales for mystical purposes. Furthermore, his works are not systematic treatises like Ibn ‘Arabī’s, but are mainly concerned with effecting subjective transformation through demonstrating the locatedness of the subject. To that end Rumi exploits the cultural symbolic resources at his disposal to show the constructed nature of subjectivity and the process of knowledge production. For example, he uses bawdy tales and vulgar words to undermine the dependency of the subject (of the esoteric secrets) on the normative symbolic systems that bring about its formation and determine its itinerary. As one example, there is the Qur’anic narrative of the encounter between Moses and the Pharaoh’s magicians where Moses’ staff miraculously turns into a serpent (Qur’an 26:15). In his exegetical take on this tale Rumi offers what we can identify as an instance where the phallus is posited as a transcendental signifier of esoteric secrets. Briefly, Rumi couches this narrative at the end of a comical bawdy tale where a preacher is admonishing his congregation about the cultural hygienic practice of keeping their pubic hair cut short.49 A prankster donning a veil and sitting among women turns to the woman next to him and says: “O sister, would you for God’s sake bring your hand forward and check the length of my pubic hair?” The woman unknowingly puts her hand in the prankster’s trousers and her hand touches his penis. Being utterly surprised she screams loudly, which is interpreted by the preacher as a mystical experience as he announces: “My preaching touched her heart!” The prankster corrects him: “No, it did not touch her heart, it touched her hand!” Rumi goes on to give an example of a transformation of the heart by referring to the story of Pharaoh’s magicians who were originally brought to refute Moses but had a change of heart when they witnessed Moses’s miracle of turning his staff into a serpent. As I have shown elsewhere, in this tale Rumi decentres subjectivities that are located within closed cultural matrices. He contests the sublimation of external forms and cultural practices by positioning a symbolic formation beyond any representation, which is referred to in the text simply with the pronoun “it.” We can recognise this symbolic configuration as the phallus, the symbolic opposite of the penis in the story, which here functions as the signifier of esoteric secrets forever eluding signification.50 As long as readers are focused on the prankster’s

68

M a h di T o u r a g e

penis or Moses’ staff (the phallic symbolism of which should not be missed) they overlook the greater point that it is something beyond language and representation—that is, the phallus, that causes the transformation of the heart. It is the presence of the phallus that in its concealment ensures the subject’s transformation. This transformation is an outline of a process which is always anticipated but its eventuality never fully realised. Totalising claims of self-grounding, coherence or the completion of the subject are therefore a claim of surmounting the inherent lack in the Symbolic. It is in this sense that the subject of a mystical text is indeed a subject-in-process. Another example where the phallus functions as a transcendental signifier indicating the lack of a definite referent in the process of meaning production is the retelling of the tale of Cain and Abel in the Qur’an (Qur’an 5:27). The two brothers, who are not named in the text, each present a sacrifice to God. God inexplicably accepts the sacrifice of one but not the other, prompting the rejected one to kill his brother. At the beginning of the story the Qur’an informs the reader that the “truth” of this tale will be revealed, a promise that seems to be abandoned as the story develops. Muslim commentators have also viewed Cain killing Abel as the foundational violence of murder. They offered various interpretations of this story ranging from citing jealousy and caution against murder, to a socialist class-based reading in modern times.51 Curiously, in the Qur’an the murderer expresses regret after the killing not for the murder of his brother but for not covering the exposed “shame/penis” of the victim.52 Interestingly Slavoj Žižek has a psychoanalytical reading of this Qur’anic text, arguing that the thoroughly transcendent notion of God in Islam prevents a sacrificial symbolic economy of exchange between God and the believers.53 In his assessment Žižek has relied on the work of French psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama, who has surprisingly overlooked the analytic possibilities offered by the textual exposure of the penis.54 The question remains, what is the “truth” of the story? Using Lacan’s theoretical framework I have argued that the truth of the story is nothing but the symbolic absence of the truth, the indefinite deferral of closure in the process of meaning production.55 Concern with covering up the corporeal penis of the murdered brother present in this text alludes to its absent symbolic correlate, the phallus. The phallus conditions signification as an open-ended process which only an inaccessible mastersignifier can inaugurate. Dany Nobus’s words describing Lacan’s understanding of “truth” is an apt psychoanalytical articulation of this point: “In Lacan’s theory truth always refers to a human being’s incapacity to master all knowledge owing to the absence of a knowing agency on the level of the unconscious.”56

L acan and S U F I S M

69

THE PHALLUS AS A THEORETICAL NEXUS “Of all Lacan’s ideas,” writes Dylan Evans, “his concept of the phallus is perhaps the one which has given rise to most controversy.”57 A good example would be Derrida’s critique, who argues that the phallus operating as a transcendental signifier and ideal object can turn into “an ideal guarantee of meaning.”58 No matter how abstract, symbolic, and inaccessible it may be, the phallus could become the guarantor of meaning and introduce “the metaphysics of presence” into the process of signification.59 Careful readers of Lacan would of course disagree, as did Lacan himself—the phallus as the ideal object and transcendental signifier guarantees the lack and conditions the limitation of culture and language.60 The point here is not to settle the debate whether Lacan’s theory falls short of his purported goals or not, but to underline Lacan’s commitment to theoretical ideality, which brings the logic of the phallus to function as the nexus around which promises (and perils) of his theory overlap with that of a premodern mystic like Rumi. In Rumi’s case he is fully aware that esoteric secrets can never be contained in any language, but can only be hinted at through cultural resources such as language. He is relentless in rejecting the literalisation of ideals and symbols as well as the erroneous sublimation of external forms. To that end, he puts objectified symbolic formations into transformative communication with their ideational matrices, or conversely he highlights the corpo-reality of external forms by drawing attention to their elemental functions, margins, and orifices. For him it is only through the veil of signifiers that inner meanings are revealed in their concealment. In other words, signifiers are both veils that conceal the Signified and the means of rending the veils. The Symbolic is permeable to the effects of the Real even though the Real remains inaccessible in itself. Hence, Rumi revels in signification, not as an event, but as a repetitive pattern of differential interpretation where signifiers are displaced by other signifiers without their Signified ever being known. The Masnavi with its more than 25,000 rhymed couplets and hundreds of tales shows that what returns in each interpretation of the Signified is yet another interpretation with a difference that makes it always other than the Signified. Even the revelation, the Qur’an, which is theologically held to be the unaltered, uncreated word of God, is understood to be itself a commentary on an inaccessible meta-historical reality that is the essence and heavenly prototype of all scriptures.61 Thus, Rumi’s goal is not to posit universals and ideals as stable referents, but to universalise the subject’s capacity to move beyond the given.

70

M a h di T o u r a g e

However, despite his evidently full awareness of the signifying limitations of the reified cultural resources and his attentiveness towards the transcendental nature of the Signified, his imaginative creativity does not take him beyond his cultural location. For example, he considers himself to be the mouthpiece of the Divine and his own Masnavi to be divinely inspired, equal to scripture, and he himself above gendered and embodied subjectivities.62 Yet, the Masnavi contains evidence of what in modern parlance we call racist, sexist, misogynist, and homophobic attitudes.63 Relatedly, phallocentric esotericism (the phallus functioning as an esoteric symbol) should theoretically signify an ontic reality that excludes totalised models of reductive subjectivity and canonised conventions of signification. Yet, instead of signifying lack and an unattainable wholeness, in Rumi’s work the phallus upholds the androcentric context of Islamicate cultures. The transcendental character of the phallus is compromised in favour of a patriarchal system in which men by virtue of having the biological organ, the penis, erroneously assume to have the phallus. As the critiques of Lacan warned, phallus-penis confusion is the result of the relationship of negation and identity in which the phallus is not the penis, but it may symbolise the penis as the privileged referent. Of course as Lacan reminds us, no one can have the phallus. The power to signify is held not by having the phallus, which is impossible, but by the token position of “being the phallus,” which according to Lacan is a feminine position.64 To take this position in the Symbolic, the woman relinquishes her power to signify.65 As Laura Mulvey writes: “An idea of woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies.”66 But in the context of androcentric Islamicate cultures, she becomes the castrated female who is “the masculine imaginary’s constitutive yet disavowed foundation.”67 In Sufism, the hermeneutical efficacy of the feminine is exploited, for example, through inventive concepts such as the “Creative Feminine.”68 So the female remains a mirror for the male’s projection of his sense of lack and loss (what psychoanalysis calls castration). In Judith Butler’s words, she becomes the site of “masculine self-elaboration.”69 In a semiotic sense, the open-ended process of meaning production is therefore brought to a closure by an androcentric system of signification that privileges the male and masculine in all arrangements of signification, positing epistemologically violent fantasmatic configurations such as “the Universal Perfect Man,” citing the feminine only in ways that uphold regimes of male supremacy and normative heterosexuality.70

L acan and S U F I S M

71

TRANSFORMATIVE ITINERARIES The unfavourable reception of psychoanalysis in Islamic studies noted at the beginning of this chapter is matched by the general dismissal of religion as a “reactionary force,” and “a universal obsessional neurosis” by psychoanalysis.71 Freud anchored his psychoanalytical insights in biology and Lacan used algebra to formalise and give his theoretical writings a scientific grounding, even though he did use metaphors from Christian theology and creationism abundantly.72 This scientific grounding is “paradoxical” in Lacan’s own estimation, because psychoanalysis is concerned with unconscious forces, motives, and fantasies.73 However, these forces, like the esoteric secrets that Sufis are concerned with, are not free-floating or arbitrarily linked. They are structured in ways that psychoanalysis tries to uncover. For instance, their connections are regulated through linguistic features such as metonymy and metaphor—the unconscious is structured like a language after all. Hence, Lacan distances himself from the Freudian model of the phylogenetic evolution of the human mind (from magic and animism to science and rationality). As Nobus writes: “Lacan argued that there is no such thing as a non-scientific human mind, whether the latter is situated within a pre-modern or modern society, whether that of a child or an adult, whether suffering from psychic problems or not.”74 Lacan is in fact critical of modern science with its view of truth as “the inherent quality of proper scientific knowledge.”75 He is equally critical of religious explanations of truth as a final cause and part of God’s ultimate plan. (Muslim mystics dismissive of theologians’ certainties about God’s intentions could agree with Lacan here.) Instead, to Lacan, “the truth of a phenomenon, action or process lies . . . only in its building-blocks, which are made up of speech and language.”76 In “scientifically” grounding his theories thus, Lacan broadens the definition of “scientific” in ways that open pathways for epistemic intersections between his theories and premodern mystical texts. This is particularly true in the case of Sufi texts where the indefinite deferral of truth is predicated on the centrality of language and its signifying dimension, which uphold a division between truth and knowledge. It is not surprising that Lacan considered himself somewhat of a mystic and his Écrits the same as a mystical testimony.77 Nor is it surprising that premodern Sufis’ concerns with the communicative aspects of language to map the itinerary of the suppression and symbolic emergence of esoteric secrets are similar to psychoanalytical interventions on the psychical process of symptom formation and dream

72

M a h di T o u r a g e

production. Perhaps the split of the subject, the suspicion of claims of certainty and authenticity and transformative critique in general are not modern phenomena after all.78 In that case the resources of premodern mystical traditions like Sufism would be relevant to the subject of postmodern conditions. It follows that the segregationist demand for maintaining a spatial outside and an “other” (e.g., territory, people, epistemology, or epoch) against whom Europe or Islam can conveniently define themselves is untenable. On the Muslim side critical scholarship of Islam based on theories originating in Europe are often dismissed through identity-claims that view them as defeatist, “inauthentic” and Islamophobic.79 On the European side “western critical theorists act as if all that is necessary is to draw on their own existing models and traditions to define any new state of the world.”80 Lacanian psychoanalysis, especially in its esoteric aspect, can provide the transformative critical space for symbolic mediation between Muslims as well as between Muslims and others. We cannot map out the parameters of such a creative space or speculate on the end results of its mediating function in advance— it would not be a creative space if we could do that, and Lacanian lack as the constitutive element of the Symbolic precludes such speculations anyways. This leaves a Lacanian subject-in-process (and by extension Sufism) open to the charge of being unsuited for providing realistic viable solutions.81 However the primary task of psychoanalysis or Sufism as represented in Rumi’s work is not to provide a handy roadmap to the truth (or to the S/signified, or to the formation of a well-adjusted fully-realised political subject), but to analyse the process of construction of that truth. NOTES 1. Joseph A. Massad, Islam in Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 306. 2. Massad, Islam in Liberalism, 16. 3. Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 1–2. 4. Massad, Islam in Liberalism, 279. 5. El Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 2. 6. El Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 2. 7. Gohar Homayounpour, Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 8. Homayounpour, Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran, xxvii. 9. See Michael Glünz, “The Sword, the Pen and the Phallus: Metaphors and Metonymies of Male Power and Creativity in Medieval Persian Poetry,” Edebiyat

L acan and S U F I S M

73

6 (1995): 223–43; Katherine Ewing, Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and Islam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Mahdi Tourage, Rumi and the Hermeneutics of Eroticism (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 10. Ian Almond, Sufism and Deconstruction: A Comparative Study of Derrida and Ibn ‘Arabī (London: Routledge, 2004), 15. 11. Glünz, “The Sword, the Pen and the Phallus.” 12. Claudia Yaghoobi, Subjectivity in Attar (West Lafayett, IN: Purdue University Press, 2017). 13. Tina Beattie, Theology after Postmodernity: Driving the Void—A Lacanian Reading of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 14. Erin Felicia Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 4. 15. Sadiyya Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn ‘Arabī, Gender, and Sexuality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 116–18. 16. John P. Muller and W. J. Richardson, Lacan and Language: A Reader’s Guide to Écrits (New York: International University Press, 1982), 2. 17. Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1996), 220. 18. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary, 166, 219. 19. Tad DeLay, God Is Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015), xxviii. 20. Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 502. 21. Lacan, Écrits, 819. 22. For example, see William C. Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn ‘Arabī’s Cosmology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), xvii. 23. Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God, xxxii. 24. Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Of Islamic Grammatology: Ibn Turka’s Lettrist Metaphysics of Light,” Al-’Usur al-Wusta 24 (2016): 52, 54. Melvin-Koushki distinguishes his use of the term “occultism” from “Sufism” and “esotericism” due to their loaded history. However, they are used interchangeably in this chapter. 25. Ayman Shihadeh, “Introduction,” in Sufism and Theology, ed. Ayman Shihadeh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 2. 26. Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 27. Jacques Lacan, “God and The Woman’s Jouissance,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Encore 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 45. 28. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary, 162. 29. Michael A. Sells and James Webb, “Lacan and Bion: Psychoanalysis and the Mystical Language of Unsaying,” Theory and Psychology 5, no. 2 (1995): 195–215. 30. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary, 162. 31. Beattie, Theology after Postmodernity, 16. 32. This is similar to proposed terms “unknowable” or “unnameable” by Russel McCutcheon to make an inclusive academic language relevant to nontheistic

74

M a h di T o u r a g e

religious discourses. See Russell T. McCutcheon, “Naming the Unnameable? Theological Language and the Academic Study of Religion,” in Theory and Method in the Study of Religion: Twenty-Five Years On, ed. Aaron Hughes (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 87–99. 33. James J. DiCenso, The Other Freud: Religion, Culture and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1999), 44. 34. DiCenso, The Other Freud, 58. 35. Tourage, Rumi and the Hermeneutics of Eroticism, 47. 36. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary, 37. 37. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. and trans. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–1974), 4:277–338, 5:339–508. 38. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 286. 39. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary, 47. 40. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, 264. 41. See Elliot R. Wolfson’s discussions of the relevance of Lacan to the study of Kabbalistic texts in his Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 111–41; also see Bruce Rosenstock, “Jacques Lacan, Wilfred Bion and the Inverted Kabbalah,” and Agata Bielik-Robson, “‘Solid Hatred Addressed to Being’: Lacan’s Gnostic Uses of Judaism” in this volume. 42. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, 175, original emphasis. 43. Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism, 18. 44. See Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 174–175. 45. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, 249. 46. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, 263. 47. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, 288. 48. See Mahdi Tourage, “Towards the Retrieval of the Feminine from the Archives of Islam,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 6, no. 2 (2012). http:​//ziz​ ekstu​dies.​org/i​ndex.​php/I​JZS/a​rticl​e/vie​w/624​/630,​ accessed 10 April 2019. 49. Jalal al-Din Rumi, The Mathnawi of Jalalu’ddin Rumi, 8 vols., ed. and trans. Reynold A. Nicholson (London: Luzac, 1925–1940), Book Five, lines 3325–3350. 50. For a detailed study of Rumi’s use of the phallus as an esoteric symbol in this tale, see Tourage, Rumi and the Hermeneutics of Eroticism, 114–48. 51. Mahdi Tourage, “The Erotics of Sacrifice in the Qur’anic Tale of Abel and Cain,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 5, no. 2 (2011). http:​//ziz​ekstu​dies.​org/ i​ndex.​php/I​JZS/a​rticl​e/vie​w/432​/439,​ accessed 10 April 2019. 52. Only a few classical commentaries translate the Arabic term “saw’a” as penis. Most commentators opt for a broader translation of this term as “corpse” or “naked corpse.” For a survey of these commentaries, see Mahdi Tourage, “The Image of the Phallus,” in Islamic Imagery, ed. John Andrew Morrow (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishing, 2014), 110–35.

L acan and S U F I S M

75

53. Slavoj Žižek, “A Glance into the Archives of Islam,” http://www.lacan.com/ zizarchives.html, accessed 4 September 2018. 54. Benslama takes the standard translation of this term as “corpse,” missing an entirely new venue of interpretive possibility; see Fethi Benslama, Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 191. 55. Tourage, “The Erotics of Sacrifice.” 56. Dany Nobus, “A Matter of Cause: Reflections on Lacan’s ‘Science and Truth,’” in Lacan and Science, ed. Jason Glynos and Yannis Stavrakakis (London: Routledge, 2018), 99. 57. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary, 146. 58. Quoted in Evans, An Introductory Dictionary, 146. 59. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 70. 60. See Michael Lewis, Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 253. 61. This heavenly archetype of the Book is designated as umm al-kitab, literally “Mother of Scripture.” See Daniel A. Madigan, “Preserved Tablet,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, Vol. Four, ed. Jane McAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 261–63. 62. For example, in the very first lines of the Masnavi (preface to Book I) Rumi speaks of the Masnavi as a Divinely inspired text equal to the Qur’an with the transmuting qualities of an elixir. Further on in Book III he repeats the same (presumably impossible) challenge that the Qur’an offers to its critiques: produce a chapter, or even a verse, like it! (Qur’an 17:88). That is to say, Rumi considers his own book to be an inimitable miracle, like the Qur’an. As I have argued elsewhere: “The comparison with the Qur’an hints that the Mathnawi is not merely a divinely inspired text, but the words of God uttered through the poet. In other words, Rumi’s Mathnawi is not a report of mystical experiences, it is the mystical experience.” Tourage, Rumi and the Hermeneutics of Eroticism, 153, 34. 63. For a discussion of these passages, see Mahdi Tourage, “Sufism Beyond Orientalism, Fundamentalism and Perennialism,” in Approaching Islam: Classical Categories and Modern Scholarship, ed. Majid Daneshgar and Aaron Hughes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), forthcoming. Also see Sadiyya Shaikh who has observed that excusing premodern Sufis’ gendered shortcomings traps contemporary Muslims in “a web of symbolic sexism.” She has subjected Ibn ‘Arabī to a rigorous feminist critique without holding him “hostage to contemporary sensibilities.” See Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy, 119. 64. Lacan, Écrits, 693–95. 65. Lacan, Écrits, 694. 66. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 14. 67. Tourage, “Towards the Retrieval of the Feminine.” 68. Henry Corbin, L’imagination créatrice dans le soufisme d’Ibn ‘Arabī, 2e éd. (Paris: Flammarion, 1958), 127.

76

M a h di T o u r a g e

69. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 56. 70. See Mahdi Tourage, “Towards the Retrieval of the Feminine.” 71. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary, 166. 72. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary, 7, 111. 73. Quoted in Nobus, “A Matter of Cause,” 95. 74. Nobus, “A Matter of Cause,” 97. 75. Nobus, “A Matter of Cause,” 98. 76. Nobus, “A Matter of Cause,” 108. 77. Jacques Lacan, “Dieu et la jouissance de la femme,” in Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XX: Encore, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 71. 78. For a discussion of premodern critique based in Islamic and Sufi principles, see Irfan Ahmad, Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 79. Aaron Hughes, Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity: An Inquiry into Disciplinary Apologetics and Self-deception (Sheffield: Equinox Publishing, 2015). 80. Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2006), preface. 81. For a critique of Lacan’s subject-in-process, see Judith Butler, “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism,” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 12.

4 JACQUES LACAN, WILFRED BION, AND THE INVERTED KABBALAH Bruce Rosenstock

The Kabbalah of Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534–1572) offered an image-rich symbolical portrait of the ruptural emergence of finitude out of the Infinite (Ayn Sof). Gershom Scholem, the twentieth century’s foremost historian of Jewish mysticism, published a synthesis of twenty years of his research into the Kabbalah in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.1 This book, appearing in English and German in 1941, made a profound impression on both Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) and Wilfred Bion (1897–1979), two of Freud’s most theoretically innovative heirs. In Lacan’s case, the reception of Scholem’s book was facilitated by his contact with a circle of Jewish intellectuals in Paris, centred around the figure of Olga Katunal, a Lithuanian émigré art historian who had studied with the German-Jewish philosophers Oskar Goldberg and his friend Erich Unger. In the first section of this chapter I will provide a brief account of the place of mathematical foundations upon which Lacan and Bion will build their Kabbalistically informed theory of the origin of human desire. I will discuss Lacan’s debt to Goldberg, Unger, and Scholem in the next section of the chapter. In the third section, I will consider Bion’s reception of Scholem’s exposition of the Kabbalah. My argument is that for both Lacan and Bion psychoanalytic practice is pictured as the inversion of the fundamental task of the Jewish people according to Lurianic Kabbalah, namely, the work of world tikkun, the repair, of the fragmented body of humanity (to harmonise the male and female sides of the Primal Man, as I will explain next). I would not want to say that 77

78

B ruce R osenstock

Lacan and Bion seek to break the world where Lurianic Kabbalah seeks to repair it. Rather, I will suggest that Lacan and Bion seek to free us from the categories of breaking and repairing (part and whole objects) and let desire rejoice in the sheer facticity of being in its rupture with what Bion, quoting Milton, frequently calls “the void and formless infinite.”2 INFINITY, FINITUDE, AND HUMAN DESIRE It might seem strange to pair the names of Jacques Lacan and Wilfred Bion. Bion is widely known as a member of Melanie Klein’s branch of “objectrelations” psychoanalysis, with its primary emphasis on the role of the mother in the early development of the infant. On the other hand, Lacan is known for his rather brusque treatment of Klein in Seminar 1, and for his call to “return to Freud” and thus a focus on the castration complex and the place of the figure of the father in the emergence of the speaking subject.3 But, however different their relationship to Klein may be, it is nonetheless true that Lacan held Bion in esteem after meeting him in London soon after the close of the Second World War.4 Although they seem to have done so independently of each other, both men took very similar trajectories in their development of Freudian theory. For both Lacan and Bion, it was essential that psychoanalysis establish itself on a secure “scientific” footing, and this meant for both thinkers that psychoanalytic theory must be expressible in mathematical terms, and, more specifically, that it should be aligned with the latest developments in the axiomatisation of mathematics in terms of set theory. Before going any further with a comparison of Lacan and Bion, a few words about the foundations of mathematics are in order. Since the late nineteenth century with the breakthroughs of Richard Dedekind and Georg Cantor in the mathematics of infinity and Gottlob Frege in logic, the axiomatic foundation of mathematics was believed to rest on the idea of the set. The mathematical set was defined not by any content—as an assemblage of one or more units, for example—but rather by nothingness, the null set.5 Both Lacan and Bion were deeply interested in these developments in mathematical logic, since they seemed to give rigorously “scientific” expression to their fundamental conception of the nature of human existence. Both men believed that human desire was stretched between nothingness and infinity, a conception that, as I will show, is deeply rooted in their reading of both Jewish and Christian theology. Augustine, to name perhaps the most important Christian source of this theological conception of human desire, had argued that human

L acan , B ion , and the I nverted K abbalah

79

sinfulness arose from the fact that we are created out of nothing and that we misdirect our longing for the infinite being of God towards finite objects that are only transitory reflections of the infinite. To the extent that human desire has any hope of finding more than illusory satisfactions in the realm of the finite, it must redirect itself towards God, the infinite source of love itself. This redirection does not depend upon the negation of human desire and its replacement by a love for a transcendent object beyond human finitude, but rather depends upon the recognition that human desire itself is an expression of divine love, the love of God, and the love for God. The human individual must identify herself with this infinite love at the source of all finite desire. Only then can the fundamental dissatisfaction and frustration of desire caused by the illusoriness of finite objects be overcome. Love itself must be the object of love, Augustine teaches, or else love will devolve into a desire for nothingness.6 This analysis of human desire as situated between nothingness and infinity, where the “leap” out of nothingness removes desire from its endless dissatisfaction with one empty finite object after another, can be translated into the framework of the set-theoretical mathematics of infinity. The finite numbers are sets whose basic element is the null set; the “leap” out of the infinite series of finite numbers is accomplished by proving the existence of a set of all sets of finite numbers, the so-called power set, which itself is not a member of these sets. This set’s cardinal number, the number of all the possible subsets of the finite numbers, is not itself a finite number, but neither is it some unspecifiable and uncountable “next” number after any finite number you may pick. If it were, it would be a member of itself. The cardinal number of this set is the “transfinite” number, an actual real number that is not a finite number. Cantor represented this transfinite number with the Hebrew letter aleph. Every finite number is included within this number (it is a subset of this power set), just as every finite human desire is a fragment of the infinite being of God. Turned in upon itself, human desire is turned towards nothingness; turned outward towards what includes it as a part, it is related to infinity. Both Lacan and Bion believed that human desire is captivated within the web of finite, transitory objects, because it arises from a break or rupture within the infinite “real.” The origin of all abstract structures of representation—language and all symbolic systems, including mathematics—is, they argued, a gap, an unrepresentable rupture that could be captured only by a self-erasing symbol, the barred zero symbolising nullity. But while the gap or rupture is the initiation of all finite symbol systems, that in which the rupture occurs is the infinite. Unwilling to appeal to a theological

80

B ruce R osenstock

conceptualisation of creation from nothing, Lacan and Bion turn to mathematics in order to model the relationship between infinity and finitude. As Alain Badiou explains in his admirably clear introduction to modern mathematical logic, Number and Numbers, it was Richard Dedekind who made infinity the positive term in his mathematics and the finite the negative term: Dedekind, with admirable pofundity, begins with the infinite, which he determines with a celebrated positive property: ‘A system S is said to be infinite when it is similar to a proper part of itself.’ And he undertakes immediately to ‘prove’ that such an infinite system exists. [Think of how the even numbers can be matched up in a one-to-correspondence with the series of natural numbers, 1, 2, 3, and so on: the infinite series of natural numbers is ‘similar’ to the even numbers, a ‘part’ of itself.—BR.] The finite will be determined only subsequently, and it will be the finite that is the negation of the infinite. . . . [A system S is finite if it is not similar to any proper part of itself.—BR.]7

Dedekind and later mathematical logicians thus begin with infinity; finite systems are built up from the negation of the infinite. For Lacan and Bion, human desire originates with the experience of this negation as the loss of an undifferentiated immersion in the Real. Not being (traditional) philosophers, neither Lacan nor Bion are inclined to render an account of the ontology of the infinite Real.8 Rather, Lacan and Bion are interested in what happens when the negation of infinity and the rupture with the Real takes place within a language-capable organism—the human being. Following Freud’s lead, they argue that the birth of desire in negation results in a trauma, but also in the possibility of breaking beyond the endless reproduction of sets—in mathematics, the number series, or, psychically expressed, the series of objects of desire in the signifying chain, all of them ultimately signifying the null set, the absence at the heart of human existence—to a new and higher set of sets, the transfinite set.9 As I have explained, the transfinite set is the set that contains all possible subsets of the number series, but it does not contain itself. If we put this in Lacanian terms, there is a point beyond every possible signifying chain (every possible enunciation as a subset of language), what Lacan called Das Ding, the thing, the “beyond-of-the-signified.”10 Lacan talked about the access to this “beyond” as “feminine jouissance.” Bion spoke about “becoming O,” where “O” refers to the source of all becoming, the ineffable infinitude from which every human being experiences a rupture into the finitude of a mortal life. Here is his description of the task of the psychoanalytic encounter: “The beginning of a session has the configuration already formulated in the concept of the

L acan , B ion , and the I nverted K abbalah

81

Godhead. From this there evolves a pattern and at the same time the analyst seeks to establish contact with the evolving pattern.”11 This is no doubt obscure, and I will try to clarify it in the third section of this chapter, but one thing is clear: It is the task of the psychoanalyst to uncover the direction that the rupture with infinity takes in the specific personality of the analysand, and allow the analysand to evolve, or, carry on counting on her own. While the mathematical basis of Lacan’s and Bion’s psychoanalytic theories is clear to anyone familiar with their work, what is less clear is the theological framework which they reworked into a mathematically rigorous account of the emergence of desire in relation to an experience of a negating, nullifying rupture within the infinite. I have mentioned the theological account of the origin of human sin in Augustine, but both Lacan and Bion also drew, perhaps even more significantly than from Christian theology, from the Jewish mystical tradition, the Kabbalah, especially the Kabbalah of Rabbi Isaac Luria. LACAN: LIFE AFTER TSIMTSUM We know from several sources that the young Jacques Lacan showed a great interest in the Kabbalah. Around 1933, soon after Lacan received his medical degree, he met the emigré art historian Olga Katunal whose circle included some of the most important Jewish intellectuals in Paris at that time, including Erich Unger, a close friend of Walter Benjamin and a student of the controversial German-Jewish philosopher Oskar Goldberg.12 Olga Katunal also counted herself a student of Oskar Goldberg, whom she knew from her time in Berlin.13 Katunal and Unger approached the Kabbalah through the lens provided by Goldberg’s theory of myth. According to Goldberg, myth was the intersection of an infinite plenitude of possible worlds with the finite realm of “normal” experience. Goldberg provided his students with what he called an “ontological method” that allowed them to dissolve the normal world of experience with its fixed categories in order to allow the infinite plenitude of possible worlds to emerge into consciousness. Erich Unger wrote a number of books in the 1920s that unfolded the implications of Goldberg’s ontological method in new theories of politics, metaphysics, and the phenomenology of the imagination. Olga Katunal, and possibly Erich Unger himself, shared with Lacan the basic framework of Goldberg’s ontological method and his exposition of the Kabbalah. What Lacan would have learned from Katunal and from reading the works of Goldberg and Unger that she made available to him in the 1930s from her

82

B ruce R osenstock

considerable library was that our “normal” experience is just a fragment of an infinite reservoir of possible realities. The only way to alter our rigidified, commodified, technologised existence, according to Goldberg and Unger, was to free our imagination from the strictures of normal experience and to allow the imagination to reach a level of becoming at the interface of the finite and the infinite. Olga Katunal also possessed a large library of Kabbalistic writings and secondary literature about the Kabbalah. In her book, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity, Christine Buci-Glucksmann points us in the right direction for understanding what Lacan drew from his early encounter with the Kabbalah.14 She quotes Lacan’s Seminar XX: Encore where he describes “a side of the other, the side of God, as supported by female jouissance.”15 This female side of God, she explains, arises from a “No Thing” (aïn, nothing, the first word of God’s identity as Infinity, Ayn Sof) that withdraws into itself in order to open a space where the world can emerge into being. As Scholem explains in his exposition of Lurianic Kabbalah: How can there be a world if God is everywhere? If God is ‘all in all,’ how can there be things which are not God? How can God create the world out of nothing if there is no nothing? This is the question. The solution became, in spite of the crude form which he gave it, of the highest importance in the history of later Kabbalistic thought. According to Luria, God was compelled to make room for the world by, as it were, abandoning a region within Himself, a kind of mystical primordial space from which He withdrew in order to return it in the act of creation and revelation.16

This act of the Infinite God’s (the Ayn Sof’s) abandonment of a region within Himself in order to clear a space for finitude was called by Luria tsimstum, or “contraction.” According to Luria, who in this follows earlier Kabbalah, the creation of finite reality begins with the emanation of a “Primal Adam” created out of the refractions of divine Light. This Primal Adam is a “macro-anthropos” as Scholem describes it,17 consisting of male and female aspects or “faces” (Parzufim), the former (male) representing the force of expansion, the latter (female) representing the force of constriction. The “vessels” in which the divine Light was held, however, shattered, and this cataclysm is the origin of the lower worlds where the fragments of divine Light congeal into material reality. In this material world, the malefemale forces are out of alignment due to the primal cataclysm that immediately followed the tsimtsum. The realignment of these forces is the task of the human being, the “micro-cosmos” of the Primal Adam, whose creation

L acan , B ion , and the I nverted K abbalah

83

restores an “image” of the Primal Adam to the fallen world of matter and its trapped fragments of divine light. According to Lurianic Kabbalah, each human individual soul is a part of the soul of the Primal Adam: “from this soul of all souls, sparks [of divine Light] have scattered in all directions and become diffused into matter. The problem is to reassemble them, to lift them to their proper place and to restore the spiritual nature of man in its original splendor as God conceived it.”18 Oskar Goldberg claimed that the split between the two aspects of God (the Infinite Ayn Sof and the male/female Adam Kadmon, Primal Adam) corresponds to a split between two ways that the Bible represents the name of God; as YHWH Echad (YHWH One) and as YHWH Elohim (YHWH God). When the infinite Ayn Sof (YHWH One) withdraws into itself, the divine Name (YHWH) is poured out into the manifold structures of the supernal realm (the Sephirot that constitute the male/female Adam Kadmon). It is also poured out as the written text of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Law (Torah). At first, the supernal realm is marked as androgynous, the male-female unity of Adam Kadmon (Primal Adam). But, as I have explained, the male-female unity of Primal Adam is completely shattered, not only on earth but also in the upper realm. The Torah as the Name of God becomes occluded, and the plenitude of the Law becomes a law of death and exile. The task of the Kabbalist is to work towards the reintegration of the bifurcated and ruptured Name of God and thus to unify the female and the male sides of Adam Kadmon. As Buci-Glucksmann expounds this Kabbalistic task in Lacanian terms, the unification of the male and female aspects of Adam Kadmon, if it could be accomplished, would recuperate the hidden jouissance at the heart of reality, the point where, as Buci-Glucksmann explains, the No Thing withdraws into itself and opens a space for the outpouring of the plenitudinous, androgynous unity of the Name. Buci-Glucksmann argues that Lacan took over into his psychoanalytic theory the idea that the task of Kabbalistic tikkun was the repairing of the broken male-female unity and the transformation of the Law from a law of exile and death into a plenitudinous source of jouissance. Whereas for the Kabbalistic rabbis the unification of the male and female aspects of God was achieved through the act of imagining the (female) “crown” (or, “corona”) of the sefirah named Yesod (Phallus) of the ten sefirot (elements) of Adam Kadmon, as the scholar of Jewish mysticism Elliot Wolfson has amply demonstrated,19 for Lacan jouissance means the redemption of the feminine from the domination of the masculine aspects of God. As Buci-Glucksmann explains:

84

B ruce R osenstock

But if the feminine is kept too long in the toils of Nothing, one ends up with that long and persistent absence: ‘civilization has not become feminine.’ Thus the feminine has never ceased to oscillate between the nothing of nothingness and the nothing of jouissance, between non-representable Nothing which eludes all form (shapelessness, chaos, lack, matter, matrix) and the nothing of the ‘female side of God’ (Lacan) or the super-jouissance allotted to women ever since Teiresias.20

While I largely agree with Buci-Glucksmann’s description of how Lacan at times imagined that the “female side of God” was the site of a “superjouissance,” it is important to recall that Lacan never completely embraces the Kabbalistic idea that the No Thing (the Ayn Sof) can become the joyous source of cosmic, plenitudinous creativity. He rather embraces a much more austere conception of das Ding or “the Real” as pure gap and irremediable rupture. In other words, Lacan rejects the possibility of a restoration of divine unity because God has voided Himself of Being.21 We can read frequent references in the seminars of Lacan to the theme that “God is dead.” But this theme is not a mere lifting of the veil of religious delusion. Rather, it lifts the veil concealing a deeper religious truth; that creatio ex nihilo is what killed God. “In the beginning was the Word,” as Lacan explains, meaning that the Word (signification as such) precedes the fantasy of a Creator God who speaks. The Word, the chain of signifiers, comes at first to signify nothing in particular, but is simply the possibility of signification itself. This “nothing in particular,” this “it” without a name, das Ding, is what subtends the signifying chain. When God died, His remains became das Ding.22 Time does not permit a full explanation of Lacan’s theory of das Ding, but his 1959–1960 seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis provides a good idea of how it relates to the Lurianic Kabbalah’s idea of the Infinite (Ayn Sof) and its primal act of self-withdrawal. Lacan discusses why an emanationist theory of creation will always entail the existence of God, whereas a creatio ex nihilo perspective allows us to do away with God. Drawing from Heidegger’s discussion of das Ding, Lacan uses a vase to represent the world created from nothing. The vase, Lacan argues, is what can be filled, but it is also an emptiness: “It is on the basis of this fabricated signifier, this vase, that emptiness and fullness enter the world.”23 A little further along Lacan speaks in terms very reminiscent of the Lurianic tsimtsum: Now if you consider the vase from the point of view I first proposed, as an object made to represent the existence of the emptiness at the centre of the real that is called the Thing, this emptiness as represented in the

L acan , B ion , and the I nverted K abbalah

85

representation presents itself as a nihil, as nothing. And that is why the potter, just like you to whom I am speaking, creates the vase with his hand around this emptiness, creates it, just like the mythical creator, ex nihilo, starting with a hole.24

While the reference to the absent signified, the phallus, is clear in Lacan’s mention of the potter with his “hand around this emptiness,” what is not so clear is that the vase is like the vessel into which the Infinite first poured out His light into the “emptiness at the center of the real” according to Lurianic Kabbalah. The act of creation shatters the vessel and leaves only shards of light captured within the void. Now while it may seem that Lacan’s description of the originary hole in the real contradicts Lurianic Kabbalah, which does in fact describe the creation of the world as an emanation of the Infinite (as a ray of Light) into the space opened by His self-withdrawal, Lacan is actually quite close to the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum. Recall that tsimtsum is a radical rupture in plenitude, God’s voiding of Himself in order to allow finite forms to emerge. For Lacan, this voiding not only makes possible the emergence of finitude and the Name of God (the Word) as the signifying chain that unfolds throughout creation, it also places under erasure divine plenitude itself. God, that is, the fullness of God’s Being, is always thereafter lost. In this space of loss, the world emerges and preserves itself in time as the drive to repair the (irreparable) rupture. As a drive to fill the void, it is a drive to cancel all finite existence and sink back into undifferentiated Being. Lacan claims that this is exactly the Freudian death drive. Rather than filling in the void once and for all, the pleasure principle seeks to proliferate ever more differentiated finite forms within the space of the void. The trouble arises when the pleasure principle falls victim to the death drive and fantasises that all that is missing to fill the void is one thing, the phallus. But the void, as the Lurianic Kabbalah teaches, is the desire of the Infinite Other for what He is not, for a creation separate from Himself. It is not the desire for anything He already has. Nothing can fill the void because the void is itself the desire of the (Infinite) Other. The death drive is the desire to put an end to the desire of the Other. This either requires putting an end to desire or putting an end to the Other. Lacan chooses the latter option, and his psychoanalytic practice is focused on bringing the analysand to the point where he or she can also make this choice. It means confronting das Ding. For Lacan, the repair of the world, what Luria calls tikkun olam, is not about restoring the lost plenitude of God, but of letting God finally be free from our desire to refill Him. Lacan would say, the repair of the world

86

B ruce R osenstock

is to let God as Other simply revert to das Ding, desireless Being-in-itself, the sheer facticity of a something that subtends the Word. WILFRED BION: BECOMING “O” Bion, like Lacan influenced by both the mathematics of infinity and the Lurianic Kabbalah as it was expounded in Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, takes the Kabbalistic framework in a different direction from that of Lacan. Bion develops a theory of the power of presymbolic thought to access the infinite reservoir of a creative Real that hews much more closely to the Kabbalah. The work of Bion, who admitted to one of his students that his whole theoretical framework was entirely indebted to the Kabbalah,25 describes the goal of psychoanalysis as being what he symbolises as “O,” or the Real, or the Godhead. But, like Lacan, Bion does not expect that we can somehow restore a lost harmony in God, or that we ourselves can fill the void within God. By becoming O, we incarnate a “void and formless infinite” that is a pure absence, withdrawal, which opens the space for meaning and signification. For Bion, all life is a process of bringing meaning into being out of the infinite void. Bion was engaged during World War II in working with soldiers coming back from combat with severe psychological disorders, some of which were the result of traumatic injuries and others from the stresses of battle. The first article that he published in his group work with these soldiers, the 1943 “Intra-group tensions in therapy,” was translated into French by Lacan, and Lacan’s weeklong investigation of Bion’s group methods in 1947 became quite influential on his later theory of cartels and the role of the psychoanalytical school on its licensed practitioners.26 Bion himself collected a number of his papers on group therapy and published them in 1959 under the title Experiences in Groups.27 Bion displays his knowledge of the work of Scholem in this book, despite the fact that he never quotes him directly. Rather, Bion discusses the importance for groups comprised of two persons (all of them sexual in nature, including the psychiatrist-analysand pair) of what he calls the “Basic Assumption of the Messianic Idea.” At the centre of Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism is a discussion of the Messianic fervour associated with Lurianic Kabbalah, which, as we have seen, is focused on the restoration of the balance between the male and female aspects of God, and the following cataclysm in Jewish history when, in the seventeenth century, the popularisation of Lurianic Kabbalah precipitated a major crisis around the figure of Sabbatai Zevi, who was proclaimed by

L acan , B ion , and the I nverted K abbalah

87

his “prophet” Nathan of Gaza to be the Messiah. As Scholem explains, Sabbatai Zevi suffered from what he identified as manic-depression.28 What Bion recognised in these chapters was the libidinal charge behind the Messianic Idea and the danger of actually bringing the Messianic Idea into the real world. In terms that clearly resonate with Scholem’s description of the despair that fell upon the Jewish people with the exile from Spain of several hundred thousand Jews whose families had lived in the Iberian peninsula for over a thousand years, Bion writes that the “feelings of hope” that are always associated with the “pairing group” focus on a leader who must never be born: “It is a person or idea that will save the [pairing] group—in fact from feelings of hatred, destructiveness, and despair, of its own or of another group—but in order to do this, the Messianic hope must never be fulfilled. Only by remaining a hope, does hope persist.”29 In his discussion of Sabbatianism, Scholem describes the tragic consequences of having a Messiah appear in reality. The Idea and the reality will inevitably clash, and, for some, the only recourse is to escape from reality and cling to the Idea as an inner truth. External reality is denied in favour of an inner reality. As Scholem puts it: Inner and outer experience were suddenly and dramatically torn apart. This conflict, for which nobody was prepared, which nobody had ever dreamt could happen, went to the very root and core of existence. A choice became necessary. Every one had to ask himself whether he was willing to discover the truth about the expected redemption in the distressing course of history or in that inner reality which had revealed itself in the depths of the soul.30

Scholem will come to see the Sabbatian movement as an essential lesson for the Jewish people, a sort of confrontation with a latent psychosis. The Kabbalistic dream of redemption must be renounced as a possible reality, but the hope that it creates must be preserved. This inversion of the Kabbalah’s goal is what inspires the psychoanalytic practice of Bion, and also of Lacan. Redemption is impossible because the infinite plenitude of God’s Being is shattered once and for all with the eruption of signification and meaning, with the Word (Lacan) and with what Bion calls betaelements: the raw data of the encounter with the nameless reality beyond consciousness. In four volumes published from 1962 to 1970, Bion unfolded a systematic theorisation of his clinical practice.31 In these volumes, Bion postulated the existence of a limited number of basic psychic elements (the content of consciousness) and functions (operations using this content). Claiming to offer an abstract calculus of the psyche, Bion represented his postulated

88

B ruce R osenstock

elements and functions with symbols that were amenable, he claimed, to algebraic manipulation. These elements and functions were intended to be the building blocks of a general framework (a “scientific deductive system”) within which Bion believed he could trace the process of psychic maturation from infancy to adulthood and the obstacles that stand in the way of this maturation. At the highest level of generalisation, Bion characterised psychic maturation as a painful but nonetheless creative process of “learning from experience,” the title of the first of the four volumes. The major obstacle to psychic maturation, Bion argued, is the subject’s intolerance of the frustration and pain that are necessary concomitants of learning. Psychosis, according to Bion, is the radical evasion of the pain associated with learning. The psychotic (non)personality attempts to regress to a level of consciousness marked by complete meaninglessness, a level where no learning is possible because no intimation of order (no “selected fact” as Bion calls it) incites the subject’s curiosity to find a coherent pattern within the welter of experience.32 The psychotic’s attempt to evade learning involves the fragmentation of consciousness into “part objects” and “bizarre objects” and the emotional assault upon any “container” (symbolised as ♀) that might intimate the possibility of holding these fragmented objects within a meaningful structure, however fragile and tentative. The psychotic subject is trapped in the position of chaotic disintegration (which Bion represented with the symbol Ps for “paranoid-schizoid”) and never seems capable of moving into the position of provisionally achieved integration of her internal mental objects (represented as D for “Depression”).33 Bion believed that the process of learning from experience that characterised each (healthy) individual’s psychic maturation was the expression of a vital and evolving reality that he symbolised with the letter ‘O.’ In his last volume of this series, Attention and Interpretation, Bion writes: The O domain . . . may be said to be, vis-à-vis the thinker, in a state of evolution. This evolving system intersects with the personality of the individual thinker. The impact of the evolving O domain on the domain of the thinker is signalized by persecutory feelings of the paranoid-schizoid position. Whether the thoughts are entertained or not is of significance to the thinker but not to the truth. If entertained, they are conducive to mental health; if not, they initiate disturbance.34

For a subject to participate in the evolution of O requires that she be willing to learn from experience, to bring order to chaos. The subject’s participation in the evolution of O requires a willingness to acknowledge the fact that all known order is hedged about with an unknowable and infinite

L acan , B ion , and the I nverted K abbalah

89

chaos. This acknowledgement is the content of the psychic position that Bion calls “faith” (symbolised with the letter F). To acknowledge one’s encompassment within an unknowable and infinite chaos is often accompanied by dread, but it is also the condition for accepting the terms upon which finite life is given to us. Participation in the evolution of O means that one chooses becoming in time (“transformation in O”) over (the psychotic hallucination of) stasis at the boundary between chaos and order. Bion’s attempt to provide an algebraic calculus of psychic maturation was not intended merely to provide psychoanalysis with a surface imitation of the abstract rigour of mathematics. For Bion, psychic maturation and mathematics both are evolutions of O, the crossing of infinity into finitude. Therefore, the ontogenesis of mathematics and the ontogenesis of the subject are fully congruent with each other. Bion expressly drew upon the work of the mathematician Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer for his understanding of how the origin of mathematics and the origin of finite subjectivity are coeval. Brouwer offered a new interpretation of Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers. His views are today called “intuitionism” and they have largely shaped the reception of Cantorian mathematics in analytic philosophy today. Bion adopted Brouwer’s intutionism as the model for the ontogenesis of the human psyche. Very briefly we may summarise Brouwer’s theory of the ontogenesis of mathematics this way: Brouwer argued that mathematical objects (the real number continuum, for example) have their source in a “creative (or, creating) subject” (het scheppende subject) that, in its first “act,” perceives a “move of time.” A move of time, Brouwer says, is “the falling apart of a life moment into two distinct things, one of which gives way to the other, but is retained in memory.”35 Brouwer calls the empty form of this intuition of two distinct things, a “two-ity.” The creative subject joins the next new perception to this primal two-ity, forming another two-ity. The creative subject learns that as time “falls apart,” it can increment its store of ever-larger two-ities, in effect creating the series of the natural numbers. The creative subject is not only able to generate a sequence of two-ities. It can also choose from among the numbers it has created and form new relationships among them that constitute new kinds of mathematical objects (fractions, for example), and, most importantly, the creative subject can choose to arrange its objects in new sequences. Since the objects it has available to it are potentially infinite (Brouwer denies the existence of any actually infinite collection of mathematical objects), the creative subject has limitless freedom to create new sequences according to any rule it chooses (including no rule). For Brouwer’s creative subject, freedom logically precedes order;

90

B ruce R osenstock

lawlessness precedes lawfulness.36 Brouwer rejects “classical” mathematics precisely because it “confines itself to predeterminate infinite sequences for which from the beginning the nth element is fixed for each n.”37 Brouwer’s creative subject has sometimes been described as an “ideal mathematician,”38 but this is misleading unless we remember that this figure is not merely an idealisation of the mathematician as someone who knows about mathematical objects, but who also creates them. Brouwer’s ideal mathematician is always coming to know herself (what her choices have created) and she is never simply perfectly self-knowing. Put in less personalistic language, Brouwer’s ideal mathematician learns about mathematical objects as she creates them. Appropriating Brouwer’s conception of the creative subject, Bion understands the relationship between analyst and analysand as a site where Brouwer’s creative subject appears before itself in emotionally saturated sensuous forms and seeks to free itself from the predetermined rules governing its past in order to make new choices. Every new choice creates a new series, a narrative twist so to speak, that can only be known by experiencing its unfolding. It makes perfect sense, therefore, that Bion titled his three-volume fictionalised autobiography A Memoir of the Future.39 Despite their somewhat disjointed and often quite symbolic language, the three volumes of Bion’s A Memoir of the Future contain some of his most explicit and sustained discussions of all the themes that I am pursuing in this chapter, from the mathematics of infinity to the inversion of the Kabbalah into a practice and theory of hope without the possibility of realising the hope. In the first volume, Bion makes his debt to the mathematics of infinity and set theory explicit. He says that “physical and sensuous components are manipulable by set theory,” but “mind, personality, relationship, ‘belief’ are not. They cannot even be reasonably defined. ‘Reasonable definition’ involves ‘confinement’ to a ‘constant conjunction.’”40 In volume two of A Memoir of the Future a character named P.A. says that “What I am trying to talk about is one of those fundamental basic things like life/death/ love/hate/birth.”41 Another character then responds, “Surely you don’t need any very elaborate mathematics for that—unless you are trying to split the ear of the groundlings.”42 There follows some play with the word “split” and then P.A. says “I feel the Intuitionists are right when they start with something simple like infinity. That is practical. That I am sure I grasped as an infant, even without the word.”43 There follows a bit of theological digression until a third character named Paul says, speaking to whomever will be the “printer” of the three volumes of the Memoir, that he wants his

L acan , B ion , and the I nverted K abbalah

91

references to God as “He” to be printed with a capital letter. He admits that he isn’t sure that any of the words of the Memoir should be printed at all, that perhaps silence about these themes should be the rule. The character Paul then mentions that Isaac Luria’s words were not written down.44 This is the first and only reference to the Kabbalah in the volume, but the context suggests that there is a relationship between the infant’s wordless grasp of infinity and Luria’s unrecorded words about God. What P.A. means by the infant “grasping” the infinite is that the infant grasps a thing in itself when it literally grasps the mother’s breast. The cycle of life/death/ birth with love/hate in the middle is the beginning of the sequence that is somehow connected to infinity as Luria would describe it. That infinity is God, of course, as P.A. says a little earlier: “it is convenient to suppose, as has already been done, that God made the integers; all the rest of analysis is man-made, an elaborate series of ‘artefacts.’”45 (We are reminded perhaps of Lacan’s vase, also an “artefact” to hold emptiness.) According to the Kabbalah, the male and female aspects of God were arranged as a pattern of numbers called “Sephirot” or “integers.” Having mentioned Luria’s failure to leave behind any written record of his Kabbalistic speculations, it seems likely that Bion’s character P.A.’s statement that “God made the integers” is meant to suggest the doctrine of the Sephirot. We find another possible allusion to Lurianic Kabbalah and the doctrine of tsimtsum on the very next page. Bion alludes to the Lurianic doctrine that creation begins with a withdrawal of divine light from the centre of divine Infinity when, after he has a character named Roland boast “I am not terrified by the silence of infinite space,”46 P.A. replies that Roland has perhaps never really heard this silence. P.A. explains that the void is not outside Roland but within him. P.A. quotes Milton’s statement that the “Celestial Light shines inward,” and then goes on to suggest that what Milton meant is that at centre of the universe is a point that the Celestial Light cannot illuminate, the darkness where Satan dwells.47 Having mentioned Isaac Luria only two pages earlier, Bion is almost certainly drawing attention to Milton’s well-known debt to the Kabbalah, a subject of his friend Henry More’s scholarly and philosophical interest.48 P.A. continues to argue that just as the universe has an invisible point at its centre, human beings have an “invisible and in-sense-able nucleus” within “their own universe.”49 Another character responds, “Like the centre of our own galaxy.”50 Just as there is a blackness at the centre of the Milky Way, there is a point of invisibility within each of us. Earlier, P.A. had said, “The difficulty is not only with the galactic centre. It is difficult to

92

B ruce R osenstock

see the centre of one’s own personality. Distracted and fascinated by what is not oneself, the periphery is substituted for the centre.”51 At the centre of the galaxy is a black hole, or perhaps two black holes, as a character named Edmund mentions (“there are signs compatible with two black holes”52). P.A. then suggests a psychoanalytic analogy: “Two parents or—according to one of the parents of psycho-analysis [Melanie Klein]—two breasts.”53 The withdrawal of the “Celestial Light” from the centre point of the universe is, as we have noted, what Isaac Luria calls tsimtsum. At that centre is a darkness that is, however, filled with the Sephirot which, in their totality, constitute the First Human (Adam Kadmon). This cosmogonic myth is also the anthropogenic myth, and also the psychoanalytic myth offered to us by Bion. But in place of God there are “two parents” (Freud) or “two breasts” (Klein, the other “parent of psycho-analysis”). The doubleness of the origin is essential also for the mathematician Brouwer. Brouwer, as I have previously explained, posited two-ity as the beginning of the intuition of infinity. The emergence of two-ity occurs within the galactic centre, the centre of the very thing that is named after the expulsion of milk from the breast of Hera when she threw Heracles away from her as he suckled at her breast while she slept (Zeus’s attempt to immortalise him). The pain of this rejection is the source of life, the No Breast, the void at the centre of the galaxy, the “black hole” (an astrophysical concept that shortly after Bion’s Memoir was published was advanced to explain radio signals emerging from the centre of the galaxy54) that becomes two-ity, the thought of before and after that is the basis of all mathematics, the “music of the spheres” that is the music of a life that is played without a score, as Bion says of his book at its beginning, a book that is itself a composition without a “key signature.”55 The music of a life played without recourse to a score, and certainly without recourse to a totalising meaning—this is what Bion is hoping that his patients can achieve. Situating himself with the patient at the void, the O, that is the centre of the self and the galaxy, the analyst’s task is to give the patient hope in a “Messianic” redemption from both persecution and despair. This hope, like the one that Scholem argues took the Jewish people past the crisis of Sabbatianism, is built upon a choice to live with the withdrawal of God from the world. It begins, Bion teaches us, with the ability to live with the withdrawal of the breast. I suspect that Isaac Luria, himself adept at making his myths come alive in the concrete relations of male and female aspects of the Primal Adam, would have appreciated the story that Bion tells in connecting the withdrawn breast to the black hole at the centre of the galaxy.

L acan , B ion , and the I nverted K abbalah

93

THE INVERSION OF THE KABBALAH: A FINAL REFLECTION In this chapter I have traced the influence of Kabbalistic themes on the psychoanalytic theory and practice of Jacques Lacan and Wilfred Bion. My argument has been that both men invert the Kabbalah’s concept of tikkun. In the Kabbalah, tikkun is the restoration of a lost divine unity and the harmonisation of the male and female aspects of God. In place of this tikkun, Lacan and Bion ask us to confront the irreversible self-withdrawal of God and the resultant void at the centre of existence. In this void, and only in this void, is it possible to create signification out of nothing, “sets” built out of the null set. The task incumbent upon us is to resist the death drive, the impulse to fill the void and silence signification. What both Lacan and Bion suggest is that the death-drive impulse lies behind all forms of the Messianic Idea, the dream of satisfying the desire of the Other, the consuming passion of the void. But, as Bion insists, the resistance to the death drive comes from the hope engendered by the Messianic Idea. To abandon that hope is to enter Hell; to hope only for more hope is to choose to live in the infinite wake of the tsimtsum. NOTES 1. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism: Based on the Hilda Strook Lectures, 1938, Delivered at the Jewish Institute of Religion, New York (Jerusalem: Schocken Pub. House, 1941). 2. See, for example, Wilfred R. Bion, Transformations (London: William Heinemann Medical Books, 1965), 151, 162, 171. 3. For Lacan’s relationship to Klein, see Jacques Lacan, Juliet Mitchell, and Jacqueline Rose, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 3–26. 4. Erica Burman, “Group Acts and Missed Encounters: Lacan and Foulkes,” Lacuna 1, no. 2 (2012): 23–42; Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 115–17. 5. For the significance of nothingness in both Lacan and Bion, see James S. Grotstein, “Nothingness, Meaninglessness, Chaos, and the ‘Black Hole’ I: The Importance of Nothingness, Meaninglessness, and Chaos in Psychoanalysis,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 26, no. 2 (1990): 257–90. 6. Augustine’s central argument is found in his demonstration in City of God, that the Trinity can be discovered within the human person in three aspects of

94

B ruce R osenstock

the human self: The love of life (God the Father), the knowledge that one is alive and the love of this knowledge (God the Son), and love of the love itself (God as Holy Spirit). See Aurelius Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1888), 1:471–73. 7. Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers, trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2011), 14. 8. But I should say that both Lacan and Bion were very familiar with the work of Henri Bergson, and both men, when they do venture into the territory of the ontology of the Real, seem to express themselves in a Freudian vocabulary of drives—Eros and Thanatos, love and hate—that both argue is the expression of a single life force that closely resembles Bergson’s élan vital. In at least Lacan’s case, any resemblance to Bergson would have been strongly denied. For a discussion of Bergson’s formative role in French thought, including Lacan, see Giuseppe Bianco, “Experience vs. Concept? The Role of Bergson in Twentieth-Century French Philosophy,” The European Legacy 16, no. 7 (2011): 855–72; for a discussion of Bion’s much more positive relationship to Bergson, see Nuno Torres and R. D. Hinshelwood, eds., Bion’s Sources: The Shaping of His Paradigms (London: Routledge, 2013), 63–65. 9. For a brief discussion of the transfinite set in relation to Lacan, see JuanDavid Nasio, Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 59–61. 10. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. 1959–1960 Book 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis. Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), 54. 11. Bion, Transformations, 171. 12. For a discussion of Katunal and her circle, see Judith Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France since 1968 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Gérard Haddad, Le péché originel de la psychanalyse: Lacan et la question juive (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 64–83. 13. For a full discussion of Goldberg, see Bruce Rosenstock, Transfinite Life: Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). 14. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity (London: Sage Publications, 2010). 15. Quoted in Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason, 86. 16. Scholem, Major Trends, 261. 17. Scholem, Major Trends, 269. 18. Scholem, Major Trends, 178. 19. Elliot R. Wolfson, Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism (Albany: State University of New York, 1995). Wolfson himself has argued that Lacan’s concept of “phallic jouissance” finds its nearly identical parallel in the Kabbalistic doctrine of the “secret of Yesod” (its male-female identity); see Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 128–41. 20. Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason, 131.

L acan , B ion , and the I nverted K abbalah

95

21. Kenneth Reinhard has also argued that Lacan’s statement, quoted by BuciGluckmann—“the face of God” is “based on feminine jouissance”—should be read as a criticism rather than an endorsement of the Jewish mystical doctrine on seeing the female aspect of God that is sometimes attributed to Kabbalists who sought a vision of the unveiled “corona” of the sefirah Yesod. See Kenneth Reinhard, “There Is Something of One (God): Lacan and Political Theology,” in Creston Davis, Marcus Pound, and Clayton Crockett, eds., Theology after Lacan: The Passion for the Real (Cambridge, UK: James Clark & Co., 2015), 150–165. Reinhard’s essay also contains a useful exposition of the influence of the Cantorian mathematics of infinity on Lacan. 22. I base this discussion on Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. 1959–1960 Book 7, 124–26. 23. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, 120. 24. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, 121. 25. James S. Grotstein, A Beam of Intense Darkness: Wilfred Bion’s Legacy to Psychoanalysis (London: Karnak, 2007), 117. 26. Belinda Mackie, “The Action of the Cartel on the Real of the Group,” Analysis 18 (2013): 139–49. 27. Wilfred R. Bion, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (New York: Basic Books, 1961). 28. Scholem, Major Trends, 290. 29. Scholem, Major Trends, 137. 30. Scholem, Major Trends, 306. 31. Wilfred R. Bion, Learning from Experience (London: Karnac Books, 1984); Wilfred R. Bion, Elements of Psycho-Analysis (London: William Heinemann Medical Books, 1963); Wilfred R. Bion, Transformations; Wilfred R. Bion, Attention and Interpretation: A Scientific Approach to Insight in Psycho-Analysis and Groups (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970). 32. “The selected fact is the name of an emotional experience, the emotional experience of a sense of discovery of coherence.” Bion, Learning from Experience, 73. 33. The oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions was, according to Melanie Klein, characteristic of the experience of the early months of infancy. In the depressive position the infant slowly learns to accept the loss of the nurturing breast and to reintegrate (repair) into a whole person the paranoid disintegration and splitting of the mother into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ part-objects. For an early succinct summary of her views, see “On the Theory of Anxiety and Guilt (1948)” in Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude, and Other Works, 1946–1963 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1975), 25–42. 34. Bion, Attention and Interpretation, 103. 35. Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, “Points and Spaces,” Canadian Journal of Mathematics 6 (1954): 2. 36. As Mark van Atten puts it, “genetically, wholly lawless sequences are primordial.” Mark Van Atten, Brouwer Meets Husserl: On the Phenomenology of Choice Sequences (Dorcdrecht: Springer, 2007), 87.

96

B ruce R osenstock

37. Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, “Consciousness, Philosophy, and Mathematics,” in Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings, ed. Paul Benaceraf and Hilary Putnam, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 90, emphasis Bion’s. 38. Anne Troelstra, Principles of Intuitionism (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1969), 95. 39. Wilfred R. Bion, A Memoir of the Future [by] W.R. Bion, ed. Jayme Salomão (Brazil: Imago Editora, 1975). 40. Wilfred R. Bion, A Memoir of the Future: Book 1: The Dream (Brazil: Imago Editora, 1975), 198. 41. Wilfred R. Bion, A Memoir of the Future: Book 2, The Past Presented (Brazil: Imago Editora, 1977), 31. 42. Bion, A Memoir of the Future: Book 2. 43. Bion, A Memoir of the Future: Book 2. 44. Bion, A Memoir of the Future: Book 2, 32. 45. Bion, A Memoir of the Future: Book 2, 32. 46. Bion, A Memoir of the Future: Book 2, 34. 47. Bion, A Memoir of the Future: Book 2. 48. Given Bion’s lifelong fascination with Milton, it is very likely that he would have been familiar with Denis Saurat, Milton: Man and Thinker (New York: Dial Press, 1925), where Milton’s use of Lurianic Kabbalah is detailed. 49. Bion, A Memoir of the Future: Book 2, 37. 50. Bion, A Memoir of the Future: Book 2. 51. Bion, A Memoir of the Future: Book 2, 33. 52. Bion, A Memoir of the Future: Book 2. 53. Bion, A Memoir of the Future: Book 2, 34. 54. Now called Sagittarius A*. 55. Bion, A Memoir of the Future: Book 2, ix.

II LOGICS OF THE MASTER

5 THE CAPITALIST EXCEPTION Discourse, Sexuation, and Infinity John Holland

The “capitalist exception” is the motive force of what Jacques Lacan calls the “capitalist discourse.” This discourse itself has a status that is distinct from that of his four other discourses. Elaborated later, and contemporaneously with the mathemes of sexuation, it is intimately connected with these mathemes, which themselves introduce some fundamental developments into Lacan’s teaching. These include a specification of the conditions under which castration can lead to the productions of the unconscious and an account of the origins and development of number in the psyche, one that owes much to the formulations of Gottlob Frege and Georg Cantor. The capitalist discourse is marked by these developments because it serves as a bridge between sexuation and discourse, importing into discourse an infinity that can never manifest itself directly, but which acts as a hidden cause. SEXUATION AND DISCOURSE Lacan’s theories of discourse and sexuation are sometimes considered to be mutually incompatible “paradigms”1 of jouissance, and they certainly approach the latter in very different ways. In chronological terms, however, they are closely related: the four discourses were first presented systematically at the beginning of The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, while the definitive writings of the formulas of sexuation appeared two years later, 99

100

J ohn H olland

early in . . . or Worse. Despite their close temporal proximity, there is a vast difference between them, one that manifests itself not least in our ability to sense what is in play in them and to locate ourselves in their manner of functioning. Throughout this period, Lacan’s teaching was becoming progressively more abstract and obscure; one can imagine the growing bewilderment of his students at this time, faced with formulations that were increasingly difficult to comprehend. The difficulty of the discourses, it is true, is lessened by their reliance on formulations and schemas found in Lacan’s earlier work. For example, the four terms and the configuration of the discourse of the master,2 S1

S2

S/

a

are closely related to his frequently repeated formulation, “a signifier . . . represents the subject for another signifier,” and to schemas that he had been using since 1964.3 What is new in the writing of the discourses is the places that the terms can occupy. In “Radiophonie” Lacan writes these as:4 agent truth

other production

and he then revises them in . . . or Worse as:5 semblance

truth

jouissance

surplus jouissance

These positions involve a system of “circular permutation,” a series of quarter-turns that permits each of the three other terms to occupy the place of the agent or semblance, thereby bringing three new discourses into existence: approached from a counterclockwise direction, these are the discourses of the university, the analyst, and the hysteric.6 Then, in 1972, Lacan introduced a further novelty, modifying his theory of discourse in two fleeting references to a fifth, “capitalist” discourse,

T he C apitalist E xception

101

which represents a partial disruption of this logic of permutation. In his course of 6 January 1972, he describes this discourse in terms of a foreclosure of castration,7 and four months later, during his lecture, “Du discours psychanalytique,” he writes it, without explanation, as a deformation of the discourse of the master, in which the places of S1 and are reversed:8

Only in this fifth discourse is the vertical arrow linking the top two terms ( and S2 in this case) absent. This discourse is puzzling because it is not clear that it can exist at all: the reversal of these terms violates the principle of permutation that serves as the basis of discourse. In the same period, Lacan also presented another, even less clearly comprehensible development in his teaching, the mathemes of sexuation, which involve another quadripartite writing:9

With these formulas, Lacan was describing structures that cannot necessarily be grasped directly, but serve, instead, as the condition for the existence of much of what can be observed and dealt with in analysis. The mathemes of sexuation are especially difficult because they are based upon a particular wager: that logic can serve as a means of constructing a “science . . . of the real.”10 This science seeks to delineate the preconditions of positions that can be located more fully in our own experience, whether in discourse or in the clinical categories of neurosis, psychosis, and perversion. Lacan was thus distancing himself not only from his somewhat more approachable work on discourse, but also, and even more radically, from his important clinical formulations of the 1950s, which had been based upon very close readings of the texts of Freud and others: for example, his theory of phobia and infantile sexual research was developed during an extended discussion of the case history of little Hans, and the paternal metaphor was formulated through analyses of various texts, including not only Freud’s study of Daniel Paul Schreber, but also the latter’s memoirs.11 The mathemes of sexuation are propositional functions that provide a complex knotting of three concerns: (1) they delineate fundamental and disparate relations to jouissance and castration; (2) they provide an account

102

J ohn H olland

of a primal establishment of logical modes, such as impossibility and necessity (as well as possibility and contingency); and (3) they evoke the genesis of number in the psyche. CASTRATION AND JOUISSANCE These mathemes present four positions with regard to jouissance and castration. The two formulas on the left, $x.Fx and "x.Fx , describe positions characterised entirely by a jouissance that Lacan will refer to as “phallic.” Those on the right $x.Fx and "x.Fx , present relations to “another jouissance besides phallic jouissance,” a jouissance that, without being defined, is categorised as being “strictly termed feminine,” one that “does not depend on phallic jouissance at all.”12 These latter positions are not, however, unrelated to phallic jouissance and the castration that can limit it, as Lacan’s use of quanteurs13 and negations seeks to show. When we read these four mathemes in counterclockwise order, the first proposition $x.Fx (there does not exist an entity, x, that is not subject to the phallic function of castration) presents us with an answer to a fundamental question: Among the figures who are characterised by a specifically “feminine” or Other jouissance, is it possible to encounter one who is not also marked by phallic jouissance? (In mathematical terms, as Lacan argues, this answer can be written as 0 or the empty set.) This question is logically prior to those that figure in classical psychoanalytic accounts of infantile sexual research, and thus in Lacan’s earlier readings of Freud: “What is a phallic woman?” and “What sort of object am I for my mother?” Such questions can only arise once the mother’s interest in the child has itself been understood as indicating her participation in phallic jouissance. The upper-left proposition, $x.Fx , expresses a logical supposition that will play a vital role for those who are located within the two lower propositions: "x.Fx and "x.Fx . The matheme $x.Fx (there exists at least one entity, x, to which castration does not apply), unlike the one on the upper right, is defined entirely in terms of phallic jouissance and possesses nothing of the “Other” jouissance. It is considered, however, to be located entirely outside the castration that would limit phallic jouissance; without such castration, the force and insistence of this jouissance will be endless. Lacan argues that with this proposition, he is writing the “rejection”— “rejet”—“of the function Φx”; “rejection,” as it appears in this context, is a very strong term, for he frequently uses it to describe foreclosure.14 For example, in his third seminar, he defined Freud’s term “Verwerfung” as

T he C apitalist E xception

103

a “rejection of a primordial signifier into the outer shadows, a signifier that will henceforth be missing.”15 This matheme is also located radically outside castration: “foreclosing” it, pushing it as entirely into the “outer shadows” as Schreber did. Unlike Schreber, however, this figure is, first and foremost, a logical construction on the part of the speaking being, a condition that can, nevertheless, often be pinned onto a particular figure in that being’s history. Positing the existence of such a matheme is necessary for those who inhabit the formula on the lower left: "x.Fx (all entities, x, are subject to castration). These speaking beings are defined entirely by phallic jouissance, and have accepted, at least in principle, the limitation imposed by castration. For them, the exception serves as a “boundary” or an edge, thus clearly demarcating what is inside from what is outside this set; for anyone who falls within this set, neither the phallic character of his jouissance nor his capacity to be castrated is in doubt.16 The clarity provided by this edge will itself provide a psychic stability for those who locate themselves within this set. Finally, the propositional function on the lower right, "x.Fx (notall—pas-tout—of each entity, x, is submitted to castration) refers to those who are not untouched by phallic jouissance, but are also marked by the Other jouissance. The negation of the symbol for “all”— "x —shows that the “boundary” that had simplified the positions of those who inhabit the preceding set is absent here. This negation indicates that, in terms of set theory, the set of speaking beings who are located here cannot be written in a way that is defined entirely by castration. In a schema in Encore, Lacan rewrites this matheme as Woman, thus emphasising how an aspect of this set falls outside this particular way of defining it.17 These four formulas enable a fundamental characteristic of the unconscious to be specified: as Lacan notes early in . . . or Worse, although it is not the case that “the unconscious = castration,” there is nevertheless a “strong relation” between the two.18 This implies that the jouissance upon which the unconscious operates, by an “encryption” [chiffrage] of it into various formations, such as dreams, parapraxes, jokes, and conversion symptoms, is phallic jouissance.19 It is, in part, for this reason that the phallus comes to “denot[e] . . . the power of signification”; it becomes the mark of a function that, through the limitations of castration, channels phallic jouissance into the paths of the unconscious formations.20 Conversely, the position of the pas-tout includes a jouissance that Lacan qualifies as being “beyond the phallus,” and which is therefore also located beyond the unconscious; this particular jouissance does not lend itself, in the same way, to the production of what can be grasped as unconscious signifiers.21

104

J ohn H olland

When seen from the vantage point provided by his work on sexuation, the conception of castration that accompanies Lacan’s explication of the four discourses seems much more restricted. In The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, castration is the force that inhibits the movement from the place of the production to that of truth; this inhibition limits the jouissance that could sap the agent’s capacity to act upon the other. For example, in the discourse of the master, “the master is castrated”22 because his “discourse excludes fantasy.”23 This exclusion prevents a vector from moving between the object a and the , thus “mak[ing] him fundamentally, completely blind.”24 His lack of access to the fantasy is precisely the condition of his ability to command the slave. The mathemes of sexuation, however, show retroactively that castration goes far deeper than this in the discourses; they are submitted to it systematically, in a way that reaches far beyond the lack of a vector from the place of production to that of truth. The discourses can be understood as an attempt to provide a logically rigorous treatment of the forms of “social motion”: a series of movements and practices that establish a “social bond” and are spurred on by the inherence within them of the unconscious and the libido that is connected to it.25 Such motion is indicated by the vectors that connect—or do not connect—the four places. Two of these places— those of the agent and the other—are occupied by speaking beings, but the complexities of their interactions are dictated by the two other positions. The place of truth is occupied by something that cannot manifest itself directly, but instead pushes the agent to act upon the other, thus establishing a connection that is often pervaded by psychic violence. The effect of this connection will lead the other to produce something that will occupy the fourth place, and which may well, in turn, have obscure effects upon the agent. The mathemes of sexuation imply that each of the terms of the discourses, each of their movements and each of the places are distinguished by the castration that can be applied to phallic jouissance. Indeed, this is necessarily the case because the unconscious and castration are linked and because the role of the discourses is to locate the unconscious and phallic jouissance within various social bonds. Castration obliges jouissance to take the detour provided by the encryption of the unconscious and lends coherence to the four terms that constitute discourse; in this way, these terms are unlike Woman, where the bar indicates the inability of castration to define all of her jouissance. The four elements of discourse lend themselves to being grasped, in analysis, as units that have derived their logical coherence and discreteness from castration. Specifically, S1 and S2 are signifiers, terms

T he C apitalist E xception

105

that can be located as separate and separable, even if any unconscious meaning that could be assigned to them may remain mysterious. The object a is an excess or “surplus” of jouissance in relation to the signifier and is produced by the operation of the signifying chain. Although the objet a contains a real element that cannot be reduced to the symbolic, it maintains a strict correlation with these signifiers and the castration that makes them possible and can therefore be written as part of a series with them. Finally, the is derived from the existence of signifiers; it is the evanescent force that comes into being and disappears in producing them. In this case, the bar over it does not locate it outside castration. Instead, this bar simply indicates that no signifier can capture the subject and its determination to encrypt jouissance; such encrypting is itself a form of phallic jouissance. While phallic jouissance is thus present everywhere in discourse, the pas-tout does not appear directly in the latter, and in order to locate its fuller manifestations, one must move away from discourse and into sexuation. An examination of how this pas-tout makes itself felt could well begin, as Lacan suggests at the beginning of Encore, “in bed,”26 but it would not end there. NUMBER AND YAD’LUN The status of Woman is not the only aspect of the psyche that involves moving from discourse to sexuation (and perhaps back again); a similar movement occurs with number. In discourse, number appears, first of all, in the cardinal numbers that are used to index the two terms that are characterised as signifiers: S1, the master-signifier, and S2, knowledge.27 The formulas of sexuation present the conditions that enable these numbers to appear, by showing how their very concept originates through the elaboration of the propositional formulas and the establishment of the logical modes of impossibility and necessity. One of the bases of discourse is the affinity between signifiers and cardinal numbers. This affinity arises from the relative coherence of the latter in comparison with irrational numbers; this coherence manifests itself in the separability and countability of positive integers. With S1, the mastersignifier—the signifier taken as a single, and therefore, in itself, relatively meaningless term—enables the master to grasp himself as one, as a unified whole, which can then act upon and dominate the slave. The S2, in contrast, is the place of a knowledge that is closely related to the unconscious, the signifiers that have been encrypted from jouissance. Because unconscious

106

J ohn H olland

formations can be grasped as a series of separate, countable signifiers, they can be formalised as a succession of positive integers. With the mathemes of sexuation, Lacan’s pushes number further, creating an account of its birth and development within our psyches. However, his approach is not quantitative. As he notes, in their everyday lives, “people imagine to themselves that, because it’s number, it must be a matter of quantity.”28 These concerns with quantity, however, as he argues, may be little more than shadows perceived by people trapped in a cave: “perhaps it isn’t, properly speaking, number in all its reality to which language gives us access. Perhaps it is only capable of hooking onto 0 and 1.”29 These numbers are inextricably bound up with the propositions $x.Fx and $x.Fx and the related appearance of the modes of impossibility and necessity. For the first of these, the encounter with women who have access to the Other jouissance but are also tinged with phallic jouissance will lead to a generalisation of this experience and the constitution of a logical category: it is impossible for anyone to be completely exempt from phallic jouissance. Following Gottlob Frege, in The Foundations of Arithmetic, Lacan designates 0 as the number that stands for such impossibility. The establishment of this impossibility gives rise to the category of necessity, which is connected with both the number 1 and the “at-least-one” of the “masculine” exception. This conception of necessity is based on Frege’s account of how the naming of zero establishes the principle of succession that automatically generates the series of positive integers. If each number is taken as a set, then the set of zero will have precisely one member—zero itself, which can be counted as 1; the counting of 0 therefore gives rise to the next number of the series, 1. Then, the set of 1 has two members—0 and 1—and this leads to 2, the succeeding number. . . . Lacan often varies this account slightly by adopting the terminology of set theory even more fully and speaking of the empty set, Ø, instead of zero. Thus, in the series of positive integers, “each number corresponds cardinally to the cardinal that precedes it by adding to it the empty set.”30 In this way, the movement from 0 to 1—which, in this account, is indissociable from the movement from $x.Fx to $x.Fx —leads automatically and necessarily to the production of an endless series of cardinal numbers. The name that Lacan gives to this necessary generation of cardinal numbers on the basis of 0—or of the “One of the empty set,” the empty set counted as the integer 1—is the “One.”31 Whenever we think of a particular quantity and of the integer that would “represent” it, every other number of this endless series maintains a ghostly presence for us, a presence that Lacan seeks to highlight by coining an expression, “There’s Oneness”

T he C apitalist E xception

107

[Il y a de l’Un]; such Oneness extends far beyond any particular cardinal number.32 Lacan then collapses this phrase into one single, neologistic and untranslatable word: “Yad’lun.”33 Contrary to what one might expect from an entity that is based on the “One,” Yad’lun’s character is not monolithic and invariable. It is founded not “on sameness,” but on “pure and simple difference”; each new element that appears in the series is distinguishable from the preceding one, just as it will be dissimilar from its successor.34 Lacan’s discussion of Yad’lun leads him to explore the paradoxical foundations and psychic effects of the cardinal numbers themselves. He notes that, taken to its logical conclusion, “the One that is at issue is nothing other than the Aleph-Nought—which symbolizes the cardinal of the numerical infinite.”35 Aleph-Nought or Aleph-null, ‫א‬0, is a number created by Georg Cantor as the first of a series of transfinite numbers; it simultaneously responds to paradoxes brought about by the cardinal numbers and creates its own difficulties. One of the former of these arises as an answer to an obvious question: how many numbers are included in the set of positive integers? As long as we remain within this set itself, the question remains unanswerable; if we choose to say that this set is composed of x numbers, then the principle of succession immediately forces us to add the next number, x + 1. Galileo posed this difficulty in a particularly striking and paradoxical way: if we take the series of squares (1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49 . . . ) and pair each of its members with a positive integer (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 . . . ) in a one-to-one correspondence (1–1, 2–4, 3–9, 4–16, 5–25, 6–36, 7–49 . . . ), then the number of squares can be shown to be precisely the same as the number of positive integers, a conclusion that is clearly counterintuitive. Confronted with this situation, Cantor produced an unexpected solution; in the words of David Foster Wallace, he “treat[ed] Galileo’s paradoxical equivalence not as a contradiction but as a description of a new kind of mathematical entity that’s so abstract and strange it doesn’t conform to math’s normal rules and requires special treatment.”36 This entity is a new kind of number, the “transfinite” numbers, which themselves form a series that begins with ‫א‬0. This ‫א‬0 is the number of all the elements in the series of positive integers, but in order to be this, it must differ radically from the numbers in that set. According to Bertrand Russell, “this new number is unchanged by adding 1 or subtracting 1 or doubling or halving or any of a number of other operations which we think of as necessarily making a number larger or smaller.”37 This produces a fundamental paradox: as Lacan indicates, ‫א‬0 is one of the most important forms of the One, for it is the only number that

108

J ohn H olland

is capable of naming the set of all cardinal numbers. Yet if ‫א‬0 is not changed when 1 is added, then it stands apart from the very principle of succession that defines the workings of the One. The place of ‫א‬0 within Yad’lun is precarious. Yad’lun, with all its difficulties, plays a complex role in the psyche and confronts us dramatically with the divide between sexuation and discourse. Because the mathemes of sexuation define a wider series of positions that can be taken in relation to castration than discourse does, certain positions that exist within sexuation are excluded from discourse. In this context, ‫א‬0 can provide a way of theorising the jouissance of the “masculine” exception, $x.Fx . If castration limits jouissance and renders it finite, the masculine exception rejects this limitation, and therefore becomes the location of an “infinity of jouissance,” which unfolds in the fashion of the set of cardinal numbers, never reaching an end.38 This exception constitutes part of one of the fundamental “couples” of the sexuation mathemes, which can be written as "x.Fx ® $x.Fx ; in Encore, Lacan also writes this as Woman → Φ.39 This couple throws light on what occurs in the passage from sexuation to discourse. The mathemes portray half of the divided status of the pas-tout (the other half reaches out to S( ), the place that would be occupied by the non-existent figure for whom phallic jouissance would be entirely alien).40 This couple is constituted by a woman as pas-tout, whose status is both within and beyond phallic jouissance and castration, and a man, whom she places in the position of the exception. This exception had given a logical coherence to the set of all speaking beings who place themselves as "x.Fx , locating themselves within castration in a way that provides them with boundaries; here, this woman “calls” out to such a figure, seeking a way simultaneously to locate her libido within the signifier and the unconscious, and to challenge this signifier, in the name of a jouissance that goes beyond it.41 Neither the pas-tout nor the masculine exception can be present as such within discourse. The requirements of castration exclude terms that go beyond it and those that reject it entirely. This does not, however, mean that nothing of the bond between them can be transmitted into discourse. Aspects of this vector can enter discourse, marking it indelibly and in complex ways. The two figures can take part in social action and motion by submitting to the castration that it requires. Castration operates as a Procrustean bed, deforming both of these terms. In discourse, Woman’s direct relation to a jouissance that exceeds the phallus is, as it were, lopped off; similarly, the exception to castration finds this castration imposed upon him. In this way, the movement from sexuation to discourse transforms the matheme "x.Fx ® $x.Fx into a very different one: → S1. The pas-tout,

T he C apitalist E xception

109

which is defined by its inability to be written entirely in terms of castration, is now submitted completely to a system of jouissance that can be transformed into signifiers and their surplus. What the pas-tout retains in this new writing is the status of something that also cannot be written within the system: it becomes the place of the subject, , the ungraspable determination to encrypt jouissance into signifiers. The partner of this is S1, in which we encounter the remains of the baroque infinity of ‫א‬0, once castration has reduced its status. This One is no longer the infinity of the set of integers; instead, it is merely the finite integer 1, the number that will confer upon its bearer the sense of logical coherence—of unity, of oneness—that will enable him to act upon others. The vector → S1 appears in each of the four discourses, and its function varies depending on the places occupied by the two terms. In the discourse of the master, it indicates how the master’s inaccessible and unsayable truth as subject pushes him to dominate the slave. The discourse of the hysteric is the one that bears the closest resemblance to the vector "x.Fx ® $x.Fx , in which the pas-tout, in part, confronts the exception, challenging the imposture inherent in any attempt to reduce all jouissance to its phallic variety. In the discourse of the hysteric, the challenge is subtly different: here the “hysteric” as “embodies the truth of the master,” the very aspect that, in his own discourse, has forced him to act, precisely because he has remained ignorant of its existence.42 This confrontation obliges him instead to produce a knowledge about this truth. In the discourse of the university, the → S1 vector becomes impossible; this implies that although education may produce a subject of knowledge, this subject will never gain access to the hidden master who controls the movement of the system, and who ceaselessly commands, “Keep on knowing more.”43 Finally, in the analytic discourse, → S1 characterises the analysand-subject’s relation to his/her production of associations and new signifiers. In contrast to the discourse of the master, these signifiers are treated not as a chain of signifiers whose connection yields unconscious meaning (S2 in the position of the other). Instead, they are conceived in terms of Yad’lun: a series in which each new signifier appears because it indicates the presence of the empty set and necessarily leads to the successor signifier. Because they all serve as such markers, they all become “equivalent to th[is] empty set” and the analysand comes to recognise this “sameness,” thereby grasping what has remained constant in the associations that s/he has produced.44 In each of these four discourses, the relation between and S1 is expressed by a vector that moves—or fails to move—from to S1. In other words, the subject always acts—or fails to act—on the S1 in one way or

110

J ohn H olland

another, depending on the position of the terms in the discourse. It is in this context that the novelty of Lacan’s fifth discourse becomes apparent. Here, it is precisely this vector that is reversed, altering the discourse of the master: enters the position of semblance and S1 becomes hidden in the place of truth. THE CAPITALIST DISCOURSE The reversal of the and S1 in the capitalist discourse differentiates this discourse from the other four in their circular system. This reversal has a profound effect on the discourse of the master, where → S1 is the source of the master’s psychic power over the slave; this power is a form of transference. The master lends a particular resonance to the slave’s knowledge because the slave has dimly discerned a hidden place—that of the —which the master-signifier has come to represent for her/him.45 This place becomes the subject of the slave’s own unconscious, and because this subject, which Lacan sometimes calls the “subject-supposed-to-know,” becomes embodied in the master, the workings of the unconscious help to ensure the slave’s subjection.46 In the capitalist discourse, the reversal of the positions of S1 and disrupts this subjection, for the master is no longer able to represent the subject-supposed-to-know for the slave. This change can also have less fortunate effects, for when the existence of the subject of the unconscious is no longer posited, knowledge loses its unconscious resonance. Thus, in the configuration → S1 of the capitalist discourse, there is no assumption that a knowledge of which we are unaware is present in our signifiers. This loss of a sense of the workings of the unconscious suggests that the character of the changes markedly when it is in the place of the agent in the capitalist discourse. Ceasing to be the subject of the unconscious, it becomes something quite different, something whose nature is dictated by this reversal. In the discourse of the master, the inability of the production to reach truth prevents a from communicating with ; in the capitalist discourse, this vector becomes necessary, confronting the directly with jouissance. When the latter takes the form of the gaze or the voice, it is endowed with the force and violence of the superego, and the subject’s encounter with it is traumatic. Overwhelmed by this trauma, the becomes an empty place, a sort of scorched earth, marked only by the loss of its relation to the unconscious. The capitalist discourse thus becomes the contrary of Freud’s presentation of analytic work in Beyond the Pleasure Principle; in that text,

T he C apitalist E xception

111

whenever the trauma repeats itself, part of it can be “bound” and symbolised, thus lessening its effects.47 Here, instead, the becomes nothing more than an abject effect of an unsymbolisable trauma. This shock of the subject’s encounter with this object can be called the “capitalist uncanny.”48 This description of the implications of the reversal of the S1 and in the capitalist discourse does not answer a crucial question: what causes this reversal? What force is able to intervene upon the discourse of the master and effect this change? In The Psychoanalyst’s Knowledge, Lacan provides an answer. The force in question is the “foreclosure of castration”: “What differentiates the discourse of capitalism is Verwerfung, the fact of rejecting, outside all the fields of the symbolic. [ . . . ] What does it reject? Well, castration.”49 The foreclosure of castration seems to reverse the two terms, thereby producing, as its effect, the encounter between a and . It is not, however, immediately apparent what this foreclosure is and why it would manifest itself by reversing these two terms; analyses of this discourse have not answered this question satisfactorily. For example, in Lacan and Marx: The Invention of the Symptom, Pierre Bruno, who has written a searching account of the capitalist discourse, passes over this question in silence, focusing more on the consequences of the reversal: the breaking or “sundering” of the connection between knowledge and the subject, and the establishment of the vector between a and .50 Part of the difficulty of theorising the foreclosure of castration in the capitalist discourse becomes apparent in the context of the expanded understanding of castration found in the mathemes of sexuation. If, as discussed earlier, castration establishes the logical coherence of terms that are characterised entirely by phallic jouissance, then the elements of the capitalist discourse are indeed subject to castration. The terms themselves, , S1, S2, a, which have been given their consistency by their relation to castration, are unaltered, as are the four places of discourse structure. Even the order of the vectors that lead from one term to another remains the same in the capitalist discourse: the in the position of agent or semblance can only intervene upon the term that follows it, S1, and not upon S2, which occupies the place of the other. Castration is thus everywhere in the capitalist discourse. Since the latter’s unique feature is the reversal of S1 and , then the foreclosure of castration must be highly localised; it must be found within—and only within—this reversal. My hypothesis is that the “rejection” of castration and the placement of it “outside all of the fields of the symbolic” can be located in a single term: the S1. The “1” in this case is not the finite integer that characterises the castrated master; instead it is the ‫א‬0 of the masculine exception, a figure

112

J ohn H olland

whom Lacan explicitly characterises in terms of a “rejection” of castration.51 The masculine exception, $x.Fx , smuggles into discourse a kind of jouissance—one outside castration—and a kind of number—a transfinite one—that had hitherto been considered to stand outside discourse. This fifth discourse is therefore the result of a rethinking of the presuppositions of the four discourses, one that could only occur because of the radicalisation of Lacan’s teaching that occurred with sexuation. In this reading, the reversal is the effect of the eruption of the masculine exception into discourse, which reverses the positions of S1 and . An abyss exists between the One of ‫א‬0 and the integer that characterises the master, making it impossible for the exception to occupy directly the position of agent. If this place is to enable one speaking being to act upon others, thus establishing a social bond, then it must fulfil at least two minimal conditions. First, its logical status must be sufficiently unproblematic that a person can assume it with relative ease and then make her/ himself “recognised” by the other upon whom s/he acts. If the master’s actions have an effect, it is because the 1, taken as a unary trait, imposes upon him a psychic unity that enables him to dominate the more complex slave, whose condition involves the presence of a multiplicity of signifiers. Second, this semblance must be capable of “representing” truth. However complex a particular semblance may be, it must also be sufficiently transparent to serve as the vessel that bears something of a truth that cannot manifest itself directly. The vector that moves from truth to the semblance indicates that the latter is not a mere appearance: it is “strictly correlative” to truth,52 and enables the latter’s contours to be felt, however vaguely and imprecisely. Although it is easy to be the semblance of the master-signifier, it is impossible to take on the ‫א‬0. Within the ordinary practices of everyday life, we can enter Yad’lun and locate ourselves commonsensically within the integers 1 and 2—the positions of master and slave—but doing so will never enable us to make the leap from the series of cardinal numbers to ‫א‬0, which must always remain inaccessible to anyone who is located in this series.53 Its abstract and paradoxical qualities render ‫א‬0 far too opaque and enigmatic to represent truth, in the way that the much simpler and more transparent master-signifier can do. From the perspective of discourse, the infinity of the exception to castration can only operate in and from the shadows. This position, however, enables it to inhabit the place of truth with perfect ease. Its inaccessible and enigmatic character renders it thoroughly able to lodge itself in a position that can only be occulted from our direct access and apprehension.

T he C apitalist E xception

113

In the capitalist discourse, the appearance of an inaccessible infinity forces the into the position of agent, thus making the capitalist uncanny necessary and inevitable, and turning the subject into a piece of scorched earth that can give rise to nothing. In this abject position, the has no choice other than to appeal to the S1, whose full character must remain profoundly hidden, but whose nature as exception will make possible the transformation of this desperate subject into a somewhat more stable form of knowledge, S2. The exception may well affect this knowledge in a way that is analogous to its action upon the "x.Fx : it provides the set of knowledge with a boundary, anchoring and stabilising it by giving it the logical coherence that comes from the capacity to distinguish between what is inside and what is outside the set. This process of shaping serves as a temporary respite from the empty and abject condition of the , which the exception has itself caused. If the capitalist discourse is characterised by the masculine exception, then we are immediately confronted with a question: how can this force enter discourse, which by definition is subject to castration? Perhaps one way in which it does so is indicated by the name of this discourse: it is the “capitalist” discourse and the exception in question takes the form of a capitalist exception, whose presence can be felt everywhere and by everyone. Although such an argument can only be indicated tentatively here, it may well be that a key to the character of the truth of this discourse is to be found in Karl Marx’s delineation of a crucial aspect of the capitalist mode of production: it initiates a motion that must necessarily expand and reproduce itself endlessly, one that will seek to do so despite the contradictions that it will engender (and which may finally put an end to it). For Marx, the creation of surplus-value transforms money into capital, thereby initiating a process in which capital must never cease to seek to valorise itself anew. As Marx argues, the “expansion of value [can] tak[e] place only within [such a] constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital”—as well as its production—“has therefore no limit.”54 The limitless character of such self-valorisation introduces into capital a potential infinity that can be symbolised by ‫א‬0. The claim that this potentiality enables it to enter Lacan’s discourse must, however, itself be treated with care, for Marxism and psychoanalysis are two fundamentally different disciplines, each studying a separate “object” and bringing its own assumptions to bear upon it. The critique of political economy is not the theory of discourse and value is not jouissance. Value’s determination to valorise itself imposes its own complex economic requirements upon human beings, constraining them to act as its “bearers”;55 discourse is

114

J ohn H olland

dominated by the very different forces of jouissance and the unconscious, which compel speaking beings in very different ways. Marx’s critique necessarily proceeds through a quantitative use of mathematics, which differs radically from the qualitative use of number in Lacanian mathesis. To argue, therefore, that Marx makes Lacan’s writing of the capitalist discourse possible will require an attentive and meticulous misreading of Marx’s critique; it will proceed on the assumption that the psyche itself misunderstands Marx. In this way, the push towards a potentially infinite process of valorisation can only enter discourse and affect our relations to the unconscious and the libido by being dimly misrecognised: it becomes an instance of the jouissance of the exception, which is sensed to extend endlessly, taking the form of Yad’lun. Within the context of the capitalist discourse, this One would not at all resemble the figure of the primal father, with which Freud strove to give body to the exception; perhaps it would not resemble any father. Instead, it would be sensed as a seemingly endless economic motion that would be apprehended obscurely as a movement towards ever more jouissance. The relative ease with which this (mis)apprehension can occur is suggested by Marx’s own recourse to corporeal metaphors, such as “social metabolism,” and his use of rather libidinalised language to characterise this motion: “metamorphosis,” “transformation,” “flow.”56 Such language has its own capacity to fascinate readers and can lead the numerical succession of capitalist valorisation to be sensed vaguely as an endless progression of jouissance. This infinite progression is seized upon by discourse, becoming a structuring principle of the psyche, one that renders the subject the prey of surplus-jouissance and makes of knowledge a temporary way of recovering from the ravages brought about by the capitalist uncanny. Such a theorising of a capitalist exception can provide a way to give a definite form to a presence that, when we are held within the grips of this discourse, can never be touched directly or experienced empirically. NOTES 1. See Jacques-Alain Miller, “Paradigms of Jouissance,” trans. Jorge Jauregui, Lacanian Ink 17 (2000): 8–47. 2. Jacques Lacan, “Du discours psychanalytique,” in Lacan in Italia/Lacan en Italie (1953–1978), ed. Giacomo Contri (Milan: La Salamandra, 1978), 40. 3. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 157, 198.

T he C apitalist E xception

115

4. Jacques Lacan, “Radiophonie,” in Autres écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 447. 5. Jacques Lacan, . . . or Worse: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 53. 6. Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2007), 39. 7. Jacques Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls: A Series of Presentations in the Chapel at Sainte-Anne Hospital, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 90–91. 8. Lacan, “Du discours psychanalytique,” 40. 9. Lacan, . . . or Worse, 27. 10. Jacques Lacan, “L’étourdit,” in Autres écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 449. 11. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre IV: La relation d’objet, 1956–1957, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 199–401; Jacques Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 129–96; Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 464–65, 482–84. 12. Lacan, . . . or Worse, 88. 13. Lacan, . . . or Worse, 24. 14. Lacan, . . . or Worse, 25. 15. Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), 150, emphasis added. 16. Lacan, . . . or Worse, 180. 17. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 78. 18. Lacan, . . . or Worse, 22. 19. Jacques Lacan, “Introduction à l’édition allemande d’un premier volume des Écrits,” in Autres écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 556. 20. Lacan, . . . or Worse, 43. 21. Lacan, Encore, 74. 22. Lacan, The Other Side, 97. 23. Lacan, The Other Side, 108. 24. Lacan, The Other Side, 108. 25. The term “social motion” has been borrowed from Jonathan Arac, who alludes to Karl Marx’s references to the “motion” of capital and its effect on social relations. For Arac, this term refers to the types of movement that can be traced out in the works of authors who created “overviews” of society, a term that is itself perched between a Marxist totality and Michel Foucault’s panopticon. See Jonathan Arac, Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 26. Lacan, Encore, 2.

116

J ohn H olland

27. Lacan, however, calculated the value of surplus-jouissance as 0.618 .  .  . , thus bringing out its incommensurability with the signifiers. See Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XVI: D’un Autre à l’autre, 1968–1969, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 131; Guy Le Gaufey, “Towards a Critical Reading of the Formulae of Sexuation,” trans. Cormac Gallagher. http:​//www​.laca​ninir​eland​.com/​web/ w ​ p -con​ t ent/​ u ploa​ d s/20 ​ 1 0/06 ​ / Le-G ​ a ufey ​ - Prol ​ o gue- ​ a nd-F ​ a ille ​ - of-N ​ o tall ​ . pdf,​ accessed 3 May 2016. 28. Lacan, . . . or Worse, 90. 29. Lacan, . . . or Worse, 90, translation modified. 30. Lacan, . . . or Worse, 138. 31. Lacan, . . . or Worse, 116. 32. Lacan, . . . or Worse, 109. 33. Lacan, . . . or Worse, 109. 34. Lacan, . . . or Worse, 125. 35. Lacan, . . . or Worse, 125. 36. David Foster Wallace, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (New York: Atlas, 2003), 40. 37. Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (New York: Dover, 1993), 79. 38. Nathalie Charraud, Lacan et les mathématiques (Paris: Anthropos, 1997), 97. 39. Lacan, Encore, 78. 40. Lacan, Encore, 78. 41. In . . . Or Worse, Lacan states that the mathematical character of the pastout “is located between the 1 and the 0,” thus referring to the qualities of the continuum or number line, qualities that he would make more explicit in his discussion of Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise at the beginning of Encore. Cantor himself hoped that the numbers in the continuum could be written as ‫א‬1 the transfinite number that would follow ‫א‬0. See Lacan, Encore, 8; Lacan, . . . or Worse, 181. 42. Lacan, The Other Side, 97. 43. Lacan, The Other Side, 105. 44. Lacan, . . . or Worse, 144. 45. John Holland, “The Capitalist Uncanny,” S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 8 (2015): 100–101. 46. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 232–33. 47. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol XVIII, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), 62. 48. Holland, “The Capitalist Uncanny,” 109–12. 49. Lacan, Brick Walls, 90–91. 50. Pierre Bruno, Lacan and Marx: The Invention of the Symptom, trans. John Holland. (London: Routledge, Forthcoming). 51. One implication of this is that, in the capitalist discourse, the S1 does not function as a “brand name,” as for example, Vanheule and Faye have suggested. See Stijn Vanheule, “Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis,” Frontiers in Psychology 7 (2016), https​://do​i.org​/10.3​389/f​psyg.​2016.​01948​;

T he C apitalist E xception

117

Esther Faye, “Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel: . . . ou pire: the discourse of capitalism.” S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 10 & 11 (2017): 188. 52. Lacan, D’un discours, 26. 53. In psychosis, one may be inhabited by the jouissance of the exception’s push towards infinity, but this does not suggest that one can become a direct embodiment of the infinite. For example, Schreber—who was marked by a foreclosure of castration as well as of the Name-of-the-Father—sought to reach ‫א‬0 by becoming a messiah who would be united with God. He never, however, reached this goal; as Lacan notes, he could only approach it “asymptotic[ally].” Schreber was not able to make the mathematical jump that would have enabled him to incarnate this inaccessible position. See Lacan, “On a Question Prior,” 476. 54. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 253. 55. Marx, Capital I, 179. 56. Marx, Capital I, 198–200, 203, 225.

6 ASSASSINATION AND JUDGEMENT Miroslav Griško

In the sixth thesis of his On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin writes “the Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist.”1 The force of the statement follows from the extent to which the soteriological dimension of the redeemer has become trivial and the annihilative dimension of the subduer has become concealed. At the end of history, everything is distorted and confused, even Benjamin’s Angel of History trapped in the “pile of debris” that has “grow(n) sky-high.”2 Within the ruins, the deepest esoteric mystery of a Last Judgement is now taken as exoteric. The mind of God is easily read, since, even if all this is true, every soul will in any case be saved: apokatastasis as self-evident. The exoteric assassination of Antichrist by Messiah, in contrast, is now esoteric. A visceral act that seals the history of the world has become obscure. Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau’s The Angel, although without explicit reference to Benjamin and his theses, can be read as an eschatological theologoumenon dedicated to the annihilative dimension of the subduer. That which Alain Badiou in a contemporary review dismissively calls their commitment to the “negation of the world”3 is a deferral of soteriological mystery to its proper non-human order, an exteriority beyond the volition of man, so as to contemplate with precision, to the extent that Jambet and Lardreau “speak as metaphysicians,”4 a metaphysics of assassination. The work’s initial question—how can Rebel oppose Master without becoming a new Master?—requires a third term for its resolution: 119

120

M i r os l a v G r i š k o

the Angel. The distinction of Rebel and Master is insufficient to establish a logic of “absolute revolt,” the Rebel will always become a new Master, and the negation of the Master therefore requires that “the Angel must arrive.”5 The arrival of Jambet and Lardreau’s Angel, in contrast to Benjamin’s image of a worldly, entombed Angel, is from what they alternately call “exteriority,” “beyond,” and “outside.”6 Yet subduing exteriority differs from redemptive exteriority in that the assassination of the Master can be known through the logic of his function, which is the function of a universal as well as its negation. Exteriority is necessary because of the conspiracy between Master and Rebel. The assassination of the Master is the assassination of the world. Naïve revolutionary humanism leads Benjamin to disappointment and suicide. Jambet and Lardreau instead begin from the Rebel’s complicity with the Master, the position of a “Lacanian pessimism.”7 The decisiveness of Lacan to The Angel follows from his account of the Master’s universality, which Jambet and Lardreau take as axiomatic. Lacan’s “laws of the semblant”8 describe this universal function as the presence of the Master also in that which he is not, the semblance that appears as his apparent negation. For Jambet and Lardreau, semblance is a “camouflage” that “disarms,”9 it is the “true discourse of the Master never spoken by the Master,”10 such that “the discourse of liberation . . . in making the Master unrecognisable, assumes the same role.”11 The universality of the Master entails a clandestine Master who is not Master, through which if the Master is universal, so too is his semblance. An Ontology of Revolution, the title of the intended yet unfinished trilogy of which The Angel is the first part, is already abandoned in this initial volume for the eschatological exploration of a higher form of negation that would be the terminus of the Master’s universality. Jambet and Lardreau’s approach in The Angel can in this respect be reconstructed according to a logic of incompleteness: the negation of the universal present in Lacan’s “not-all.” Under the condition that a universal is marked by a negativity which indicates its simultaneous incompleteness, negation as incompleteness denotes an antagonism between semblance and what Lacan obtusely calls “that which might not be a semblance”:12 the semblance of incompleteness and an incompleteness that might not be a semblance. The former names an incompleteness of the Master in the form of a Master who is not Master, while the latter names an incompleteness that marks the exteriority of the Angel who is his assassin. For if the Master is both universal and incomplete, a hole in the universal either indicates only the insidiousness of a universal Master who is not Master, or the gateway of an annihilative exteriority. The antagonism between a hole in the

A ssassination and J udgement

121

universal and the semblance of a hole in the universal is an eschatological war over the meaning of ontological incompleteness. Either incompleteness is an inconsistent meaninglessness that allows for new regimes of the universal, however apparently deficient and self-effacing, or it evokes a “narrow gate through which the Messiah might enter”13 from the outside. LAST MOMENT ON EARTH Badiou argues that a unique tendency of twentieth-century politics was its intent to force a “definitive” solution, a strategic consensus across factions that converges towards the solution of a final war.14 The Angel enacts this tendency, but with the logic of final war now taken in its most “literal”15 sense: as eschatological war. Anything less than what the Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart terms the “insane expectation”16 of eschatological history—the messianic annihilation of the world, the resurrection of all the dead, and the pronouncement of a Last Judgement—fails to attain the solution, which absolute revolt seeks. On the basis of the extremity of the solution as indicative of absolute revolt’s impossibility, Jambet and Lardreau locate this impossibility in absolute exteriority: “We do not come out of this ‘beyond,’ we can only tax the imposture which pretends today to have done away with it.”17 “Insane expectation” in The Angel becomes a form of insane “armchair metaphysics,” yielding a deep structure of messianically initiated extinction consistent with an initial reduction of “a multiple . . . to two.”18 For Jambet and Lardreau it can be said that whereas all a priori metaphysical reflection prosecutes a reduction19—a universal claim about that which is, being qua being20—in the last instance this reduction is based on the cut of the meta,21 which indicates an outside that is irreducible to that which is, and is therefore necessarily in antagonism with the latter. While an outside in this case does not revoke the universal, since the universal names all that is, if being qua being is only another name for the universality of a Master, his negation now lurks in (metaphysical) impossible exteriority. Utterly obscure to that which is, the entirely “negative metaphor”22 of the Angel connotes a messianic negation, in that the liquidation of the Master—the Messiah as assassin of Antichrist—comes from an outside—the negation as exterior to being is messianic parousia. Jambet and Lardreau’s self-described “negative theology”23 of The Angel is at once an acute form of political theology that seals a knowable ontological structure, a history of the world ending with an unknowable apophatic dimension now taken as an active negation.24

122

M i r os l a v G r i š k o

Political theology, understood in nuce according to Carl Schmitt’s thesis “all significant modern concepts of the state are secularised theological concepts,”25 yields three basic positions. From a first position, to the extent that secularisation names the transit of the concept from theology to politics, the movement between the two more fundamentally implies that their order is contingent. For if a given concept—such as Schmitt’s classic example of the sovereign—remains consistent despite its secularisation, the concept is transcendent to both theology and politics. Because the integrity of the concept is not compromised by its instantiation as theological or as political, this position consequentially dispossesses both theology and politics of their force. An opposed position maintains that order is not contingent, but rather necessary to the understanding of the concept. Secularisation does not efface the theological origin of the concept, but is instead immanent to the theologeme. This position can be further subdivided into contrasting positive and negative senses. In its positive sense, secularisation as the politicisation of a theological concept is an affirmative thesis pertaining to what obtains in virtue of the concept. The empirico-historical effects that follow from the logic of the theologeme indicate the truth of the theologeme. The theological concept discloses its fundamental understanding of how the world is precisely through its apparently anti-theological secularisation.26 The negative sense, in contrast, accepts the immanence of secularisation to theology, but, against an affirmative ontological claim of what the world is in light of the theological concept, thinks according to the end of the world. The perspective here is apocalyptic, in that the transit of the concept, in both its empirico-historical and dispossessive forms, is equivalent to the vector of history, which may, in degrees, become legible as Signs of the Times. This latter approach to political theology is equivalent to an eschatological theologoumenon. If Schmitt’s Catholicism ultimately means that his work is best understood as an eschatological theologoumenon,27 Jambet and Lardreau’s Angel merits a similar classification. Yet the marked difference between the two is their respective starting points for eschatological conjecture. The pertinence that Schmitt ascribes to the concept of the political—the friendenemy distinction—is, in the last instance, an attempt to define the primary antagonism of eschatological history and thus to determine the opposed sides of eschatological war. The eschatological basis of Schmitt’s thought signifies that the friend-enemy antagonism is more precisely understood as the antagonism between Katechon and Antichrist.28 The framing of eschatological war in terms of the Katechon, whose presence restrains the coming of the Antichrist (2 Thessalonians 2:6–7), informs Schmitt’s statism

A ssassination and J udgement

123

or, more accurately, institutionalism: his continued search for the Katechon, from National Socialism to the papacy. While Schmitt’s critique of liberalism above all attacks its illusory abrogation of the political—and thus liberalism’s claim to have brought peace to the world, which, as an entirely worldly achieved peace, can only be a counterfeit antichristic peace29—if it is still possible to think the Katechon, for Schmitt, the Antichrist has not yet come. In this respect, Jambet and Lardreau replace Schmitt’s friendenemy distinction with the distinction between Rebel and Master, only so as to then collapse the two into each other with the negative metaphor of the Angel: a messianiocentric rather than katechonocentric eschatology. For Jambet and Lardreau, the Katechon has already fallen apart. They accordingly do not seek out the restrainer, but rather think eschatological war at its final, cumulative point, positing a messianic moment that will kill Antichrist, his assassination from outside. Whereas Schmitt’s thought is dedicated to a reordering of the earth—the nomos of the earth—Jambet and Lardreau think infinitely closer to the last moment on earth. An eschatological theologoumenon that begins from the last moment on earth moves from the problem of authentic katechonic affirmation to the problem of authentic messianic negation. The mirror image of Schmitt’s reactionism is Jambet and Lardreau’s “Maoist philosophy,”30 developed above all through the concept of cultural revolution. Yet cultural revolution is now disfigured and recoded as the messianic assassination of counterfeit last moments on earth. The logic of negation of cultural revolution is the logic of negation present in Mao’s concept of antagonism, described in Badiou’s words as a “non-dialectical disjunction, without synthesis”:31 the distinct sides of Rebel and Master and the unilateral negation of one side. The problem of revolt is that the function of negation is collapsed by an embryonic Master in every Rebel. Because an initial antagonistic duality of Two inevitably becomes One through the negation of one side—all negation thus reversing into the consecration of a Master—Mao’s famous formula “One divides into Two” recapitulates the necessity of cultural revolution’s perpetual negation against the undermining of negation that affirms the new Master. Jambet and Lardreau adhere to the formula, but, with a measure of contempt for its monotonous circuit, subordinate the repeated transition from One to Two to the act of division. Division becomes the cut of a meta, extending the ultimately tautological horizon of antagonism to its both nonsensical and logical breaking point, whereby pure negation can only be found in another world: “absolute purity requires that the whole of one’s time be occupied by the other world.”32 Absolute purity of messianic negation transmogrifies the standard account of the relation

124

M i r os l a v G r i š k o

between revolt and messianism—that the former is a secularised variant of the latter33—into a logic of commitment to insane expectation. If ontological commitments denote that which a particular concept in the last instance holds to be real,34 the commitment to negation becomes understandable as a form of modal entailment—if revolt is possible, which is to say, ceteris paribus, if revolt is impossible, then the Messiah will necessarily come—or as a xenoontological commitment, according to which pure negation implies an absolute exteriority to the affirmation of being qua being that is the One of the Master. For Badiou, even if the argument is not read in the literal eschatological sense and the negative metaphor of the Angel is simply a generic antagonistic One to the One of the Master, Jambet and Lardreau relapse into a theological type One with the stringency of antagonistic sides, the “two times one”35 of Angel against Master. The concept of antagonism is to rather be understood, according to Badiou, as a “One that has always been the becoming of its own scission.”36 Yet the logic of the Angel maintains that the scission is not the One’s own scission, not entirely immanent to the One. “One divides into Two” rather infers a form of outside. For if the scission is the One’s own scission, it remains, although undercutting the One, entirely of the One. Negation as absolute purity is zero times one, a holed One marking what Kierkegaard would call an “infinite qualitative difference” between the One of the Master and absolute exteriority; for Jambet and Lardreau, “there is the Light and its Prince, the darkness and its Angel.”37 The darkness of the Angel reduces the world to the intensity of a quality, a property, with which it is necessarily in antagonism. The world is nothing other than the property of the Master, the light of his universality. The darkness of the Angel lies “at the bottom of an exile, at the bottom of a universal.”38 The depth of the Angel indicates a state of occultation, withdrawn from the light of the Master, and therefore a hidden antagonism, since “the universal undermines .  .  . antagonism,”39 negation as such. According to the universality of the property, whereby the Rebel necessarily becomes Master, no antagonism and no true war obtains in the false antagonism determined by the One of the Master. The negative metaphor of angelic pure negation is the exteriority of antagonism as the occultation of antagonism, which is at once the occultation of the negation that is the Master’s assassination. The light of the Master and the darkness of the Angel assume an antagonistic form in their pure contradiction: there is nothing other than the property, but there is an exteriority to the property. The exteriority is messianic according to the infinite qualitative difference between the property of the world and that which is beyond the property; the messianic is

A ssassination and J udgement

125

exteriority, whereby the instantiation of that which is beyond the property becomes the negation of the world. The absoluteness of messianic exteriority implies a strictly passive messianism.40 The arrival of Messiah cannot be accelerated, as this would indicate an infection of exteriority by the world, the latter’s contamination of the former’s absolute purity. Accelerated messianism is paradigmatic of the trap that renders the Rebel a Master. The desire to accelerate messianism turns on the precondition that the universality of the Master is in some way incomplete. Jambet and Lardreau follow Lacan, such that desire indicates a lack, and all revolt is a desire, yet “all desire is of the Master.”41 In the acceleration of the messianic, the apparent hole in the Master operates as a “lure” through which the Rebel becomes Master with his introduction of counterfeit antichristic peace; or, in other terms, judgement now precedes assassination. The last moment on earth of assassination is namely misinterpreted by an accelerated messianism as a temporal last moment: the past of the subjugation to the Master is to be annihilated by the desire for the Master’s negation. In contrast, for Jambet and Lardreau, “there is only the present, the past does not exist. And this is precisely our most profound metaphysical thesis, our ‘esoteric’ thesis.”42 The present is the occulted presence of a structure of antagonism, the incompleteness of the Master that is not a lure, but instead marks “the only possible breach”43 of the universal and a negation which lies on the other side. The One of the structure of incompleteness divides into “two autonomous spirals of sense,”44 which, in their total split, entail the antagonism of a state of (eschatological) war: either incompleteness is only the semblance that renders all that is not the Master the Master, or incompleteness apophatically evokes assassinating outside. INCOMPLETENESS AND ITS SEMBLANCE For Jambet and Lardreau, “the enemy is not error, but the semblant.”45 Semblance operates as a fog of war that hides (eschatological) war. Semblance as fog of war dissolves the consistency of the sides of an antagonism and yields either a One or an already divided One. In the sense of the former, semblance functions as the semblance of a divided Two, which is at its core One. The division of One into Two returns to One and the Rebel becomes Master. In the sense of the latter, the division of the One into Two now is the semblance of a divided Two. In consequence, semblance annuls antagonism, as there is no One to be divided, but only an already divided

126

M i r os l a v G r i š k o

One, a state in which, in Lacan’s words, “there is no longer any need for (a Master) to be present.”46 Semblance as fog of war maintains that either war is over on the basis that every war inaugurates a new Master or that war is over on the basis of the Master’s absence.47 The problem of semblance is accordingly not only a problem of the universal, but a problem of a universal that is incomplete. For Jambet and Lardreau, it is this second dimension that is decisive to the logic of The Angel, as it marks the counterfeit last moment on earth of the universal’s counterfeit negation. The universal is not a simple “master-signifier” that instantiates an explicit order according to its logic. By extension, antagonism is not found in the straightforward exclusion from this universalising signifier, as, for example, in the work of Laclau and Mouffe. Their universal, also articulated with Lacanian concepts, is a “master-signifier (that) involves the notion of a particular element assuming ‘a universal’ structuring function,”48 while the concept of antagonism that follows lies at “the limits of every objectivity, which is revealed as partial and precarious objectification.”49 If antagonism obtains at the limit of universal objectification, an explicit master-signifier in the style of a Lacanian Name-of-the-Father engenders an equally explicit antagonism. Yet it is precisely an explicit universal and an explicit antagonism that are opposed by Jambet and Lardreau with the identification of the enemy as semblance. The Master of objectification and exclusion cannot account for the Master who is not Master, the semblance of the Master also posited by Lacan, which is ultimately the Master’s self-negation that at once hides another form of negation. What Jambet and Lardreau term their cynegetics is a hunt for the enemy as semblance that goes beyond the primitive signifier of a Name-of-the Father universal, so as to, first, identify the incomplete Master, and, second, uncover a pure antagonism—the real eschatological war—against its apparent erasure by the Master’s semblance of incompleteness. Whereas the role of semblance increases in importance throughout Lacan’s work, as Grigg50 observes, the concept’s ubiquity in his later seminars compromises its precision. Against this dilution, Grigg reconstructs semblance according to three primary features, which, when supplemented with its coherency with incompleteness, describes the incomplete Master Jambet and Lardreau intend to track down. First, the semblance possesses an “ersatz quality.”51 Semblance stands in for something and its primary function is thus substitutive. Second, the substitutive function is not deceptive, but is recognised as such: semblances are known to be ersatz. Third, and decisively, despite its ersatz quality, semblance remains preferable to that which it substitutes. Semblance is not reducible to illusory appearance,

A ssassination and J udgement

127

it is recognised as ersatz, and simultaneously infers an axiology, whereby a value is conferred to semblance over that which it replaces. Yet the axiology of semblance is not a value that is juxtaposed to another value—the ersatz quality given preference over that which it substitutes—since that which semblance substitutes is a void. For Miller, Lacanian semblance is “a veil that hides nothing.”52 If semblance as a substitute for nothing is an ersatz nothing, semblance as veil is a transparent veil. As standing in for something, semblance marks the lack of something, but the value conferred to the ersatz means that it is transparent in its standing in for nothing and is valued for this function. A transparent veil, although because it is a substitute for void is, in the last instance, nothing, an axiological dimension follows from, in the terminology of the Ljubljana school, the “minimal differentiation of the void” that this transparent veil entails—that despite it being nothing, it is at least something. For Miller, if semblance is a nothing that is at least something, it is therefore also a nothing that produces something.53 But the ersatz quality of that which produces something also means that this something is incomplete, as ersatz implies lack: semblance is not-all of that which it functions as a substitute for. Under the condition that semblance stands in for nothing, it is then a not-all of nothing, a semblance of nothing and also a semblance as not-all. The identification of the enemy as semblance detects in this ersatz quality a germ of antagonism in the preference for semblance over that which it substitutes. Yet the axiology of semblance follows from its substitution for a void, and semblance is thus the value of an ersatz void. For this reason, Jambet and Lardreau’s Master as semblance is not the primitive master of the master-signifier and the-Name-of-Father, but rather a Master who is not Master as incomplete Master. The Master as a semblance of the void becomes preferable to the void, since it is a semblance and not the void itself. Antagonism as antagonism with semblance is not an antagonism between all and not-all so as to disclose the not-all of a universal Master, but rather posits that the Master is Master because the Master is a semblance of not-all. The antagonism of The Angel is the antagonism of not-all and not-all, of incompleteness and its semblance. Lacan’s formalisation of the not-all is given as ~(∀x)Φx, and can be stated as “not all x are Φ of x.”54 As identified by, inter alia, Badiou55 and Grigg,56 the key passage in which Lacan elaborates the objective of the logic of the not-all is the following from Seminar XX: In Aristotelian logic, on the basis of the fact that one can write ‘not-every (pastout) x is inscribed + in Fx’ one deduces by way of implication that there is

128

M i r os l a v G r i š k o

an x that contradicts it. But that is true on one sole condition, which is that, in the whole (tout) or the not-whole (pas-tout) in question, we are dealing with the finite. Regarding that which is finite, there is not simply an implication but a strict equivalence. It is enough for there to be one that contradicts the universalizing formula for us to abolish the formula and transform it into a particular. This pas-tout becomes the equivalent of that which, in Aristotelian logic, is enunciated on the basis of the particular. There is an exception. But we could, on the contrary, be dealing with the infinite. Then it is no longer from the perspective of extension that we must take up the pas-toute. . . Now, as soon as you are dealing with an infinite set, you cannot posit that the pas-tout implies the existence of something that is produced on the basis of a negation or contradiction. But, as we know from the extension of mathematical logic which is qualified as intuitionist, to posit a ‘there exists,’ one must also be able to construct it, that is, know how to find where that existence is.57

Lacan’s aim is to avoid the conclusion necessitated by an Aristotelian logic, which follows from the law of the excluded middle: that the negation of a universal entails the affirmation of a particular. Lacan accordingly stresses that the negation is not to be taken “in extension,” which denotes that there is a particular that does not fall under the universal function. Yet the intent is not only to avoid the affirmation of a particular, but also to avoid the negation of the universal function through this affirmation that necessarily “abolish(es)” the universal. The preservation of the universal function occurs alongside the identification of the negativity that does not fall under the universal function, and thus, in Grigg’s words, “breaches”58 the universal. The negation present in the not-all is to perforate the universal in such a way that the universal continues to operate as a universal, while still producing a hole in the universal: the rejection of the negation in extension. The Aristotelian logic is to be overcome in the interdependent senses that it does not entail a negation as affirmation of the particular, while also not implying a negation of the universal function. The resources employed to realise this objective are taken from set theory and intuitionistic logic. The logically necessary relation of the affirmation of the particular and the negation of the universal, as Lacan remarks, obtains on the condition of finitude, namely, on a condition of completeness: the law of the excluded middle. Intuitionistic logic rejects the law of the excluded middle, but only under the contrasting condition of the infinite, a condition of incompleteness. The law of the excluded middle is a “logic of completeness,”59 since the revocation of this exclusion would entail incompleteness. On the level of the finite, the particular and the universal exhaust the possibilities of the finite, such that there is no excluded

A ssassination and J udgement

129

term, and the law of the excluded middle remains valid. On the level of the infinite, however, the rejection of the law of the excluded middle’s completeness follows from an understanding of infinity as that which opposes completeness. Intuitionistic logic is a logic of incompleteness in its particular conception of the infinite, according to which the law of the excluded middle does not apply and, in consequence, the affirmation of the particular as a negation of the universal no longer holds. Yet, as Badiou observes, there is an incoherence in Lacan’s argument which arises from the fact that he does not only appeal to intuitionistic logic so as to avoid completeness, but takes his concept of infinity from set theory.60 The allusion to the “realm of the infinite” becomes an explicit reference to an infinite set. For the intuitionistic logic that Lacan simultaneously mobilises, such a formulation is unsound, since it rejects the notion that an infinite set is an infinity. On the basis that infinite sets are complete, for example, the set of all natural numbers, intuitionistic logic maintains that because of this completeness infinite sets do not designate true infinities, in contrast to the position of set theory. Whereas Lacan extracts from intuistionistic logic the rejection of the law of the excluded middle on the basis of a reference to the infinite, he simultaneously describes the infinite as an infinite set, which for intuistionistic logic is not a true infinity. Yet the conflation of insights from intuistionistic logic and set theory can also be said to index the nascent concept Lacan tries here to formulate. While intuistionistic logic allows for a rejection of the law of the excluded middle, Lacan also wants to preserve the function of the universal, and thus the infinity that he refers to is the infinity of an infinite set. The infinity of an infinite set may be understood as a universal as such—the actual infinity of a given infinite set and thus a universal function—the universal is a One, the infinite set of X. But the not-all of the One is at once a breach of the One, which is articulated through a negation that relies upon intuitionistic logic. Whereas the position is logically incoherent in its synthesis, the insights which Lacan appropriates from set theory and intuitionistic logic are, in this respect, an attempt to formulate something to the effect of an incomplete finitude. Finitude here names the discrimination of a universal as universal, while the incompleteness of this finitude as universal indicates the breach of the universal. The not-all accordingly operates as a type of inversion of the infinite set from set theory. In place of the actual infinity of set theory—a given infinite set—Lacan proposes a holed One: a finite term and its concomitant incompleteness. The logically flawed interchange of intuitionistic logic and set theory turns inside out the infinite set.

130

M i r os l a v G r i š k o

In the context of the problematic identification of antagonism at the heart of The Angel, the incomplete finitude of a holed One becomes a model for the antagonism with the Master as semblance. The not-all designates an inconsistency that can be appropriated as a formalisation of antagonism according to the maintenance of the universal function alongside its simultaneous breaching. The universal, despite this breaching, remains a universal; the Master remains Master even at the point where he is incomplete. In the terms of the Master who is not Master, this incompleteness is constitutive of the Master as semblance. The argument of The Angel is precisely that such a semblance of the Master remains a Master: the Master who is not-all is still Master. If the not-all Master is still Master this is because the breach of the universal hides a negation withdrawn on the other side of the breach. The incompleteness of the Master does not vitiate the Master, insofar as the negation that is his apparent incompleteness now functions as an ersatz negation for a negation from the outside. The identification of the enemy as semblance becomes a distinction of the not-all of the Master and the not-all of angelic outside. Jambet and Lardreau write that the antagonism with the Master takes place in an “invisible” realm.61 The universal of the Master as semblance is a holed universal, from which a structure of antagonism arises through the conception of this hole as indicative either of the Master’s incompleteness or of the messianic “narrow gate,” on the other side of which is occulted negation. The semblance of not-all is a void immanent to the Master and the incompleteness of the Master denotes a form of mastery where “there is no longer any need for (a Master) to be present.” The not-all that is not a semblance implies the incompleteness of a hole in the universal as well as a negation concealed in an invisible realm. There is nothing in the structure of an incomplete finitude—the presence of a hole in the universal—which indicates the negation that lurks on the other side. The formalisation of incompleteness only describes incompleteness as such. It is on the basis of a similar reasoning that Jambet and Lardreau frame messianic negation in terms of a “wager” that the Angel will arrive. Potential variants of incompleteness are described qualitatively, and an angelic outside lacks any formalisation, remaining ephemeral; although this ephemerality is ultimately appropriate to what is evoked as lying on the other side. Yet, at the same time, if the incompleteness of the Master is a semblance, it is an ersatz incompleteness that occludes another conception of incompleteness, another meaning of a deeper void. One hole in the universal would now divide into two holes, the antagonistic (non)sides of an eschatological war.

A ssassination and J udgement

131

HUNTING DOGS (OBJECTIVE MEANING OF VOID) Jambet and Lardreau remark that with their reliance upon the wager “the Lacanians will not overlook .  .  . to point out that we prefer jouissance to truth.”62 For the psychoanalysts, a negation on the other side in its utter withdrawal cannot be on the side of truth. Messianic negation itself functions as a semblance in the preference of an ersatz void as angelic void over the truth of this void, which is its meaninglessness. Eschatological insane expectation will be accused of denying the truth of a void in favour of a jouissance generated from it. Yet in Seminar XVII, in conversation with the orientalist André Caquot, Lacan himself speculates that the revealed law of an eschatological God, as communicated through the prophetic tradition, “does not have anything at all to do . . . with jouissance.”63 Although Jambet and Lardreau do not reference the 1969–1970 Seminar, the conjectures within it near the separation of truth and jouissance that their eschatological theologoumenon seeks. For the break that monotheism initiates is identified by Caquot as the “replacement of the goddess with Israel,”64 which Lacan describes as “curious”: “there is here a formation and an extremely sharp difference which remains, in short, fairly opaque despite the centuries of commentaries.”65 For Lacan, YHWH is a God who “is ferociously ignorant of everything that exists of certain religious practices that were rife at the time, and that are focused on a certain type of knowledge—sexual knowledge.”66 Ferocious ignorance is the ignorance of the pairing of a god and goddess, so that YHWH, oblivious to a sexual knowledge that completes a conception of the divine, instead communicates directly to a “people.”67 For Lacan, this shift from a sexual knowledge to a “truth” that one now “falls upon,”68 is “in itself something quite mysterious” as though, if “anyone who adhered to (this truth)—but of course it is impossible to adhere to it—would not know what he is saying.”69 The elimination of the goddess—and a fortiori the elimination of completeness70—in favour of the direct communiqué to an elect is now the mystery of something incomplete, whereby, as Ensslin observes in his commentary on this passage, referencing Lacan’s concept of half-saying the truth, the truth operative here “can only be half said.”71 Irrespective of what the mystery of this truth ultimately entails, if the basic terms of the wager of Jambet and Lardreau’s eschatological theologoumenon is that an incompleteness connoting messianic outside is not a flight to jouissance away from a brutality of truth, it is then the denial of the truth of incompleteness as an objective meaning of void—the denial as

132

M i r os l a v G r i š k o

the semblance that substitutes an angelic void—which attempts to escape a secret and more brutal truth. The preference of semblance of void over void is misunderstood if the former is entirely equated with a minimal something that semblance produces in contrast to the brutalism of the latter. The ersatz axiology of the semblance is not grounded in the presence of a material or the positing of an object, however useless or incomplete—the transparent veil of the semblance—against void as such. The brutalism of void is constitutive of the ersatz axiology of semblance, but void is now enjoyed, suffered, negotiated. Semblance is not the denial of void, the postulation of an all in place of not-all, so as to avert the confrontation with void. For a characteristic of semblance is that it is known as semblance. Semblance is accordingly a particular pragmatics in relation to void. The Master who is not Master does not deny void as such—as this is what renders an explicit universal Master incomplete—but rather proposes a strategy and tactics for its management.72 When in his mathemes of discourse Lacan renames the position of agency the position of semblance the functionality of semblance is acknowledged.73 His further formulation of a fifth discourse of the Capitalist, which, decisively, does not follow the rotational sequence that unifies the previous four discourses of the Master, the University, the Hysteric, and the Analyst, marks an entirely new74 organisation homologous with the Master who is not Master, the Master qua semblance. At the centre of this new organisation is a conception of the functionality of semblance in relation to void, whereby the Capitalist discourse employs the agency of semblance so as to repeat a basic incompleteness. If the semblance is not-all and therefore it is always ersatz, the Capitalist discourse conceives this not-all as a void that produces something from nothing, whereas this something is also always nothing—the ersatz as not-all and the ersatz of nothing—which in turn motivates the repetition of a circuit founded on the relation of truth and jouissance. The immediate proximity of the discourse of the Capitalist to the discourse of the Master lies in the former’s reversal of the place of two terms in the latter discourse: the location of the subject and the location of S1. Yet the fifth discourse breaks from the previous four discourses according to how it diagrams the vectors that relate the terms and underlying positions constitutive of the discourses.75 The Capitalist discourse locates the subject, rather than S1, in the position of semblance (agency), such that the subject produces its own S1, which occupies the position of truth, following the vector running from semblance to truth. This posited S1 yields S2,

A ssassination and J udgement

133

which occupies the position of jouissance, and subsequently produces the a (object) in the position of surplus-jouissance. The object returns to the subject in the position of the semblance, so as to repeat the circuit. In the concise summary of Gendrault, the essence of the Capitalist discourse is that “the subject, now as an undivided agent, produces the truth that leads to knowledge from which the object is produced to the subject’s full satisfaction.”76 “Full,” however, should be qualified, in that the repetition of the circuit obtains in virtue of an incompleteness which engenders further repetition, and the latter for Lacan is precisely synonymous with jouissance.77 Instead of the archaic Master who prohibits jouissance, the (Capitalist) Master who is not Master invests the subject with the functionality of semblance in relation to the void position of truth—that is, the subject’s creation of S1, which fills the position of truth—although in the name of the further production of jouissance. Jambet and Lardreau’s attack on the Master who is not Master is an attack on the conspiracy between jouissance and a semblance of truth so as to extricate truth.78 Their cynegetics now follows a basic stratagem whereby void position of truth becomes truth of void: the objective meaning of angelic void. The separation of the truth of void of the Master who is not Master from the truth of void as angelic void lies in the sense in which the former’s production of jouissance at once indicates an obviation of an objective meaning of void, in that the precondition of the possibility of the void’s enjoyment is its meaninglessness. An occult circuit of jouissance that is woven by the Master who is not Master around the meaninglessness of void requires that the void’s truth is null—the void position of truth. Under the condition that jouissance can be produced from meaninglessness, the Master who is not Master is on the side of a form of the truth of the void, but also on the side of jouissance. If the truth of the void without jouissance evokes the truth of an eschatological God who “knows nothing about sexual knowledge,” Jambet and Lardreau’s angelic void, even if accused of being on the side of jouissance rather than truth, nevertheless overtly names the negation of a Master who subordinates truth to jouissance. From the perspective of the Master who is not Master, an ascription of objective meaning to void will be conceived as the failure to directly confront void. The bind of truth and (objective) meaning is an archaic conflation. The Lacanians’ familiar trope of a posited Big Other who gives consistency (meaning) to void and thereby annuls it only recalls the primitive Master. Yet for angelic void, the degree of the void’s brutalism is now indexed not by its meaninglessness, but by an active negation and a deference of soteriology to absolute beyond. The logic of angelic void entails that the denial

134

M i r os l a v G r i š k o

of (eschatological) objective meaning of void denies the void’s brutalism. The semblance of the Master maintains that (1) the void must be suffered, but it can nevertheless be managed and even enjoyed; (2) the void can be productive; (3) there remains the escape of death.79 If angelic void is not merely an aversion of void, angelic void is itself the brutalism of void, which means the objective meaning of void can only be eschatological: the absolute terror of the negation of the world and a Last Judgement. According to objective meaning as eschatological, angelic void implies for Jambet and Lardreau that “each soul has cosmic responsibility for the outcome of the combat,”80 the judgement after the end of the combat indicative of a goingbeyond death. The “eternity of the Master” is a counterfeit eternity of the eternity of the eschatological terror of an eschatological mission, a truth that in its utter strangeness can only be, as Lacan suggested, incompletely adhered to. The Master’s aversion to that which goes beyond death, and mutatis mutandis, to that which goes beyond being, is the true escape from void. An objective meaning of void that would at once indicate an outside undergoes an erasure, so as to secure the Master’s flight from the assassination and judgement that informs eschatological insane expectation. If the eschatological God knows nothing about jouissance, but does know about “love, hate,”81 Jambet and Lardreau are on the side of hate. “Hatred for the semblant”82 operates as a territorial animal—the hunting dogs of their cynegetics—who “protects the breach”83 in being against its appropriation by semblance, so that negation can come from the outside. For the cynegetic approach, objective meaning of void is an eschatological war against ersatz void. But eschatological war is only sealed by the subduer as annihilative exteriority. “Messianic narrow gate” is not, as it is for Benjamin, “every second of time,”84 but the objective meaning of void. And it is this shift from time to void that can be understood as the transition from Benjamin’s Judaic messianism to Jambet and Lardreau’s Christian messianism.85 For the latter, the force of messianic subduer is intensified, in that the identity of the Messiah is known, the Messiah has already been on earth, and thus the Messiah comes twice. Messianic absence is not articulated on a horizon of anticipated promise, but rather the removal of the Messiah from the surface of the earth signifies the absolute exteriority of a purely transcendent vanishing point, structuring the world from outside, around a hole. The seal of eschatological war as messianic assassination is the moment of parousiac instantiation of exteriority. The ingress into the world of an outside that still remains outside on the basis of its infinite qualitative difference “breaks the history of the world in two”86 for the second and final time.

A ssassination and J udgement

135

Instead of reversals, repetitions and circulations that manage void, eschatological insane expectation entails unidirectionality, cuts, one-sidedness, and irreversibility controlled by void. Eschatology is the pure reduction to a “straight line in one direction.”87 But this straight line is also the marker of a void. The Master was thus always semblance according to his manipulation of eschatological line as void. The primitive Master reverses the disintegrating directionality towards void with a circular twist back to origin and the nostalgia of a Golden Age. The Master who is not Master recognises the void, but apes creatio ex nihilo, making a nothing-something from nothing. Eschatological insane expectation maintains both directionality and void in the form of a cut on the side of that which is not: an absolute exteriority that commands the straight line of history, at which the most acute point of this cut marks the outside as messianic narrow gate. Eschatological war in this sense can only be invisible, as it is entirely determined by an absent other side. NOTES 1. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arrendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 255. 2. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 258. 3. Alain Badiou, “An Angel Has Passed,” in The Adventure of French Philosophy, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2012), 203–22. 4. Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau, L’Ange: pour une cynégétique du semblant (Paris: Grasset, 1976), 18. 5. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 36. 6. See the numerous references to “outside,” “beyond,” “exteriority” in attempting to frame the problem of The Angel, above all in the work’s opening and closing chapters. 7. On Jambet and Lardreau’s Lacanian pessimism, see Badiou, “An Angel Has Passed,” as well as other reviews from the period of the book’s release. 8. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 37. 9. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 27. 10. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 23. 11. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 30. 12. This is the title of Lacan’s Seminar XVIII: On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance, trans. Cormac Gallagher (New York: Karnac, 2002). Lacan throughout the seminar never explicitly states what such a discourse might be. 13. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 264. 14. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 36.

136

M i r os l a v G r i š k o

15. Gayatri Spivak, in a contemporary review of The Angel criticises the project as being “literalist” in its interpretation of Lacan—that is, Jambet and Lardreau’s interpretation of Lacan’s account of desire, which leads to the argument for the messianic figure of what they term the “unsexed” Angel. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Anarchism Revisited: A New Philosophy,” Diacritics (June 1978): 66–79. A counter-proposition would then be that the true location of their literalism is found in the explicit use of theological and eschatological concepts. 16. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 392. 17. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 228. 18. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 23. 19. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 24. 20. In other terms, what Jambet and Lardreau describe as the antagonism with the sékommça (Lacan) of the Master. 21. For Lacan, “meta is, properly speaking, that which implies a break (la coupure).” See Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Denis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 265. 22. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 36. 23. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 36. 24. While this understanding of the Angel as messianic negation thus follows in the path of Gilles Grelet (See Gilles Grelet, Déclarer la Gnose: D’une guerre qui revient à la culture (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002) who identifies Jambet and Lardreau’s Angel with the Christos Angelos of “division,” and, by extension, with a concept of “absolute war” that negates the world, a difference in how this logic of negation operates reflects a corresponding difference in (political) theologies (a difference between absolute war and eschatological war). While Grelet adheres to a tradition that intertwines gnosticism and revolution on the basis of a shared commitment to a negation of the world, the inverse perspective of the trap of the Rebel and the trap of revolution marks the absolute exteriority of such negation. Said differently, if for gnostic eschatology a judgement is made upon the world (e.g., “the world is fundamentally unjust”), which, as a result, then calls for its negation, an orthodox eschatology understands that the judgement of the world is beyond it, and thus the world’s negation—the inevitability of the last things disclosed through revelation—precedes its judgement. The identification of the world with the Master is not such a last judgement made upon the world, but rather a description of its structure. That this description takes on the name of the Master indicates—against any semblance of a Master who is not Master (i.e., the Rebel)—the true location of messianic negation: somewhere entirely outside the world. 25. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 36. 26. See for example, Gil Anidjar’s argument in Blood (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) that the “hematology” of race war and capital flows indicates the truth of Western Christian theology; or Curtis Yarvin/Mencius Moldbug’s argument in How Dawkins Got Pwned (Unqualified Reservations, 2016) that the

A ssassination and J udgement

137

Cathedral (the ideological apparatuses of Western democratic societies) as a secularised and unscientific fanatic moralism indicates the truth of Puritanism. 27. See Heinrich Meier’s The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy, trans. Marcus Brainard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) for a strong argument in this direction. 28. See Meier’s The Lesson of Carl Schmitt for the importance of Katechon in Schmitt’s thought. 29. Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt, 23–25. 30. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 91. 31. Badiou, The Century, 37. 32. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 88. 33. For a concise synopsis of the standard account, see Roland Boer “Marxism and Eschatology Reconsidered,” Mediations 25, no. 1 (2010): 39–60. 34. See Kit Fine, “The Question of Ontology,” in Metametaphysics, ed. David Chalmers, David Manley and Ryan Wasserman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 157–77. Fine’s argument that commitments are claims about what is real instead of claims about what is, is more appropriate for the negative theological approach of The Angel. 35. Badiou, “An Angel Has Passed,” 214. 36. Badiou, “An Angel Has Passed,” 214. 37. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 87. 38. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 45. 39. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 50. 40. On the distinction between active and passive messianism, see, for example, Amos Funkenstein, Maimonides: Nature, History, and Messianic Beliefs (Tel Aviv: MOD Books, 1997). 41. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 35. 42. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 21. 43. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 34. 44. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 51. 45. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 24. 46. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 106. 47. The former is the contemporary problem that Jambet and Lardreau confronted at the time of writing The Angel—that is, their critical stance to what they perceived as totalitarianisms, whereas the latter is their anticipation of the Fukuyaman “end of history” democratic world order a little more than a decade later. 48. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 2001), xi. 49. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 125. 50. Russell Grigg, “Semblant, Phallus, and Object in Lacan’s Teaching,” Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious 1 (2007): 131. 51. Grigg, “Semblant, Phallus, and Object in Lacan’s Teaching,” 131.

138

M i r os l a v G r i š k o

52. Jacques-Alain Miller, “Of Semblants in the Relations Between Sexes,” Psychoanalytical Notebooks of the London Circle 3 (1999): 12. 53. Miller, “Of Semblants in the Relations Between Sexes,” 12. 54. Russell Grigg, Lacan, Language and Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 84. 55. Grigg, Lacan, Language and Philosophy, 84. 56. Alain Badiou, “The Subject and Infinity,” Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2008), 211–27. 57. The translation is taken from Grigg, Lacan, Language and Philosophy, 84–85. 58. Grigg, Lacan, Language and Philosophy, 85. 59. David Gray Carlson, A Commentary to Hegel’s Science of Logic (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 302. 60. Badiou, “The Subject and Infinity,” 212. 61. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 36. 62. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 39. 63. Lacan, Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 133. 64. Lacan, Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 140. 65. Lacan, Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 140. 66. Lacan, Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 136. 67. Lacan, Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 136. 68. Lacan, Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 135. 69. Lacan, Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 135. 70. In this respect, the esoteric source of Lacan’s famed “there is no sexual relationship” is the idiosyncratic goddess-elimination of monotheistic revelation. 71. Felix Ensslin, “Accesses to the Real: Lacan, Monotheism, and Predestination,” in Lacan and Philosophy: The New Generation, ed. Lorenzo Chiesa (Melbourne: re.press, 2014), 61. 72. For example, the psychoanalyst. 73. For a concise summary of how the mathemes of discourse changed over time, as well as a reading of the capitalist discourse, see Stijn Vanhuele, “Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Psychoanalysis,” Frontiers in Psychology 7 (2016): 1–14. 74. See John Holland’s “The Capitalist Exception: Discourse, Sexuation, and Infinity” in this volume. 75. See Holland’s chapter in this volume for the visuals of the mathemes of discourse. 76. Philippe Gendrault, “Lacan’s Fifth Discourse, Introducing the Capitalist Discourse.” Unpublished paper. http:​//www​.sfps​ych.n​et/La​can_s​_Capi​talis​t_ Dis​cours​e_1_.​pdf, accessed 7 September 2018. 77. Lacan, Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 48. 78. Jambet and Lardreau: “Where we break with Lacan . . . [is] the preference accorded to jouissance over truth.” See their L’Ange, 11. 79. For Lacan death is the limit of jouissance. 80. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 88.

A ssassination and J udgement

139

81. Lacan, Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 136. 82. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 77. 83. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 47. 84. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 264. 85. And by extension, Islamic messianism, as in Islam the Messiah is also Jesus Christ, Isa Ibn-Maryam. 86. Jambet and Lardreau, L’Ange, 230. 87. Eschatology is “a straight line in one direction. The direction of the straight line is irreversible. This unidirectionality is common to both life and time. Unidirectionality and irreversibility are fundamental to their meaning. The purpose of this unidirectionality lies in this direction itself. This direction is always toward an end; otherwise, it would be directionless. The end is essentially Eschaton.” Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, trans. David Ratmoko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 3–4.

7 THE DEVIL’S CHOICE Slavery and the Logic of the Vel Jared Sexton and Sora Han

This chapter addresses the modern problematic of racial slavery and universal freedom and the possibility of a theoretical formulation of relations between the two terms. Jacques Lacan had much to say about the latter especially, but his discourse can be brought to bear powerfully on the former as well, provided we do so with some extensions and modifications. Within the interdisciplinary field of Black Studies, the announcement of Afro-pessimism in the last decade or so provides an occasion for revisiting Lacan’s intricate commentary on the dialectic of slavery and freedom, raising the specter of abolition as a form of unconscious thinking and action with profound ramifications. Lacan encapsulates the analytic process in “Position of the Unconscious” in a sentence: “The vel returns in the form of a velle.”1 The forced choice (vel) that constitutes the subject as such is only properly assumed in and as a will or a wish (velle) to get free of that originary constitution. For Lacan, this is always and everywhere the vel of slavery, imposing the psychic conditions of, in his sardonic phrase, “a life somewhat inconvenienced by the cost of freedom.”2 How is freedom to be pursued? Where Lacan was for much of his career concerned with the subject’s alienation in language at the nexus of the imaginary and the symbolic registers, he turned increasingly towards consideration of the production of jouissance within a political-libidinal economy that requires attention to the register of the real, that which is “inscribed on the basis of an impasse of formalization.”3 141

142

J a r ed S e x to n a n d S o r a H a n

Racial blackness entails, in the historic instance, the experience of this impasse of formalisation—whether aesthetic, political, or ontological. If abolition is a real movement for the psycho-political enjoyment of freedom, then it must pass through the attempt to articulate directly the unthought position of the slave towards the affirmation of passivity before an unconscious knowledge of freedom that consists in the possibility of radicalising— and universalising—singularity. On that note, we should keep in mind the resonance between the following pair of critical observations as they bear upon the issues raised for psychoanalysis by the problem of slavery, and vice versa: one by Lacan, the other by Julia Kristeva, one of his most wellknown interlocutors. At the 1966 Johns Hopkins University conference, “The Structuralist Controversy,” Lacan shared this with his compatriot and fellow analyst Pierre-Gilles Guéguen: “But the unconscious has nothing to do with the instinct or some archaic knowledge, nor with thoughts that would be prepared underground. It’s a thought with words, a thought that gets away from your vigilance, from your active monitoring state . . . as if a demon played with your vigilance.”4 And in her book, In the Beginning Was Love, Kristeva states: “Seen in psychoanalytic terms, the rights of man comprise not the right to calculate what life is but to understand the unconscious, to understand it even to the gates of death.”5 The significance of these observations about the lures of consciousness and calculation will become evident as we go. THE CHOICE TO CHOOSE The discourse of Afro-pessimism is replete with psychoanalytic references stretching back nearly two decades now and yet it is striking that so few readers—whether critics or comrades, foes or fellow travellers—have bothered to try to understand them, whatever their difficulty. Doing so is absolutely vital, however, in order to grasp the rudiments of its desired intervention upon what appears broadly across the interdisciplinary fields of social, political, and cultural theory as an ideologically necessary reduction of the concept of racial slavery in the modern world. Joan Copjec argues in Imagine There’s No Woman that “psychoanalysis is the mother tongue of our modernity and . . . the important issues of our time are scarcely articulable outside the concepts it has forged. While some blasé souls argue that we are already beyond psychoanalysis, the truth is that we have not yet caught up with its most revolutionary insights.”6 We concur, with this major qualification: psychoanalysis is concerned principally with slavery as the fulcrum

T he D evil ’ s C hoice

143

between the ancient and the modern regimes. The racialisation of slavery and corollary enslavement of racial blackness are fundaments of Western modernity and its consequent globalisation.7 The subsequent emergence of the idea of freedom and the rights of man, while crucial to the international abolitionist movement from the eighteenth century onward, have not enabled the radical reconstruction required to bring about the true end of slavery and its myriad conditions of possibility. The time of slavery is now and the project of freedom remains not only incomplete, but also, in important respects, unbegun. “But what if slavery does not die, as it were, because it is immortal, but rather because it is non-mortal, because it has never lived, at least not in the psychic life of power? What if the source of slavery’s longevity is not its resilience in the face of opposition, but the obscurity of its existence? Not the accumulation of its political capital, but the illegibility of its grammar?”8 If so, then the project of an Afro-pessimist psychoanalytics must attend to this obscurity and illegibility.9 Slavery, as a psychoanalytic reference, reveals the language of power (immortality, resilience, opposition, accumulation) in contrast to a language of an unknown grammar (non-mortality, obscurity, illegibility, dissemination). This contrast is not unlike that which Lacan is constantly drawing between conventional notions of the unconscious and the critical idea he develops of the unconscious that is “structured like a language.” In his 1971 lecture at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, “Knowledge, Ignorance, Truth and Jouissance” (now published in the brilliantly titled collection, Talking to Brick Walls), Lacan reiterates that the unconscious is “the field of speech,” insofar as the analyst is tuned into a “grammar and repetition” or a “logic” revealed beyond the manifest rhetoric, or “invention to persuasion” of speech.10 Similarly attuned to this logic beyond rhetoric or persuasion is the notion we will discuss here as “the vel of slavery.”11 Lacan first introduces the concept of the vel in 1960, during comments delivered to a colloquium at Le Centre Hospitalier Henri Ey in Bonneval and later published as “Position of the Unconscious” in the full edition of his Écrits. Lacan, in fact, presents two central hypotheses there to be developed over the next decade or so: first, “a signifier represents a subject to another signifier,” which he elaborates most fully in Seminar XX; second, “the vel of alienation . . . imposes a choice between its terms only to eliminate one of them—always the same one regardless of one’s choice,” which he expands upon in his more well-known Seminar XI. Both of these hypotheses bear on Lacan’s basic understanding of the psychoanalytic subject’s alienating insertion into or, better, its alienating emergence within the “symbolic order” (aka “the Other”), the invariantly imposed “non-natural

144

J a r ed S e x to n a n d S o r a H a n

universe” of languages and the “customs, institutions, laws, mores, norms, practices, rituals, rules, traditions” with which they are intertwined in any given culture or society.12 Here is Lacan’s famous passage: The register of the signifier is instituted on the basis of the fact that a signifier represents a subject to another signifier. This is the structure of all unconscious formations: dreams, slips of the tongue, and witticisms. The same structure explains the subject’s original division. Produced in the locus of the yet-to-be-situated Other, the signifier brings forth a subject from a being that cannot yet speak, but at the cost of freezing him. The ready-to-speak that was to be there . . . disappears, no longer being anything but a signifier.13

This much is elementary even to Lacan’s newest readers and easy enough to grasp in outline, but there is an underappreciated implication of “the subject’s original division” relevant to the present discussion. If we return to the second hypothesis, we see that it presents, as noted, a more productive formulation of the relation between the terms of a constitutive choice, a choice that is not only forced but also, crucially, asymmetrical. In this respect, the choice is forced on two levels. One is forced to choose something and one is forced to choose this thing. Lacan continues: Alienation resides in the subject’s division, the cause of which I just designated. Let us proceed to discuss its logical structure. This structure is a vel, which shows its originality here for the first time. In order to do so, it must be derived from what is known, in so-called mathematical logic, as union (which has already been acknowledged to define a certain kind of vel). This union is such that the vel of alienation, as I call it, imposes a choice between its terms only to eliminate one of them—always the same one regardless of one’s choice. The stakes are thus apparently limited to the preservation or loss of the other term, when the union involves two terms.14

Union here refers to a set theoretical operation denoting the set of all elements in the collection or intersection of two or more different sets, most commonly represented by the Venn diagram of overlapping circles showing the range of possible logical relations between the sets. Within this union, which is meant to formalise the stakes of the subject’s alienation in the symbolic, Lacan isolates one particular logical relation—the vel—for special attention. Vel, from the Latin, can be translated as an “or,” but it is the particular “or” associated with the coupling “either/or.” Lacan makes passing mention of some other logical relations that could be obtained

T he D evil ’ s C hoice

145

between the terms of disjunctive sets in order to highlight the peculiar nature of the vel of alienation: This disjunction is incarnated in a highly illustratable, if not dramatic, way as soon as the signifier is incarnated at a more personalized level in demand or supply: in “your money or your life” or “liberty or death.” It is merely a question of knowing whether or not (sic aut non) you want to keep life or refuse death, because, regarding the other term in the alternative, money or liberty, your choice will in any case be disappointing.15

Disappointing, to say the very least! Choosing your money over your life during an armed robbery means losing both your money and your life. So too declaring your freedom before a despot, who is paradigmatically, for Lacan, the slave master. Further: You should be aware that what remains is, in any case, diminished: it will be life without money and, having refused death, a life somewhat inconvenienced by the cost of freedom. This is the stigma of the fact that the vel here, functioning dialectically, clearly operates on the vel of logical union, which is known to be equivalent to an “and” (sic et non). This is illustrated by the fact that, in the long run, you will have to give up your life after your money, and in the end the only thing left will be your freedom to die. Similarly, our subject is subjected to the vel of a certain meaning he must receive or petrification.16

Between or beyond the aut (yes or no, not both) and the et (both yes and no), there is the vel (yes or no, where either is possible). Lacan selects the disjunctive vel in order to indicate the fundamental fantasy of plenitude structured by a temporality wherein one has both this and that—a life of wealth, a life of freedom—before being confronted with a choice between them, as if one could have this or that but not both, only to realise, once that fantasy is effectively traversed, that there is indeed a prior choice, outside of temporal experience, an unconscious choice between either term, apprehended only after the fact, but a choice in which the choosing transforms the choice itself. One essentially chooses between losing both terms in whole now or retaining only one term in part for now and losing both terms in whole later. The choice involved in the vel of alienation is, then, whether to accept the differential structure of meaning altogether—the register of the signifier—and thereby to enter into time, to temporise lack and to temporise loss, choosing not life over death, but rather life / death over immortality, lack / surplus over fullness, difference over the one. It is, in short, to reckon with the cost of freedom in a life inescapably diminished

146

J a r ed S e x to n a n d S o r a H a n

by an original division or splitting, a life (and death) subject to unconscious determinations and not only external constraints. To choose otherwise is to know nothing about it.17 Acceding to the imposed register of the signifier, where the real of being as such disappears beneath or behind the signifier in the production of symbolic meaning, produces an indivisible remainder of non-meaning within meaning (as an effect of what Freud terms “primal repression” and Lacan notates “S1”), generating through displacement and condensation a whole series of enigmatic signifiers that intrude upon and interrupt the sense, the coherence, the continuity, indeed the unity, of any discourse whatsoever. The unconscious is that encroaching, intrusive, interruption; it is the inexorable “demon [playing] with your vigilance.” Lacan glosses the process in Seminar XI as follows: If we choose being, the subject disappears, it eludes us, it falls into nonmeaning. If we choose meaning, the meaning survives only deprived of that part of non-meaning that is, strictly speaking, that which constitutes in the realization of the subject, the unconscious. In other words, it is of the nature of this meaning, as it emerges from the field of the Other, to be in a large part of its field, eclipsed by the disappearance of being, induced by the very function of the signifier.18

To approach this psychoanalytic subject, pulled towards the question of the structural difference of blackness and the political effects of slavery on modernity, there is here another vel: as we are confronted with the choice between “meaning and non-meaning,” the logical union of the “alienating vel” constituting symbolic life, we are also confronted with the choice between “sovereign or slave,” what could be described as the logical union of the blackening vel constituting political life, “the threshold of the political world.”19 Thus, choosing sovereignty (indigenous, ecological, anticapitalist) is simultaneously not choosing slavery, and this “either / or,” this “yes or no, where either is possible,” always returns that choice to a certain kind of forced choosing of slavery through another temporal loop. This is how we could understand the importance of the inescapability of abolition as unconscious knowledge. The logical union of the blackening vel is a form of choosing slavery through the experiential circuit of choosing something other to slavery. For, as Lacan reminds us about the fate of choosing liberty (over death) or meaning (over being) “in the long run,” we will return with sovereignty “in the long run” to that curious form of unsovereign sovereignty to be a slave.20

T he D evil ’ s C hoice

147

The basic and deeper point we must retain is this: just as the subject of language is constantly negotiating experiences of symbolic suturing and unravelling, the subject of radical politics is constantly negotiating experiences of sovereign rebellion—and somewhere along the way, feelings and acts emerge that are revolting, unbelievable, or unconscionable to the entire order of obedient or transgressive sovereignties (of governance, culture, selfhood). The slave in / of the subject of radical politics must be analysed for an unconscious knowledge it both represses and reveals as well as, importantly, a certain preference for inviting, instigating, or summoning the procedure by which such knowledge can be encountered. This holds insofar as the psychoanalytic subject (of politics) is the subject of the unconscious and as such can in no way achieve mastery, despite the strongest imaginary temptation to lay claim to its pretense. Lacan writes thus: “we analysts deal with slaves who think they are masters, and who find in a language— whose mission is universal—support for their servitude.”21 The subject is, instead, best understood through the figure of the slave insofar as psychic life requires subjection to the symbolic order if any freedom whatsoever is to become a possibility. Justin Clemens argues, on that note, “the figure of the slave is integral to Lacanian psychoanalysis from first to last.”22 And this is not, again, because the aim of Lacan’s teaching is to encourage and enable us to become masters (of ourselves, of others, of nature) through the analytic process—the master cannot even desire freedom, much less pursue it—but rather to come to terms, literally and figuratively, with how we might become slaves in the proper sense; subjects no longer seeking emancipation as such and thereby paradoxically perfecting slavery through ever more sophisticated forms of adaptation and appeal to the Other, but seeking instead to create “the scant freedom”—of making future necessity out of past contingency—that can only be forged within slavery itself.23 THE CHOICE OF SLAVERY But saying this only raises the question of the status of slavery in Lacan’s theoretical apparatus, the clinical practice from which it arises, and the broader political ramifications thereof. In thinking about the relations between the symbolic slavery of alienation within the register of the signifier and the material slavery of captivity within the institution of bondage across social formations, we see that the ethics of psychoanalysis is bound up in a peculiar understanding of freedom that complicates certain

148

J a r ed S e x to n a n d S o r a H a n

prevailing political assumptions, not least on the Left. Alenka Zupančič writes in Why Psychoanalysis?: There exists a very intimate connection between the notion of the subject and the notion of freedom . . . at the very centre of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The idea, however, is not simply that of a ‘free subject,’ it is not about the notion of the subject that has freedom as one of its essential attributes, and can act ‘freely.’ Lacan never gets tired of repeating that subject is the effect of the structure, and in this sense it is anything but free. Yet the structure itself is far from being simply non-problematic, clear, or smooth running. And perhaps the shortest definition of the subject in this theory would be that ‘subject’ is the conceptual name for that point of regularity, of substance, or of structure, in which the latter breaks down, or displays an inner difficulty, contradiction, negativity, contingency, interruption, or a lack of its own foundation. Subject is the place where discontinuity, a gap, a disturbance, a stain becomes inscribed into a given causal chain.24

In a sense, the subject is anything but free, and yet a scant freedom can be derived at the point of a structural breakdown. Importantly, this breakdown is not external to the subject, who is, after all, an effect of the structure itself. Self and society are, in this way, linked by and as structure. So “getting free,” as political principle and practice, is inherently complicated and compromised, not simply externally blocked or thwarted. Put differently, the subject as such does not (succeed or fail to) get free as the subject is not identical with any agency. Accordingly, we have two concepts of slavery here. The first is a universal slavery as a function of the signifier that Clemens demonstrates is fundamental to Lacan’s theory of the psychoanalytic subject. And the second is a “material slavery of captivity” that can be outlined as a historically sedimented difference which inhabits the field of language (and thus, thought, politics, etc.) as a pause, or hiatus, registering the reality of the vel. Given this more nuanced understanding for deploying Lacan’s idea of a forced choice, we can talk about the vel of slavery with respect to “the fundamental relations between racial slavery and settler colonialism in the development of global modernity,”25 and, beyond that, the whole manifold of domination. Stretching the idea of the vel of alienation can help clarify and conceptualise the relation between these two political and theoretical trajectories. The challenge, in other words, is not how to think about these two modes of domination and the radical politics that challenge them as alternative political strategies or political traditions, but as a vel. The forced choice between colonialism / decoloniality and slavery / abolition

T he D evil ’ s C hoice

149

is irreducible to a sociohistorical containment and resistance; the forced choice is a structure of the function of modern radical politics in the field of blackness / anti-blackness in general that defends against an “unconscious knowledge.” Condensing a voluminous body of critical scholarship on race and slavery to the logic of “deracination,” or the logic of “the loss of the dialectics of loss and recovery as such,” we can invoke the “the relational field called racial slavery [that] remains the unthought ground of thought within Black Studies.”26 The constitutive elements of colonialism—the assault on and theft of land, labor, language, and lineage, and so forth—are also found within the depredations and dispossessions of slavery by definition.27 Given this, in thinking about the relation between the two terms, there is something like a vel at hand, where choosing, politically and intellectually, to think with and through slavery entails a necessary thinking of colonialism as well, whereas to choose colonialism risks, even overdetermines, the likelihood of missing what is essential to both configurations of power. But it is not just that thinking slavery requires thinking colonialism too, a point that some might attempt to make in reverse; it requires a particular type of thinking, what one could inadequately call problematisation, which should not be confused for the critique of colonialism, even the trenchant critique found in the overlapping literatures of Native Studies and decolonial thought. Extending the analogy, we might say that choosing the decolonial framework is not unlike the choice of psychosis in the clinical context, the psychotic choice of being over meaning, wherein one remains tied to one’s being but only by forfeiting the possibility of an experience of one’s existence that is communicable to others. Choosing the framework of slavery, on this account, would be similar to the choice of meaning as such, wherein one is alienated from being, severed irreparably from it, but not for all that detached from it altogether; rather the relationship to being is transformed, mediated. More directly, a relationship to being is established for the first time, since it is only through separation—permanent and unrecoverable loss—that relationality is possible at all. In another complication of the matter, Lacan’s forced choice is not just that between the one or the other or even the one over the other, but rather, in depicting the vel with a Venn diagram, he draws our attention to the fact that a region of overlap remains between the two and that overlapping region, subtracted from both sets, is in fact the locus of analytic work. This suggests that the best way to approach the relationship between slavery and colonialism is not to attempt some comparative analysis, where they are placed in a side-by-side tabulation. Rather, we must think from within

150

J a r ed S e x to n a n d S o r a H a n

the overlap, and from bottom up. Not looking at the position and vantage of colonists that were also slave masters, or vice versa, but looking at the position and vantage of those that were both colonised and enslaved, meaning here the slaves of the colonised. Abolition, thus, would necessitate not only an end to slavery in the most immediate sense—or else manumission would simply mean graduating, at best, into the predicament of colonisation (much as the promise of “free labor” for black people in the United States after 1865 would mean graduating, at best, into the exploitation decried by the First International)—but an end to both (and ultimately all) of the sovereign powers that made such enslavement possible in the first place. The freedom sought by abolition, if that is its true aim, is neither positive nor negative, but deconstructive; or, better, decompositional.28 Choosing indigenous or decolonial sovereignty means writing another effective attachment between rights and people, in turn granting sovereignty to the colonial power, to capital, to the slave power, and on the presumed basis of autonomy capable of negotiating a treaty. Choosing abolitionist freedom means inhabiting a non-place in the discourse of rights, a point of discontinuity and disturbance, a stain, as Zupančič has it. So there are layers of choice at hand. There is a choice to choose and a choice not to choose. But it is not simply a question of whether you accede to the symbolic—that is, not only the question of what psychic structure (neurotic, perverse, psychotic) you will take on. It is also a matter of how you accede to the symbolic, a secondary choice that Lacan addresses through the formulae of sexuation, or sexual difference in the psychic, not the sociopolitical, sense. Which is to say, in the present idiom, that once one chooses the analytic frame of slavery and the pursuit of abolitionist freedom, there is still the question of how to go about it, through a masculine or feminine position. Yet this is only the case if freedom is the true aim of abolition: that is the key. Extending this, could it be said that an Afro-pessimist psychoanalytic is interested in the “layers of choice” available in the discourse of slavery? This discourse’s manifest rhetoric (including abolitionist rhetoric) can be analysed for glimpses of an unconscious knowledge, a “field” or “logic,” of power and politics, and in particular, how power and politics limit an encounter with the truth of slavery and freedom by making each the other’s other. Perhaps an Afro-pessimist psychoanalytic allows us to encounter how both liberal and radical philosophies of freedom bear a logical union with forms of enslavement and submission to political conscience and ideologies, and further, how institutions and fantasies of enslavement bear a logical union with jouissance as a form of freedom that is at once singular and not one’s own.

T he D evil ’ s C hoice

151

Lacan’s comments on freedom require us to take seriously that freedom is a fantasy, first and foremost; and that a virtual point of freedom emerges through an analytic process in which a subject accepts their powerlessness in the face of the Other (i.e., realises through repetition that there is no desire, including the desire for freedom from the Other, except through the desire of the Other). When Lacan discusses freedom as a fantasy, it is specifically with respect to an “I” arrayed against and independent from the Other. This means that we can think of collective demands for selfdetermination, liberation, or any other discourse of sovereignty as fantasies of freedom at the level of political imaginaries and rhetoric, but nonetheless structured by the vel of alienation in language and / as the “vel of slavery” insofar as the desires pursued in these fantasies of freedom emerge from an a priori choice made in favour of political meaning, or against the (real or imagined) destitution of being signified by the slave. While for Lacan, as Clemens demonstrates, the slave signifies a universal subjection to the master-signifier, the idea of the vel of slavery suggests that when a subject mobilises speech and action with political conscience and a certain belief in the desire for this and that form of freedom, they are both enjoying the fantasy that their subjection to the master-signifier can have political meaning and blinding themselves to a certain irreducibility of this subjection to meaning (political or otherwise) that returns to each subject, in absolutely singular form, as a primordial signifier. This is a shift in analytical focus away from the precariousness or absoluteness of the master’s sovereignty and towards a perverse sovereignty and slavishness repressed by the psychic life of power and its various signifiers of the master and slave. The US slave codes that imposed limits on the master’s freedom to discipline come to mind as an example of how this perversity is formally repressed, and thus carried along, by law; as does the Oedipal law of white domesticity and kinship, which coexisted with the slave law of partus sequitur ventrem. One can and should argue against approaching slavery as a reflection of positive law, just as an elaboration of the vel at a more general level gives us a way to see how the politics of slavery and its abolition cannot be approached as a problem of political consciousness. Instead, the register of an “unconscious knowledge” of slavery and freedom not only illuminates slavery’s obscure existence, but also gives a set of rules to an as-yet illegible grammar. For if slavery and freedom are figures of an unconscious knowledge, then articulations of such obscurity and illegibility themselves are necessary symptoms that make possible thinking about our relationship to this unconscious knowledge. Unconscious knowledge, rather, is had only in relation, staged in Lacan’s

152

J a r ed S e x to n a n d S o r a H a n

essay between the unconscious and the analyst who is trained to hear and to speak to the being of the real through the libidinal movements of transferential speech. “The question of the psychoanalyst’s knowledge,” Lacan goes on in his 1971 lecture to say, “is not at all as to whether it is articulated or not. Rather, it’s about knowing which place one has to be at in order to sustain it.”29 In this “place” is a way to think about the occult presence of slavery within the logic of the vel, because the principal difficulty here is that one cannot experience the choice as it happens; it is never present, here and now, because it is unconscious and inaugural to experience as such. One can only experience it nachträglich, après coup, through reconstruction, as an imposition that one takes hold of somehow. One must “freely” choose, retroactively, what one was effectively unable to make a free choice about. This is what Lacan was getting at when he states: “The vel returns in the form of a velle.” Alienation, which one chooses unconsciously prior to experience as such, can only be experienced after the fact, as an aspect of the secondary process of separation undergone in analysis, where the petrification of subjection to the signifier is challenged by the introduction of a question of desire. The choice is transformed thus into a will or a wish: “Therein lies the twist whereby separation represents the return of alienation. For the subject operates with his own loss, which brings him back to his point of departure.”30 Or, as Colette Soler aptly phrases it: “Separation requires that the subject ‘want’ to separate from the signifying chain. . . . Separation supposes a want to get out, a want to know what one is beyond what the Other can say, beyond what is inscribed in the Other.”31 For Lacan, this operation is the point at which the subject is constituted, as if for the first time, in the process of reconstitution or reconstruction “separare, separating, ends here in se parere, engendering oneself.”32 To get out or to get free, one must enter further into the signifier, into “the infinite slide of meaning,”33 but not, ultimately, to discover some unconscious knowledge about the meaning of one’s desire (as the desire of the Other). It is to learn something else, something about the non-meaning or non-sense of the drive, “something the subject can’t help or stop in him or herself.”34 THE CHOICE OF FREEDOM Staying with this notion of reconstruction after the fact, we might draw together some of the above strands with a reference to Rita Dove’s fascinating and underappreciated verse play, The Darker Face of the Earth,

T he D evil ’ s C hoice

153

a rewriting of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex set in antebellum South Carolina; especially the route that the protagonist Augustus, an enslaved black Oedipus, takes in his reconstruction during the unfolding of this tragic tale. “Reconstruction” is in scare quotes here because Augustus does and does not follow the path anticipated by Freud and Lacan. In Oedipus Rex, the tragic movement of reconstruction returns Oedipus to the same place without his knowledge. Oedipus, infamously, thinks he is going out into the world in order to escape a curse and to save his family, only to fulfil that very curse because he believes he knows who his birth parents actually are and that he is therefore going somewhere other than his place of birth. He is leaving his natal community so far as he knows. The tragedy of reconstruction here is also a lesson about political revolution, as we’ll see in a moment. Augustus’s misadventure in Dove’s play is also a movement of reconstruction, but Augustus returns unwittingly to his original point of departure with a personal mission to seek vengeance—rather than grace— based upon a mistaken belief that he and his mother were cursed insofar as he was orphaned by his white father/master. Augustus, who unlike Oedipus knows he has been orphaned, reenacts and redoubles Oedipus’s curse thereby because he thinks this additional knowledge allows him to understand the cause of his curse and, thus, the motive of his return. The crucial difference Dove stages is, then, how Augustus mistakes the cause of his desire for vengeance and the consequences this mistake holds for the classic aesthetic support tragedy provides for political conscience. Dove does this by introducing the conundrum of Augustus’s Other, who he imagines to be the white master and cannot imagine to be a black slave. Whereas Oedipus’s father, King Laius, was the legitimate paterfamilias in the wrong place at the wrong time, Augustus’s father, as a presumed master, is the wrong man in the right time and place. This subtlety in Dove’s retelling sustains a position from which we can approach Augustus as a slave, neither hero nor anti-hero, insofar as he invents his master/ father to carry out his own role of imaginary revenge and eventual symbolic action (among comrades who cannot comprehend it within the diegesis, and before an audience that cannot be composed in or beyond the theatre world!). Augustus’s subjection to the signifier is dramatised in the text without relinquishing the representational challenge of depicting his role as a slave in, or to, his failed psychical revolution, regardless of what happens next in the fictional universe. And this is accomplished, interestingly, by retaining the difference between the natal triad of Oedipality and the natal pentad of American slavery. Scylla, the slave prophet, recalling the day Augustus was born, explains, “The curse touched four people.” And the

154

J a r ed S e x to n a n d S o r a H a n

chorus of slaves responds, “Black woman, black man / white woman, white man.” To which Scylla warns further, “Four people touched by the curse: / but the curse is not complete.”35 This is, plus ultra, a step beyond what Hortense Spillers calls “America’s great sexual quartet.”36 This bears directly on Augustus’s confusion about whether the father is real, symbolic, or imaginary. Lacan had other ways to describe our subjection to the signifier, of course, and most pertinent here might be his concept of symbolic castration. His reformulation of Freud’s Oedipus complex incorporated the insights of structural linguistics and anthropology in order to argue that the entrance into language produces a cut in the body of the resultant speaking-being (parlêtre), transforming an organic body into a libidinal body organised by erotogenic zones laden with unconscious meaning and, moreover, a recalcitrant dimension of non-meaning or meaninglessness. This symbolic castration is operated by what Lacan terms the paternal function, a third term whose structural mediation intervenes upon the closed, imaginary relation of fusion and rivalry within the motherchild dyad. With The Darker Face that function is interrupted or precluded in the dramatic setting established by the constituent elements of slavery. The Name-of-the-Father, the paternal function, does not simply fail to take hold, as in the conventional analytic purview (discussed earlier as the choice of alienation in the signifier). Instead, that name is fundamentally misrecognised because, under the law of slavery, there is an intrusion of the white father/master as the author of a foreclosure of the possibility of black paternity and a disavowal of black maternity under the terms of partus sequitur ventrum. The Name-of-the-Father (which is drawn from the homophony in French between the nom or name of the father, his inheritance or line of descent, and the no of the father, his prohibition of incestuous desire for the mother) opens the subject onto the larger universe of sociality and wards against the descent into psychosis. As such, the choice that would seem the most alienating is in reality the most enabling, and that which takes you away from being delivers you to existence; forced partition is, again, necessary for any relationality whatsoever, permitting (without guaranteeing) movement from idios kosmos (private world) to koinos kosmos (shared world). What this shared world will consist of, however, is radically shifted to the extent that the Lacanian reformulation of the Oedipus myth (which is already a function of Freud’s modern reading of the ancient text) is situated within the history of slavery that it solicits. This is why we can understand Dove’s play as an attempt to modernise the myth and not simply to relativise it, a reformulation of a reformulation that returns to the source material only to

T he D evil ’ s C hoice

155

read it, in hindsight, through its subsequent iterations. The drama of reproducing or maintaining a sovereign line of rule over a Greek city becomes a drama about reproducing or maintaining a sovereign line of mastery over a Southern plantation, moving from citizen-subject to slave-object. Whereas the blood line is the city’s source of sovereignty in ancient Greece, the blood line cannot be the plantation’s source of sovereignty in American slave society given that “the difficulty of the blood” under the regime of racial slavery as dramatised in Dove’s play leaves the master “not always sufficiently protected against the burden of incest.”37 For Oedipus, the curse takes the form of a future that cannot be escaped, while for Augustus, the curse is always already a general condition produced by the absolute supremacy of the master’s and the mistress’s desire over any incest taboo or law of partus. Augustus is cursed internally, it is coursing through his veins, as Scylla declares: “Your Augustus is pretty clever— / been lots of places and knows / the meanings of words and things like that. / But something’s foul in his blood, / and what’s festering inside him / nothing this side of the living / can heal. A body hurting that bad / will do anything to get relief—anything.”38 We can see in this the implications of the Afro-pessimist conceptualisation of “natal alienation” and how this absolute disorganisation of sex and genealogy suspends the social function of the incest taboo.39 Yet, Dove’s rendition is no mere transplantation or historical experimentation. Or, if it is, it is to great effect and benefit to psychoanalytic theory. Contrary to the Oedipal internecine drama instigated by the gods and to Freud’s universal metaphor of the incest taboo as foundation for desire, Dove’s internecine drama represents a grammar of interracial sexuality that displaces the metaphor of the incest taboo and the Name-of-the Father and raises questions about how we are to understand narratives of revenge, guilt, punishment, and solidarity when, within the logic of the vel, the father can be either a master or a slave. Is Dove’s play representing the phenomenon Lacan theorises as “separation” and the “scant freedom” that emerges in the subjectivisation of subjection? Does not Augustus’s resignation to be carried off and given meaning by his comrades in revolt—despite the horrible truth that he killed his real father, failed to kill his imaginary father, committed incest with his real mother, and failed to kill his imaginary lover—depict perfectly the revelation or surprise of an unconscious knowledge that his animating fantasy of revenge defended against? Augustus has pursued his alienation in the Other to the point of his own fading away, and this aphanisis takes place in the conversion of his specular image as orphan into his real being as property. He has realised that the vel between being and meaning returns him to a meaningless being produced

156

J a r ed S e x to n a n d S o r a H a n

by his choosing meaning (endowing his life with purpose as given in vengeful fantasy). Instead of persisting in the fantasy now traversed, or blinding himself to the world as Oedipus does, he is simply returned, yet again, to this vel—passive, powerless, deflated. Being as dramatised here is not an abstract, mythical non-alienated self, but a slave, a “genealogical isolate,” a libidinal subject in the place of an object, in an intimate revolt against himself and his self. And this is where Dove’s challenge to the classic aesthetic support tragedy provides for political conscience is linked to also an understanding of what makes black heroism qualitatively different and to what she calls, in a wonderfully provocative understatement, a “different take on incest” in this and other creative works. With respect to the latter point, she moves entirely against the grain of both the conventional reading of ancient Greek dramatic pathos and the moralism too often attributed to the psychoanalytic clinic: Incest appears as an almost natural outcome for people who know each other very well. Even in The Darker Face of the Earth, it’s not the overwhelming concern. I don’t want the audience to think, “Oh no, it’s incest,” but that it’s a shame that Augustus and Amalia can’t stay together. In that sense, it’s similar to what happens in [my novel] Through the Ivory Gate: the emotion that’s called up is not “How horrible—she slept with her brother,” but “How sad that this ruined her life.” It’s a different take on incest, that’s true.40

Again, the psycho-political suspension of the incest taboo produced by the economies of slavery opens another practice of interpretation and judgement, if, that is, we can tarry with the negative, ostensibly anti-social space it affords, a space, perhaps, for the articulation of a truly non-oedipal (which is not to say anti-oedipal) psychoanalysis.41 Regarding black heroism, here, this is the heroism of a twice-disinherited slave, rather than a deranged and haunted royal heir. Where Oedipus comes to realise, through his ill-fated journey to the throne, that he is the source of the suffering that he initially believes he has single-handedly alleviated among the citizenry, Augustus, emerging from among those whose suffering is by design of a gratuitous violence executed by rulers and citizens alike, learns that his plan to liberate the enslaved has worked, so to speak, but for the wrong reason. And rather than succeeding as the new sovereign of the emancipated, Augustus passes away, later, offstage, almost incidentally, as a non-sovereign casualty of war; a death that is neither martyrdom nor sacrifice, but one that it is not without effect. Oedipus believes he is chosen, only to discover that he is utterly condemned. Augustus believes he

T he D evil ’ s C hoice

157

is forsaken, only to discover that he is otherwise functional. How? To what end? Here is Dove: It wasn’t until I began working through the play again that I realized that the tragedy of the original Oedipus is that he is a living dead man. So it doesn’t really matter whether Augustus lives or dies; either he dies and that’s it, or he lives, but in a nihilistic sense. Ultimately we know only what history tells us: this slave rebellion will fail, has failed. Since we know how slavery ended [sic], we can also imagine the end of Augustus; though he is still alive at the end of the play, we know what the immediate future holds. Only when he is finally executed will he come to life again as legend. When I recognized this final irony, I was able to change the ending so that Augustus lives, and the impact was much more heartbreaking. There is a bitter optimism to the piece. Regardless of what happens to Augustus after the play closes, he is a hero, and his example will influence the history that follows. But what should one think about—a brilliant defeat? Augustus has become a role model, but he is also dead. I think of Medgar Evers and Emmett Till, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.—throughout history, heroes get destroyed.42

A “bitter optimism” might be another way to describe Afro-pessimism, after the fact: optimism with a vengeance, one that pursues every fantasy of redemption into a brilliant defeat, one that lives in a nihilistic sense, without intrinsic meaning or value, moving with unbidden purpose into certain but unforeseen destruction, wielding only the most passive and indirect historical influence as myth and legend, as the heart-breaking drama of unnameable loss realised too late, a fateful choice returning as a final irony, a last will and testament, a lesson before dying. Augustus, the slave going to kill the master, concludes in the climactic scene: “Everything was so simple before! / Hate and be hated. / But this—love or freedom— / is the devil’s choice.”43 NOTES 1. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 715. 2. Lacan, Écrits, 714. 3. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 93. 4. Pierre-Gilles Guéguen, “Lacan, American,” trans. Julien Marzouk, The Symptom 13 (2012). http:​//www​.laca​n.com​/symp​tom13​/laca​n-ame​rican​.html​, accessed 10 April 2019.

158

J a r ed S e x to n a n d S o r a H a n

5. Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 62. 6. Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 10. 7. See Lindon Barrett, Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity, ed. Justin A. Joyce, Dwight McBride, and John Carlos Rowe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). 8. Jared Sexton, “‘The Curtain of the Sky:’ An Introduction,” Critical Sociology 36, no. 1 (2010): 15. 9. In Sora Y. Han, Letters of the Law: Race and the Fantasy of Colorblindness in American Law (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 30. Han reveals how American constitutional law, perhaps not unlike indigenous and decolonial politics (which are inevitably bound up with this law), is indebted to the non-mortality of slavery performed via the black claim to civil rights as a “decompositional right.” 10. Jacques Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls: A Series of Presentations in the Chapel at Sainte-Anne Hospital, trans. Adrian Price (London: Polity, 2017), 12–13, 18. 11. See Jared Sexton, “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign,” Critical Sociology 42, no. 4–5 (2016): 583–597. “The Vel of Slavery” was written at the invitation of Alexandre Da Costa for a special issue of Critical Sociology on the theme of “Post-Racial Ideology and Politics in the Americas.” The vel, as drawn from Lacan’s discourse, was taken as a helpful concept-metaphor to reframe the relationship between slavery and colonialism therein and, further, to contradict the idea that racialisation—specifically the “negrophobia” that Frantz Fanon long ago established as germinal to racial slavery—did not fundamentally shape the history and present of black and indigenous people as such. 12. See Adrian Johnston, “Jacques Lacan,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (2018). https​://pl​ato.s​tanfo​rd.ed​u/arc​hives​/fall​2018/​ entri​es/la​can/,​accessed April 10, 2019. 13. Lacan, Écrits, 713. 14. Lacan, Écrits, 713. 15. Lacan, Écrits, 713. 16. Lacan, Écrits, 714. 17. For more on the vel of alienation, see Roberto Harari, Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction, trans. Judith Filc (New York: Other Press, 2004), especially Chapter 9. 18. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 211. 19. Sexton, “The Vel of Slavery,” 593. 20. This is the real of freedom Han traces through the 1857 freedom suit, Betty’s Case, in “Slavery as Contract,” “where distinctions between freedom and enslavement appear as effects of a freedom that is there in the law, but not of the law.” Han, Letters of the Law, 401. 21. Lacan, Écrits, 242.

T he D evil ’ s C hoice

159

22. Justin Clemens, “The Field and Function of the Slave in the Écrits,” in Lacan and Philosophy: The New Generation, ed. Lorenzo Chiesa (Melbourne: re.press, 2014), 193. 23. Lacan, Écrits, 213. 24. Alenka Zupančič, Why Psychoanalysis? Three Interventions (Copenhagen: NSU Press, 2008), 23. 25. Sexton, “The Vel of Slavery,” 583. 26. Sexton, “The Vel of Slavery,” 584, 588–89, 592. 27. See Sexton, “The Vel of Slavery.” 28. “The black claim to civil rights does not write an effective attachment between rights and people. Instead, it is a legal form that decomposes liberal modern citizenship’s reification of civil rights as objects of (dis)possession.” Han, Letters of the Law, 19. 29. Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls, 32. 30. Lacan, Écrits, 715. 31. Colette Soler, “The Subject and the Other (II),” in Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Janus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 49, emphasis added. 32. Lacan, Écrits, 715. 33. Soler, “The Subject and the Other (II),” 48. 34. Soler, “The Subject and the Other (II),” 53. 35. Rita Dove, The Darker Face of the Earth (Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press, 1996), 3. 36. Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 154. 37. Spillers, Black, White, and In Color, 318. 38. Dove, The Darker Face of the Earth, 111. 39. See Sora Han, “Poetics of Mu.” Textual Practice (2018), https​://do​i.org​/10. 1​080/0​95023​6X.20​18.15​15790​, accessed 10 April 2019. 40. Therese Steffen and Rita Dove, “The Darker Face of the Earth,” Transition 74 (1997): 119–20. 41. See Philippe Van Haute and Tomas Geyskens, A Non-Oedipal Psychoanalysis? A Clinical Anthropology of Hysteria in the Works of Freud and Lacan, trans. Joey Kok (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012). 42. Steffen and Dove, “The Darker Face of the Earth,” 114, 116, emphasis added. 43. Dove, The Darker Face of the Earth, 146.

III IN NOTHINGNESS WHERE NAMES AND MEANINGS GUSH FORTH

8 EXPERIENCES OF TRANSCENDENCE IN THE BORROMEAN KNOT Janina Maris Hofer

Ever since Lacan introduced the Sinthome to the Borromean Knot it completely changed the course of his psychoanalysis. The focus of this chapter will be the Borromean Knot of the later Lacan, specifically the role of the Sinthome, which enables jouissance and, in contrast to the symptom, can only be enjoyed, not analysed. From this point of view, Thomas Luckmann’s concept of the experience of transcendence (Transzendenzerfahrung) will be explored and integrated into Lacan’s framework of the Borromean Knot. As a sociologist of religion, Luckmann offers a concept of transcendence in which language plays a predominant role. From his perspective as a phenomenologist, experience is the basis for humans to get in touch with transcendence. The ultimate aim of this chapter is to show to what extent Luckmann’s concept of experiences of transcendence can be combined with Lacan’s Sinthome, providing a way to describe “religious” experiences. To begin, I will introduce the Borromean Knot as a construct that Lacan uses to describe humans as speaking beings, in order to make language their most defining characteristic. The later Lacan distinguishes the Borromean Knot from his earlier threefold knot by the inclusion of a fourth ring, which he calls the Sinthome. Consequently, through the Sinthome, the speaking being can experience a fullness that is beyond language and lack. The addition of the fourth ring enables enjoyment of the unbearable plenitude, the Thing, which Lacan describes as jouissance. However, the term 163

164

J anina M aris H ofer

jouissance is used in diverse ways throughout Lacan’s work. If Luckmann’s experiences of transcendence are used as a replacement within the knot, I will argue, this ambiguity is diminished. An experience of transcendence depends, first, on the primacy of experience and, second, on its expression within the limits of language. Introducing Luckmann’s primacy of experience to the Borromean Knot makes it possible to view the Sinthome as a linguistic expression of an experience of transcendence. This, accordingly, modifies Lacan’s understanding of religion. Lacan’s early notion of religion with its primary function of creating sense would have located all reports of religious experiences within the realms of language, be it conscious or unconscious. The later Lacan’s Sinthome, especially when linked to Luckmann’s experience of transcendence, has the potential to integrate extraordinary experiences, such as near-death or mystical experiences, into the subject without structuring them as a language. THE BORROMEAN KNOT OF THE LATER LACAN The Borromean Knot is the construction that Lacan uses to describe humans as speaking beings (parlêtre).1 Unlike in previous schemes, with the Borromean Knot, Lacan is no longer primarily concerned with theoretically opening up the subject of psychoanalysis. Instead, he attempts to locate the human being in a larger concept of (linguistic) reality.2 The Borromean Knot consists of the knotting of at least three rings. If one ring is removed from the knot, all others are also released, since the individual rings are no longer connected to each other. Each ring has the same importance and position within the knot and cannot be compensated by another ring.3 Lacan formalised the Borromean Knot in two ways: a three-dimensional knotting of three rings illustrates the psychic reality of the subject, and a two-dimensional model illustrates the interaction of the three orders. He uses the latter in many of his seminars after 1974, whereas the former is to be understood as a theoretical premise whose main characteristic of knotting cannot be reduced to two dimensions. In the twodimensional representation, the rings slide on top of each other, leave the field of topology, and again become a geometric figure of circles and surfaces that can be named—they show an imaginary picture, which can never represent reality.4 Over and over the question has been raised whether the Borromean Knot is a model or a graphical summary of the relationship R.S.I. (Lacan’s registers of the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary).5 Lacan assumes that it is impossible to represent the structure R.S.I.; nevertheless

T ranscendence in the B orromean K not

165

he claims the Borromean Knot is identical to this structure. Thus, in Seminar XXIII Lacan states: “The Borromean Knot does not constitute a model, in so far as it possesses something that imagination fails to grasp when it gets close to it. I mean that, as such, it resists the imagining of the knot. The mathematical approach to the knot in topology is insufficient.”6 This insufficiency accordingly reveals Lacan’s intent, as Lacan wanted to lift the three-dimensional Borromean Knot beyond the status of a model and give it the experienceable, inarticulable character of reality. The later Lacan was confronted with the problem of understanding three completely heterogeneous terms woven together: the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. These three registers by definition cannot have a common metalanguage as parts of a single structure. If Lacan were to engage in a form of metalanguage here, he would have to be accused of infinite regression on the basis of his own prohibition of a metalanguage. Accordingly, this equality of orders in the Borromean Knot and their interdependence have the logical consequence that none of the orders possess the structuring principle, but the structure only results from the knotting.7 The knot is composed of three properties, which are supported by every order: it is consistent, ex-istent8 and making holes. As Luke Thurston explains: “the series consistence (consistency), ex-sistence (ex-sistence) and trou (hole) is mapped onto that of imaginary, real, and symbolic respectively. The classical image of three rings, as shown in the Milanese coat-of-arms, offers a consistent version of the Borromean Knot, which is ostensibly at odds with the real of its knottedness.”9 Lacan created a verb, “making holes,” for the dominant property of the Real, which is transferable to the other orders within the Borromean Knot. He writes: “Ek-sistence as such is defined, is supported by what in each of these terms, R.S.I., creates a hole.”10 The technical term of “making holes” (faire trou) used by Lacan in connection with the structure of the knot could be translated as “indicating a lack.” He uses this verb because it matches his terminology of knots and also connotes the nihilistic appearance of the Real order.11 In theory, each of the three properties of consistency, ex-sistence, and making holes are brought primarily from one order into the Borromean Knot and transferred from there to all other orders. In other words, the Borromean Knot takes over the individual properties of its rings and these properties are in turn carried by the knotting of all rings. Insofar as the Real indicates lack, the lack in the Real is therefore transmitted to all other rings and they become irreducible to the symbolic structure within the Borromean Knot.12 Introducing a fourth ring to the triple knot led to a crisis in Lacanian theory, because it destabilised the established equality of the three registers of

166

J anina M aris H ofer

R.S.I. Once Lacan starts integrating the fourth ring of the Sinthome, he was unable to reach a definitive formalisation, instead constantly transforming the Borromean Knot.13 In the words of Thurston: “If, in an initial moment, the Borromean Knot had seemed to offer the possibility of a coherent formalisation of Lacan’s three terms, it became clear in the Seminar R.S.I. that a triple knot was by no means the final or definitive version.”14 Although the Borromean Knot of three rings appeared to be a much more stable formalisation, Lacan nevertheless continued forward with his work on the variation with four rings. This apparent sacrifice of stability indicates the importance of the fourth ring of the Sinthome. For Lacan, this advantage lay in the Sinthome’s ability to compensate or shift the properties of the individual rings: the Sinthome can therefore change the properties of the knot itself. Integrating the Sinthome allows the Borromean Knot to refer to extralinguistic experiences without falling apart completely, despite the instability this integration creates. Lacan failed to establish a definitive topology of R.S.I. for psychoanalytic practice, since ex-istence is irreducible to any image or signifier and hence the Borromean Knot lacks a definitive metalanguage.15 Above all Lacan did not want the Borromean Knot to be solely a metaphor, because it also contains parts of the Real, which language cannot fully interpret.16 The function of the Sinthome, which was previously missing in the topology of the threefold knot, now opens the theory onto the Real embodied in a symptomatic fourth ring.17 Although from Seminar XXIII onwards, Lacan introduces variants of the Borromean Knot that elaborate the interconnection of the three fundamental orders in different ways, and all these different knots serve their own explanatory purpose, their key feature of the knottedness of the Real remains the same. One of the key inspirations for Lacan’s insistence on continuing with the Borromean Knot with four rings was James Joyce. Following what he understood to be Joyce’s successful handling of language and the Sinthome, in the Borromean Knot with the fourth ring of the Sinthome, it is Joyce who exemplifies that the Sinthome has the potential to take over the function of knotting together the other rings. Lacan assumes that a (healthy) person is by definition subject to desire, since humans need language to live in the world among other humans; he also sees the person as bound by language.18 The case of Joyce becomes of interest because it seems to contradict this assumption. Linguistically, Joyce expresses himself as if the symbolic ring had come loose and language is hence completely falling apart. An example of this could be the translinguistic homophony of French in English, which he uses in Finnegans Wake: “Who ails tongue coddeau, aspace of

T ranscendence in the B orromean K not

167

dumbillsilly?”19 Joyce writes “who,” which can be heard as a French “où” and if one continues listening in French, one might understand the following: “Où est ton cadeau, espèce d’imbécile?” which translates to “Where is your gift, you stupid fool?” Yet it is precisely in this apparent collapse that Lacan sees something essential. For Lacan, Joyce’s artifice of writing was what restored the Borromean Knot. Thus, reconsidering his former psychoanalytical judgement that Joyce compensated for his lacking father with his art, Lacan states: “Joyce’s art is so particular that the term Sinthome is very fitting for it.”20 This is why he considers it appropriate to speak of the Sinthome and does not see Joyce as someone with whom one of the rings has come loose: they are held together by his writing.21 Lacan accordingly defines the Borromean Sinthome as that which can hold the three rings of the knot together, even if they would no longer hold together. Lacan never wanted to see the knot as a model for the structure R.S.I., but as the Real itself. Thus, the structure of the Borromean Knot is seen as identical to the structure of the human psyche. On this basis, Lacan claims that the unconscious is not like the Borromean Knot; it is the Borromean Knot. In Seminar XXII Lacan says: “There is no other definition, in my opinion, of the unconscious: The unconscious is the Real.”22 Only a few sentences, later he states: “The knot is not a model; it is a support. It is not reality; it is the Real.”23 The writing of the knot is its materiality and therefore it is not representation or metaphor of the psychic structure, but rather its display.24 But this has a consequence. Proclaiming the Borromean Knot not to be ordinary writing, in the sense of being part of a linguistic structure, but to be a display of the Real, makes it uncriticisable within the realms of language and science. In order to constructively criticise the Borromean Knot and use it within the boundaries of science it has to be part of language and therefore it cannot be more than a model or metaphor of the psychic structure. However, this idea contradicts Lacan’s language theory profoundly, which, as mentioned, does not provide a metalanguage for the R.S.I. structure.25 Nevertheless, we have to look at the Borromean Knot primarily as a model, knowing this was not the intention of its author—with this in mind, when considered as a model, we know that the Borromean Knot will have its vulnerabilities and is open to criticism as well as further development. In the spirit of its constant development, and also to explain what Lacan found so decisive about the additional fourth ring, I will propose a new version of the Borromean Knot, which does not claim to be more than just a model or metaphor. This new knot illustrates the main concepts of the later Lacan, such as the three realms of the Real, the Symbolic, the Imaginary,

168

J anina M aris H ofer

and, most importantly, the Sinthome. It focuses on the main function of the Sinthome as a ring referring to its task relative to the other three rings. With this model of the Borromean Knot, I do want to claim that it is the only way to represent the functions of the Sinthome within the knot, but visualise its feature as an assurance of cohesion in case of suspension—that is, meaning the detachment of the symbolic ring, just as in the case of Joyce.

Figure 8.1  Borromean Knot including the Sinthome: the Real (R), the Symbolic (S), the Imaginary (I) and the Sinthome (Σ).

This Borromean Knot, which includes the Sinthome, illustates Lacan’s original equivalence of the three registers and integrates the other properties of the later fourfold knot. Note how the fourth ring is connected to the rest of the knot. It only penetrates the centre of the original Borromean Knot, so that one of the three original rings can now detach without dissolving the entire knot structure because it is held together by the Sinthome. By introducing a fourth ring, the knot emphasises the autonomy of the Sinthome, in contrast to the symptom, which for Lacan belongs to the symbolic order and appears as an effect in the order of the Real.26 In addition, this knot demonstrates the function of the Sinthome as an assurance of the cohesion of two rings, in the case of a temporary suspension of the third. Lacan introduces variations of the Borromean Knot, which clarify the detachment he bears in mind; he assumes that there are moments in which the symbolic ring is released and yet the three rings do not fall apart: “Inasmuch as the Sinthome is tied on to the unconscious and the Imaginary is tied onto the Real, we are dealing with something from which the Sinthome emerges.”27 This emphasis of the rings or even their detachment is not

T ranscendence in the B orromean K not

169

shown in Figure 8.1 of the Borromean Knot. In this variation the Sinthome is only significant when a ring is detached. According to Lacan’s comments on the Borromean Knots and James Joyce, it can be assumed that this can be observed when the symbolic ring is detached. CONSEQUENCES OF INCLUDING THE SINTHOME IN THE BORROMEAN KNOT Through the introduction of the Sinthome as a fourth ring to the Borromean Knot, the unbearable plenitude or fullness of the Real can now be experienced directly. But what are the consequences of granting humans as speaking beings access to the Real through the unspeakable Sinthome? Indeed, it is such a move that led to the aforementioned major shift in Lacanian psychoanalysis that created problems of its own, demonstrated in Lacan’s continued proposals of new variations of the knot without ever reaching a definitive formalisation, as well as the criticisms that stemmed from this approach. A concept such as Luckmann’s experiences of transcendence can smooth out some of the difficulties the Borromean Knot with the Sinthome creates, while at the same time clarifying why Lacan insisted on continuing his explorations of the fourth ring with the Sinthome. Using Luckmann’s experiences of transcendence in this manner, however, presents its own obstacles. The term experiences of transcendence, formulated by Luckmann with influences from the phenomenological tradition, is at first glance diametrically opposed to Lacan’s constructivist concept of language. But if Luckmann’s concept is considered in terms of how Lacan understands language in terms of its close relation to jouissance, we see that not only can experiences of transcendence highlight the theoretical merits of the Borromean Knot with the Sinthome, but can also help to clarify ambiguities in Lacan’s use of jouissance. Accordingly, before discussing in more detail Luckmann’s experiences of transcendence, I will first outline Lacan’s account of the relation between language and jouissance. Generally, Lacan uses these two terms in opposition to each other, but in his later seminars he develops a manner of combining them. To understand how language and jouissance come together is vital in order to comprehend parallels between Luckmann and Lacan. In a passage in Seminar XXIII, Lacan writes: “If we think that there is no Other of the Other, or at the very least, no jouissance of this Other of the Other, then we really need to perform a suture somewhere between this symbolic, which stretches out here on its own, and this imaginary which is here.”28

170

J anina M aris H ofer

For Lacan, there is no enjoyment of the other, understood as the other of language, because then there would have to be a “language” of the other of the Other of language.29 This is once again an instance of Lacan not wanting to admit a metalanguage, something he postulated at the beginning of his work and never intended to move away from. If one should speak of a lalangue30 at all, then this can only be an unsystematic one, necessarily outside of the Borromean Knot. To achieve this, Lacan has to separate the Sinthome from the symbolic order to create a fourth ring, which holds the Borromean Knot together as soon as another ring loosens. Yet with the introduction of a fourth ring, Lacan’s long-defended primacy of language falters, because language is no longer opposed to the extralinguistic and can no longer be deduced from it. Instead, the extralinguistic Real can be directly experienced through the Sinthome as structured supplementary jouissance and no longer requires a detour via language. For the Borromean Knot including the Sinthome, the question arises as to how far the primacy of language must be abandoned so that the introduction of the Sinthome does not contradict this primacy. Let us again consider the previously introduced variant of the Borromean Knot, which integrates the Sinthome as the fourth ring, but with an additional focus on the spaces between the rings.

Figure 8.2  Borromean knot including the Sinthome (∑) with intersections and object a (1).

Lacan calls the different intersections of the rings “meaning” (4) and “phallic or lacking jouissance”31 (2). Only the intersection of the Imaginary and the Real (3) is left empty until Seminar XXIII, because Lacan does not want a metalanguage that is able to speak about the Other of the Other. It is

T ranscendence in the B orromean K not

171

only with the introduction of the Sinthome that he does fill this void (3) with supplementary jouissance. The ring of the Sinthome can hold together the Imaginary and the Real if the symbolic ring has loosened. It should also be noted that at the centre of the knot, objet a,32 which is a complex concept of Lacan, has its place, but cannot be elaborated in the context of this chapter.33 For Lacan, the human being can only be adequately conceived via his language. The Borromean Knot with its primacy of language accordingly becomes the centre of theoretical considerations. This is because it has the same structure, with the corresponding properties of the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary, as humans themselves. Because the R.S.I.-knotting constitutes the human being as a whole speaking being, it shows how it reacts to the world as part of a linguistic community. This reaction to the world and how we deal with it can be seen in the structure of language and its use. Language serves, on the one hand, as an inner-psychic link, and, on the other hand as a connection between humans and the world. Through the Borromean Knotting of the three orders, Lacan’s comprehension of language and anthropology is determined by lack. Three main characteristics of the knot support the notion of lack as the central characteristic of language. First, the missing objet a forms the centre of the knot, which drives the subject, and yet can never be named. Second, the knot itself has taken over the property of making holes in the symbolic order. Third, within language the Sinthome is an expression of an experienceable plenitude or fullness, which lies beyond language and is opposed to lack. The Sinthome is the end of the chain of signifiers, the end of the language that refers to something just to refer to something different. This property of lack is probably the most central of the Borromean Knot, if not also of all Lacan’s thought.34 The field of language becomes a place of lack, not because it allows the subject to express lack, but because lack is inscribed in the subject upon entry into language.35 By definition, the speaking being is subject to desire, since language is needed to live among other people in the world.36 In consequence, language is confronted with the unbearable plenitude of the Real and receives a negative connotation; it becomes the language of lack. Humans can only experience the Thing, which represents the unbearable fullness of the Real, under the condition of the Sinthome; it temporarily takes over the function of the Symbolic and enables jouissance.37 The Sinthome is the verbalised expression of jouissance, which is confronted with the meaningful Symbolic-Imaginary language. Yet jouissance is notoriously ambiguous in Lacan’s writings, and to fully understand the Sinthome as a verbalised expression of jouissance, this oscillating concept must first be understood in its various meanings in order to

172

J anina M aris H ofer

be able to use it appropriately within the Borromean Knot. For example, Lacan describes the enjoyment of the Thing, the unbearable plenitude, within the Borromean Knot as jouissance. However, he also describes the enjoyment of desiring without satisfaction as jouissance. This he claims in Seminar V: This is the aspect [being a subject of desire] which will forever remain only in its irreducible character, the altogether false aspect of human desire understood as any reduction and adaptation, and any analytic experience will go against it, the subject does not simply satisfy a desire, he enjoys desiring, and this is an essential dimension of his jouissance.38

Jouissance, understood as plaisir, which Lacan sees as part of the realm of the Imaginary, can be equated with the Freudian term “Lust.” Lust or pleasure can be triggered by the satisfaction of a need, but never brings complete satisfaction and always cries out for more.39 Lacan, however, over time no longer used this form of pleasure for his understanding of language, replacing it with (linguistic) meaning in the Borromean Knot. The understanding of jouissance in the context of desire in Seminar V is defined as the simple pleasure of striving for a desire without an object. The lack of the object means that desire cannot be satisfied and therefore continues to exist. Jouissance accordingly becomes the driving force of desire: when the subject enjoys desire, jouissance preserves desire. In Seminar VI, the relationship between desire and jouissance changes to the effect that it becomes the objective of desire. As an example, Lacan cites sexual desire or love between men and women, which he asserts can never be satisfied.40 This second understanding of jouissance presupposes a lack of pleasure, for only what one does not possess can be desired.41 In the Borromean Knot, however, Lacan locates this kind of jouissance in the intersection of the Real and the Symbolic. This jouissance can be illustrated by the unsatisfactory lust inherent in the lack.42 Due to the inherent lack of phallic jouissance, it loses its biological connotation, which is contained in the Freudian term.43 The understanding of jouissance in the context of the Real varies deeply compared to the two former options. The Real is assigned to the real Other, which is an area of lawlessness, of boundless enjoyment, freed from the limits of Symbolic-Imaginary language.44 This place is not to be understood as a locality, but as the area of jouissance, which is contrasted with the area of meaningful language (sens).45 When jouissance refers to the field of boundless enjoyment, Lacan calls it, among other things, supplementary jouissance.46

T ranscendence in the B orromean K not

173

LUCKMANN’S UNDERSTANDING OF EXPERIENCES OF TRANSCENDENCE In light of these varied meanings of Lacan’s term jouissance, it is Luckmann’s experiences of transcendence that can give us a new understanding of Lacan’s problematic concept. Moreover, it can also help explain the relation between jouissance and the Sinthome, which will bring us back to the importance of the four-ring variation of the Borromean Knot in the later Lacan. Together with Alfred Schütz, a sociologist of knowledge, Luckmann developed a threefold theory of experiences of transcendence. As Schütz’s student, he built his theory of the structures of reality as found in Husserl’s comprehension of language based on appresentations.47 Just like Husserl, Luckmann uses the term appresentation, which consists of marks, signs, and symbols,48 to denote that which goes beyond the immediate, subjective experience. An appresentation can transmit information beyond subjective experience referring to an active performance of consciousness. This gives an indication of something outside subjective experience. In other words, appresentations provide a synthesis of the present and the non-present in marks, signs or symbols. In contrast to subjective experience, the appresentation is not immediate, but is a vehicle of reference mediating experience and, as such, already contains meaning. If the appresentation turns out to be a faulty reference to subjective experience, it is resolved and replaced by another sign with a correct reference.49 Luckmann first contrasts subjective experience with transcendence, for neither transcendence, nor the transcendent world can be directly experienced. Nevertheless, the immediate, subjective experience can be surpassed: through the use of appresentations. Therefore, appresentations are the key to experience transcendence through the medium of marks, signs, and symbols.50 Starting from appresentations, which mediate subjective experience through signs, Luckmann emphasises the experiences of transcendence finding their expression in the neologism Transzendenzerfahrungen. Experiences of transcendence are divided by Luckmann into three categories: small, medium, and great. For Luckmann, the primacy of experience, following his phenomenological commitments, can reach its full potential in the concept of great transcendence, in comparison to small and medium transcendence. Small transcendence describes the overcoming of the space and time of my own subjective experience with the help of language.51 Medium transcendence enables access to the experience of someone else that I will never directly experience.52 Whereas in comparison to Lacan’s

174

J anina M aris H ofer

thought, Lacan could explain from his structuralist viewpoint both of these horizontal transcendences,53 small and medium, Luckmann holds an advantage when it comes to the vertical transcendence, the so-called great transcendence. For Luckmann, a great experience of transcendence means the boundary-crossing of everyday experiences and irreplaceably turning away from daily life towards another reality, in which I no longer experience myself or, as Lacan would say, I am no longer divided into the subject and the ego. In Luckmann’s words, such a great experience of transcendence arises from “encounters with other states of consciousness and situations (sleep, dream, ecstasy, crisis, death) that give glimpses of ‘other realities’ beyond the everyday life-world in and through artistic or literary creation and religious and theoretical concerns.”54 Luckmann speaks of the temporary loss of the mundane tension of consciousness, which makes it possible to turn to and away from certain experiences.55 This loss of the tension of consciousness means humans can at most let consciousness flow completely passively and remain unable to act in everyday reality.56 As soon as mundane life returns and we try to grasp the great experiences of transcendence through language, they resist our words or are distorted by the everyday idealisation of language.57 Accordingly, one can only express vague memories through language and these solely refer to experiences made in a wide-awake state. As memories are “translated”58 into language or embodied in symbols, they serve as a guide to extraordinary realities. The symbolic59 memories can leave traces in ordinary reality by questioning pragmatic motives or even decisively influencing systems of relevance of daily life.60 Similar to the sign, the symbol refers to something constantly absent, as Lacan would say, something foreclosed. Unlike the sign, it is detached from its appresentative relationship with the bearing symbol as it transgresses everyday reality. It builds an appresentative bridge between ordinary language and extraordinary reality, following the principles of the arbitrariness of the bearer of meaning, the changeability of meaning, and the transferability of symbolic function to another bearer. Through the last principle, the symbol stands out from the sign and can shift from one reference to another without being a direct indication of the extraordinary reality, although it still retains the potential to do so.61 Luckmann also emphasises a decisive characteristic of symbols (that Lacan can never share): “Symbols are intersubjectively constituted and form historical contexts, often even hierarchically arranged systems institutionalized as special knowledge.”62 Luckmann gives us examples of these vehicles of meaning in order to clarify his understanding of the symbols used to express the great experience of transcendence. He says that they can be (almost)

T ranscendence in the B orromean K not

175

anything conceivable, such as objects from the surrounding world, body parts, movements or even historical events.63 With a basic understanding of Luckmann’s concepts in hand, some clear connections begin to emerge with Lacan’s Borromean Knot with Sinthome. First, this speakable vertical transcendence, which takes place in another reality, has the potential to critically address Lacan’s extralinguistic understanding of the Sinthome. Moreover, the relation between jouissance and the Sinthome can be better explained: Luckmann’s comprehension of great transcendence can be said to fit Lacan’s concept of the Real, to the extent that the former is able to complement the latter. Last, as a phenomenological term, experiences of transcendence critique the linguistically oriented psychoanalysis of the early Lacan and has the potential to integrate the inexplicit realm of experience which resists language. INTRODUCING EXPERIENCES OF TRANSCENDENCE INTO THE BORROMEAN KNOT The later Lacan leaves his structuralist way of thinking behind and gives the Real, through the Sinthome and supplementary jouissance, the opportunity to no longer only have a traumatic and destructive effect. Supplementary jouissance becomes accessible to humans as speaking beings through the Sinthome, as we have seen in the case of Joyce. Joyce’s last name embodies the enjoyment beyond language that Lacan represents in the Borromean Knot with the additional ring—a type of life belt—of the Sinthome.64 With the Sinthome, there is a way to overcome the boundaries of language, or in other words, the potential to transcend language. Although Lacan himself hardly spoke of “transcendence” or “transcending,”65 the fact that theologians, linguists,66 and psychoanalysts67––albeit differently and according to the context of their fields––discuss Lacan in relation to some form of transcendence demonstrates this potential dimension of the Borromean Knot with the Sinthome. In Encore, Lacan links supplementary jouissance with mysticism and opens the door to the Real for religions that were previously exclusively relegated to the register of the Symbolic.68 Previously in Lacan’s thought, God, Mohammed, Ganesha, Love, and all other named religious figures were reserved for the status of partial objects or lacking objects. They could never be lifted to the status of the Thing, because there was no access to it.69 These religious entities, as lacking objects, which trigger a lacking jouissance, had above all the function of displacing supplementary jouissance.

176

J anina M aris H ofer

For example, the early Lacan would never have said that the Christian commandment of charity could be capable of evolving supplementary jouissance.70 The later Lacan, in contrast, turns to mysticism and uses the supplementary jouissance of a Christian mystic, Therese von Avila, for his argumentation.71 As we have seen, Luckmann, who also deals with mystical experiences, dreams, and intoxication as belonging to another reality, uses the concept of great transcendence. Following his sociological and phenomenological approach, he categorises these events as mystical experiences.72 In this thought tradition, Luckmann assumes the primacy of the subject, as Lacan does too, but Luckmann does not proceed from the primacy of language, as a sign system without meaning. Instead, he posits the subjective experience as a logical premise, which means language subsequently translates the experience to make it intersubjectively comprehendible. This phenomenological approach to mysticism, dreams, and other extraordinary realities, which prioritises the subject’s experience, potentially criticises Lacan’s primacy of language. In addition, Luckmann’s concept of experience that brings forth the experience of (great) transcendence can also be critically contrasted with Lacan’s supplementary jouissance enabled by the Sinthome. More precisely, the primacy of subjective experience makes it possible to view the Sinthome as a linguistic expression of supplementary jouissance, which in Luckmann’s concepts can be described as (great) transcendence. Yet the possibility of substituting supplementary jouissance with an experience of transcendence only is applicable in the rare case when the ring of the Sinthome holds the three other rings together. In that moment the Sinthome prevents the Borromean Knot from falling apart and thus enables supplementary jouissance. In such a case, the Sinthome takes over the function of the symbolic ring and enables something akin to an experience of transcendence in the intersection between the Real and the Imaginary ring. By overriding the Symbolic order, the Sinthome becomes a hybrid between experience (or in Lacan’s words jouissance) and language, in which language does not prevail and experience does not fragment. The Sinthome coats the transcendent experience with language, thus providing a language-cloak that gives this transcendent experience a shape or body without linking this body to the chain of signifiers.73 The body as plenitude causes an interruption in the chain, because it does not refer to a subsequent signifier, but marks the end of the signifying chain and thus becomes the fundamental signifier. Accordingly, the Sinthome is recognisable in language and assumes the function of Luckmann’s symbols. Unlike Luckmann’s understanding of

T ranscendence in the B orromean K not

177

symbols, each Sinthome is individual and can be recognised by others, including the imaginary self, but cannot be deciphered. It can only be accepted as an indication, not directly attached to any signifiers, and therefore refers to another reality beyond language. The Sinthome verbalises the experience of transcendence, assumes the function of the Symbolic, and at the same time makes it impossible to understand or decipher the transcendent experience. For Lacan, the essence of speaking does not lie in vocalisation—as an example he mentions the deaf—but in the process of verbalisation with all its nuances: the Sinthome.74 Similar to the symptom, it can only be recognised by a detour, as a lack in the Symbolic-Imaginary language. Yet unlike the symptom, the Sinthome can be noted by its persistence, which makes any further analysis impossible, and, in Lacan’s words, marks the end of the analysis. The Sinthome assumes the function of the Symbolic and at the same time puts experience above language, such that from now on it is understood as a systematic place holder of the experience of transcendence, which manifests itself in Symbolic-Imaginary language. If in Lacan’s Borromean Knot one replaces supplementary jouissance with Luckmann’s great experience of transcendence,75 the result is transcendent experiences organised by the Sinthome. By integrating the concept of transcendent experience, Lacan’s theory of knots is helped in three ways. First, Lacan’s complex concept of jouissance gains definitional sharpness, since we no longer have to use it for the two contradictory concepts of enjoyable lack and supplementary jouissance. We can replace the latter completely by the term “experiences of transcendence.” Second, unlike supplementary jouissance, experiences of transcendence do not imply an increase in enjoyment compared to the lacking jouissance—there is nothing akin to a concept of jouissance at stake in Luckmann’s experiences of transcendence. Luckmann’s concept does not imply a positive (joyful) evaluation of the experience, but merely describes it as something extralinguistic and therefore distinct from all the experiences fragmented by language. Third, the primacy of language in the Borromean Knot can be maintained, for as long as the ring of the Symbolic does not dissolve, the subject remains bound to language, which denies him direct access to experience. Although the Sinthome is already present in the fourfold Borromean Knot, it is not required, as long as the knot holds itself together. Only when the Symbolic order is detached can the Sinthome take effect and assumes its function: the Sinthome replaces the symbols or signifiers and substitutes the primacy of language with the primacy of experience. The Sinthome enables an extralinguistic connection between the subject and its experience of transcendence.

178

J anina M aris H ofer

This is a new way to look at the function of the fourth ring, because it provokes a breach with the theoretical foundation of Lacan’s notion of humans as speaking beings. It allows them to experience the Real without putting it into language, leaving it undecipherable. At the same time, it transforms Luckmann’s experiences of transcendence into something completely individual and impossibly accessible through conscious communication. Possible examples could be reports on extraordinary experiences, such as near-death or mystical experiences or pieces of art like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Perhaps most radically, if experiences of transcendence are an expression of religion, as Luckmann understands them, they lie beyond the structures or languages of existing religions.76 NOTES 1. Lacan creates the neologism “parlêtre” (a noun composed of the French verbs “to talk” and “to be”) because humans express themselves as divided subjects. In this chapter the terms “parlêtre” and “speaking being” are used as synonyms. See Jacques Lacan, “Joyce le symptôme II,” in Joyce avec Lacan, ed. Jacques Aubert (Paris: Navarin, 1987), 32. 2. See, for example, Luke Thurston, “Ineluctable Nodalities: On the Borromean Knot,” in Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, ed. Dany Nobus (New York: Other Press, 1998), 148. 3. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XXIII: Le sinthome (1975–1976) (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 20. 4. See Thurston, “Ineluctable Nodalities,” 150; Ulrike Schneider-Harpprecht, Mit Symptomen leben: Eine andere Perspektive der Psychoanalyse Jacques Lacans mit Blick auf Theologie und Kirche (Münster: Lit, 2000), 281. 5. See Thurston, “Ineluctable Nodalities,”148. 6. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXIII: The Sinthome (1975–1976) (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016), 30. 7. See Thurston, “Ineluctable Nodalities,” 149f. 8. Heidegger’s term “ekstasis” has been rendered as “ex-sistence” in the French translations of his Being and Time. Lacan directly refers to Heidegger’s temporality of Dasein, when using the term “ex-sistence.” See Janina Maris Hofer, Sprache der Transzendenzerfahrungen: Die Briefsammlung der Parapsychologischen Beratungsstelle Freiburg i.B. (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2018), 69. 9. Thurston, “Ineluctable Nodalities,” 151. 10. Jacques Lacan, Seminar, XXII: RSI, 36f. http:​//www​.laca​ninir​eland​.com/​ web/t​ransl​ation​s/sem​inars​/, accessed 11 November 2018. 11. See Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XXII: Réel et symbolique et imaginaire (1974–1975), 101–106. http://gaogoa.free.fr/SeminaireS.htm, accessed 11 November 2018.

T ranscendence in the B orromean K not

179

12. See Thurston, “Ineluctable Nodalities,” 150f. 13. Thurston, “Ineluctable Nodalities,” 155. 14. Thurston, “Ineluctable Nodalities,” 155. 15. See Thurston, “Ineluctable Nodalities,” 158. 16. See Jacques-Alan Miller, “La topologie dans l’ensemble de l’enseignement de Lacan,” in Quarto. Bulletin de psychoanalyse, no. 2 (Bruxelles: Bulletin de l’école de la cause freudienne en Belgique, 1981), 14f. 17. See Thurston, “Ineluctable Nodalities,” 157. 18. See Peter Widmer, Subversion des Begehrens eine Einführung in Jacques Lacans Werk (Wien: Turia und Kant, 2012), 11. 19. See James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1987), 15. 20. Lacan, Seminar XXIII, 42. 21. See Lacan, Séminaire, livre XXIII, 152. 22. Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XXII, 87, translated into English by the author. 23. Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XXII, 88, translated into English by the author. 24. See Marc Crommelinck, “Psychoanalyse et épistémologie,” in Psychanalyse: que reste-t-il de nos amours?, ed. Francis Martens (Bruxelles: Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2000), 112. 25. See Lacan, Séminaire, livre XXIII, 90. 26. “Here is the symptom, the effect of the Symbolic in so far as it appears in the Real, and even it is in this direction here.” Lacan, Seminar, Book XXII, 115. 27. Lacan, Seminar XXIII, 42. 28. Lacan, Seminar XXIII, 58. 29. See Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XXII, 134; Jean-Marie Jadin, “Au coeur de la jouissance: L’objet a,” in La Jouissance Au Fil De L’enseignement De Lacan, ed. Jean-Marie Jadin and Marcel Ritter (Toulouse: érès, 2009), 456f. 30. “Lalangue” is a neologism of Lacan and can be defined as: If the material words are enjoyed as in motérialisme, this can be understood as a synonym for lalangue, in its non-existing pure manner. In this, the human gets in touch with the Real through the material word of the imaginary order; the expression of this touch is found in the Sinthome. See Lacan, Séminaire, livre XXIII, 80. 31. Lacan named it “phallic jouissance” after the Freudian term and meant that desire and lack are its main characteristics. Henceforth it is referred to in this work as “lacking jouissance,” which is less charged with the baggage of criticism associated with the Freudian terms. 32. Lacan introduces the term objet a to distinguish it from the other objects that existed in Freud’s model. The letter “a” is never differentiated, but is only a symbol of the object meant in this way. See Jacques-Alain Miller, “Jacques Lacan and the Voice,” in The Later Lacan: An Introduction, ed. Véronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 138. 33. See Hofer, Sprache der Transzendenzerfahrungen, 100ff. 34. See Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Taylor & Francis, 2006), 98f.; Peter Geissbühler, La réception apaisante du manque en dieu et en l’homme selon Jean Ansaldi. Le nouage discontinu de la

180

J anina M aris H ofer

foi et du désir avec le langage, en théologie et en psychanalyse, à partir et en vue de l’éxistance du croyant chrétien, (unpublished, 2010), 743. 35. See Geissbühler, La réception apaisante du manque en dieu et en l’homme selon Jean Ansaldi, 156. 36. See Widmer, Subversion des Begehrens, 11. 37. See Lacan, Seminar XXIII, 77. 38. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book V: The Formations of the Unconscious, 229. http:​//www​.laca​ninir​eland​.com/​web/t​ransl​ation​s/sem​inars​/, accessed June 1, 2018. 39. See Dylan Evans, Wörterbuch der Lacanschen Psychoanalyse (Wien: Turia und Kant, 2002), 113; Dylan Evans, “From Kantian Ethics to Mystical Experience: An Exploration of Jouissance,” in Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, ed. Dany Nobus (New York: Other Press, 1998), 3. 40. See Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XXI: Les non-dupes errent (1973– 1974), ed. École lacanienne de psychanalyse (1973–1974), 27f. http:​//www​.vala​s.fr/​ IMG/p​df/S2​1_NON​-DUPE​S---.​pdf, accessed 31 March 2019. 41. See Evans, “From Kantian Ethics to Mystical Experience,” 5f.; Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XX: Encore (1972–1973), Le champ freudien (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 14. 42. See Schneider-Harpprecht, Mit Symptomen leben, 288. 43. In addition, it not only erases the biological burden, but also integrates the criticism of the concept of the “phallus” by Derrida and feminist authors. Derrida’s main criticism lies in the emphasis on a particular signifier, the phallus, which reintroduces the metaphysics of presence. See Evans, Wörterbuch der Lacanschen Psychoanalyse, 228. 44. See Marcel Ritter, “Une reprise,” in La jouissance au fil de l’enseignement de Lacan, ed. Jean-Marie Jadin and Marcel Ritter (Toulouse: érès, 2009), 177. 45. See Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre X: L’angoisse, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 213; séminaire XX, 13. 46. Furthermore, Lacan’s supplementary jouissance is referred to as “jouissance de l’Autre,” “jouissance féminine,” “jouissance totale” or “jouissance pure.” However, only the term “supplementary jouissance” does not carry an unnecessary ballast of connotations. See Christophe Weber, “La jouissance du manque dans l’autre,” in La jouissance au fil de l’enseignement de Lacan, ed. Jean-Marie Jadin and Marcel Ritter (Toulouse: érès, 2009), 365f. 47. Luckmann refers to how Husserl uses the term “appresentation” in various writings, but emphasises the definite supremacy of the text corpus Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. See Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckmann, Strukturen der Lebenswelt (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2003), 636; also see Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1950), 142–50. 48. See Schütz and Luckmann, Strukturen der Lebenswelt, 634. 49. See Schütz and Luckmann, Strukturen der Lebenswelt, 640. 50. See Hofer, Sprache der Transzendenzerfahrungen, 122.

T ranscendence in the B orromean K not

181

51. See Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 106, 110. 52. See Schütz and Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World, 106 and 110. 53. See Hofer, Sprache der Transzendenzerfahrungen, 125–28. 54. Schütz and Luckmann, Structures of the Life-World, xiii. 55. See Schütz and Luckmann, Strukturen der Lebenswelt, 614f. 56. See Schütz and Luckmann, Strukturen der Lebenswelt, 620. 57. See Schütz and Luckmann, Strukturen der Lebenswelt, 617. 58. Luckmann uses the quotation marks in the original text and it probably means that this translation is incomplete, not a real appresentation of the experienced, as is the case in everyday reality. See Schütz and Luckmann, Structures of the Life-World, 123. 59. Both Lacan and Luckmann use the term “symbolic,” but designate two different things. By “symbolic” Luckmann means the linguistic indication of a great experience of transcendence. For Lacan, on the other hand, “symbolic” means everything that belongs to the symbolic order and appears as an error or fracture in imaginary language. 60. See Schütz and Luckmann, Strukturen der Lebenswelt, 623. 61. See Schütz and Luckmann, Strukturen der Lebenswelt, 657. 62. Schütz and Luckmann, Strukturen der Lebenswelt, 658. 63. See Schütz and Luckmann, Strukturen der Lebenswelt, 146. 64. See Jadin, Au coeur de la jouissance, 483f. 65. A counterexample is delivered in Seminar X, where he uses the word “transcendence.” See Lacan, Séminaire X, 344f. 66. See Thomas J. Brennan, Trauma, Transcendence, and Trust: Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Eliot Thinking Loss, Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 67. See Jean Allouch, La psychanalyse est-elle un exercice spirituel? Réponse à Michel Foucault (Paris: EPEL, 2007). 68. See Gabriel Boussidan, “La jouissance sexuelle,” in La jouissance au fil de l’enseignement de Lacan, ed. Jean-Marie Jadin and Marcel Ritter (Toulouse: érès, 2009), 383. 69. See Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 115. 70. Lacan reminds us of the Christian commandment of charity, which appeals to the love of the other/Other, which belongs to the register of the Imaginary/Symbolic. With the introduction of supplementary jouissance, Lacan sees the possibility of emphasising self-love in the double commandment of love, in which he sees the potential of an asexual love where nothing can be described and only enjoyed. See Lacan, Séminaire, livre XXIII, 191 and see Fink, Lacanian Subject, 120. 71. See Evans, Wörterbuch der Lacanschen Psychoanalyse, 255f. 72. See Schütz and Luckmann, Strukturen der Lebenswelt, 655. 73. Examples of such a body can be found in Hofer, Sprache der Transzendenzerfahrungen, 201ff; Lacan lists the example of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce; Jean-Louis Gault, “Two Statuses of the Symptom: Let Us Turn to Finn Again,” in

182

J anina M aris H ofer

The Later Lacan: An Introduction, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 75. 74. See Jacques Lacan, Das Seminar: Buch X: Die Angst (1962–1963) (Wien: Turia und Kant: 2010), 344. 75. Once the great transcendent experiences are integrated into Lacan’s scheme, they can be simply called “experiences of transcendence” for simplicity, since Lacan would exclude the small and medium transcendent experiences of Luckmann. See Hofer, Sprache der Transzendenzerfahrungen, 128–30. 76. Another example of these extraordinary experiences are spiritual experiences and conversions. Eckhart Tolle discusses in his book JETZT! Die Kraft der Gegenwart (Bielefeld: J. Kamphausen Verlag & Distribution GmbH, 2000) how he faced God and his description of that experience perfectly fits the experience of transcendence according to this article. See Hofer, Sprache der Transzendenzerfahrungen, 231–34.

9 FREEDOM AND NOTHINGNESS, BETWEEN THEODICY AND ANTHROPODICY Lacan and (Un)Orthodox Perspectives Davor Džalto

Relating Orthodox Christian theology to the thought of Jacques Lacan is by no means an obvious enterprise, notwithstanding the fact that the general issue of Lacan and theology has been raised and that some of the Lacanian methods have been applied in reading various religious motifs and topics.1 My intention in this chapter is to inquire into the possibilities and limitations of a comparative analysis of some of the foundational ideas of Orthodox Christianity and those of Lacan. In the first part, I focus on Lacan’s understanding of the figure of the “father” (especially the “Divine Father” of the “Judeo-Christian” tradition) and relate the functioning of this father figure with the Christian dogma of the Trinity (and, specifically, with the issue of the “monarchy” of the Father). In the second part of this chapter, I develop a comparative reading of Lacan’s idea of the “mirror stage” visà-vis the role and function of the (concept of) “icon” (image) in Orthodox Christian theology. What this analysis aspires to show is that the concept of (God) the Father, as it appears in Orthodox theology, allows for an overcoming of the “tyranny” of nature, through the affirmation of a free (personal) existence. This, however, becomes thinkable only insofar as there is an “image” (icon), which enables the human being to “assemble” his/her “real” (eschatological) identity. Although this chapter relates some of Lacan’s ideas to those that we find in Orthodox theology, I do not want to suggest here that there is an 183

184

D a v or D ž a l to

inherent relationship between the two, or that a (meaningful) “Lacanian theology” is even possible (unless, of course, “theology” is taken in a more metaphorical sense). I do think, however, that a mutual dialogue can be beneficial for both discourses. GOD (THE FATHER) In his Seminar III, on 4 July 1956 (in the context of the Schreber case), Lacan makes the following observation: Whatever certain of the weaknesses in Freud’s argument concerning ­psychosis may be, it is undeniable that the function of the father is so exalted . . . that nothing less than God the father . . . is necessary for the delusion to attain its culminating point, its point of equilibrium. The prevalence, in the entire evolution of Schreber’s psychosis, of paternal characters who replace one another, grow larger and larger and envelop one another to the point of becoming identified with the divine Father himself, a divinity marked by the properly paternal accent, is undeniable, unshakable.2

It seems that Lacan follows here the general Freudian scheme when it comes to the relationship between the (family) paternal figure and the “Divine Father.” It is, indeed, very tempting to establish a direct link between the earthly father figure and the heavenly Father (God). A direct link between the two was established very early in modern psychoanalysis, although the interpretations of this link varied (when one compares Freud’s and Jung’s readings for instance). Freud saw the concept of God as some kind of (both individual and collective) delusion, which has its origins in the projection of the father figure unto the metaphysical plan. In the experience of the child, the father is the source of authority, prohibition, fear, but also of protection, help, and desire.3 Consequently, the process of growing up does not necessarily mean that the need for a paternal figure fades away; it becomes only transferred from the biological/family father figure unto the general, metaphysical plan. This gives birth to the universal, all-powerful Father, named “god” (with or without the capital “g”).4 What this scheme implies is that the idea of (a) god primarily functions as a codification of authority, which conforms to the hierarchically organised society. Thus the fantasy of god (the universal father) mediates all sorts of unconscious phenomena, including the Oedipus complex, sadomasochistic impulses, and the like. In this sense, both of these father figures (the “real” [family] father and the “Divine Father”) belong to the symbolic order, they

F reedom and N othingness

185

are established as part of our immersion into the (symbolic, social) “world.” The “Big Other” speaks through both of these paternal figures. It seems that such understanding of the metaphysical father figure relies on the Old Testament depictions of God (especially if those depictions are read through the prism of the “symbolic” order), probably combined with late medieval and early modern theological conceptions that insisted on sin, guilt, fear, and suffering as constitutive elements of the human relationship with God, to which also belongs the idea of God as the supreme judge, who condemns the disobedient sinners and gives salvation to the obedient ones.5 When it comes to the Christian concept of the (Triune) God, the parallel between the earthly/family father and God seems even easier to establish: God the Father and (God) the Son seem to resemble human (family) figures. However, this parallel is not only far from being simple, but is, in fact, very misleading, as we will shortly see. It is based on the psychoanalytic phantasy about God (and His paternal[istic] qualities), which is very much at odds with the meaning of the “Father” figure (of God) as it is developed in Christian and, specifically, Orthodox Christian theology. THE (NAMELESS) NAME (OF THE FATHER, AND THE SON, AND THE SPIRIT) From the very beginning, Christian theologians have stressed that everything we can say (or think for that matter) about God (His being) can only be an approximation, an imperfect way of saying something about (Divine) reality which is, in principle, beyond our reach, beyond our cognitive capacities. This premise, however, contradicts the whole enterprise of “academic” theology, which has attempted to make sense of both God and His relationship with the world (and vice versa). This gave birth to the apophatic and cataphatic theological methods, the former preferring to keep silent about God (who He is and how), while the latter expresses/articulates Christian faith, formulates dogmas, and so forth (borrowing both its method and concepts from philosophy and/or rhetoric—or, nowadays, why not from psychoanalysis for instance), under the presupposition, to be sure, that everything that can be said about God as God has only relative, not absolute value and precision. The teaching of Gregory Palamas contributed to overcoming this tension, by articulating the distinction between the nature (being) of God (which remains hidden) and the Divine “energies” (modes of God’s

186

D a v or D ž a l to

revelations/operations in the world) that can be known and experienced, and through which even the created beings (e.g., humans) can enter a communion with God. As a result, God becomes knowable, and the experience of God becomes understood as real. At the same time, however, God (in His Divinity) also remains hidden, never fully graspable.6 Orthodox theology thus proposes that the true way of “knowing,” or the true “knowledge” (both of God and another human being, or the world for that matter) is not rational or philosophical. Nothing (including God) can be known or experienced in what it “really” is (a personal being), if we treat that other being as an object, that is as an external, objectified set of data that are presented to our minds.7 The only way to obtain (metaphysically) relevant knowledge is through—love.8 To love is to know, and to progress in love is to reveal, more and more, the personal reality of another being, without ever being able to exhaust it.9 To love is to acknowledge the mystery of another being, the mystery (= “hidden things”) which is, paradoxically, being revealed to us through love, without ever exhausting the mystery of a personal existence (of those we love). To put it simply, to really “know” someone or something (in a metaphysically relevant way) is to enter a (loving) communion with him/her.10 What we can conclude from this brief outline is that when Christian dogmatic theology talks about the “Father,” and the “Son,” and the “Holy Spirit,” these names should not be understood literally, as if they had been meant to project the family roles unto the metaphysical (Divine) realm. And yet, it seems impossible to simply disregard this naming of the Father, and the Son, and the (Holy) Spirit, as if these names were completely unrelated to the (traditional) family roles. The (God) “Father” refers to the generator, to the One who “brings forth” the other Divine persons—the Son and the Spirit (although not in the same way). In this sense, it might seem that the Divine Father performs a similar function as earthly fathers: They all seem to generate (although in different ways) their sons (and/or daughters) or, at least, they initiate/ participate in the generation of their offspring (in the case of human beings). The puzzling thing here is that this Christian concept of the Divine being becomes so similar to the well-known concept of gods’ daughters and sons known from various ancient mythologies. Zeus/Jupiter was one of those “genitors” of his divine sons/daughters (sometimes with the help of female goddesses/women, sometimes without, as in the case of the birth of Athena/Minerva). It becomes unclear why Christians would choose to use such controversial terminology in their attempt to explain who their God is (and how this God is both One and Three), if we keep in mind the

F reedom and N othingness

187

social and political context of the first centuries, when Christians wanted so passionately to distinguish themselves from the polytheistic surrounding in which they lived. The concept of the “Divine Father” indeed appropriates the image of the “earthly” (patriarchal) family, in which the father “gives birth” (although, in reality, it’s the mother) to his “sons” (although they might also be daughters). However, the concept of the “Father” in the Trinitarian discourse functions as a trope, it signifies two different, even opposite things at the same time. On the one hand, the names of the persons of the “Divine family” can be interpreted as indicating love, which (ideally speaking) is supposed to prevail among the family members as opposed to, say, business or political relationships that are based primarily on interests, profits, domination, and the like. In other words, it is the family (or an image of it) which has traditionally been understood as the place where one normally experiences love and very close relationships, at least more than in other types of human interactions that belong to the symbolic order. The relationship between God the Father and (God) the Son, hinted at through the names used to designate the Divine Persons, is the one of closeness, but also the one of freedom and love, which does not indicate separation or subordination (which would be the case had the concepts of “Master”—“Servant” been used for instance). On the other hand however, the Divine relationships of being “born” and of “proceeding” (from the Father) stand for something very different, even opposite to the family and family/biological relationships. Christian dogma about the Triune God stands for overcoming the family and family relations as a social or biological category (that is as a category of necessity).11 The (name of the) Divine Father thus replaces the earthly one, the (name of the) Divine Son replaces the earthly son (or daughter), and the (name of the) Divine Spirit replaces the earthly mother, a symbol of love. Taken together, (the Triune) God is supposed to suggest another reality, another mode of existence, which characterises the Divine (eschatological) sphere, but in which we (as humans) are also called to be partakers. The Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit, thus replaces the natural (naturedriven or nature-determined) relationships, and calls the human beings to transform their own (necessity-based, or nature-determined) relationships into a “Godlike” existence. What is natural dies and a new reality is born, characterised by freedom and love. This new reality, which the dogma of the Trinity formulated for the first time, is what modern Orthodox theology calls personhood,12 as opposed to an individual[ised] “I.”13 This is why the Trinitarian Dogma, which speaks of the Divine “Persons” is, structurally, different from the polytheistic concept of god(s)/father(s)

188

D a v or D ž a l to

and their (divine) children. In this sense, Lacan is right when he detects that there is an irreconcilable difference between “the Greek god” and God in the Judeo-Christian context (although both his premises and his conclusions seem to be problematic): The I who says, I am the one who am, this I, absolutely alone, is the one who radically sustains the thou in his interpellation. That’s all the difference there is between the god of the tradition we come from and the god of the Greek tradition. I wondered whether the Greek god is capable of proffering himself in the mode of any I. Would he say, I am the one who is? This is out of the question, however.14

THE “MONARCHY” OF THE FATHER To understand the point about how misleading the parallel between the earthly father and Divine Father can be, one needs to go a bit deeper into Triadology, and unpack what many perceive as a “stumbling block” in Orthodox dogmatics—the question of the role of (God) the Father vis-à-vis the other Divine Persons (the Son and the Spirit). This issue, the so-called monarchy of the Father, is arguably one of the most important—and most misunderstood—concepts in Orthodox theology. Its significance can be seen from the fact that many Orthodox theologians hold it to be the distinctly Orthodox understanding of the Trinity, to be clearly differentiated from the Roman Catholic Triadology (inherited in many Protestant traditions as well). Both the monarchy issue and the issue of filioque are concerned with the relationships between the Divine Persons and, consequently, the relationship between the Divine Persons (the Father, the Son, the Spirit) and the Divinity itself (nature or essence of God). As we will see, the way we understand these relationships has important consequences as to the issue of freedom (both Divine and human) and the type of ontology we develop vis-à-vis the world in which we live. Given that this is one of the most complex places in Christian theology, it is not possible to enter here into a comprehensive analysis. It will suffice to give an outline of how this monarchy is understood in Orthodox theology, and what the consequences towards our understanding of authority and/or paternal figures are. The classical formula that was adopted (in response to the question “What does it mean that (the Christian) God is both One and Three?”) speaks of one Divinity (one Divine nature, substance, or ousia), and Three (Divine)

F reedom and N othingness

189

Persons (or hypostases). The faith in the Triune God was expressed in the Nicene (as well as in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan) creed. The NiceneConstantinopolitan creed, which is still used in the Orthodox Church, states that the Son “is born” from the Father, and the Holy Spirit “proceeds” from the Father (alone).15 The creed thus reiterates the New Testament formula given in John 15:26: “When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father—the Spirit of truth who proceeds [my emphasis] from the Father16—he will testify about me.” As it is generally known, in the Roman Catholic tradition we find the later filioque addition to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed, which determines that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son” (qui ex Patre Filioque procedit). The idea that the Son is “born” from the Father and that the Spirit “proceeds” from the Father, gave rise to the concept of the monarchy of the Father, which Gregory Nazianzus had already elaborated upon: For us there is one God, for the Godhead is one, and the Three in whom we believe proceed from and are referred to the One. . . . Thus when we look at the Godhead, the First Cause, and the Monarchy, the One appears to us; but when we look at the Persons in whom the Godhead is, who timelessly and with equal glory come forth from the First Cause, we adore the Three.17

(Of course, what goes without saying is that no temporal categories can be applied here—both “begetting” [the Son] and “proceeding” [of the Sprit] are eternal, and in this sense, the Father [as Father] is not in any sense “older” than the Son, or the Spirit). Vladimir Lossky’s understanding of the monarchy is also illuminating: Against the doctrine of procession ab utroque the Orthodox have affirmed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone—ἐκ μόνου τοῦ Πατρὸς. This formula . . . represents in its doctrinal tenor nothing more than a very plain affirmation of the traditional teaching about the ‘monarchy of the Father,’ unique source of divine hypostases. It may be objected that this formula for the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father alone provides no place for any relation of opposition between the Second Person of the Trinity [the Son] and the Third Person [the Spirit]. But those who say this overlook the fact that the very principle of relations of opposition is unacceptable to Orthodox triadology—that the expression ‘relations of origin’ has a different sense in Orthodox theology than it has among defenders of the Filioque.18

For centuries, the Orthodox Church has been defending this monarchy of the Father as a fundamental aspect of the true (Christian) faith against

190

D a v or D ž a l to

the (Roman Catholic) filioque addition. However, the monarchy has also been misunderstood, misused, and appropriated (both in the Christian “East” and “West”) in a variety of ways, making the monarchic God the Father a prototype of patriarchal/autocratic figures in the sociopolitical realm.19 Superficial or malicious readings aside, the question still remains whether or not the concept of the monarchy of the Father introduces a certain “inequality” within the Trinity, where the other Divine Persons are, in some sense at least, “subordinated” to the Father (which can, then, be applied to the sociopolitical realm to defend the monarchic rule of the family/tribe/state “fathers”). The significance of the monarchy of the Father can be interpreted primarily in terms of the liberation of (the concept of) God from the prevalence of (abstract) nature over the person (personal reality). The Trinitarian dogma advanced the concept of “person/hypostasis” as that primary reality which is free from any pre-given (determined, necessary) nature or being. Thus, God as a communion of three Divine Persons is not only free vis-à-vis the world, but also free from His own being. In other words, if God is one because the Father is one (“I believe in one God the Father [no comma after ‘God’!] . . . ), then the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are understood as free persons. On the contrary, if God is one because the Divine essence is one (although it is one!), then neither the Father nor the Son or the Holy Spirit are free from the Divine essence, which appears then as an impersonal entity (some kind of Divine “DNA”) which determines who the Divine persons are (their identity) and how, irrespectively of their (personal) relationships. However, if the “monarchy” of the Father is affirmed, the Divine essence, so to speak, exists because there is the relationship of love between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (which makes them the Father, the Son, and the Spirit), based on freedom and love. That means that the Father is “constituted” as the Father through His relationship with the Son and the Spirit (and vice versa), and not because that relationship is dictated by some nature. The monarchy thus secures God’s personal identity, God’s existence as a communion of Divine Persons who exist freely, and not for any other reason. This understanding of Triadology has important consequences as to the understanding of the relationship between God and the world, and for the status of the “earthly” (family) paternal authority. The “monarchy” of the Father de-essentialises the world, in the sense that it introduces the concept of (ontological) freedom, where personal relationships (of love) have ontological priority over nature or essence. Things, however, get more complicated when we try to grasp how this “ontological freedom” can be introduced into the human realm. How can this presence of the Divine Father

F reedom and N othingness

191

figure be understood vis-à-vis the earthly paternal figure (family father figure or an authority-figure broadly speaking)? To grasp this dynamic one has to address another crucial concept in Orthodox theology—the concept of “icon” (image). IN THE IMAGE OF (GOD) (THE FATHER . . . ) Another dogma in Christianity (in addition to the belief in Triune God) is the dogma of the Incarnation of God (the Son). This dogma speaks of the Son (Divine Logos) becoming a human being. This incarnate God (who remained God, and became also a human being) is the Messiah, Christ (the Anointed One), whose personality (following the Orthodox belief) embraces both divine and human natures, “without separation and without confusion.” What is interesting in the context discussed here is that the Son of God is referred to as an “icon” (image) of God (the Father), who reveals (in his iconic function) the Father. The idea was developed already in the Epistles attributed to Paul. In Colossians 1, we find the following verse: “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation” (Col. 1:15). Another verse, which explicitly mentions the “iconic” function of the Son, is found in 2 Corinthians: “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Cor. 4:4). There are also other places that, although not explicitly mentioning the Son/Christ as the image/icon of God/the Father, do imply such as relationship.20 Later Christian tradition would understand this iconic function of the Son (Christ) in two ways. To be an icon (image) of something/someone means that the image is similar (in some respects) to the prototype and, at the same time, different from it (in other respects).21 In this case, the idea that the Son/Christ is the image of the Divine Father means that he is “like” God (the Father) according to his Divine nature.22 So, in this sense, the Son is the icon of the Father because the Son is God (just like the Father), but he is not the Father as a Person, whose unique personal identity is based on the relationship with the Father and the Spirit. On the other hand, the iconic function of Christ (the incarnate God the Son) also implies something else. It stands for the idea that in Christ the indescribable and the undepictable (Divinity) became describable and depictable—the invisible God became a human being, which means that he appeared in a visible (and, therefore, depictable) form.23

192

D a v or D ž a l to

The “iconic” function of Christ makes sense only vis-à-vis the “observer,” meaning the human being. Christ is the icon of the Father only to the human gaze, which, through this icon, has a foretaste of a different reality, which the human eye (or mind) can never see directly, or comprehend fully. However, the icon enables the human being to transform their mode of existence in such a way that it resembles the mode of existence of God himself. This is what in the Orthodox tradition is called “divinisation” (theosis)—becoming “like God.” For the Orthodox tradition this was precisely the purpose of the incarnation of the Son—so that human beings can become gods (by grace).24 However, Christ is not only an icon, but, as an icon, he is also a prototype. He becomes the “prototype” of what the rest of human beings should become—his theanthropic being becomes an invitation for the human being to become, so to speak, anthropotheotic. In this sense one should also understand the concept of the human being as the “icon” (image) of God, which goes back to the very beginning of the Old Testament narrative.25 Orthodox theology sees the human being as the icon of God (and the icon of Christ), precisely in this sense—that the human being has the potential to overcome the biological, natural or socially-imposed constraints, and that each human being has a potential to grow into the “likeness” of God, meaning into a new mode of (personal) existence which transforms the (necessity of the) natural mode of existence into an existence which is based on freedom and love. All other instances of “iconicity” that we find in the Orthodox tradition (including icon-painting) serve this purpose. MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL . . .  It is time now to relate this icon-function, which was briefly described earlier, with the function of the “mirror image” in Lacan’s account on the “mirror stage” in the development of the human being. In his presentation delivered on 17 July 1949 in Zurich, Lacan explains, Indeed, this act, far from exhausting itself, as in the case of a monkey, in eventually acquired control over the uselessness of the image, immediately gives rise in a child to a series of gestures in which he playfully experiences the relationship between the movements made in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it duplicates— namely, the child’s own body, and the persons and even things around him.26

F reedom and N othingness

193

The crucial concept here is that “reality” (the child’s body) mirrors the image (in the mirror). It suffices to understand the mirror stage in this context as an identification, in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes [assume] an image—an image that is seemingly predestined to have an effect at this phase, as witnessed by the use in analytic theory of antiquity’s term, ‘imago.’27 For the total form of his body, by which the subject anticipates the maturation of his power in a mirage, is given to him only as a gestalt, that is, in an exteriority in which, to be sure, this form is more constitutive than constituted, but in which, above all, it appears to him as the contour of his stature that freezes it and in a symmetry that reverses it, in opposition to the turbulent movements with which the subject feels he animates it.28

In this concept, the child’s body, and the child’s “I,” get “assembled” through the image and acquire an identity which differentiates this “I” from the rest of the world. What Lacan is proposing here is that an image (in the mirror), as something that by definition has no ontological foundations on its own (following the traditional image-prototype relationship), becomes here the generator of reality. The image that we see is constitutive of our identity, it “assembles” us into one, more or less unified whole (the “I”). Taking Lacan’s proposal a step further, we realise that this image is a mirror image in two senses precisely: It is an image of “us,” but it is also an inverted image (we are not really as we appear in the image). Both of these aspects are crucial for the whole process to work (although in a paradoxical way). On the one hand, we can ask: What does it mean to acquire our identity when we see the image of ourselves? If there is no “me” as a personal entity prior to the encounter with the mirror image, the image that appears in the mirror is not exactly the image of “me” but rather a phantom, an external(ised) copy of a (still not fully existent) reality (i.e., a personal “me” in front of the mirror). This way the mirror image “creates” a reality out of some potentiality, which is constituted only through the encounter with the image. However, this (mirror) image, as noted previously, is not really what we (“really”) look like (outside the mirror image). For example, our left appears in the mirror image on the right, and vice versa. The surface of the mirror might also be full of imperfections (stains, transparency, convex and concave surfaces, etc.) that make the image “less real” compared to the physical prototype in front of the mirror. However, these imperfections (or the “lie” of the mirror image) do not prevent the constitution of the

194

D a v or D ž a l to

“self,” quite the contrary—because of and via these properties of the mirror image, a personal “self” is constituted. This image-reality dynamic that we find in Lacan allows us to establish parallels with the role and function of the icon-concept in Orthodoxy to quite a significant degree. As we saw, already the Son/Christ function as an image vis-à-vis the human being. We also saw that the human being is the icon of God in the world, as a being who has the potential for overcoming the pre-given (natural) reality (including his/her own being), in order to become a free being in (a loving) communion with others, iconising that way the mode of existence of God Himself. In addition to these instances of iconic functions, the liturgical gathering (the Eucharist) and the physical (painted) icons also function as images of the eschatological reality (the Kingdom of God), which is “not yet,” since it comes at the end of history/ time as we know it, but is “already” here, present in history through the icons. Icons as images that make the eschatological reality (of the Kingdom of God) present (although in an imperfect way) already “here” and “now” also inverse the traditional (Platonic) understanding of the image-prototype relationship. Icons are “re-presentations” of the real “thing” (the eschaton), which means that their “real” character is not derived from anything that is “objectively” present in history (the world). They are “real” (representations) only insofar as they stand in an (iconic) relationship with the prototype. This means that we, in our so-called “real” presence (based on the necessity of our physical, biological, social . . . being) belong to the “world” (history) as something that lacks any true identity, any “real” (eschatologically relevant) substance. We, thus, face a double “nothingness” that appears as constitutive of who we are (in history): 1. From the point of view of the “real” eschatological existence, our historical being appears as a potentiality, as something that still does not really exist: in the only manner which is ontologically relevant, and that is the eschatological one. In other words, our historical being/identity appears to be similar to the undifferentiated potentialities that the child’s (nonexistent) “I” has prior to the confrontation with the mirror image. 2. From the point of view of history, our “real” eschatological identity is in the future, meaning that it is not “now” and in that sense it is (still) “nothing,” a pure potentiality to be (maybe) realised in the future. However, precisely because this eschatological identity (“us” in the future) is not “real” in the sense in which “real” things in history manifest themselves (=it is not compelling, it does not work as an objective set of data that

F reedom and N othingness

195

are presented to the analytic mind), there is freedom, there is a chance to establish this new (future) existence based on freedom and love—that is, on something that is not a physical, biological or social necessity. This personal “I” (which, as a being of communion, immediately implies “you”) thus appears out of two “nothingnesses,” the one of the historical (not-really real) existence and the future (not yet really/fully present/manifested) reality of the eschatological world. The only way in which this future existence can be (imperfectly) manifested in this world/history is—the icon. The icon (i.e., something not [quite] real by definition) thus acquires ontological priority over the “raw” reality (including the pre-given reality of our own being) as it structures that reality as “real” (in-the-eschatonpresent) existence. An icon, as an eschatological portrait of the human being, enables the (potential) reality to “assemble” and organise itself in an eschatologically relevant way. In front of it we become aware of “who we are,” and the image organises our “real self,” which starts to emerge out of the potential reality of our biological, social or historical existence. The personal identity is thus not born out of some pre-existent (ontological) reality/necessity; neither is it simply constructed as part of the symbolic order (as it is the case, partly at least, with the individual), but it rather emerges out of our ability to organise our existence conforming to an image (icon) which functions as a prototype according to which “our” (personal) reality is organised. The “iconic prototype” allows thus for the appearance of the (Divine) Father figure whose (iconic) eschatological presence enables us to get rid of all figures of authority and oppression as false icons—that is—idols. Such a scheme enables us to change our existence from one which is rooted in various types of necessities (including biological and social ones) into one which is based on freedom and self-emptying love. NOTES 1. There have been attempts at a theological articulation of Lacan in the Orthodox world, see, for example, Nikolaos Loudovikos, Psychoanalysis and Orthodox Theology: About Desire, Catholicity and Eschatology (Athens: Armos, 2006), (in Greek); Christos Yannaras, “Psychoanalysis and Orthodox Anthropology,” in Personhood: Orthodox Christianity and the Connection between Body, Mind and Soul, ed. Chirban John (Westport, CT: Bergin and Carvey, 1996), 83–89. Another interesting study (although not theological in its aspirations, and yet coming from an

196

D a v or D ž a l to

Orthodox Christian background) is Petar Jevremović’s book on Lacan, Lacan and Psychoanalysis (Belgrade: Plato, 2000), (in Serbian). 2. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses 1955–1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russel Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 314–15. 3. See Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: Liveright, 1955). 4. See Freud, The Future of an Illusion, as well as Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), chap. 1. 5. In contrast to this, C. G. Jung’s reading of the earthly father–heavenly Father link is much more complex and nuanced. Cf. Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958). 6. See Gregory Palamas, The Triads, trans. Nicholas Gendle (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1983). 7. See Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1976). 8. See Nicholas V. Sakharov, I Love Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2002). 9. A line from The Little Prince is sometimes quoted in this context, which renders the point quite clearly: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, trans. Katherine Woods (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971), chap. 21. 10. Some elements of this understanding of knowledge as, essentially, a matter of inter-personal communication can be found in the Biblical language, where the verb “to know” is used also to describe sexual intercourse (cf. Genesis 4:1). 11. See Luke 14:26. 12. See John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1985). 13. It seems that Lacan’s understanding of God in the “Judeo-Christian” tradition follows more this “individualistic” (“I”-centred) paradigm, rather than the model in which personhood (personal identity based on a loving communion) characterises God (the Father) more than God’s (individualised) essence. 14. Lacan, The Psychoses, 287. The problem, of course, with this formulation is that it, first of all, ignores the context in which the phrase “I am who I am” appears, and, it seems, that a little bit of unpacking of that context would have been beneficial for the analysis Lacan was trying to make in chapter 2 of Seminar XXIII. For Lacan: “[I]t’s one of the most profound characteristics of the mental foundation of the Judeo-Christian tradition that against it speech clearly profiles the being of the I as the ultimate ground” (Lacan, The Psychoses, 287). However, it seems that he refuses to contemplate the fact that the Christian God (at least) is One (“I”) only insofar as He/She is also Three (giving rise to the “we” identity simultaneously with the “I” one, if not before it). It is only in these dynamics that the formation of a personal identity (in the Context of Christian theology) becomes possible. 15. The original Nicean Creed does not specify the kind of relationship of the Spirit with the Father and/or the Son. 16. Vulgata renders this phrase as “qui a Patre procedit.”

F reedom and N othingness

197

17. Gregory of Nazianzus, quoted in Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974), 81. 18. Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, 78. 19. In particular discourses, the monarchy of the Father is turned even into a rationale for advocating (or condemning) particular modes of sociopolitical organisation, for example, when the “monarchy” of the Father is used as a justification of the monarchic/autocratic rule as a “distinctly” Orthodox political theology. The “monarchic” Father seemed to many as a nice theological pretext to justify the patriarchal system with the father as the “head” of the family, and, by implication, the king/autocrat as the “head” of the sociopolitical community. Those who take for granted the link between the Divine “monarchy” and earthly monarchy/autocracy, but are critical of it, often see the “monarchy” of the Father as a distinctly (“Eastern”), retrograde, pre/non-modern character of the Orthodox world, which cannot think “equality,” “plurality,” and “democracy” at the very basic (ontological) level, as the filioque addition, supposedly, does (which can be taken to advance this fantasy even further and claim that it is in this distinct feature of Orthodox dogmatic theology that one can find the reason why these ideas never truly flourished in the Orthodox countries). 20. “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known” (John 1:17–18). “‘If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.’ Philip said, ‘Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.’ Jesus answered: ‘Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, “Show us the Father”?’” (John 14:7–9). 21. “An image is a likeness depicting an archetype, but having some difference from it; the image is not like the archetype in every way.” John of Damascus, Treatise I, 9, in St John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, trans. Andrew Louth (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2003), 25. 22. “The Son is a living, natural, and undeviating image of the Father, bearing in himself the whole Father, equal to him in every respect, differing only in being caused. For the Father is the natural cause, and the Son is caused; for the Father is not from the Son, but the Son from the Father. For [the Son] is from him, that is the Father who begets him, without having his being after him.” Damascus, Three Treatises, 25. 23. This is what we find as the core argument in John of Damascus, in his defence of the holy icons (cf. Damascus, Three Treatises, I, 7–8.) 24. The purpose of the incarnation of God (the Son), his death and resurrection, have very often been misunderstood, probably under the influence of late Medieval and early Modern theologies in the West that were focused so much on the issues of guilt, sin, justification, debt-paying, and so forth. This is what we also find in Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of the incarnation in “A Meditation on Michelangelo’s Christ on the Cross” (in John Milbank, Slavoj Žižek, Creston Davis, eds., Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology (Grand

198

D a v or D ž a l to

Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2010), 169–81. Žižek (mistakenly) takes for granted that the Christian understanding of sin is “a debt requiring repayment” (169). He continues on by saying “I have asked traditional theologians a very simple question: ‘Why did God have to die on the cross? They say: ‘To pay for our sins.’ Then I ask: ‘To whom? Was there another guy with whom God had to make a deal?’ Then they rejoin: ‘No, Christ died out of a sense of justice.’ Then I say: ‘Wait a minute, the moment you say this, you’re back in the pagan universe, where gods are just higher-level beings much like us, and there is a kind of cosmic justice controlling them as well. And what you have effectively done is construct a universe in which God, in all his power and glory, is subordinate to the impersonal laws of abstract justice’” (170). Now, it is not clear who those theologians were who Žižek spoke to, but they must have been very ill-informed ones, whose understanding of Christianity was much worse than Žižek’s. In fact, were the premise true, Žižek’s objections would be entirely applicable. It is, indeed, a strange idea (from an Orthodox Christian perspective at least), bordering with blasphemy, to understand the incarnation and its purpose along the lines of “debt-paying” or some abstract “justice-making” necessity. In fact, the (original) sin in the Orthodox tradition is not even understood as a debt, or a transgression of some (legal, metaphysical, or Divinely imposed . . . ) prohibition. The sin refers to the broken communion with God, a choice of nonexistence (or existence without God), which is impossibility. However, the incarnation of Christ has been understood, from the early Christian period, not simply as an attempt on behalf of God to re-establish the broken communion, but as enabling the human being to become divine. 25. See Genesis 1:26–27. 26. Quoted after “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 75. 27. Lacan, Écrits, 76. 28. Lacan, Écrits, 76.

10 THE MOST MYSTERIOUS OF EFFUSIONS On the Presence of Jacques Lacan in the Work of Benny Lévy Gilles Hanus Translated by John Holland

At first glance, Jacques Lacan’s presence in the texts of Benny Lévy seems

both exceptional and anecdotal. His presence is exceptional because, in quantitative terms, it is rare; it is “anecdotal” because references to him are succinct and concentrated. Lévy discusses Plato, Sartre, and Levinas, of course, and Hobbes, Spinoza, and Philo of Alexandria also make appearances. Even Freud turns up in his book Le meurtre du pasteur: critique de la vision politique du monde, but Lacan? Several references to Lacan’s work are found specifically in Lévy’s reading of Freud,1 there are a few allusions to the “mirror stage” here and there in his interviews with Sartre,2 and a formula cited in Le nom de l’homme3 recurs in Le Logos et la lettre.4 Is that enough for us to speak of Lacan as having a presence in Lévy’s work? It would not be unreasonable to reply in the negative, if the effect of one person’s thought on another’s could rightly be expressed in terms of the visible space it occupies there. It is nonetheless quite striking that Lacan’s name or his work is always mentioned by Lévy at critical junctures of his reflection. This is a sufficient reason to take a moment to dwell upon this discrete, and discreet, presence. The fact that Lévy refers to Lacan whenever he is striving to think about what, in his work, bears the name “seminality”5 cannot be a mere coincidence. The presence of one author in another’s work can take several forms. First and foremost, it can be expressed in the way in which the first author is cited, referenced, glossed, discussed or critiqued—in other words, in 199

200

G i l l es H anus

the textual traces of the first scattered throughout the texts of the second. A presence can also be more subtle, and can take the form of an echo, a vestige or a resonance. That is, we can understand “presence” in the strict sense, and look for the aspects of Lacan’s thought that are explicitly present in Lévy’s text (which, as has been noted, are few but noteworthy). “Presence” can also be understood in a broader sense, one that would lead us to pay attention to the similarities in the movement of the two authors’ thought and to examine the proximity of their respective intellectual practices, their ways of explaining ideas, and the positions they take towards what each of them considers to be the dominant discourse, the discourse of the Master, from which one must always escape if any thinking is to occur. ORAL TEACHING, ANTIPHILOSOPHY, AND LITERALITY The proximity of Lacan and Lévy’s thought is manifest in at least three areas: the way that they present their thought, their polemical relation to philosophy and the importance that each attributes to the letter. For these two thinkers, the question of the link between oral teaching and the writing of texts is raised with acuity. Lacan’s widely known, published Seminars are transcriptions of the course he gave each year, and are supposed to provide something like a direct link to his thought—as he presented it. There are far fewer of his written Écrits, which have the welldeserved reputation of being much more technical and difficult to understand. Jean-Claude Milner, in particular, has raised this question of the link between speech and writing in Lacan’s work [œuvre], concluding that if a “Lacanian work” exists, it is to be found in his written texts, which Milner calls “Scripta.”6 This conclusion in no way detracts from the importance of the Seminar, but instead subordinates it to Lacan’s written texts. There is also a form of imbalance between the spoken and the written for Lévy, whose primary activity was teaching, and who gave about four yearly seminars over the course of many years.7 In comparison, he published only a very limited number of books: five, not counting his interviews with Sartre, published in 1980.8 His texts are also dense and difficult. They call for a meticulous and patient study that seeks to restore to them the power of the speech from whence they came. Indeed, all of Lévy’s books are derived from oral teachings, as can be appreciated by reading the courses that have been published since his death.9 For both of these thinkers, there is the same rejection of “easy” writing and a practice that can be compared to intense oral explication. In Lévy’s

T he M ost M ysterious of E ffusions

201

work, it is actually possible to discern something like a reversal of the aridity of writing and the profusion of speech. Both authors present, in practice, the idea that the two thoroughly distinct forms of writing and speech are linked to and complete one another. From this, it can be inferred that there is also a proximity between their respective conceptions of language. Like Lacan, Lévy was engaged in a continuous dialogue with the texts of the philosophical tradition. Both of them maintained polemical and fruitful relationships with these texts, which were sources of inspiration, which they pushed to their limits, and which they read in new ways by introducing unexpected connections.10 While avid readers of philosophy, neither conceived of his reading as a rehashing of ideas or as a learned commentary; instead, this reading was always an occasion for giving texts new meanings, allowing them to take on fresh and novel significations. This is why specialists, who are conservative by nature,11 tend to be so perplexed by Lacan and, perhaps to a lesser extent, by Lévy. Their distance from and proximity to philosophy can be summed up in a single word: antiphilosophy. This word appears in the work of both Lacan and Lévy. The former adopts it as his own;12 the latter attributes it to Levinas, whom he discusses in Visage continu.13 This is a Lacanian term and Lévy may have borrowed it from the psychoanalyst himself, whom he read, but it is more likely that he encountered it in the work of another author, one to whom he was close. The form in which Lévy evokes it suggests this interpretation. In L’œuvre claire, which was published several years before Lévy’s Visage continu, Milner writes: “Psychoanalysis has established that it is the discourse of the subject. However, it no longer needs philosophy to explain what a subject is. If philosophy is no longer useful for psychoanalysis, then it is harmful and should be acknowledged as such. This is the moment of antiphilosophy.”14 This final expression, which does not seem to occur in any of Lacan’s own texts, is what appears in Visage continu: “there is a moment of antiphilosophy in the thought of Levinas.”15 For Lévy and Lacan, antiphilosophy never involves renouncing rationality, but is rather an attempt to free oneself from the conceptual reduction of the real produced by the discourse that is specifically philosophical: the logos. In both cases, the moment of antiphilosophy emerges in the recognition of the letter’s primacy over the logos. Here Lacan appeals to Freud himself: “Freud’s originality, which disconcerts our sentiment but alone enables the effect of his work to be understood, is his recourse to the letter.”16 Although the psychoanalyst always paid attention to the philosophical resonances of his own thought, he gradually took his distance from

202

G i l l es H anus

philosophical discourse. It is linguistics, more than philosophy—which fundamentally restricts itself to producing a discourse (that of the Master)— that provides a way of understanding what is involved in the recourse to the letter, the “material medium [support]” of discourse.17 For this reason, Lacan turned instead to science—that is, to mathematics and philosophy. Although philosophy has certainly never ceased referring to science and scientificity, the relation between this science and Lacan’s own is nothing more than homonymic: for the first, what is in question is the Greek episteme; for the other, it is Galilean science. Here, Lacan opted not for the philosopheme, but instead for the matheme.18 It was also in the name of science, and of a science of the letter, that Lévy crossed swords with philosophy. Neither Greek nor modern, this science refers to Torah study in the Judaic tradition and to the “semantemes”19 that give rise to it. In Être juif, Lévy’s final book, “science” designates ‫ חוכמה‬or hokhma, which is the wisdom of the teachings given at Mount Sinai: the Torah, understood in its double dimension as written and oral.20 The division between this science and philosophy is not only temporal; such a science is located within a completely different paradigm, with a totally other form of rationality, that of the Talmud. These two ways of taking a distance from philosophical discourse are quite distinct, but they both lead to an argument with the Pauline tradition concerning its views on the relation between the letter and the spirit, and to a highlighting of the parallel between philosophical discourse and a certain type of Christianity. Lacan writes: “Of course, as it is said, the letter kills while the spirit gives life. I don’t disagree . . . , but I also ask how the spirit could live without the letter.”21 More radically, Lévy reverses the Pauline formula: “for only the letter gives life, and the spirit kills!”22 On the path that led to this statement, Lévy had met up with Lacan and his thinking. We shall now examine their encounter at the point where it was the most intense: the name of the father. THE NAME-OF-THE-FATHER With Sartre, Lévy learned23 that nothing authentic transpires in “the bond of paternity, which is rotten.”24 Reconnecting with his being-Jewish required him to break through and struggle with the “truth of generation.”25 Things are engendered: this fact presides over our existence. It is a pure fact, devoid, as such, of meaning: “to be born is . . . to receive” one’s place, as Sartre wrote in Being and Nothingness.26 Yet birth and the place it

T he M ost M ysterious of E ffusions

203

assigns are purely contingent,27 which harks back to what presides in nausea. Everyone has to give meaning to this initial contingency: this is the very task of the For-itself, the Sartrean subject. This is so because ultimately our place is nothing in itself, independently of consciousness, which gives it a meaning: “To be sure, in being born I take a place, but I am responsible for the place which I take.”28 That generation could have a truth, that fact and meaning could commingle: this is what is not self-evident. This notion is borne out in Sartre’s notion of contingency, which is central to his thought. Contingency—the condition of the freedom to which the subject is, as we know, condemned—characterises a world in which there is no father, which most definitely does not mean that there is no progenitor. Paternity—and, more generally, parenthood, for the mother is also the locus of a problem for Sartre—speaks in terms of necessity: “When fathers have plans, children have destinies.”29 The shadow of the father casts a pall, and it must be dismantled in order to give meaning to existence and to become, as it were, one’s own son;30 this is Sartre’s final word in the last chapter before the conclusion of Being and Nothingness: “Every human reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to found being and by the same stroke to constitute the In-itself which escapes contingency by being its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which religions call God.”31 In Lacanian terms, by restricting himself to existing fathers (even if they were absent, as Sartre’s father was), Sartre lacked any notion of the Nameof-the-Father. It is precisely this Name-of-the Father, or rather the Namesof-the-Father, in the plural,32 that caught the attention of Lévy, when he was looking for formulations that would enable him to free himself from the confines of the Sartrean horizon and fully engage himself with the thought of those whom he would call the “Masters of Israel.” The progenitor, who is the mother’s objet a, refers to the Name-of-theFather, by way of castration—another element lacking in Sartre—which provides a means of linking speech and paternity. The father, as a name, is an event of language33 or at least, at the outset, a question: “What can it mean to be a father?”34 That is, how is it possible to understand the strange bond—which everyone has noticed (although noticing is very different from understanding)—between copulation and procreation? “Paternity, like maternity, has a problematic essence—these are terms that are not situated purely and simply at the level of experience.”35 Experience unfolds in reality; paternity and maternity refer to the real, which is linked to speech. Lacan knots the father to the name, which is

204

G i l l es H anus

outside experience. To approach the father via the name is to emphasise that paternity is not purely biological: The point is that the sum of these facts—of copulating with a woman, that she then carries something within her womb for a certain period, that this product is finally expelled—will never lead one to constitute the notion of what it is to be a father. . . . I’m simply speaking of what it is to be a father in the sense of procreation.36

To signify this enigmatic constitution of the “being-a-father [être-père],” Lacan speaks on several occasions of “metaphor” and creates the expression “paternal metaphor.”37 Lacan names the point where father and progenitor, where instinct and signifier, become united—perhaps to the point that they coalesce—“the most mysterious of effusions.”38 Lévy borrows the same expression at least twice, for he finds that it expresses the heart of the problem, which is found, in Lacanian terms, where speech and genitality are joined: the problem of the Name-of-the-Father. He sees it provisionally as a way of expressing what is called ‫ זרע‬or zera in Hebrew,39 which denotes both seed or semen and descendants, thus indicating the very place where paternity and prophecy are concretely knotted together. For this reason, it refers to the Name-of-the-Father: “This effusion, where, in the gift of sperm, the gift of speech is retained [se réserve]—as an Idea that is sown—let us name it ‘Seminal.’”40 Ex-fundere: the Latin source of “effusion” literally means “to cause to gush” or “to spurt,” “outside.” “Effusion” also refers to the action of spreading and implies a spilling over. Very early, it came to refer to an exhilaration or transport of joy, and then to the sincere manifestation of a feeling. Literally, this term means a “pressing out,” and more figuratively or metaphorically, it means “expression.” More than a coming-out-ofoneself or an action-at-a-distance, effusion implies a projecting-oneselfoutside-the-self, which has nothing at all to do with the reversal of the paternal project/curse into filial destiny. In projecting himself outside himself, the father produces by dismantling himself: this is the mystery of paternity (and also in another sense of maternity, which Lacan does not address in this context). It is a “subtractive gift,”41 through which the father is not a cause, in the usual sense of that term, but instead a project which, by the separation that he establishes, creates a place for the person who is thus created: the father withdraws, but is preserved as a trace in his name.

T he M ost M ysterious of E ffusions

205

THE NAME AND HIS NAMES In the meditations of both thinkers, what is known as the “burning bush”42 plays an essential role in the mystery of paternity. The narrative of the “burning bush” in Exodus reads as follows: And Moses was tending the small flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian. And he drove the flock beyond the desert and came to the mountain of God, at Horeb. An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush. And he saw, and there was a bush burning in the fire and the bush was not consumed. Moses said, I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight; why doesn’t the bush burn up? And Hashem saw that he had turned aside to look and God called to him from within the bush: “Moses! Moses!” He said, “Here I am.” And He said, “Do not come closer. Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground.” He said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.43

In his reading of this passage, Lacan follows the path traced by Freudian doctrine, at the heart of which is found the “myth of the father”44 or the “Oedipus complex.”45 In his view, this central position accounts for both the force of the doctrine and the reason why post-Freudian psychoanalysis “seems to have stalled, . . . because analysts have not dared to go further than Freud regarding this question.”46 What is the meaning of this myth, which Freud sets out in Totem and Taboo47 and Moses and Monotheism?48 Essentially, it means that, for human beings, the primal father replaces the totem animal; this is attested to by the fact that the two major proscriptions of totemism correspond to the two crimes imputed to Oedipus.49 Lacan relies on the work of Lévi-Strauss50 to emphasise that the totem’s function of classification allows him to include it within the sphere of the signifier. In order to go beyond Freud as regards the central question of his doctrine, Lacan extends the totem into the signifier. Lacan moreover notes the close proximity between the notions of the “father” and of the “fear of God,”51 a proximity that would not surprise any reader of Freud, who held that: “the god of each patient is formed in the likeness of his father, . . . his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and . . . at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.”52 The question of the name of the father, when considered in the core of its intensity, involves the question of the names of God; the narrative of the burning bush provides an exemplary case for studying this. Lacan was

206

G i l l es H anus

interested in this narrative not in its own right, but as the inauguration of a biblical sequence in which the question of the name—or better, the names53—of God was essential. The variety of divine appellations is quite striking, even more so because they come to us in all their multiplicity from the mouth of God Himself.54 Further, this proliferation of names is directly linked to the question of the name of the fathers; this is emphasised by the Midrash, which Lévy cites when he discusses the burning bush narrative. The question that is raised, beyond that of the names of God, is that of the relation of God to men, and to Moses in particular. When God speaks to Moses, He first presents Himself as “the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”55 and signifies that Moses should present Him to the Hebrews as “[t]he God of your fathers,”56 or also as “the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”57 Finally, for Pharaoh, He will be “the God of the Hebrews.”58 There is thus a movement from the most private intimacy, from the point of view of Moses—“the God of your father”—to the greatest externality, from Pharaoh’s point of view—“the God of the Hebrews.” Further, the initial mention of Moses’ own father quickly disappears and is replaced with the plural, “the God of your fathers.” It is thus not enough to know what God’s name is (who He is); one must also know whose God he is. In the Lacanian schema, these two questions could also be asked in reference to the father. In his reading of the burning bush narrative in Le nom de l’homme,59 Lévy looks to the Midrash Rabbah,60 which teaches, in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua the Kohen, son of Nehemiah, that the voice that called out to Moses from the bush, twice repeating his name, was that of his own father: “He revealed Himself to him with the voice of his father.” Because Moses was a “prophetic novice” when God revealed Himself to him, the question of how he would receive the prophecy was an acute one. God said, “If I reveal Myself to him in a great voice I will frighten him,” just as His voice had frightened the six hundred thousand Hebrews gathered at the foot of Mount Sinai (the smallest of mountains, just as a bush is the smallest of trees; Abraham ibn Ezra [1092–1167], one of the great Rishonim, said that it was a lowly thorn bush). However, He could also not speak too quietly: “with a small voice I will sour him on prophecy.” In other words, prophecy must be modulated and adapted to the recipient. Everything hinges on intensity: at Sinai, Moses, who had by then become accustomed to prophecy—to the extent that this is possible—heard, “from amidst that fire,”61 in the full light of day, whereas the people “heard the voice out of the darkness.”62 Prophecy—which, as divine, is absolute—is given in a singular

T he M ost M ysterious of E ffusions

207

way, and what distinguishes the prophet from others is that he is able to hear it. The Midrash also explores the meaning of Exodus 3:2: “An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush.” The Midrash asks why the Torah specifies that the bush appeared to him, and answers that it was “to teach us that other men were with him and they did not see; only Moses saw.” Not only did the bush burn without being consumed, but Moses alone was able to see this. It is easy to understand why Lacan was interested in this passage. The Midrash also explains that Moses was not unaware of the variety of signifiers involved in the question of knowing of whom God is the God. Moses initially believed that the name of his own father was associated with those of the patriarchs, but then he realised, disappointedly, that the former had disappeared. In 3.7, referring to the request Moses made to his interlocutor at the precise moment that “your fathers” replaces “your father,”63 the Midrash “reports” that God replied, “I am not your father, rather I am the God of your father. I came to you with seduction so that you would not be afraid.” In this, God was treating Moses as if he were a child,64 so that he would pay attention to the revelation that was going to be made to him. However, from then on, He would only address “words of truth” to Moses. This does not mean that the interaction between God and Moses was fundamentally unrelated to paternity, or that the question of paternity merely served as a sort of bait intended to fool Moses and lure him in. Instead, the point is that if prophecy occurs through the intervention of the voice of what Freud called the “father in the flesh,” what is played out in it actually involves something on another level than that of family experience. In Lacanian terms, the real of the father is given in the reality of the progenitor, to which, however, it cannot be reduced. Lévy states this as follows: Yes, the words of truth supersede belief, the bursting forth of the Fathers, God of the Fathers, and not only the voice of your father, the God of your Father. Yet this is speech that, if it casts the charms of seduction aside, still retains the mark of the paternal voice, the trace of the subtractive gift. Speech that has not forgotten that effacing your traces leads to bewilderment.65

The question of the names of God is central to Talmudic tradition, as much for speculative as for halakhic reasons (that is, those of Judaic law), concerning especially the “blessing of the name,”66 a Talmudic euphemism for cursing this name (which is translated clumsily into French as “blasphème” and into English as “blasphemy”). For example, in Sanhedrin 56a, two types of names are identified: His Name and His “nicknames”

208

G i l l es H anus

(‫ כינויים‬in Hebrew).67 Both of these belong to the same class, but differ in their manner of designating and in the practical implications with which they are associated. The Name is the Tetragrammaton (as Exodus 3:15 indicates: “This shall be My name forever, This My appellation for all eternity”); all the other divine designations are “nicknames.” The difference between them can be understood by appealing to the distinction between “proper names” and “common nouns.” The “nicknames” resemble common nouns, which designate one particular thing or another, without distinguishing them, and can be applied to several of them at once. Common nouns are always predicative; they name God, for example, by stating one of His attributes. In contrast, the Name is more akin to a proper name, which cannot be attributed to anyone other than its bearer. (It is of course possible for several people to be homonyms of one another; we understand, however, that each is designated by a unique name. In any case, homonymy is not relevant to the subject of God, who is one.) The “nickname” Elohim is used in regard to certain men (such as judges, for this is one meaning of the term in Hebrew, or Moses in relation to Aaron and Pharaoh, etc.); the Tetragrammaton is obviously never used in this way. The “nicknames” are descriptions that are derived from and emphasise a trait or determination, thus saying something about anyone to whom they are applied. The Tetragrammaton, on the contrary, seems not to say something about God but rather to designate God Himself, just as a proper name designates whoever bears it, in the sense not of exhausting the bearer’s essence, in philosophical terms, but of focusing more directly on God than “nicknames” do. Common nouns are general designations: they can be defined and their essence grasped by means of propositions. Proper names seem to be pure reference, which merely point to something without defining it; no proposition can exhaust their meaning. In other words, common nouns are the subjects of predicates, by virtue of a logical connection, whereas proper names designate a unique subject, without the involvement of logic. They are strictly referential. Using the difference between proper names and common nouns as a basis for distinguishing between the Name and “nicknames” has some limitations, because another fundamental characteristic of proper names is that they are received and not self-generated.68 Now, it is self-evident that God did not receive His name from anyone other than Himself. In his seminar on the psychoses and in On the Names-of-the-Father, Lacan, like many others before him, focuses on the well-known formula that is customarily translated as the tautology “I Am that I Am.” Pure selfreference thereby takes the form of a simple iteration, a process that in fact

T he M ost M ysterious of E ffusions

209

does occur several times in the Torah. A careful reading would not content itself with judging these to be repetitions, but would seek to discover the meaning contained within an apparently tautological formula. In Exodus 33:19, for example, the verse seems to state a truism: “and I will grant the grace that I will grant and show the compassion that I will show.”69 What does this mean? Could it be said that the text is stammering? Why not instead read in this strange turn of phrase a reminder of the fact that the divine act—“I will grant grace”—supposes that there is a recipient, to which or to whom grace will be granted. The tautology thus expresses a form of relation: for grace to be granted, there needs to be someone to receive it. In the divine act, the active “part” implies a passive “part.” In this case, the passive side—the second member of the proposition—is Moses, to whom God has just announced, two verses earlier, that he has “truly gained”70 His favour. In this apparent tautology, Moses is no longer designated by his proper name, but instead by the role he plays as a prophet in the divine act. The redundancy of the formula makes the role of the prophet as such explicit: he is the non-exclusive recipient of, but the personal support for, the divine act of revelation. The most famous tautology concerns the name of God, as revealed to Moses. Lacan seems to understand it as a pure repetition, as something like the Supreme Being’s statement [énoncé] that He is identical to Himself, that he is immutable, as if, at root, everything begins by a statement [énoncé] of sameness. Is this the translation of the mirror stage into signifiers? Perhaps, however, the formula can also be read in the same way as the “tautology” that has just been presented. The formula would not at all be a statement about the divine essence or its identity with itself, but would, at best, express its essence for humans. It would then be more a question of what humans are supposed to learn from the apparent statement of such self-identity than an affirmation of this identity as such. Likewise, the name of the father could rightly be said to convey something not about the identity of the father but instead about the identity that is prescribed or revealed to the person who receives it. SEPARATION Lévy’s reading distances itself from Lacan’s in its refusal to reduce the semanteme to a philosopheme, albeit one disguised as a matheme. First divergence: Lacan’s reading is far too philosophical because it wants to cast God in the role of Supreme Being. Thus, as he develops his meditation on

210

G i l l es H anus

the Names-of-the-Father, Lacan moves back up from Moses to Abraham, the first patriarch. He approaches this figure in terms of the binding of his son Isaac, as this is described by Søren Kierkegaard and Caravaggio, wagering that this narrative manifests what the Bible has to say about the real of the father. It is not certain that, as a result, he does not find, once again, the Freudian myth of Oedipus. Indeed, Lacan follows Freud’s hypothesis that Moses the Egyptian was murdered by the Jews, in a reiteration of the murder of the father of the primal horde, a murder that would usher in the passage from the real father to the symbolic father: It is because the secret malediction of the murder of the Great Man—which itself only draws its power from the fact that it echoes the inaugural murder of humanity, that of the primitive father—it is because this event emerges into the light of day, that what, in the light of Freud’s text, we are obliged to call Christian redemption may be accomplished. That tradition alone pursues to the end the task of revealing what is involved in the primitive crime of the primordial law.71

Second divergence: Lacan’s reading of the Bible is overly “JudeoChristian,” and thus basically Christian. For example, the relation to what he identifies as the Law is always approached in terms of the figure of Paul. However, the figure of Abraham allows something else to be said about the father. For Lévy: What was wondrous for Abraham was that the sign72 points to the place where “the most mysterious of effusions” transpires. If immortals express themselves with mathemes, Abrahamic existence will use semantemes to say what arrogant rationality would have been quick to consider a minor form of knowledge. Until the time, certainly less glorious, when it runs up against a meager myth in which the son kills the father and sleeps with the mother. A myth held to be universal. What the Abrahamic body reveals: the letter brings life, like semen. The letter gives itself to such a body. For it will not die, in passing from father to son. In such a body is retained the meaning of a universality that has not had to mourn the loss of kinship.73

In order truly to understand these propositions in all their resonance, one must take leave of the field of discourse, even that of the analyst, and enter the field of study [étude]. Lacan was able, at most, to point us in this direction, but he could not give it life. This is why Jacques Lacan remains such a discreet presence in Benny Lévy’s texts, a presence that suggests rather than speaks.

T he M ost M ysterious of E ffusions

211

NOTES 1. Benny Lévy, Le meurtre du pasteur: critique de la vision politique du monde (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2002). 2. Benny Lévy, Pouvoir et liberté: cahiers, ed. Gilles Hanus (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2007). 3. Benny Lévy, Le nom de l’homme: dialogue avec Sartre (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1984). 4. Benny Lévy, Le Logos et la lettre: Philon d’Alexandrie en regard des pharisiens (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1988). 5. Lévy’s use of this term will be discussed here. 6. Jean-Claude Milner, L’oeuvre claire: Lacan, la science, la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1995), 24. 7. These seminars contain numerous references to Lacan. 8. Jean-Paul Sartre and Benny Lévy, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, trans. Adrian van den Hoven (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 9. Benny Lévy, Lévinas: Dieu et la philosophie. Séminaire de Jérusalem, 27 novembre 1996–9 juillet 199, ed. Léo Lévy (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2009); Benny Lévy, L’Alcibiade : introduction à la lecture de Platon. Cours à l’Université de Paris, 5 février 1996–20 mai 1996, ed. Gilles Hanus (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2013), VII. 10. Regarding Lacan, see Alain Juranville, Lacan et la philosophie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984); regarding Lévy, see Gilles Hanus, “Entre dialogue et polémique: Benny Lévy face à la philosophie,” Cahiers d’études lévinassiennes 9 (2010): 309–43. 11. On the difference between “specialists” and those who search for truth, see Lacan, On the Names-of-the-Father, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 74. 12. See Jacques Lacan, “Peut-être à Vincennes .  .  . ,” in Autres écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 313–15; in “Monsieur A.” (18 March 1980). http:​//esp​ace.f​reud.​pages​perso​-oran​ge.fr​/topo​s/psy​cha/p​sysem​/diss​olu9.​htm, accessed 10 April 2019. He also writes, “I’m rising up, if I may say so, against philosophy. What is certain is that it is finished.” 13. Benny Lévy, Visage continu: la pensée du retour chez Emmanuel Lévinas. (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1998), 117. 14. Milner, L’oeuvre claire, 146, emphasis added. 15. Lévy, Visage continu, 117, emphasis added. 16. Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses: The Seminar, Book III, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), 239. 17. Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 413. 18. For more on Lacan and mathematics, see Guy-Félix Duportail, Intentionnalité et trauma: Levinas et Lacan (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2005), 136ff. 19. “We shall give the name ‘semanteme’ to the Scripture’s way of signifying existence, the seminal power of the letter.” Lévy, Le Logos et la lettre, 8.

212

G i l l es H anus

20. Benny Lévy, Etre juif: étude lévinassienne (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2003), 13. 21. Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter,” 423. 22. Lévy, Le meurtre du pasteur, 34. (This passage addresses reading Plato and calls for a “Platonism of the letter,” but there is no reason not to consider it as having a general value.) 23. See Benny Lévy, La cérémonie de la naissance, ed. Gilles Hanus (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2005). 24. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: George Braziller, 1964), 19. 25. Lévy, Le meurtre du pasteur, 64. 26. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 490. 27. As Sartre writes, birth is an “absolute and incomprehensible fact,” Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 419. 28. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 495. 29. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857, Vol 1, trans. Carol Cosman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1:99. 30. Sartre returned to this question at the end of his life, in his dialogue with Benny Lévy, on the basis of numerous intuitions scattered throughout his texts, which had always remained in the penumbra; for a more detailed discussion of this. See Gilles Hanus, Penser à deux? Sartre et Benny Lévy face à face (Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme, 2013), 119ff. 31. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 615. 32. Lacan insists on the importance of this plural, but does not develop this theme; see On the Names-of-the-Father, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 55–56. 33. Lacan writes: “the function of being a father is absolutely unthinkable in human experience without the category of the signifier.” Lacan, The Psychoses, 292. 34. Lacan, The Psychoses, 292. (Translator’s note: The author indicates that this text is also found on the back cover of the French edition of the seminar.) 35. Lacan, The Psychoses, 179. 36. Lacan, The Psychoses, 293. (Translator’s note: This text is also cited on the back cover of the French edition.) 37. For example, see Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 463, 479. 38. Lacan, The Psychoses, 189. 39. Lacan was not insensible to the Hebrew language, and had apparently learned enough of it that he was able to refer directly to certain Hebraic commentaries. For example, see On the Names-of-the-Father, 78–79. 40. Lévy, Le nom de l’homme, 90. 41. Lévy, Le nom de l’homme, 180. 42. For Lacan, see, for example, On the Names-of-the-Father, 79–80; for Lévy, see Le nom de l’homme, 161ff.

T he M ost M ysterious of E ffusions

213

43. Exodus 3:1–6. [Translator’s note: All citations of the Hebrew Bible are from Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures: The New JPS Translation according to the Traditional Hebrew Text (NJPS). The NJPS version of these specific verses has been modified to reflect the original French translation provided by the author (the NJPS transliteration of place names has been retained): Et Moïse faisait paître le menu bétail de son beau-père, Jethro, prêtre de Madian. Et il conduisit le troupeau au-delà du désert et parvint à la montagne de Dieu, au Horev. Un ange de Dieu lui apparut dans une flamme de feu du sein du buisson. Et il vit et voici que le buisson brûlait dans le feu et que le buisson ne se consumait pas. Moïse dit: je vais me détourner afin de voir cette grande vision: pourquoi le buisson n’est pas brûlé. Et Hachem vit qu’il se détournait pour voir et Dieu l’appela du sein du buisson, disant: “Moïse, Moïse.” Il dit: “Me voici.” Il dit: “N’approche pas d’ici. Retire tes sandales de tes pieds car le lieu sur lequel tu te tiens est une terre sainte.” Il dit: “Je suis le Dieu de ton père, le Dieu d’Abraham, le Dieu d’Isaac et le Dieu de Jacob. Et Moïse cacha son visage car il craignait de contempler Dieu.”

44. Lacan, On the Names-of-the-Father, 72. 45. Lacan, The Psychoses, 268. 46. Lacan, On the Names-of-the-Father, 72. 47. Sigmund Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” in The Standard Edition, Vol. XIII (London: Hogarth, 1953), 1–161. 48. Sigmund Freud, “Moses and Monotheism,” in The Standard Edition, Vol. XXIII (London: Hogarth, 1964), 1–140. 49. Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” 132. 50. See in particular Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). 51. Lacan, The Psychoses, 268. 52. Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” 147. 53. Lacan returns to this question with an expression of regret in “Science and Truth”: “I am inconsolable at having had to drop my project of relating the function of the Name-of-the-Father to the study of the Bible”; Jacques Lacan, “Science and Truth,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 742. 54. For a discussion of the Name in Lévy’s work, see chapter 4 in Gilles Hanus, Benny Lévy, l’éclat de la pensée (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2013). 55. Exodus 3:6. 56. Exodus 3:13. 57. Exodus 3:15,16. 58. Exodus 3:18. 59. Lévy, Le nom de l’homme, 161ff. 60. The English translation of the Exodus Rabbah 3:1 cited here is by Dena Weiss and is available online at Sepharia: https​://ww​w.sef​aria.​org/S​hemot​_Rabb​ ah.3?​ven=D​ena_W​eiss_​trans​latio​n&lan​g=bi.​ Other sections of the Rabbah have been translated from the French provided by the author.

214

G i l l es H anus

61. Deuteronomy 4:36. 62. Deuteronomy 5:20. 63. It should be noted that, in addition to moving from the singular to the plural, there is also a move from the familiar to the formal use of the second person (i.e., “thy father” vs. “your fathers”). 64. There is a play on words in the midrash around the root of the verb used here, the radical of which can mean either “credulous” (pitui) or “child” (pesi). 65. Lévy, Le nom de l’homme, 163. 66. “The Name,” or Hashem, is a traditional name for or way of speaking of God. Lacan shows that he has only an approximate knowledge of this when he claims that “Shem,” without its article, is a name of God. 67. On the difference between the Tetragrammaton and the other names that designate the attributes of God by homonymy with His “actions,” see chapter 61 in Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedländer (Skokie: Varda Press, 2002), 89–91. 68. I would like to thank Jean-Claude Milner for drawing my attention to this characteristic. 69. This is the literal translation presented in Exodus 33:19, note b-b (NJPS). 70. Exodus 3:17. 71. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar, Book VII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 174. 72. This refers to circumcision, the “sign of the covenant,” (Genesis 17:11) for which symbolic castration could well be a substitute. 73. Lévy, Le nom de l’homme, 170.

11 MEANING AND EMPTINESS Re-introducing Ibn ‘Arabī to Late Modern Minds Philipp Valentini

The great Muslim teacher Ibn ‘Arabī (1165–1240) has been introduced in the West first through Renaissance epistemologies and later, in the twentieth century, through late occultist epistemologies. Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, Christian Kabbalah, and Martinist Free-Masonry were mingled to create a hermeneutical device through which the modern scholar or convert to Islam could approach Ibn ‘Arabī ‘s texts. Nowadays, however, historians of Sufism tend to read Ibn ‘Arabī only through a Neoplatonist framework,1 while specialists of Ibn ‘Arabī generally defend the idea that his teachings cannot be reduced to a Neoplatonist paradigm.2 The first part of this chapter shall argue that Ibn ‘Arabī is not a Neoplatonist. This is then followed by a digression into Lacanian theory that takes Lacan’s attempt to extract himself from the kind of thinking of a “Christian Kabbalist” (1962) as well as from late occultism (1975–1976) seriously. The digression through Lacanian theory enables me then to use his transformation of the French language in such a way that we are no longer in need of the couple on which European modernity has constructed its imperial apprehension of other spiritualities: the knot “Being&Consciousness.”

215

216

P h i l ipp V a l entini

‘ADAM AND IJĀD, OR WHY IBN ‘ARABĪ IS NOT A NEOPLATONIST In the first pages of his book on the history of Western Sufism,3 Mark Sedgwick argues that it is the shared episteme of Neoplatonism that made it possible for European spiritual seekers to find something akin to their own world-views in the texts of Muslim mystics. The discursive markers that designate a text as Neoplatonic are, according to him, the following: • the relation between the ultimate One and the many is that of an ontological emanation: “everything must derive from the One without implicating the One in any form of change.”4 • the individual soul found in matter and the universal soul found in intelligence are one: “by parallel a landscape which a number of people are admiring remains one, even though each person has their own separate and different view of that landscape.”5 • Neoplatonism implies a chain of being in which being is homogeneous to consciousness. This is to say that the consciousness—or as Sedgwick calls it the “life force”6—of being is being itself and not something other than being itself. On the basis of these three discursive markers, Sedgwick then argues that Ibn ‘Arabī is a Neoplatonist because he sees God as both “One and Intelligence”;7 in modern terms, we would say as simultaneously being and consciousness.8 I would add to these three items a fourth, namely a presence of the metaphor of the mirror that Plotinus uses to describe the relation between matter and intelligence. Material bodies are similar to mirrors in which images of being appear and disappear. Plotinus writes: The being which is imagined in it is “not” being but only a fleeting frivolity; accordingly, the things which seem to come to be in it are frivolities, nothing but phantoms on a phantom, just like something in a mirror which really exists in one place but is reflected in another.9

The purpose of the metaphor of the mirror in a similar context is then to acknowledge the difference between different existent things while remaining mindful of the fact that “we cannot think of something of God here and something else there, nor of all God gathered at some one spot: there is an instantaneous presence everywhere, nothing containing and nothing

M eaning and E mptiness

217

left void, everything therefore fully held by the divine.”10 What is of importance here is that in a Neoplatonist framework, this void and emptiness imply negative qualities that must be avoided. According to Plotinus, matter is “no-thing,” “evil,” “feminine,” “measureless,” but this evilness is not ontological, simply because all that exists participates in the fundamental goodness of the One. Matter is then an inverted mirror of the One which is also “no-thing” and “measureless.”11 It is this inverted analogy that makes the soul fear a sense of horror vacui while it flees towards the One: will it go back to the nothingness (being without a form and thus stuck in the mud of evil) it came from or reach the intelligence of the One? In the words of Seidel: As it progresses towards the formless, says Plotinus, the soul fears that it will meet nothingness (VI.9.3) the shapeless form of its origin: chaos. Contemplating the ghostly shapeless form that would be matter or the shapeless form that is the One could easily excite horror vacui, whichever emptiness or chaos that might be.12

Again emptiness is seen as a conceptual enemy that disturbs the spiritual process that allows me to move towards the utter perfection of the One. What those images on the mirror then reflect is not different from being itself. Matter is “non-being” and thus a “spectre and phantasm of bulk; it is a weak and pale ghost incapable of having a form.”13 In this sense, Plotinus’s philosophy is one that praises “autoeroticism,” in that the soul discovers first that the body is a reflection of its own light, while later it finds its identity in its being a diffraction of the One.14 Or, to say it in Levinassian terms, the quest for the persistence into being is a quest for the persistence of the extension of one’s identity over the disturbing presence of the other that faces me and thus asks me irredeemably not to be, but rather to be accountable for her/him. Now, a simple remark of Ibn ‘Arabī should already raise our attention to the fact that his teachings do not praise the contemplation of pure being as such as the most perfect spiritual vision one may receive. He writes: to envision a thing itself by itself is not analogous to envisioning it in another matter/order than itself, this is to say in something that acts as a mirror. Indeed, the thing that acts as a mirror makes apparent to the thing that is reflected its own ipseity in the shape of the place in which it is reflected.15

In other words, the shape of the thing that acts as a mirror marks a place. This marking-the-place signs the form in which the reflected thing

218

P h i l ipp V a l entini

envisions itself. Houria Abdelouahed has shown—although more in an intuitive way than through a clear-cut demonstration—that the metaphor of the mirror for Ibn ‘Arabī is not a narcissistic one (nor a plotinian one). This is because the relation between the thing that is reflected and its own reflection is less important for its own self-knowledge than the speech that the breath of the reflected thing inscribes on the surface of the thing-thatacts-as-mirror. It is through that speech addressed to another-than-itself that the reflected thing seizes its own identity.16 In order to clarify why Abdelouahed’s article breaks with the hegemonic European interpretation of Ibn ‘Arabī it is first necessary to introduce the reader to the general Western view of Ibn ‘Arabī’s metaphysics. On the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy website, in an article on Ibn ‘Arabī written by William Chittick, we read the following: Foremost among the technical terms of philosophy that Ibn ‘Arabī employs is wujûd, existence or being, a word that had come to the centre of philosophical discourse with Avicenna. In its Koranic and everyday Arabic sense,  wujûd means to find, come across, become conscious of, enjoy, be ecstatic. It was used to designate existence because what exists is what is found and experienced. For Ibn ‘Arabī, the act of finding—that is, perception, awareness, and consciousness—is never absent from the fact of being found.17

Thus, according to Chittick, Ibn ‘Arabī identifies consciousness with being through the concept of wujūd that he translates either as being or as existence. In his book devoted to Ibn ‘Arabī, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, we read the following translation of a short text written by Ibn ‘Arabī about what is opposed to wujūd, this is to say ‘adam: The Real possesses the attribute of Being and the attribute of Necessary Being through Himself. His contrary is called absolute non-existence (al-'adam al-muṭlaq). . . . It is obvious that God creates the things and brings them out of non-existence into existence .  .  . the apparent situation is that their nonexistence is a relative non-existence (‘adam al iḍafi).18

What is clear from Chittick’s quotation is that Ibn ‘Arabī states that there are two forms of ‘adam: one that is absolute and one that is relative. His teachings indeed imply that each singular and concrete thing that is perceived has an immutable essence in God’s eternal science—that is, that it has never left the relative ‘adam to which it belongs and is not identical to an absolute ‘adam from which nothing could emerge. Yet this translation

M eaning and E mptiness

219

has been challenged by Eric Winkel, who is currently translating the major opus of Ibn ‘Arabī, The Meccan Openings. He has decided to translate the word 'adam as “emptiness.”19 I defend Winkel’s decision because the word “non-existence” raises a series of contradictions that Ibn ‘Arabī could not have had in mind. If we read the book of Ibn ‘Arabī that comes the closest to a philosophical treatise, The Production of Circles, we encounter the following statement: “Know that wujūd and ‘adam without a thing are not added

upon what is wujūd (mawjūd) and what is ‘adam (m‘adum), but rather it is wujūd and ‘adam itself.” In order to illustrate this point Ibn ‘Arabī then writes: “Zayd is mawjud in his essence in the market but is ‘adam (m‘adum) in his home.”20

The statement according to which a thing can be simultaneously a thing that is mawjūd and a thing that is m‘adum needs to be at the centre of our focus. Indeed, Ibn ‘Arabī argues that for the thing to be simultaneously in a state of wujūd and in a state of ‘adam, wujūd and ‘adam must not be a quality of the thing. If they were a quality, then the law of contradiction would apply (the thing cannot be black and white at the same time). However, Ibn ‘Arabī declares that a thing can be by its very essence wujūd and ‘adam simultaneously. Now, if I translate ‘adam with nonexistence I will necessarily be led to treat ‘adam as a quality that is added to the essence and by which I qualify the essence of the thing that I am describing and thus enter a set of contradictory statements. The sentence about Zayd would then read like: “Zayd is existent in the market but nonexistent at home.” Either Zayd is existent or he is non-existent. To be in a place does not make him non-existent. What translators then usually do is either add in brackets the expression “with regard to different relations” or the words “with regard to time and place,”21 which are not found in the original text. In this way they separate the essence of Zayd from his being-existent and being non-existent and thus do exactly the opposite of what Ibn ‘Arabī is here teaching.22 If we now translate ‘adam with emptiness, as Winkel does, then the contradictions constructed by the translators simply disappear. We would then read “Zayd is present in the market but in a state of (absolute) emptiness in his home.” What makes this presence of Zayd in the market? The simple fact that his body senses23 God’s presence in the market, but not in his home. What is then the identity of the body in the emptiness that it senses when it becomes aware of itself in this same void it has never left? If there would be only void/emptiness then we would not be able to give an account of the interactions that make it possible for void/emptiness to be felt and experienced—that is, known by a concrete and singular body

220

P h i l ipp V a l entini

that speaks in a clear way about its essence. Our bodies would feel different sets of affects while holding to the position that these feelings are an illusion. The body in its emptiness would state that it is both an illusion and a tangible reality. This is an antinomy from which we cannot escape if we accept that there is only emptiness. The way out of this antinomy is to accept the idea that I can only understand myself through the speech and meaning that is given to me in my interactions with others. The simple experience that proves this point is given by the fact that I cannot feel at once the totality of my body. It is only by watching the body’s reflection, feeling the touch of the other and finally being addressed by the speech of the one that gazes at me that I start knowing my own body. This is the reason why in an Islamic context the contemplation of the God that speaks and thus socially organises the letters of the Qur’an is perceived as being more perfect than the silent mental image of the Self of the First Principle that is contemplated by philosophers and ascetics.24 In order to further develop this thought, we must focus our attention on a second term that challenges western Christian and Aristotelian logics. The notion of ijād shares with the term wujūd the same linguistic root. It is thus often translated with the term “existentiation.”25 Ibn ‘Arabī has written a book whose purpose is to help the disciple put into practice the spirituality he is teaching. In this small work, The Book on the Secret of the Divine Names, he comments on every divine name by describing how it rules the life of the disciple and what use he can make of this divine name to reach the knowledge of God’s supreme Ipseity. We find in the chapter devoted to the name The Creator the following opening sentence: “The Creator predetermines the things before he existentiates (ijād) their essences, after that they are in a state of wujūd (mawjūd) in the second degree of their determination.”26 What this sentence entails is that Allah first expresses His concern for27 the immutable essences (He addresses their singular realities) and then determines their form (their capacity to receive God’s light that enables each one of these things to perceive and feel its identity). When these essences are only in the intention of God they are not aware of the emptiness in which they find themselves in, while when they receive a form—a body that feels the reality of itself and of the other than itself—they start to become aware of the emptiness in which they find themselves in. But what does the power of ijād bring forth? It brings forth a pre-created synthetic and folded meaning that can be understood only if it is experienced with a whole body that becomes aware of all its nuances through all of its senses. What the body then does is to unfold the pre-created meaning it carries through its entire existence, while bringing it back to its first issuer.

M eaning and E mptiness

221

How does Ibn ‘Arabī explicate this idea? In the book quoted before, The Production of Circles, he invents a myth that has the function of illustrating his teachings on the divine names. At the outset of this myth, each single divine name finds itself having keys that would entitle it to exert its authority on something. But, at this moment of the myth, not a single name is confronted with the thing that receives its authority. Therefore, all the divine names are not aware of the full meaning of their authorities. This is why all the divine names moved towards the name Allah and “asked for the wujūd of the Heavens and the Earth until they would be able to put the key in the right door.”28 What ijād thus brings forth is a meaning, if by meaning we intend the following: a given combination of divine names that exercise a specific authority on a single body, which thus expresses the effects of the divine initial intention addressed to its immutable essence and the rule that has combined these same divine names in this specific manner. It is then the mission of man to formulate a personal clear language by emulating the clearest language of all: the Qur’an. Man becomes aware of his mission in the emptiness in which he finds himself. In other words, we could define ijād with the following: the power by which a body becomes aware of a preeternal meaning that is addressed to its singularity. However, what this definition leaves unexplained is what “awareness” here entails for a specific meaning. AWARENESSES AND MAKING THE “IMPOSSIBLE” PRESENT “Consciousness” is a Western conceptual construction that dates at least from the nineteenth century.29 Applying consciousness to Ibn ‘Arabī is anachronistic and misleading. What we have instead is a topology of awarenesses that the body feels along its path towards the experience of God’s utmost Reality. One of the most important books of Ibn ‘Arabī is the Fusus al-Hikam. Each chapter of this book is devoted to the wisdom of a specific prophet. The first chapter is devoted to Adam, while the last chapter is devoted to Muhammad, who, in the Islamic tradition designates the one that encompasses the perfections of all previous prophets and by his own incomparability fully abrogates the laws and spiritual pedagogies related to those laws that are now bygone. As God cannot be known in His own Ipseity, that perfection is achieved for the one that sees God in the mirror of the muhammadian presence. The mirror is not understood by the Shaykh, Ibn ‘Arabī, as a projection of the identical. The mirror is rather a place where

222

P h i l ipp V a l entini

the vacuity of one’s self leaves a delimited place for the synthetic and folded meanings that come from God to occur and thus take a constructed grammatical form. In this sense, the mirror is not a narcissistic metaphor, but one that leaves the possibility open for a meeting with the other-than-myself. This point becomes evident if we compare the contemplation of God in the mirror of Adam with the contemplation of God in Muhammad’s mirror while focusing on what forms of awarennesses these two different contemplations entail. In the chapter devoted to Adam, the affects that are evoked refer to a sensation that is felt on the surface of the skin “and they did not feel/become aware,30 (wa hum lā yash'urūn, which here is about the angels that do not know all the names that God has given to Adam); or affects that are perceived by the speculative mind that draws analogies to produce universal ideas “fī‘l dhihn”;31 or a form of perception that literally grasps the thing that it intends to perceive “idrak” (here referring to the fact that the world is not able to know its subtle relation with the Real in the same way He understands it).32 In the chapter devoted to Muhammad, the senses refer to an act of testifying to the Truth that is related to a passage in the Qur’an which narrates the vision of God that innocents experience during their martyrdom.33 Along with this act of vision (mushāhadat)34 of God beyond any comparison, we find such faculties as the sight of God in the world of analogies,35 the fragrance of fine perfume and the taste of the good things36 that guide the servant on the right path, and, finally, the hearing of the conversation between God and His servant.37 All these five faculties guide humans towards the knowledge of God’s Ipseity. How? By contemplating the power of God’s first injunction in which His concern for the immutable essences is felt. The word that means either order or affair (amr) occurs three times in this chapter,38 while three is also the number that Ibn ‘Arabī attributes to Muhammad. It is then not only a body that feels with all its senses God’s Ipseity while contemplating His Ipseity in the mirror of Muhammad, but, above all, it is a body that has become able to be empowered by the supreme divine order and thus be accountable for all creation before God. This body has the power to shape its affects according to the prophetic revealed Law and its social interactions through the spoken words of the Qur’an.39 If the thing that receives wujūd is delimited and the One that emits the meanings that are carried by the thing is unlimited, what is the identity of the limit that shapes the form of the thing that is delimited? It is here that Ibn ‘Arabī’s insights on the “impossible” bring his entire thought one step further away from a Plotinian-like way of thinking. If Ibn ‘Arabī would have

M eaning and E mptiness

223

been a Plotinian Neoplatonist, he would have manipulated the impossible as a notion that refers to that which cannot be by nature, or by necessity, or by circumstances.40 But this is not the case for Ibn ‘Arabī, the Shaykh al-Akbar. His treatment of the impossible makes it something that is active in its constantly limiting the shapes of the forms that are uplifted by God’s wujūd. The “impossible” for Ibn ‘Arabī is the “thing that cannot receive wujūd.”41 Moreover, it is possible to speak about the “impossible” and thus to use it actively to circumscribe an argument by saying: “Suppose the impossible.” When my speech acts in this way it gives, in Ibn ‘Arabī’s words, a “presence to the impossible.”42 We have stated before that the experience of sharing with God a common meaning as such has a stronger perfection than the act of only experiencing emptiness as such. This is why the argument on the presence of the “impossible” is of such importance. It comes directly from the Qur’an and follows those verses in which God describes impossible situations so as to encourage His believers to be thankful: “Had there been in these two (the heaven and the earth) other gods (as well) apart from Allah, then both would have been destroyed.”43 Thus, if we are able to give presence to the impossible, then this very act of speech is that which makes it possible for an unfolded meaning to become an articulated and clear speech in which words are distinguished from another.44 The impossible is then the absolute ‘adam upon which God reflects Himself, a reflection that is best grasped and tasted in the mirror of Muhammad. Following the translation of Winkel, we would say that the “impossible” is the effective “light-blocker”45 that makes it possible to speak about the limit between different things, and thus to transform a pre-created synthetic and singularising meaning that is associated with each one of our essences into, in the world of bodies, an articulated speech. TWO FORMS OF MYSTICISM Knowing that our European languages are heavily influenced by a modern grammar and philosophy that adhere to the knot Being&Conciousness, how can we poetically transform our languages so that we might get nearer to the teachings of Ibn ‘Arabī that work through Wujūd&’Adam&Awareness? Lacan draws a distinction between two forms of mysticism. The first is what he calls occultism, while the second is a mysticism of the Law. Ibn ‘Arabī had been introduced in France and the United States in the twentieth century through a modern occultism (foremost that of Ivan Aguéli

224

P h i l ipp V a l entini

and René Guénon) which Lacan had closely known in his youth.46 Modern occultism47 designates a set of spiritual discourses and practices that historically have begun with the French magician Eliphas Levy (1810–1875) and ended with the New Age movement in the 1970s. It organises an eclectic set of spiritual teachings in a self-explaining philosophical order that historically comes from Martinist Free-Masonry, popular spinizosim and a reactualisation of late neo-alexandrian philosophy.48 This philosophical order is considered then to be a “scientific” and “pure doctrine”49 of the total identity between being as such and consciousness: “the total and absolute knowledge . . . is . . . the realisation of the totality of being.”50 “Science” and “Pure doctrine” are the reasons why the translations of modern occult teachings into social interactions have most often taken the form of cults,51 as there must be an embodied “Guru” that not only repeatedly declares authoritatively the identity between these two terms, but also expels from his sight anything that exceeds, lacks, disturbs the belief in their identity. Furthermore, according to the same logic, the modern occultist tries to enter the totality of all that is in an immediate way by investing in, with a strong desire and expectation, the word “initiation.”52 In a modern context, “initiation” would then bring the spiritual seeker directly into the utmost mystery of all that is. The seeker is thus moved by the idea that there is someone in the world that has a stable possession of the whole-of-knowledge. This “Guru” is entirely untouched by human passions and must be an embodiment of a pure intellectual doctrine. By meeting this person, the modern spiritual seeker believes that he can gain a direct access to the whole-of-being that is entirely known by the one that embodies the spiritual master. As Guénon himself puts it: “We have already stated before that initiation must have a non-human origin . . . this is also the case for the rites and symbols it uses.”53 In this sense, a spiritual quest informed by Guénon’s doctrine is the quest for an enjoyment, as the pupil invests his desire in the body of the master who embodies the subject who is supposed-to-know the whole-of-knowledge. The body of the spiritual master acts, in a Lacanian language, as the objet petit a54 that is a mediator between the whole-of-knowledge, the whole-of-being and the modern spiritual seeker.55 The “Guru” carries then for the disciple the Name-of-the-Father that stabilises the awareness the pupil has of his own body (that is seen through the eyes of his “Guru”) while he sutures the whole-of-being with the whole-that-is-known. It is after having started to investigate the differences between a Christian Kabbalist way of thinking and a Jewish way that Lacan acknowledged, on 19 December 1962: “Someone called me the last of the Christian

M eaning and E mptiness

225

kabbalists.”56 However, it is then only ten years later, on 3 March 1972 that Lacan attempts finally to step out of a late occultist worldview based on the Name-of the-Father: “I have been on the path of the Name-of-theFather. . . . But, I will never do this again.” To understand this remark, we need to introduce the second form of mysticism that Lacan presented in his seminars. The pure signifier “revealed Law” casts outside of its remit the desire for a perfect symmetry between the masculine position that aims at controlling the whole-of-knowledge and the feminine position that constantly eludes this control.57 This second form of mysticism is particularly evident in the seminar The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969–1970), when Lacan comments on the history of the biblical prophet Hosea. The Torah here narrates the story of the prophet Hosea who has married a sacred prostitute who thus praises her divinity though sexual rites. He orders her to repent. This matrimonial relation is transmuted into a spiritual hermeneutics of the relation between God and Israel. God’s unconditional love for His people is such that he keeps the door of repentance always open even when they do praise other divinities through sexual rites. What thus strikes Lacan in this story is the very fact that YHWH does not want to know anything about sexual sacred rites. In fact, as Lacan observes, YHWH seems to be the only divinity of these times that does not want to know anything about sex. YHWH makes four commands that indicate how strongly He rejects the present state of the people of Israel who practice sexual magical rites: (1) Hosea must call his son Jezrael because He will put an end to the house of Israel; (2) Hosea must call his daughter Ruhama (which means “not cherished”) because YHWH no longer cherishes the house of Israel; (3) Hosea must call his last son Lo-Ammi (“not my people”) because the house of Israel is no longer His people; and (4) the deeds of prostitution undertaken by Hosea’s wife—and thus the people of Israel who praise other divinities—must be shown in broad daylight. It is only once these four commands are enacted that YHWH will bring back in the solitude of the desert His people so that they may repent and answer positively His love: “You will then call me ‘My Spouse’ and no more ‘My Baal’” (Hosea 2:18). In the conversation between the scholar of the Torah Caquot and Lacan in the 1969–1970 seminar, the former notes that the formula for “My Spouse” is Ish, which is not gendered, while Baal means the “Master” and its feminine “Beoula” has the meaning of a woman who is in need of a husband. It is this thought that stands behind the following remark by Lacan about the God of Hosea: “There is one sure thing, all relations with women are outside the Law.”58 In other words, the pure signifier of the revealed Law leaves the

226

P h i l ipp V a l entini

gap that separates the whole-that-is (the feminine position of the bodies that eludes the political power that wants to control them or Beoula) from the whole-that-is-known (the masculine position that tries to organise the bodies according to its own philosophical categories, Baal) open without ever trying to suture them, without conflating one with the other. Why is this the case? Because the revealed Law is commented upon in such a way that no content ever closes its signification. Instead, the Law operates as the abundance of signifying meaning. This is the reason why God is not interested in any sexual magical rite, as these seek to theopolitically suture the whole-that-is (Beoula) with the whole-that-is-known (Baal). Plotinian Neoplatonism as described by Sedgwick in its modern reception shares with modern occultism the same psychological apparatus that is driven by the horror vacui and the quest for a master that stabilises by his own embodiment the whole-of-knowledge of the disciple—that is, that enacts the Name-of-the-Father. Late occultism makes an important use of the myth of the Androgyne in which by an inner meditation the disciple becomes the passive “feminine” aspect of the “primordial nature” that is fully grasped by the reality of the Self and its universal intellect. This universal intellect is fully displayed in the words and actions of the late occultist master as he is both the “uncreated soul” and the “active and detached soul.”59 In this sense, it might well be said that modern occultism is a backlash of the sacred of Baal and Beoula that has been first abolished by Judaism.60 But once the belief in this Big Other (the construction of a socially embedded mind that believes that there is somewhere a gaze that orders my thought in a closed totality so that it can fit the actual socio-political order of things) embodied in the body of the modern-late-occultist-master evaporates in thin air, the belief in being is gone. Being was only the signifier that in our European languages urged the disciple to look for the body that enfleshes the fictitious whole-of-knowledge of the disciple in the first place. For Lacan: being as such has no meaning at all. Yes, there where we find the word “being” it becomes the master-signifier as the philosophical discourse shows so well that in order to be at the service of being and to be brilliant, this is to say pretty, it finds itself being only a signifier that constantly plays the role of the master-subject (signifiant m’être61). A Master-subject that is infinitely redoubled in its mirrors.62

If there is no being for Lacan, what does the one that is no more cling to? To what Lacan understands as the Thing: that is, that which arouses my desire, but nonetheless is nowhere to be found. The Thing marks the

M eaning and E mptiness

227

emptiness and irreality of all the objects my desire meets and uplifts the troubadour to the status of one that not only knows the emptiness of the Big Other that is nothing else than a social construction, but also to the status of one that conveys the paradox of desire that is only moved by the emptiness of its desired object. The Thing is the irrepresentable that makes it possible to re-present the Real that moves my language, but is never described by it.63 Or, as Ibn ‘Arabī puts it, desire in its most intense form is always desire for something that is ‘adam.64 RETURN TO THE BEGINNING Moreover, we are now able to appreciate in a new way the use that the Islamic tradition makes of the Name-of-the-Father. It is a name that is cut and thus disrupts any attempt to build a symmetry between the whole-that-is and the whole-that-is known—that is, to tie again the knot Being&Consciousness. This difference between the whole-that-is and the whole-that-is-known is best exemplified by two apparently contradictory statements: Ibn ‘Arabī’s remark that Muhammad is “father of the spirits”65 and the Qur’anic verse (33:40): “[And know, O believers, that] Muhammad is not the father of any one of your men, but is God’s Apostle and the Seal of all Prophets. And God has indeed full knowledge of everything.” By confronting these two statements and reading the classical and early modern commentators of the Qur’an, we understand that what is here at stake is that while every existing essence of a human individual is ex ante the expression of a meaning that finds in Muhammad its cosmic and principal source, nevertheless, ex post, on the day of Judgement every biological father will flee from his child and thus not be accountable for the sins of his child.66 This is the reason why God has stripped from Muhammad the possibility of being a “father.” Muhammad will not abandon his community but instead intercede for them, and, through the mercy that is given to Muslims, he will also intercede for the whole of humanity on the Day of Judgement. In other words, Muhammad mirrors God through three features: • His being an orphan67 reminds us of the Qur’anic verse about God: He “begets not and neither is He begotten” (112:3). • In the same way that Islam strictly rejects that the term “Father” may apply to God, it reminds its believers that Muhammad should not be called father.

228

P h i l ipp V a l entini

• Finally, in the same way that God pours out His universal mercy on mankind, Muhammad is an exception that, because he is an exception, is able to work as a mercy to the worlds (in a Lacanian language we would say that the plural “worlds” tell us that he is the not-all that eludes the oppressive position that tries to close in one totality allthat-is by forcefully giving it the shape of the whole-that-is-known): “Indeed, in this [Qu’ran] is notification for a worshipping people. And We have not sent you, [O Muhammad], except as a mercy to the worlds” (21:106–7). These three analogies between God and Muhammad show us that the position of the Name-of-the-Father is always disrupted in favour of a mercy that flows through the opened gap between the whole-that-is-known and the whole-that-is-open. This act cracks a breach in the mind of the late modern individual who until now wrongly tried to construct a perfect symmetry between being and consciousness. Finally, this same breach allows her now to taste the real emptiness that she has never left. ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LACAN AND IBN ‘ARABĪ What is the fundamental difference between Lacan and our contemporary interpretation of Ibn ‘Arabī’s teachings when it comes to combining the signifiers Emptiness&Revealed Law&Body? First, we need to state the immediate and obvious difference. Both answer the same transhistorical question68—how is it possible to feel emptiness?—but within different intellectual contexts that respond to a different set of questions and answers. The fundamental problem that marks European modernity and from which Lacan never entirely steps out of is: “How can I find an identity between being and consciousness, or rather, establish the knot Being&Consciousness?” Any answer to a secondary philosophical problem is marked by the quest to answer this absolutely unanswerable question. On the other hand, all answers given by Ibn ‘Arabī to such secondary questions are answers to another unanswerable question, namely: “How do I find an identity between the way-of-being in the world according to the Law that establishes one that gives the Law and another one that abides by it, and the way-of-being in the world according to the absolute Unity of God which somehow must exclude any other ontological reality?” Nonetheless, we can compare these two very different contexts through a purely formal question: Around which pivot do Lacan and Ibn ‘Arabī ultimately make the knot Emptiness&Revealed Law&Body turn?

M eaning and E mptiness

229

From this formal point of view, Lacan’s anti-philosophy is still, even in his later days, marked by a hidden quest for the Name-of-the-Father. In fact, he praises Joyce for inventing his genealogy, namely, for creating a new master signifier that empowers his creative drive which ties together the Real (that constantly disrupts the totality I believe in), the Imaginary (the belief in a closed totality) and the Symbolic (the objects that populate this totality) which structure his mind. In the seminar The Sinthome (1975–1976), Lacan states that even if Joyce rejected his father because he never acted as a father to him, through his literary style Joyce was able to reinvent new meanings associated with his proper noun and thus treat it as a common noun. In this sense, the sound of his proper noun becomes a new master-signifier and thus a compensation for the loss of his father. In other words, the name-ofthe-father once lost comes back into the game through the hidden door of Joyce’s capacity to glide on the meanings of his proper name: “The noun which is his, this is what he values at the expense of his father.”69 Yet, this autoproductive subjectivity can function only if I become father of my own subjectivity. This is where one still finds a trace of Plotinian Neoplatonism and the urge to use the word being in the thoughts of the later Lacan. However, since for those who evolve in a Jewish or Islamic context the Law and the pre-eternal meaning are given, so too is wujūd. Wujūd “is a gift, which is Pure Good.”70 This is why ultimately the power by which I am a subject that can give a meaning to the series of affects that run on my body are a “pure gift.” This would then also be a translation for wujūd that might be better than “being” or “existence:” the gift by which this body is aware of God’s meaningful presence. Both intellectual traditions (Lacanian and Akbarian) conceive the relations between the inside and the outside as having the shape of a Möbius strip.71 Nonetheless, for Lacan the strip’s movement is given by the attempt to find a compensation for the loss of the Name-of-the-Father, while for Ibn ‘Arabī it is moved by the intense love and meaningful compassion that God has for the emptiness of the immutable essences that ask to be dressed by His wujūd via His divine names. NOTES 1. See Mark Sedgwick, Western Sufism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Alexander Knish, Sufism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), chap. 4, and especially p. 127. 2. For example, Michel Chodkiewicz, Un océan sans rivage (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 176 n.15; Gregory Lipton, Re-Thinking Ibn ‘Arabī (New York: Oxford University

230

P h i l ipp V a l entini

Press, 2018), 164; Ali Ghandour, Die Theologische Erkenntnislehre Ibn al’Arabi’s (Norderstedt: Editio Gryphus, 2018), 177–85. 3. Sedgwick, Western Sufism, 20. 4. Sedgwick, Western Sufism, 20. 5. Sedgwick, Western Sufism, 20. 6. Sedgwick, Western Sufism, 21. 7. Sedgwick, Western Sufism, 44. 8. George J. Seidel, “Chaos in Plotinus,” Revue de philosophie ancienne 10, no. 2 (1992): 211–20. 9. Plotinus, The Enneads, III.6 (26).7, 21 ff; see also Christian Schäfer, “Matter in Plotinus’s Normative Ontology,” Phronesis 49, no. 3 (2004): 266–94. 10. Plotinus, The Enneads V.5 (9). 11. Seidel, “Chaos in Plotinus,” 217. 12. Seidel, “Chaos in Plotinus,” 219. 13. Seidel, “Chaos in Plotinus,” 216. 14. Pierre Hadot, Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), 10. 15. Ibn ‘Arabī, Fuṣūṣ  al-Hikam, ed. Abu ‘al-Ala Affifi (Beirut:  Dar al-Kitab al-’Arabi, 1980), 48, translation is mine. 16. Houria Abdelouahed, “La source et l’écart,” Cliniques méditerranéennes 73, no. 1 (2006): 115–27. 17. William Chittick, Ibn Arabi. https​://pl​ato.s​tanfo​rd.ed​u/ent​ries/​ibn-a​rabi/​, accessed 6 September 2018. 18. William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge (New York: SUNY Press, 1989), 12. 19. Eric Winkel, The Youth: Book I (Eric Winkel: 2016), 27 fn. 1; see also the definition of emptiness given by the Akbarian scholar Jurjani in Kitab at T’arifât, trans. Maurice Gloton (Paris: Al Bouraq, 2005), 209, entry 712. 20. Ibn ‘Arabī, La production des cercles, eds. Paul Fenton and Maurice Gloton (Paris: Éditions de l’éclat, 1996), 5, translations are mine; see also ʿAbd-al-Ġanī Ibn-Ismāʿīl an-Nābulusī (1641–1731), Iḍāh al-maqṣūd min waḥdat al-wujūd (Cairo: Dār al-Āfāq al-’Arabīya, 2008). 21. As Gloton and Fenton precisely do in Ibn ‘Arabī, La production des cercles, trans. (from Arabic into French) Paul Fenton and Maurice Gloton (Paris: Éditions de l’éclat, 1996). 22. Another attempt to save the formula “existence and non-existence” might well be to put non-existence in the realm of the estimative judgements (wahm) that are not entirely true to the fact that only “being” is. Should we follow this hypothesis, we would understand non-existence as a production of the mind that imagines God and that at the same time (in this specific scenario) is imagined by Him. Yet what this symbolic scenario misses is that if we follow this argument to the end then we should not be able to find a theory of becoming in the teachings of Ibn ‘Arabī. But, in the Éditions de l’éclat, we do find a teaching on becoming that is not here established as a product of only the imagination. In fact, Ibn ‘Arabī makes

M eaning and E mptiness

231

the imagination of the cosmos by the believer dependent on the composition of the elements that form the body of the believer. God has the power to change this composition when a person dies and thus to shape his body in a way that enables her to imagine and feel through her whole body that she is in paradise or hell. Ibn ‘Arabī writes about what happens when a human body dies and is transferred either to paradise or hell: When He (God) grasps the human by the shape that forms the equilibrium of all its faculties, He makes her ride a mount that is different from the present composition of her body (before her death). It is by this new body of hers that she is transferred to the abode that corresponds to this new body. (See Ibn ‘Arabī, Fuṣūṣ  al-Hikam, 169, translation is mine.)

23. See the wonderful pages by Ali Ghandour on Ibn ‘Arabī and the senses of the body. For Ibn ‘Arabī the intellect that cognises a thing belongs to the servant while the senses of the body belong to God only. Ali Ghandour, Die Theologische Erkenntnislehre Ibn al’Arabi’s, 177–85. Ghandour explains that according to Ibn ‘Arabī the senses are never mistaken while the intellect as well as the faculties that are implied in the production of estimative judgements can be mistaken. The intellect even in its most perfect form is always less truthful than the senses of the body as such. 24. ‘Abdal Qadir al Jazairi, Le livre des Haltes, Vol. I, trans. Michel Lagarde (Leiden: Brill, 2000–2001), 226. 25. Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabī, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 184. 26. Ibn ‘Arabī, Le secret des Noms de Dieu, ed. Pablo Beneito (Beirut: AlBouraq, 2010), 25 (in the Arabic edition), translation is mine. 27. Anthony Shaker, Thinking in the Language of Reality (Lac des îles: Xlibris, 2012), 249. 28. Ibn ‘Arabī, La production des cercles, 40, translation is mine. 29. Von der Dämonologie zum Unbewussten: Die Transformation der Anthropologie um 1800, eds. Helmut Zander, Maren Sziede (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenburg, 2015), VII–XVI. 30. Ibn ‘Arabī, Fuṣūṣ al-Hikam, 51 31. Ibn ‘Arabī, Fuṣūṣ al-Hikam, 51. 32. Ibn ‘Arabī, Fuṣūṣ al-Hikam, 51, 54. 33. Qur’an (85:3): “and by the witness and the witnessed.” 34. Ibn ‘Arabī, Fuṣūṣ al-Hikam, 222. 35. Ibn ‘Arabī, Fuṣūṣ al-Hikam, 223. 36. Ibn ‘Arabī, Fuṣūṣ al-Hikam, 222. 37. Ibn ‘Arabī, Fuṣūṣ al-Hikam, 223. 38. The first mention of the word amr refers to the divine reality that is manifest in women. The second occurrence of amr refers to the impossibility to contemplate God’s reality without contemplating His reflection in a mirror. The third reference refers to the division between God and evil.

232

P h i l ipp V a l entini

39. For an anthropological survey of the effects of this belief on social interactions see Rudolph Ware III, The Walking Qur’an (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2014). 40. James Wilderberg, Plotinus’ Cosmology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 102. 41. Chittick, Sufi Path of Knowledge, 82. 42. Chittick, Sufi Path of Knowledge, 124. 43. Qur’an 21:23, trans. Muhammad Tahir ul Qadri. 44. Chittick, Sufi Path of Knowledge, 357. 45. Private communication from the translator concerning his forthcoming publications of chapter 360 of Ibn ‘Arabī ‘s Meccan Openings. 46. See the afterword written by Jacques-Alain Miller in Jacques Lacan, Le Sinthome 1975–1976 (Paris: Le Seuil, 2005); also see Sedgwick, Against the Modern World; Lipton, Rethinking Ibn ‘Arabī. 47. The three main modern occultists are Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891) for the English-speaking hemisphere, Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) for the Germanspeaking part of the world, and René Guénon (1886–1951) for the French-speaking countries. 48. Glenn Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Cornell University Press, 2001). 49. A famous quotation by René Guénon’s pupil and introducer of Ibn ‘Arabī in France, Michel Vâlsan is the following: “Guénon is the ‘infallible compass and impenetrable suit of armor’ to understand the teachings of Ibn ‘Arabī.” The “compass” is an allusion to Free-mason symbologies. See Michel Vâlsan, “La fonction de René Guenon et le sort de l’Occident,” Revue Études Traditionnelles n° 293 (Juil., Août, Sept., Oct, Nov. 1951): 294–95. 50. Michel Vâlsan, ”Remarques préliminaires sur l’Intellect et la Conscience,” Revue Études Traditionnelles n° 372–73 (Juil.-Août et Sept.-Oct. 1962): 201. 51. The first text on this argument is Abdallah Penot, “Guénon et les guénoniens.” http:​//als​imsim​ah.bl​ogspo​t.com​/sear​ch/la​bel/A​bdall​ah%20​Penot​%20-%​ 20Gu%​C3%A9​non%2​0et%2​0les%​20gu%​C3%A9​nonie​ns, accessed 19 September 2018. It critiques the paradigm of Guénonian cultish Sufism but still wishes to remain truthful to Guénon’s thoughts. Furthermore, this global paradigm has been exposed only recently with the publication of Paola Abenante’s articles, “Essentializing Difference: Text, Knowledge and Ritual Performance in a Sufi Brotherhood in Italy,” The e-Journal of Economics & Complexity 2, no. 1 (May 2016): 51–68; see also Paola Abenante, “Misticismo Islamico: Riflessioni Sulle Pratiche di Una Confraternita Contemporanea,” Meridiana, no. 52 (2005): 65–94; and on a theoretical level that discloses the distance between the construction of the western reception of Ibn ‘Arabī and a careful reading of Ibn ‘Arabī’s texts, see Lipton, Rethinking Ibn ‘Arabī. 52. René Guénon, Aperçus sur l’initiation (Paris: Editions Traditionnelles, 1946), 34. The sentence that best exemplifies the whole book is the following in which “initiation” is defined as the transmission of an original vibration that orders the chaos: “For the chaos to start taking form, it needs to receive an initial

M eaning and E mptiness

233

vibration.” On a microcosmic level, this refers to the transformation of the inner chaos of the apprentice that is not yet similar to the one who fully embodies in the sight of the apprentice the First Intellect. 53. René Guénon, Aperçus sur l’initiation (Paris: Editions Traditionnelles, 1946), chap. 8. 54. This is to say the object on which I project my desire and that holds together the illusion of the totality in which I believe and according to which I order all my ideas and emotions. 55. For a further analysis of this specific mode of subjectivation, see Philipp Valentini, French Sufi Theopolitics, PhD Dissertation, University of Fribourg (Switzerland), 2019. 56. Guideon Berto, ”Chronologie des références de Lacan à la Cabale.” https​:// ww​w.idi​xa.ne​t/Pix​a/pag​ixa-0​60604​2351.​html,​ accessed 20 September 2018. 57. Joan Copjec, Read my Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (London: Verso, 1994), 54; see also Philipp Valentini, “Modern French Androgyne, Pre-Modern Arab Eve: A Lacanian Discourse Critique,” European Journal of Psychoanalysis, forthcoming. 58. Jacques Lacan, Les non dupent errent 1973–1974, 43. http:​//www​.vala​s.fr/ ​Jacqu​es-La​can-l​es-no​n-dup​es-er​rent-​1973-​1974,​322, accessed 24 September 2018. 59. Michel Vâlsan, “Un symbole idéographique de l’Homme Universel (Données d’une correspondance avec René Guénon),”  Études Traditionelles 364 (March–April 1961). 60. See also Emmanuel Levinas, Du sacré au saint (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1977), 90. 61. Here is a wordplay typical of Lacan: Master-Subject sounds in French like the “signifier of my being.” 62. Hubert Ricard, “La pluralité des acceptions de l’être dans Encore,” Association lacanienne international,” (2008). http:​//www​.ali-​aix-s​alon.​com/H​Ricar​ d%20P​lural​it%C3​%A9%2​0acce​ptati​ons%2​0Etre​%20ds​%20EN​CORE%​20200​ 9.pdf​, accessed 21 September 2018. 63. Viviana M. Saint-Cyr, “Créer un vide ou de la sublimation chez Lacan,” Recherches en psychanalyse 13, no. 1 (2012): 14–21. 64. William Chittick, “The Divine Roots of Human Love,” Journal of the Ibn ‘Arabī Society 17 (1995): 55–78. 65. Ibn ‘Arabī, Futūḥāt al-Makkīyah, ed. Ahmad Shamsedin (Beirut: Dar al Kotob al Ilmiya, 2011), 19. “You are our father with regard to the spirit—and while I was addressing the presence of Adam—and Adam is our father according to our bodies.” 66. Qur’an (80:33–35): “When the piercing call [of resurrection] is heard / on a Day when everyone will [want to] flee from his brother / and from his mother and father,” trans. Muhammad Asad. 67. Shigeru Kamada, “Nabulusi’s commentary on Ibn al Farid’s Khamriya,” Orient XVIII (1982): 19–40.

234

P h i l ipp V a l entini

68. Alain De Libera, L’art des généralités (Paris: Aubier, 1999), 624; R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), chap. 5. 69. Jacques Lacan, Le Sinthome 1975–1976, 126. http:​//www​.vala​s.fr/​IMG/p​df/ s2​3_le_​sinth​ome-2​.pdf,​ accessed 23 September 2018. 70. William Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-’Arabi’s Cosmology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 330. Lacan understands the gift only as a gift of language that is given to a child who must be born to the world of her parents; see Frédérique F. Berger, “De l’infans à l’enfant: les enjeux de la structuration subjective,”  Bulletin de psychologie, vol. 479, no. 5 (2005): 505–12. 71. Jacques Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), 264; Michel Chodkiewicz, An Ocean without Shore: Ibn ‘Arabī, the Book, and the Law (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), 25.

INDEX

Abdelouahed, Houria, 218 Abel, 68 Abraham, 32, 34, 43n54, 44n56, 205–6, 210 Abraham, Karl, 26 ‘adam, 218–19, 223, 227 Adam (Kadmon), 44n65, 82–83, 92, 221–22, 233n65 Afro-pessimism, 8, 141–42, 157 Aguéli, Ivan, 224 Al-Ghazali, 60 alienation, 17, 19–20, 22, 24, 28–29, 65, 141, 143–49, 151–52, 154–56 Allah, 64, 220–21, 223 Almond, Ian, 61 angel, 7, 119–21, 123–24, 130–34, 136n16, 205, 207, 222 antagonism (Mao’s concept of), 123–24 anti-blackness, 6, 47–49, 51–56, 149 antichrist, 119, 121–23, 125 anxiety, 16, 26–28, 30, 32, 34–36, 39, 47–48, 50–54

Aquinas, 35 Archon, 17–18, 20–22, 29–30, 37 Augustine, 45n76, 78–79, 81, 93–94n6 Avicenna, 60, 218 Avila, Therese von, 176 Ayn Sof/Ein Sof, 20, 28–29, 44n69, 77, 82–84 Baal, 225–26 Badiou, Alain, 80, 119, 121, 123–24, 127, 129 becoming, 33, 38–39, 80, 82, 86, 89, 230n22. See also theosis Belaval, Yvon, 5 Benamozegh, Elie, 28, 41n16 Benjamin, Walter, 81, 119–20, 134 Beoula, 225–26 big Other, 20, 28, 37, 47, 49–51, 54, 62, 133, 185, 226–27 Bion, Wilfred, 7, 77–96 black hole, 92 Bloch, Ernst, 36, 46n91 235

236

Blumenberg, Hans, 17, 40–41n7 body, 1, 7–8, 17, 21, 25–27, 77, 154–55, 176, 192–93, 210, 217, 219–22, 224, 226, 228–29, 230–31n22 Böhme, Jakob, 3 Boothby, Richard, 47, 49–54 Borromean Knot, 4, 8, 163–82 Brouwer, Luitzen Egbertus Jan, 89–90, 92 Bruno, Pierre, 111 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 82–84 Buddhism/Zen, 1–2, 4, 10n15 burning bush, 34, 43n54, 205–7 Butler, Anthea, 52, 54 Butler, Judith, 70 Cain, 68 capitalist discourse, 7, 99–101, 110–14, 116–17n51, 132–33 Cantor, Georg, 78–79, 89, 99, 107, 116n41 Caquot, André, 131, 225–26 Carter, J. Kameron, 47, 51, 54–55 castration, 16, 18, 25–28, 32, 36, 42–43n46, 54, 57n25, 70, 78, 99, 101–5, 108–9, 111–13, 117n53 Ceremony of Tea, 2 Chesterton, Gilbert, 37–38 Chinese (language), 1–2 Chittick, William, 63, 218–19 choice, 8, 30, 49, 85, 87, 90, 92, 113, 141–46, 148–54, 156–57, 197–98n24 Christ, 23, 139n85, 191–92, 194, 197–98n24 colonialism, 4–5, 60–61, 63, 148–50, 158n9 Copjec, Joan, 142 creatio ex nihilo, 8, 84, 135 Day of Judgement. See eschatology death, 6, 17–20, 39, 54, 83, 90–91, 134, 138n79, 142, 145–46, 156, 174, 231n22; black-, 47–48, 51–52, 55; drive, 27, 85, 93. See also God,

I ndex

death of Dedekind, Richard, 78, 80 Derrida, Jacques, 69, 180n43 desire, 3–4, 6–8, 17–22, 24, 27–30, 36, 38, 43n50, 43n54, 44n69, 48, 61, 64–66, 70, 77–81, 85–86, 93, 125, 136n15, 147, 151–55, 166, 171–72, 179n31, 224–27, 233n54 destitution, 17, 21–22, 24, 39, 151 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 54 Dove, Rita, 8, 152–57 discourse, Lacan’s theories of, 99–101, 104–5, 108–14, 116–17n51, 132–33 discourse of the capitalist. See capitalist discourse echad, 25, 31, 33, 35–38, 83 El Shadday, 34, 43n54 emptiness, 3–4, 8–9, 10–11n17, 84–85, 91, 216–21, 223, 226–29, 230n19. See also ‘adam; nothing/nothingness; void encryption, 103–5, 109 end of times, 2. See also eschatology ersatz, 7, 126–27, 130–32 eschatology, 7, 119–26, 130–35, 136n15, 136n24, 130n87, 183, 187, 194–95, 227 esotericism, 2–6, 10–11n17, 31, 39–40, 62–72, 73n24, 74n50, 119, 125, 138n70 exception, 6–7, 33–40, 99, 103, 106–14, 117n53, 128, 228 excluded middle, law of, 128–29 existence, 8, 18, 22, 24–25, 34–36, 38, 40–41n7, 45n76, 54, 66, 78, 80, 85, 87, 93, 101, 105, 110, 128, 143, 149, 151, 154, 183, 186–87, 190, 192, 194–95, 197–98n24, 202–3, 210, 211n19, 218–21, 229, 230n22 exoteric/exotericism, 3–5, 119 Ezra, Abraham ibn, 206

I ndex

father, 10–11n17, 44–45n70, 55, 78, 153–55, 167, 203–7; divine, 8, 35, 38, 93–94n6, 183–87, 192, 195, 196n5, 196n13, 196n15, 197n19; monarchy of the, 188–90, 197n19; primal, 16, 23, 26, 31–33, 45–46n82, 114, 210. See also generation, truth of; Name-of-theFather; seminality formalism/formalisation, 2–4, 8, 27, 71, 105–6, 127–28, 130, 141–42, 144, 164, 166, 169 Forster, E. M., 31 Frank, Eva, 40 Frank, Jacob, 39–40 freedom, 8, 19, 37, 89, 141–43, 145, 147–48, 150–52, 155–57, 158n20, 187–88, 190, 192, 194–95, 203 Frege, Gottlob, 78, 99, 106 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 23, 26–31, 49–50, 55, 64–65, 71, 77–78, 80, 92, 101–2, 110, 114, 146, 153–55, 184, 199, 201, 205, 207, 210 Ganesha, 175 generation, 106, 186, 193, 208; truth of, 9, 202–3 gift, 17, 204, 207, 229, 234n70 gnosticism, 6, 16–25, 28–30, 37, 40–41n7, 136n5 God, 7–8, 10–11n17, 15–19, 22–27, 31–40, 43n54, 46n92, 49–51, 62–64, 66–69, 71, 79, 81–87, 91–93, 95n21, 117n53, 119, 175, 182n76, 183–92, 194, 196nn13–14, 197n24, 203, 205– 9, 216, 218–23, 225–29, 230–31n22, 231n23, 231n38; American/white, 6, 47, 52, 54–55; dark, 26, 43n50; death of, 16, 31–33, 45n81, 45– 46n82, 197–98n24; eschatological, 131, 133–34; voice of, 44n56, 45n81, 206–7. See also Allah; El Shadday; father; Yahweh/YHWH

237

Goldberg, Oskar, 77, 81–83 grammar, 1–4, 9n2, 27, 143, 151, 155, 223 Grigg, Russell, 126–28 Guénon, Rene, 224, 232n47, 232n49, 232nn51–52 Haddad, Gérard, 16, 27, 41n16, 44n56, 44n70 Hanegraaff, Wouter, 5 Hannity, Sean, 52 Hart, David Bentley, 121 hate/hatred, 6, 15–17, 19, 21–24, 26–27, 31–33, 38, 42n27, 43n54, 48–49, 87, 90–91, 94n8, 134 Hegel, G. W. F., 10n7, 28, 44n63, 49 Heidegger, Martin, 84, 178n8 hell, 7, 93, 230–31n22 Hobbes, Thomas, 199 Hosea, 225 Husserl, Edmund, 173, 180n47 Ibn ‘Arabī, 9, 60–63, 67, 75n63, 215–23, 227–29, 230n22, 231n23, 232n49, 232n51 icon, 8, 183, 191–92, 194–95 ideogram, 2 ijad, 220–21 il y a de l’Un. See Yad’lun imaginary, 3, 28, 55, 63–64, 66, 70, 141, 147, 153–55, 164–65, 167–72, 176–77, 179n30, 181n59, 181n70, 229 impossible, 6, 20–21, 57n28, 64, 106, 121, 124, 164–65, 221–23 infinite/infinitude/infinity, 7, 25, 28, 35, 36, 38, 42–43n46, 46n92, 77–92, 99, 107–9, 112–14, 117n53, 124, 128–29, 152 intuitionism/intuitionistic logic, 89–90, 92, 128–29 Israel, 28, 33, 131, 203, 225 Ives, Vanessa, 11

238

Jambet, Christian, 7, 119–27, 130–31, 133–34 Jezrael, 225 Jonas, Hans, 17 jouissance, 4, 6, 8, 16, 18–22, 24–25, 29–31, 34–36, 40, 47, 61, 83, 99–101, 134, 141, 150, 163–64, 169–73, 175–77; anti-black, 53, 55; autistic, 27–29; capitalist discourse and, 110–14, 132– 33; evil as, 48–49, 51–52; female/feminine, 26, 80, 82, 95n21; infinite/super, 17, 20, 84, 108, 117n53; the Other and, 56, 102–3, 106, 169; phallic 94n19, 102–6, 108–9, 111, 170, 172, 179n31; supplementary, 26, 170–72, 175–77, 180n46, 181n70; surplus, 105, 114, 116n27; truth vs., 131–33, 138n78 Joyce, James, 26, 31, 166–69, 175, 178, 229 Jung, Carl, 16, 25, 184, 196n5 Kabbalah, 7, 17, 20, 26–30, 35, 38, 40, 77–78, 81–87, 90–91, 93, 94n19, 95n21; Christian, 11n17, 27–31, 44n61, 215, 224–25 Kafka, Franz, 22, 24, 32 Kant, Immanuel, 34, 37, 49 katechon, 122–23 Katunal, Olga, 77, 81–82 Kierkegaard, Søren, 124, 210 Klein, Melanie, 78, 92, 95n33 Kojève, Alexandre, 2–3, 10n5, 10n7, 10n14 Kristeva, Julia, 142 lack, 28, 30, 36, 39, 48–50, 52, 54–55, 64, 66, 68–70, 72, 84, 104, 125, 127, 145, 148, 163, 165, 170–72, 175, 177, 179n31 Laclau, Ernesto, 126 lalangue, 39, 170, 179n30

I ndex

language, 1–4, 6, 10–11n17, 18, 20, 22, 26, 33, 39, 46n92, 50, 60–66, 68–69, 71, 79–80, 90, 106, 141, 143–44, 147–49, 151, 154, 163, 164, 166–67, 169–78, 201, 203, 215, 221, 223, 226– 27. See also grammar Lardreau, Guy, 7, 119–27, 130–31, 133–34 law: Judaism and, 15–16, 18–19, 31–33, 35, 37, 83, 207, 210, 229; revealed, 9, 131, 221–23, 228– 29; slavery, 144, 151, 154–55, 158n9; white, 52, 54 letter, 37, 91, 200–202, 210, 220 Lévi, Éliphas, 224 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 205 Levinas, Emmanuel, 199, 201, 217 Lévy, Benny, 9, 199–204, 206–7, 209–10 libido/libidinal, 21, 27–30, 35, 47, 87, 104, 108, 114, 141, 152, 154, 156 light, 19–20, 57n25, 82–83, 85, 91–92, 124, 191, 206, 217, 220; -blocker, 223 Lo-Ammi, 225 Lossky, Vladimir, 189 love, 16, 21, 24–26, 32, 42n27, 55, 57n29, 66, 79, 90–91, 134, 157, 172, 175, 181n70, 186–87, 190, 192, 195, 225, 229 Luckmann, Thomas, 8, 163–64, 169, 173–78, 180n47, 181n59 Luria, Isaac, 28–29, 35, 44n69, 77–78, 81, 86, 91 Mao, 123 Marcion, 23 Martin, Trayvon, 6, 47–49, 51–54 Mary (the Virgin), 40 Marx, Karl, 113–14, 115n25 Masnavi, 69–70, 75n62 Master, 3, 6–8, 37, 61, 109, 111, 119–21, 123–27, 130, 132–35,

I ndex

136n20, 136n24, 147, 187, 203, 224–26; colonial/slave-, 4, 145, 150, 151, 153–55, 157; discourse of the, 5, 100–101, 104, 110–11, 132, 200, 202 master-signifier, 25, 48–49, 55, 68, 105, 112, 126–27, 151, 226, 229 matheme, 99, 101–4, 106, 108, 111, 132, 202, 209–10 meaning, 1–3, 6, 8–9, 9n2, 18, 27, 50, 53–54, 62, 64, 66, 69, 87, 92, 105, 130–34, 145, 149, 151–52, 155, 170–74, 176, 203, 208, 210, 220–23, 226–27; pre-eternal, 221, 229; production of, 68, 70, 86, 109, 146; -lessness/non-, 88, 121, 131, 136n24, 133, 146, 152, 154–57 mercy, 227–28 messiah/messianism, 16, 26, 28, 30, 33, 35–36, 38–40, 44n70, 46n91, 86–87, 92–93, 117n53, 119, 121, 123–25, 130–31, 134–35, 136n24, 139n85, 191 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 16, 127 Milner, Jean-Claude, 200–201 Milton, John, 33, 78, 91, 96n48 miracle, 6, 55–56, 57n29, 67, 75n62 mirror, 216–18, 221–23, 227, 231n38; stage, 8, 103, 192–93 mobius strip, 4, 29, 229 monotheism, 7, 15–17, 21–23, 25, 32, 34, 43n54, 131, 138n70 More, Henry, 91 Moses, 31–32, 34, 43n54, 67–68, 205–10 Mouffe, Chantal, 126 Muhammad, 221–23, 227–28 murder, 6, 23, 31–33, 49, 52, 55, 68, 210 mystical/mysticism, 8–9, 10–11n17, 17, 36, 39, 49, 59, 61–68, 71–72, 77, 81–83, 95n21, 164, 175–76, 178, 216, 223–25

239

Name-of-the-Father, 8–9, 15, 18, 44n56, 117n53, 126, 154–55, 202–6, 209–10, 224–29 names, 6, 8, 15, 19, 36–37, 39, 52, 54, 84, 87, 175; divine/of God, 23, 29, 34, 39, 49, 63, 83, 85, 186–87, 205–9, 214n66, 220–22, 229. See also Name-of-the-Father Nathan of Gaza, 87 national socialism, 123 Nazianzus, Gregory, 189 neoplatonism, 9, 215–17, 223, 226, 229 negation, 22, 25, 35, 70, 79–80, 102–3, 119–21, 123–26, 128–31, 133–34, 136n24 Nicholas of Cusa, 25 not-all, 7, 28, 38–40, 103, 105, 108–9, 120, 127–30, 132, 228 nothing/nothingness, 7–8, 19, 30, 38, 36, 78–79, 84, 132, 135, 194–95, 203, 217. See also emptiness; void number, 79–80, 89, 91, 101–2, 105–9, 112, 114, 116n41, 129 objet petit a, 8, 20–22, 28–30, 39, 44n56, 105, 171, 203 Oedipus, 5, 8, 153–57, 184, 205, 210 One, 25–26, 28, 30, 32–33, 35, 37, 83, 106–9, 112, 114, 123–26, 129–30, 186, 188–91, 196n14, 216–17, 222. See also echad; yad'l'un orphan, 153, 155, 227 Other, 15, 17, 18, 20–22, 24–26, 28–30, 35–39, 47–56, 60, 65, 72, 85–86, 93, 100, 104, 109, 111, 143–44, 146–47, 150–53, 155, 169–70, 172, 220, 222. See also big Other outside, 2, 6–7, 17, 24, 28, 72, 91, 103, 111–13, 120–21, 123–25, 130–31, 134, 135, 136n24, 204, 229 Palamas, Gregory, 185 parlêtre, 22, 154, 164, 170n1

240

pas-tout. See not-all paternity, 9, 154, 202–5, 207. See also father Paul (of Tarsus)/Pauline Christianity, 16, 19, 29, 44n63, 191, 202, 210 phallus, 9n2, 30, 66–70, 83, 85, 103, 108, 180n43. See also phallic jouissance Philo of Alexandria, 199 Plato, 5, 194, 199 Plotinus, 216–18, 221–22, 226, 229 political theology, 121–22, 197n19 prophet/prophethood/prophecy, 9, 31, 131, 204, 206–7, 209, 221–22 Qur’an, 59, 63, 67–69, 75n62, 218, 220–23, 227–28 race, 48, 52, 149 Rank, Otto, 26 Real, the, 3, 6, 8, 21–22, 24, 26–27, 30, 35–39, 43n54, 49, 53–55, 61, 63–64, 66, 69, 79–80, 84–86, 94n8, 101, 141, 146, 152, 154, 164–72, 175–76, 178, 201, 203, 207, 210, 218, 222, 227, 229 Reale, Giovanni, 5 rebel/rebellion/rebelliousness, 7, 16–18, 23, 31, 33, 36–38, 119–20, 123–25, 136n24, 147, 157 redemption, 18, 23, 28, 40, 83, 87, 92, 119–20, 157, 210 Reik, Theodor, 15, 24, 26, 31–33, 35, 44n56 remnant, 16–17, 20–21, 28–31, 33, 39. See also sh’erit Roof, Dylann, 48 Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 2, 4, 10n5 Ruhama, 225 Rumi, Jalal al-Din, 59, 63–64, 66–67, 69–70, 72

I ndex

sacrifice, 18, 23, 27, 32, 56n44, 47, 49, 54, 68, 156 sadism, 47–49, 51–52, 54, 57n25 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 199–200, 202–3 Satan, 33, 36, 91 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 1 Scholem, Gershom, 17, 20, 42n34, 77, 82, 86–87, 92 Schmitt, Carl, 122–23 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 101, 103, 117n53, 184 Schulz, Bruno, 40 Schütz, Alfred, 173 secret, 6, 20, 65–67, 69, 71, 200; of echad, 36; of Yesod, 94n19. See also True Man Sedgwick, Mark, 216, 226 Seidel, George J., 217 semanteme, 202, 209–10 semblance, 7, 100, 110–12, 120–21, 125–27, 130–35 seminality, 199, 204. See also father; Name-of-the-Father sephirot, 29, 44n65, 83, 91–92 serpent, 18, 36, 67 set theory, 90, 103, 106, 128–29 sexuation, 6, 104–6, 108, 111–12, 150 Shekhinah, 26, 30, 40 sh’erit, 39 shofar, 15, 31–33, 44n56 signified, 62–64, 66, 69–70, 72, 80, 85 signifier, 6, 25, 27, 29, 39, 43n54, 48, 50–55, 62–69, 84, 100, 103–6, 108– 10, 112, 143–48, 151–54, 166, 171, 176–77, 204–5, 207, 209, 225–26, 228–29. See also master-signifier sinthome, 8, 22, 24, 163–64, 166–71, 173, 175–77, 179n30 slave/slavery, 7, 8, 18, 104–5, 109–10, 112, 141–43, 146–57 Soler, Colette, 152

I ndex

sovereign/sovereignty, 6, 33, 35–36, 39–40, 54, 122, 146–47, 150–51, 155–57 Spinoza/Spinozism, 3, 25, 199 Strauss, Leo, 5 subject, 1–4, 6, 8, 10–11n17, 15–16, 18, 21, 24, 26, 28–30, 32, 38–39, 49–55, 59, 61–69, 72, 78, 88, 100, 105, 109–11, 113–14, 132–33, 141, 143–48, 151–52, 154, 155–56, 164, 171–74, 176–77, 193, 201, 203, 208, 224, 229; creative, 89–90; master-, 226 Sufism, 59–67, 70–72, 215–16 symbolic, 3, 7, 9n2, 15–18, 21–22, 26–28, 32, 36–37, 39, 49, 51–52, 54–56, 63–72, 79, 90, 105, 111, 141, 143–44, 146–47, 150, 153–54, 164–72, 174–77, 181n59, 184–85, 187, 195, 210, 229; pre-, 86 Taoism, 3 Taubes, Jacob, 17, 19–21 theosis, 38, 192 the thing/das Ding, 24, 29, 36–37, 48–54, 56, 80, 84–86, 163, 171–72, 175, 226–27 tikkun, 28, 30, 77, 83, 85, 93 time/temporality, 19–20, 85, 89, 125, 134, 145–46, 174, 189, 194, 219 Torah, 10–11n17, 45n81, 83, 202, 207, 209 totality, 3, 38, 224, 226, 228–29, 233n54 trinity, 183, 187–90 True Man, 3–4 truth, 15, 64, 66, 68, 71–72, 87–88, 100, 104, 109–10, 189, 207, 222n23. See also generation, truth of; jouissance, truth vs.

241

tsimtsum, 25, 28–29, 35, 82, 84–85, 91–93 Unger, Erich, 77, 81–82 universal/universality, 4, 60–61, 69, 71, 120–21, 124–30 Valéry, Paul, 18, 45n80 void, 3, 7, 30, 78, 84–86, 91–93, 127–28, 130–35, 171, 217, 219. See also emptiness; nothing/ nothingness war: casualty of, 156; eschatological, 121–26, 130, 134, 136n24; and postcombat psychological disorders, 86; race, 48, 136–37n26 Weil, Simone, 34 Winkel, Eric, 219, 223 Winnicott, D. W., 33–34 Wolfson, Elliot R., 83 woman, 8, 25–26, 35–36, 39–40, 70, 102, 154, 204, 225; Woman, 103–6, 108 world, 3–4, 17, 19–23, 28–32, 34, 37, 48, 77–78, 81–85, 87, 92, 119–25, 134, 136n24, 146, 154, 171, 173–75, 185–86, 190, 194–95, 222–23, 228 wujūd , 218–23, 229 Yahweh/YHWH, 18, 29, 32, 45n76, 83, 131, 225 Yad’lun, 25, 107–9, 112, 114 Yom Kippur, 31–32, 35 zero, 79, 106, 124 Zevi, Sabbatai, 33, 40, 86–87, 92 Zimmerman, George, 47, 52–54 Žižek, Slavoj, 16, 24–25, 30, 37–38, 42n27, 68, 197–98n24 Zupančič, Alenka, 148

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Agata Bielik-Robson is a professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham and a professor of philosophy at the Polish Academy of Sciences. She published articles in Polish, English, German, French, and Russian on philosophical aspects of psychoanalysis, romantic subjectivity, and the philosophy of religion (especially Judaism and its crossings with modern philosophical thought). Her publications include the books: The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction (in English, May 2011), Judaism in Contemporary Thought: Traces and Influence (coedited with Adam Lipszyc, 2014), Philosophical Marranos: Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity (2014) and Another Finitude: Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy (2019). Davor Džalto is deputy dean at Sankt Ignatios Academy, senior lecturer in Eastern Christian studies at Stockholm School of Theology, and president of The Institute for the Study of Culture and Christianity. He has published extensively in the domains of the theology of personhood, Orthodox Christian political philosophy, history and theory of modern and contemporary art, Orthodox Christian art, and iconography.

243

244

A bout the A uthors

Miroslav Griško is an independent researcher in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He completed his doctoral studies in philosophy at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. He is a collaborator with Šum: Journal for Contemporary Art Criticism and Theory. Sora Han is associate professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society, the School of Law, and African American Studies at UC Irvine. She is also the Director of the Culture and Theory PhD Program in the School of Humanities. She is currently working on two books: Slavery as Contract, which brings together poetics, contract law and Afro-pessimist theory to think beyond the property metaphor of slavery; and Mu, the First Letter of an Anti-Colonial Alphabet, an experimental text on the “anagrammatic scramble” (Mackey) of abolitionism. Her most recent publications on this new line of research are “Slavery as Contract,” in Law and Literature (2016), and “Poetics of Mu,” in Textual Practice (2018). Gilles Hanus teaches philosophy in secondary school in Maisons-Alfort (in the suburbs of Paris). He directs the Cahiers d'’études Lévinassiennes, the journal of the Institut d’études lévinassiennes. He studied with Benny Lévy for many years, and works now to publish his courses and seminars. He has published several books about Emmanuel Levinas, Benny Lévy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Rosenzweig, and recently, Spinoza. His most recent publications include: Quelques usages de la parole (2019); Sans images ni paroles: Spinoza face à la revelation (2018); L’Épreuve du collectif (Verdier, 2016); and Penser à deux? Sartre et Benny Lévy face à face (L’âge d’homme, 2013). Janina Maris Hofer, PhD (2017), currently works as a project manager in Macas, Ecuador. She holds an interdisciplinary master of arts in Religious Studies from the Faculty of Theology, University of Bern, and a PhD in philosophy from the Faculty of Humanities, University of Bern. Her book Sprache der Transzendenzerfahrungen (in English: Language of Experiences of Transcendence) was published in 2018 (transcript-Verlag). Her areas of interest are psychoanalysis, near-death experiences, philosophy of language, and qualitative research of religion. John Holland is an independent scholar and French-to-English translator who lives in Nantes, France. He has been studying Lacanian psychoanalysis and critical theory since his doctoral dissertation in English at Princeton University. A member of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars,

A bout the A uthors

245

he has pursued his research in several psychoanalytic schools and associations in France. He was the guest editor of the 2015 issue of S: Journal of the Circle of Lacanian Ideology Critique on “Capitalism and Psychoanalysis” and is the translator of Pierre Bruno’s book Lacan and Marx: The Invention of the Symptom (2019). Bruce Rosenstock is professor of Religion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His most recent book is Transfinite Life: Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination (2018). Jared Sexton teaches African American studies and film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author, most recently, of Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing (2017) and Black Men, Black Feminism: Lucifer’s Nocturne (2018). Mahdi Tourage, PhD (2005, University of Toronto), is currently associate professor of Religious Studies and Social Justice and Peace Studies in the Department of Religion and Philosophy, King’s University College at the Western University. His book Rumi and the Hermeneutics of Eroticism was published in 2007 (Brill), and his publications have appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Iranian Studies, and International Journal of Žižek Studies. His areas of interest are Islamic religious thought, Sufism, gender and sexuality, and psychoanalysis. Philipp Valentini is finishing his PhD dissertation at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) on the reception of Speculative Sufism in twentieth-century France. He attempts to show the epistemological differences between the metaphysics of Ibn ‘Arabī’s heir, Sadr al-Dîn Qûnawî, and those sketched by the Francophone readers (René Guénon, Michel Valsan, Henry Corbin) of the Andalusian Shaykh. A paper of his is to be published at the end of 2019 in the European Journal of Psychoanalysis, “Modern French Androgyne, Pre-modern Arab Eve: A Lacanian Discourse Critique.” Before starting his PhD dissertation in 2013, he worked for five years at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, Italy, where, as a project manager, he co-established the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations and Spiritualities. Calvin Warren is assistant professor of African American studies at Emory University. He received his BA from Cornell University (College Scholar) and his PhD in African American/American studies from Yale University.

246

A bout the A uthors

Warren’s research interests are in Continental Philosophy (particularly post-Heideggerian and nihilistic philosophy), Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, Afro-pessimism, and theology. Duke University Press published his first book, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (2018). He is currently working on a second project Onticide: Essays on Black Nihilism and Sexuality, which unravels the metaphysical foundations of black sexuality and argues for a rethinking of sexuality without the human, sexual difference, or coherent bodies. He has published articles in various journals, including CR: New Centennial Review, GLQ, TSQ, and Nineteenth Century Context.