Forgetting Freud

FORGETTING FREUD

FORGETTING FREUD

IS PSYCHOANALYSIS IN RETREAT?

ROB WEATHERILL.

ACADEMICA PRESS BETHESDA - DUBLIN - PALO ALTO

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weatherill, Rob. Forgetting Freud : is psychoanalysis in retreat? / Rob Weatherill. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-936320-21-9 1. Psychoanalysis. 2. Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939. I. Title. BF173.W4112 2011 150.19'5--dc23 2011026968 Copyright 2011 by Rob Weatherill

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

Chapter OneCulture and Hysteria 11

Chapter TwoPsychoanalysis and the Night 35

Chapter ThreeThe Proximity of the Other 55

Chapter FourThe Seduction of Therapy 75

Chapter FiveEnjoyment! For Nabokov and Others 93

Chapter SixAbsent Goodness 113

Chapter SevenDon’t Do It Like Machines! 131

Chapter EightTheory Against the Real 157

Chapter NinePsychoanalysis and Indifference 173

Chapter TenThe Queer End of Psychoanalysis 193

Notes 215

References 243

Index 251

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

he 10 essays that comprise this book have all been presented over the past

15 years, in shortened versions, at seminars or conferences and many have

been subsequently published. Chapter One was first presented to an international

conference on Lacanian psychoanalysis, organised by the Association for Psycho-

analytic Psychotherapy in Ireland (APPI), in St Vincent’s University Hospital,

Dublin, in November 1994, and published the following year in The Letter:

Lacanian Perspectives on Psychoanalysis, No 3, pp 45-52. Chapter Two was

presented at an APPI Congress, “The Legacy of Jacques Lacan”, at St. Vincent’s

University Hospital, Elm Park, Dublin on 24 November 2001, published the fol-

lowing year in The Letter, No 24, pp 99-110. Chapter Three was first given as a

paper, “The Proximity of the Other: Levinas and Psychoanalysis” at the APPI

Congress, St. Vincent’s Hospital, Elm Park, Dublin, on 25 November 2000, pub-

lished the following year in The Letter, No 21, pp 28-40. Chapter Four first ap-

peared as a short article in the Dublin journal, Inside Out (1999), Vol. 36, pp 2-11.

(Inside Out is the journal of humanistic psychotherapy in Ireland.) A much en-

larged and altered version was published in 2000 as “The Return of Seduction”, in

the British Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. 16, No 3 pp 263-273. Chapter Five

was first presented as “Nabokov’s Lolita and the Death Drive”, a talk given to

The Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (IFPP) on 20 April 2002. A

much expanded version was presented at a clinical seminar in the Dublin Business

School, entitled, “Nabokov, Seduction and Enjoyment”, 22 October 2005. A short

T

x Forgetting Freud?

version of Chapter Six appeared as, “In the Name-of-the-Father: Absent

Presence”, in the British Journal of Psychotherapy, 1994, Vol. 11, No 1, pp 83-

91. Chapter Seven was first presented as “The Death Drive: a Psychoanalytic

Heresy”, the keynote address given in San Francisco on 20 September 2003 to the

Northern Californian Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and the Psy-

choanalytic Institute of Northern California. The later part of this essay was

presented as “Bataille and Levinas, at the Limits of Psychoanalysis”, at a day con-

ference on “Body, Trauma, Impasse”, organised by the College of Psychoanalysts

in Ireland (CPI) 7 October 2006. An outline of Chapter Eight was presented at the

APPI congress in November 2004. Chapter Nine was originally a keynote paper

presented at a seminar on crime and punishment organised by CPI in January

2007. The title of the paper then was “Raskolnikov’s Dream. Complacent Psys

All Round”. This paper was subsequently posted on the Iona Institute website

(News) at http://www.ionainstitute.ie. Chapter Ten was published as a response to

a seminar on Queer Theory entitled “Sexuality and the Death Drive: Reading Lee

Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive”, which took place at

University College Dublin, Ireland on 3 and 4 July 2007. This seminar was organ-

ised by Noreen Giffney (Women’s Studies, UCD School of Social Justice) and

Anne Mulhall (Irish Studies, UCD School of English and Drama). The response

was published here: http://tinyurl.com/6a8a7tk (criticalpsychoanalysis.com).

None of this work could have happened without the support and informed dis-

cussion of my psychoanalytic colleagues in Ireland and Britain to whom I am

most grateful.

Rob Weatherill, Dublin, Spring 2010.

INTRODUCTION

The modern subject is both full and empty at the same time – full of feelings, blind passions and hysterical intensity, and an empty point of uncertainty, like an atomic particle, that can be influenced at a dis-tance by the weakest of quantum forces.

t may be true, as already claimed,1 that the world has become weakly thera-

peutic and anthropocentric. The unsurpassed success of capitalism in recent

decades, allied to liberal democracy and the rule of law, has created a foundation-

al secular belief and ongoing voracious demand, continuously met by the flexibil-

ity of the Market: everything is here for us.

I

Not just the specifics of counselling, therapy groups and centres and the whole

rhetoric of care and love, but we must endure also the therapeutic paradigm ex-

tending to the State and the large corporations, even going so far as therapeutic

warfare. The background therapeutic noise is audible virtually everywhere, from

the music used to facilitate shopping, to 24-hour rolling news coverage, to the

world of public relations and advertising – to create, manufacture and satisfy de-

sire. Needs are identified, isolated, promoted and then provided for, by the Mar-

ket. To help us cope with choice there are myriads of personal trainers, counsel-

lors, gurus, coaches and so on, essential to negotiate each day. The therapeutic

rule, which has become an absolute for our time, there must be no lack. The suc-

cess of this therapeutic logic has trounced all opposition coming from the old Left

and the old Right.

2 Forgetting Freud?

More specifically, with the explosive rise in neuroscience technologies, brain-

imaging to scan our moods and behaviours, with the prospect of identifying

pathologies and altering behaviour, who needs psychoanalysis today? With CBT

and its variants, regarded as the evidence-based treatment of choice for most cur-

rent psychological maladies, who needs the “talking cure”? More far-reaching

still, with genetic markers being identified for a whole raft of diseases including

mental disorders, what then would be the point of speaking? In short, the whole-

sale objectification and instrumentalisation of human “functioning” appears to

make psychoanalysis redundant several times over. Just as the doctor-patient rela-

tionship became bypassed during the nineteenth century with the development of

objective techniques for measuring organ function, mental illness has over the last

century or so become similarly operationalised. Consider, for instance, the recent

explosion in the identification of child psychopathologies.

Human systems are now all of a piece with the way we understand functioning

in biological systems. There are multiple levels of networking and functioning

from the lowest intra-cellular cell signalling and control systems, to inter-cellular

“communication and feedback” systems via cell-surface proteins receptors and

ligands, various signal transduction processes, resulting in signal cascades affect-

ing the functioning of tissues and organs to the functioning of the organism itself.

From here there are further immensely complex ecological hierarchies and net-

works of functioning between organisms. This complexity is replicated in the

functioning of human organisations and societies. The question then arises: what

happens to language, as in the spoken language, amidst this complexity of func-

tioning? Surely, comes the reply, communication is crucial for the smooth opera-

tion and the self-ordering of systems. Surely, it is more important than ever to

speak. However, the speaking that is required amounts to the transmitting of in-

formation, approximating to digital communication, through operational channels

and protocols, analogous to cell and tissue signalling systems. Speaking with pre-

cision; nothing else will do.

Introduction 3

Psychoanalysis, on the contrary, is concerned with a different kind of speaking

beyond the operational scientific communications systems type of “speaking” be-

ing rolled out globally, and performed increasingly by automated systems and

voice synthesisers. The psychoanalytic “subject” is of a different order. Psycho-

analysis privileges “speaking” with all quirks and idiosyncrasies left in, as well as

mis-speaking or un-speaking (deparole), all part of following the “free associ-

ation” rule. Where speaking reveals a slippage of meaning, something other ap-

pears. This other constitutes the subject, who is eclipsed by operational language

and communication. Even, and especially, the so-called empowered educated sub-

ject of liberal democracy is not primarily the subject who speaks in psychoanalys-

is. The so-called autonomous subject represents no opposition to the operational

digital world, but simply facilitates and legitimates the tightening of its grip.

Ironically, psychoanalysis has come by default to claim a unique place in con-

temporary culture: to listen to the subject of the unconscious, i.e. the subject of

suffering, of incompleteness, failure and self-hatred, but also of humour and cre-

ativity. However, as Lacan has emphasised, this subject is fleeting or fading and is

always in danger of being taken over by the “imaginary” and made to work for

the ego. Therapeutic strategies generally, far from listening to this elusive subject,

actually encourage this ego empowerment via adjustment to efficient, rationally

based and scientifically “proven” functioning that drowns out subjectivity, by

eliminating any lack.

There are two key questions. First, how can psychoanalysis survive in its

radical attempt to let the subject speak in all its hidden humanity? Secondly,

what should be the relation of psychoanalysis to ethics2 generally, an ethics

which, according to Levinas, is our first philosophy.

The last century, the century of the machine, saw, what Steiner called, the

“rolling out of the Night”.3 Much of what will follow in these essays is haunted by

that chill and attempts to reconnect psychoanalysis with the Night. While therapy

culture consumption may be warming the planet, the real of the personal and the

social is undergoing a relentless cooling or chilling as when a gas expands and its

4 Forgetting Freud?

molecules cool down. The digital revolution is creating this cooling effect – isol-

ating, automating, marginalising, bit by bit the human qua human. Eventually,

perhaps, the whole thing will proceed without us, when awesome processing

power, akin perhaps to nuclear energy, finally over-powers.4

The claim by some opponents of contemporary psychoanalysis that it is uneth-

ical, that it turns the moral universe on its head, might be conceded to some de-

gree in what follows. However, it is no weltanschauung; it is not prescriptive, not

a religion or an ideology. Freud says at the end of the New Introductory Lectures,

“Psychoanalysis is, in my opinion, incapable of creating a weltanschauung of its

own”, and he goes on to warn, “[a]ny of our fellow-men who is dissatisfied with

this state of things, who calls for more than this for his momentary consolation,

may look for it where he can find it... we cannot help him”.5 Bion referred to psy-

choanalysis as a probe, no world-view, no consolation, no safety within a religion,

none of the “momism” of popular therapy. Beyond religion, beyond psychoana-

lysis, the ethical tears through all stabilising notions revealing the depth of our

problem – the extent of contemporary freedom and indifference.

Freud was increasingly realistic; not peace and harmony – we should prepare

for war!6 In relation to the death drive, an ethical call if ever there was one, Freud

states at the end of Chapter VI of Civilisation and its Discontents: “In all that fol-

lows I adopt the standpoint, therefore, that the inclination to aggression is an ori-

ginal, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man... that constitutes the greatest

impediment to civilisation”. As civilisation is precariously held together by the

other great instinctual pole, Eros, Freud concludes that it is, “this battle of the gi-

ants that our nurse-maids try to appease with their lullaby about Heaven”.7 Here

Freud names the ethical coordinates.

What is argued in the 10 essays that follow is the renewed engagement8 of psy-

choanalysis with the world, beyond post-structural relativism, the crisis of mean-

ing, and the retreat into the academy. The analyst explores and loosens the threads

of meaning, deconstructs and punctuates the polysemy, knots, chaos and inde-

terminacy of language, and must also be the one who is alerted to real absence.

Introduction 5

She may act (not literally) as one who is witness, who gives evidence, maybe at

the scene of a crime, a witness for a more incisive psychoanalysis aware of and

not indifferent to the tension between freedom and the tragedy that Lacan tells us

follows in freedom’s shadow. Not just interminable listening and waiting, but also

a search for truths about origins (reconstructions of the past) and about uncon-

scious desire. Not just the refusal of mastery and endless deferral of the “truth” of

the unconscious, or what Vatimo paradoxically calls “emancipatory nihilism”, but

on occasion the challenge, the flash of wit, the critical intervention, the pre-empt-

ive strike.

Inhabiting a permanently floating linguistic world of analytic neutrality implies

that everything is playful and worthy of equal (un)concern. This is really a para-

doxical kind of “ethical” omniscience, widespread in analytic circles, a dispas-

sionate overview of the world which might mark a radical failure of commitment

and concern, except to be playfully un-committed and un-masterful. Recent ex-

amples come to mind that illustrate the analytic without the ethical.

Christopher Bollas’s imaginary psychoanalyst character,9 doesn’t like “being

tough” any more. In fact, “[h]e felt sorry that he had to live in these specific

times, when the whole world did seem to be falling to moral pieces” (p.150). He

feels that if people would just “hang out together” there would be less objectifica-

tion, less violence. He is typically New Age, retreating to his muse for consola-

tion. But, he feels free to say (and this signals the narcissism of the contemporary

movement) that at 64, “he felt very much in need of some cuddling other who

would take him in her arms and tell him not to worry”. He is also complaining

that these days, “no one asks us out to play... We can’t play anymore: only profes-

sional actors get to do that. We can’t play football: only professionals get to do

that” (p. 59). And so on. Later he says that “fucking” is supposed to take the place

of playing and that foreplay was the only play permitted these days – “we should

be able to foreplay any time we want” (p. 61). We will note in passing that all this

talk of play and cuddling not only connotes a new self-absorption – feel free to be

6 Forgetting Freud?

up for you – but also a new infantile whinge with its retreat into the loving em-

brace of the mother which is simultaneously a retreat from the world.

This retreat, or more properly ressentiment, has long been a feature of the

wider culture in the West. Andrew Smith10 was the man who disappeared, who be-

longs to no one and knows no one. His body was discovered in his flat in North

London by a neighbour, someone he had never talked to, who smelled the decom-

position of the body and phoned the police. This was two months after Smith had

died. There were no details of Andrew Smith’s next of kin and nothing to identify

him with anyone, family or friends. He was buried with no one to grieve him.

Journalist Ariel Leve followed up his lost story. She discovered he had been

fostered by a working class elderly couple who already had two children of their

own. His foster mother died of cancer in 1978 when Andrew was only 13. He

lived with the father, but gradually and unaccountably withdrew from family and

friends who in turn lost contact with him. He was last seen by his sister in Decem-

ber 2004. In that same year, there were seven million people living alone in Bri-

tain, four times the number recorded in 1961. By 2021, it is estimated that 37% of

all households will be single occupiers. The figures for aloneness are rising 20-

30% faster in the 22-44 age group.

Adam Phillips illustrates the retreat of the academic into self-satisfaction.

“Sane now” is the title of the last chapter of his recent book.11 Here, the author’s

“religiosity” comes to the fore which exemplifies this absence of ethics in the

guise of the ethical. “Deep sanity”, he describes as keeping opposites in play,

listening endlessly and never judging. Here, contra Freud, the analytic position is

generalised to a whole way of life of evenly suspended attention. According to

Adams, the deeply sane do not need a number of things. They don’t need to be

understood; they don’t need recognition; they don’t need relationships subject to

contract (because they don’t expect relationships to last); they see their talents as

gifts (not apparently something hard-worked for); they know that wanting is frus-

trating and getting can be even worse; so they are ironic in their pleasure-seeking,

and real pleasure-seeking is known by the deeply sane to be risky, but that doesn’t

Introduction 7

stop them! “The sane person knows that being able to only be a nice person is the

death of sexual excitement; and that being able to only be nasty is too isolating”

(p. 235). Similarly, in a Blakean moment: “the sacrifice of excitement is the royal

road to envy” (p. 236). By this stage, he has every option in human desiring ac-

counted for. Sanity means “harmony and the supreme bearing of conflict” (p.

240). Here is the idealised version of the analytic way of life, a meta-positioning

of oneself beyond human desiring while including oneself in it at one remove, ap-

proving everything and remaining uncommitted and undisturbed.

In a direct appeal to the ethical notion of kindness, he suggests that sane kind-

ness would mean that, “all forms of sacrifice would be avoided, if at all possible”

(p. 241). One might pause there for a moment to wonder: who cares for the sick?12

Who cares for the autistic child? He feels “privileged”, he says, “spending time”

with an autistic child: “It is like being in a room with someone who only appears

to be a person” (p.161). But who, we should ask, by avoiding sacrifice, can care

for such a person, rather than just “spend time”? Sane kindness, he opines, means

no adult can know what’s best for another adult, or group, or society. This is fine

for what Philip Roth calls the educated egalitarian elites, who can fine-tune their

desires after having had the best that life and learning can offer. What kind of

sane kindness would it be, not to privilege some adult life-styles over others?

What is at issue here is not the playfulness and humour, the emphasis on radic-

al personal freedom, not even Adams’s over-clever use of paradox and irony, not

the anarchic destabilisations of our habitual thought-processes, but the appalling

feeling that this is all there is.

What Phillips is suggesting is an ideal state of transcendent sanity which in-

cludes everything in its gracious kindness and forbearance, except negativity. His

“opposites” which are kept in play are not really opposites because ultimately

they play by the rules of reason. This is why Phillips can privilege the child’s

primitive madness (it is only adults who fear it), adolescent passion, even the pas-

sion for suicide (only anxious sanity fears the “death-line” being kept open). Even

autism and schizophrenia raise the (rational) question for Phillips as to: “why has

8 Forgetting Freud?

their desire had to take this form?” (p. 171). There is an explanation. Autism may

be at the extreme end of the spectrum – the almost complete disavowal of human

relating – but ultimately it is redeemable! What Adams forecloses is the radical

negative. Without it, we can celebrate madness as it only reveals to us the ex-

treme, the exciting and the creative in the human condition beyond the mere

banality of ordinary dull sanity.

We must agree with Foucault, who says at the end of Madness and Civilisa-

tion, “psychoanalysis has not been able, will not be able, to hear the voices of un-

reason, nor to decipher in themselves the signs of the madman. Psychoanalysis

can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign

enterprise of unreason”.13

The sovereign negative that refuses to become part of a dialectical process of

redemption features in every essay that follows here, because it is the controver-

sial ground out of which the ethical arises in responsibility and non-indifference

to the other.

The following chapters can be read in any order, but the reader will be helped

by a brief indication as to the material in each. The first chapter asserts that the

contemporary capitalist world bears all the appearances of a return on all fronts to

orgiastic excess, with the ego consenting to its own destruction and unbinding.

The second chapter explicates how the way was paved during the last century for

“the Night of the world” (of the Camps), via the breaking of the covenant between

the Word and the Real. Chapter Three follows Levinas, who regarded psychoana-

lysis as unethical, and thereby implicitly challenges psychoanalytic practice and

its relation to suffering. Chapter Four returns to the all-important yet psychoana-

lytically foreclosed subject of seduction. All the complex ideological battles with-

in psychoanalysis, as well as its more recent professionalisation, can be seen as

systematic attempts to stop the play of seduction. Chapter Five continues that

theme with a complex discussion about the nature of sexual enjoyment and the ef-

fects of sexual abuse. The main illustration is Nabokov’s Lolita. Chapter Six con-

siders our “faith” in the value of the analytic process. The analyst has to have

Introduction 9

some acknowledged or unacknowledged faith in this goodness that he does not

possess, or he will not be able to bear failure, and will resort to cynicism, power

or manipulation. However, goodness per se is traumatic. Chapter Seven revisits

the death drive and the encroaching post-human world of digital, automated tech-

nologies. Bataille lived the death drive! A comparison of Levinas and Bataille re-

veals that “both understand the world in terms of an extreme shaking. Both exper-

ienced criminal ideologies at first hand”. Both have lived suffering. Chapter Eight

is partly a plea for a psychoanalysis based on Lacan and Klein, although their

starting points are radically different and cannot be reconciled. Chapter Nine de-

picts psychotherapists as promoting an emotivist, subjectivist culture largely free

from ethical constraints and thereby further contributing to weakening of the so-

cial. Chapter Ten examines the radicalization of psychoanalysis by “queer

theory”, looking, in particular, at Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the

Death Drive, which not only deconstructs binary identities, but in this extreme

form wants to abandon the future as well. The “queering” of everything makes for

a pitiless world of jouissance.

CHAPTER ONE

CULTURE AND HYSTERIA

Hysteria is silent and at the same time it mimes. And – how could it be otherwise – miming / reproducing a language which is not its own, masculine language, it caricatures and deforms that language: it “lies”, it “deceives”, as women have always been reputed to do.1

he term hysteria dates back to ancient Greek medicine and the wandering

womb (Hysterion). In nineteenth century psychiatry, it rose to prominence

in the work of Jean-Martin Charcot, under whom Freud studied. Hysteria “cre-

ated” psychoanalysis. How do we understand hysteria over a century on from

Freud’s first theorisations? Is it a meaningful category any longer? From the point

of view of psychiatry and DSM IV, hysteria no longer exists as a psychiatric cat-

egory.2 We are going to discuss a condition that no longer exists! But for Freudian

and some post-Freudian analysts, hysteria still exists and retains a central place.

T

Hysteria is a condition that reveals, exposes, dramatises, spectacularises the

nature of human subjectivity itself; the subject coming into being, or the subject at

the edge of being, refusing or subverting being. Hysteria is the “noise” accompa-

nying the hypostasis of the subject. What is always in play, as it were, is the hys-

teric’s “involvement” in (phallocentric) desire in a complex and paradoxical way,

maybe in an absolute way, connected to death. The (non-)position of the hysteric

– playing, caricaturing, deceiving – is not a medical problem (although it can be

12 Forgetting Freud?

made so), but an existential problem, a question of freedom and responsibility

and, ultimately, a question of ethics.

First we will briefly consider the divergences within psychoanalysis itself on

the subject of the hysteric, before going on to consider what has been called the

general hystericisation of culture in the modern period.

the subject of hysteria

Psychoanalysis investigated / discovered hysteria when patriarchy was comparat-

ively strong but beginning to fail. Repression was strong and what was repressed

was sexuality. In particular, women were isolated, denied professional and social

advancement outside the home.3 Within the home, worse, women were con-

strained to appear demure, satisfied and domesticated. Failure to sustain and

maintain this “feminine” disposition or facade could end up in radical social ex-

clusion, the sanatorium, madness and death (Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina,

Hedda Gabler, Kristine Torvald, Tess, etc.). Freud’s hysterical patients could not

talk about sexuality. Instead, they revealed the marks of sexuality on their minds

and bodies – preoccupied with pains, headaches, paralyses, and so on. Here

(“pathogenic”) sexual ideas were repressed, and the immense and excessive feel-

ings and affects connected to these ideas were converted into bodily symptoms.

Freud, uniquely, provided a space, the inaugural space of listening, in which the

hysterical subject could talk, fantasise and freely associate. For a time, he be-

lieved optimistically that once the “pathogenic ideas” were uncovered either

through hypnosis, the pressure technique or free association, the physical pain

could be abreacted, transformed by catharsis, into mental pain and the symptoms

relieved. Psychoanalysis comes into being. We will outline very briefly some of

the different approaches to the hysteric since Freud. First and foremost, the

Lacanians have retained the term, while others have largely abandoned it.

For Lacan, the symbolism in hysteria is grounded in the primordial, the univer-

sal image of the suffering, the fragmented body as elaborated by Melanie Klein.

Culture and Hysteria 13

Within language, within the Symbolic register in which the subject must come to

be, a gap necessarily opens between (unconscious) desire on the one hand and the

more conscious demand that is made within language. Lacan says, “the hysteric is

suspended at this necessary cleavage... between demand and desire”.4 Further on

Lacan says: “Everyone to tell the truth has his little extra desire simply more or

less intensified. What is important in the case of the hysteric is that she shows us

that for her, this desire qua beyond every demand, namely qua having to occupy a

function qua refused desire, plays a role of the highest importance”. He warns us,

“you will never understand anything about a male or female hysteric, if you do

not begin from this recognition of this first structural element”.5 Within the con-

straints imposed by living as part of any language culture, desire can never be sat-

isfied, can never be adequately represented. Something has always to be left be-

hind. It is this that the hysterical subject feels bound to refuse.

In his seminar of 16 April 1958, Lacan writes about Freud, that his “only mis-

take, as one might say, is drawn along in a way by the necessities of language, to

orientate in a premature fashion, to put the subject, to implicate the subject in too

definite a fashion in this situation of desire”.6 For the hysteric, desire is always en-

igmatic, elusive, absent, and/or in excess.

It is too simplistic to suggest that the hysteric situates herself as victim, a

powerful position that evokes guilt and hate in equal measure. True, the hysteric

can offer herself as a sacrifice, or in Lacanian terms, occupy the position of “ob-

ject-a”, to be the hidden cause, the seduction or lure, for the desire of the Other.

She wants the Other to want her, while she appears to have no desire. Indeed she

may be a lost cause. To offer oneself as a lack, as an absence, or a non-entity, or

to appear and disappear is to confront the world, this world, with an impossible

question. What do you (the Other) want from me? What do you expect from me?

Tell me who I am. You tell me what I should do. What should I desire? Her re-

sponse may be to identify with the Other’s desire to mask her own absence, the

so-called hysterical identification. I find out what my problem is from reading

therapy books. I have such and such symptoms; therefore I have cancer, have


heart disease, etc. Or, she can defeat the experts, there is no answer, no one has

the answer. She can present herself as the epitome of suffering, or, as supremely

uninvolved in her own or the Other’s suffering, a condition described by Jones as

la belle indifference.7 She can play with the signs of femininity appearing as a

“real” woman, while retaining a male desire and secretly hating the feminine. The

hysteric is an expert in what Genosco calls “bar games” – the various bars with

which psychoanalysis is familiar. For instance, the bar between the signifier and

the signified, the conscious and unconscious, male and female, normality and psy-

chosis, surface and depth, appearance and reality, and so on. She must mock,

break through, overthrow the Master who supports the bars, or appears to do so,

while perhaps playing the master herself. She is always up at the bar. She can be

the master, the one who knows, who is complete in herself, the one who as a wo-

man lacks nothing with the secret knowledge, the secret sexual knowledge, to be

absent from the place of enjoyment where she appears to be, subversive at the

point of absolute conformity, anarchic and demure.

Far from not existing, as contemporary psychiatry may have it, hysteria, one

might be forgiven for thinking, is the only condition that exists. It shows all the

equivocal masks of subjectivity with which psychoanalysis has to deal. All this

double or multiple talk goes to show the aleatory, problematic and shifting nature

of subjectivity, the way “identities” are cobbled together and dispersed, for pur-

poses known, more often unknown. In a Heideggerian sense, being-there, Dasein

is inescapably a dissimulation which is also a concealment. Dasein must necessar-

ily forget its own mystery, whereas psychoanalysis, without preaching, should re-

verse this trend. Heidegger says: “Humanity builds up its ‘world’ out of whatever

intentions and needs happen to be the most immediate”.8 The psychoanalytic task

is to explore these traces and openings, pathways through the forest, with no par-

ticular aim, other than exploration. Psychoanalysis is “way-making”. Heidegger

provides the proper complexity: “Saying keeps the way open along which speak-

ing, as listening, catches from Saying what is to be said, and raises what it thus

has caught and received into the sounding word”.9 And then, “The word begins to


shine as the gathering which first brings what presences to its presence”.10 Psycho-

analysis, thus understood, allows, permits and facilitates the (hysterical) gathering

of presences to re-sound, re-sonare, to resonate in the analytic space – the space

above all of loosening (lysis – loose). However, the hysteric will disrupt our way-

making.

Some analysts, however, understand hysteria outside this context of the hypo-

stasis of the subject. Here, more simply, the sexually coloured excessive and con-

flicting demandingness and obvious distress of the hysteric is understood, not as

an existential problem with desire per se, but within the much narrower context of

failure of the early infantile environment. Hysteria is quite simply a

(psycho-)medical problem. If the (maternal) environment had been good enough,

integrative enough, then there would be no need for the later complex pathologies

of hypersexualisation of life and desire. Put simply: a good home can meet all the

needs of its children. Desire, from this perspective, is left to one side, because it is

quite simply irrelevant. Desire should be normal!

The therapeutic task becomes one of re-integration of the aberrant pregenital

impulses which are seen to be disruptive of the normal11 happy life that we all

have come to expect as a basic human right. Ultimately, hysterics, at the extreme

at least, are seen as deviant and disturbed, even demonic and dangerous – unana-

lysable if we take Zetzel’s fourth category.12 Since Freud, they are to be listened

to, empathised with, cared for in their distress, but with the aim of normalisation –

the domestication of desire. This is the approach adopted by non-Lacanian ana-

lysts and therapists generally. There is a widespread belief that hysterics should

want to be “normal” and that given time and space will want to resolve their diffi-

culty and unhappiness. Hysterics will naturally mature into “normal” women (and

men) who will look for the phallic solution to fulfilment along the well-known

lines that Freud suggested, when (1) he spoke of the girl’s renunciation of active

clitoral masturbation and her assumption of a passive relation to her father,

“which clears the phallic activity out of the way”, and “smoothes the ground for

femininity”. Freud asserts: “the feminine situation is only established, however, if


the wish for a penis is replaced by one for a baby, if, that is, a baby takes the place

of a penis in accordance with an ancient symbolic equivalence”.13 We should note

that to be a fulfilled wife and mother is still the choice of the majority of women.

Or, (2) to take the other route of becoming a successful independent woman equal

to men (the phallic woman). But what underlies both (1) and (2) is the desire for,

and disgust with, phallic sexual activity, which is precisely what the hysteric can-

not and will not resolve.

Some commentators14 are critical of the revised role of the therapist as a “nur-

turing mother” who will act as a container for hysterical affects. For example, the

notion of developmental lines in Anna Freud, the secure internalisation of the

good object and the achievement of the depressive position in Melanie Klein, the

virtual True Self destiny of Donald Winnicott, all imply progress towards the

classical notion of “genital maturity” away from excessive complaints and hyster-

ical grudges15 allegedly left over from the failure of the early environment. The

analytic space will free up this arrested developmental trend which, in effect, will

calm hysteria by containing, analysing and finally resolving it. Yet, in so far as

hysteria is a refusal, especially a refusal of help, this well-meaning therapeutic

disposition might serve only to exacerbate desire on the one hand or maybe create

a false acquiescence on the other.

the subject of culture

Leaving this major controversy within psychoanalytic theory and practice to one

side, it will be meaningful to talk about a “culture of hysteria”. We will briefly

consider the changing cultural context in which the hysteric is embedded and, in-

deed, I will argue, hystericises the structure of culture itself. Many have noted a

major cultural change which favours Narcissus over Oedipus. Take, for instance,

Christopher Lasch’s ground-breaking book Culture of Narcissism, or the general-

ised drift towards “emotivism” away from universal values.16 Jean Baudrillard

refers to “a culture that produces everything, makes everything speak, everything


babble, everything climax”.17 Francois Roustang alleges that ours is a culture of

“subsuicidal collective violence”. He was referring specifically to the violent ter-

ror of men (and women?) when faced, not with the troubled, disturbed figure of

the hysteric in Freud’s time, but with the “liberated” woman’s absolute right to

unlimited sexual gratification.

Baudrillard comments,

A sexually affluent society can no more tolerate a scarcity of sexual goods, than of material goods. Now this utopian continuity and avail-ability can only be incarnated by the female sex. This is why in this society, everything – objects, goods, services, relations of all types – will be feminised, sexualised in a feminine fashion. In advertising it is not so much a matter of adding sex to washing machines (which is ab-surd) as conferring on objects the imaginary female quality of being available at will, of never being retractile or aleatory.18

If psychoanalysis has described the way by which we ambivalently leave be-

hind “polymorphous perverse sexuality” and enter the domain of “official” sexu-

ality with its limited commodified pleasures, then the contemporary world bears

all the appearances of a return on all fronts, in all zones and modes, to orgiastic

excess. Not, as in the primitive rituals of the Potlatch,19 not as Gift (Mauss), but as

nothing more or less than the compulsion for “fun”, for “play”, entertainment with

the body as amusement park, a slot machine, a pleasure centre, a receptacle for re-

lief. The drift is towards the feminisation of culture, which is the denial of sexual

difference, or its “resolution” in the feminine. Without difference, the erotic is re-

placed by a functionalised palpitation, a detumescence, a generalised loss of

power – stalling like an aircraft that falls back to earth. To the culture of narciss-

ism, Baudrillard adds two further “n’s” of postmodernity: narcosis and necrosis.

The widespread loss of social capital, the erosion of traditional cultures world-

wide under the blistering impact of the modernising process, has led on the mi-

crosocial level to the loss of what Bion called “reverie” and what Winnicott called

“environmental provision” or “holding”, leading to what many theorists have em-

phasised – namely the widening split between the infantile drives and the ego’s


capacity to contain and modulate them. The loss of contact and cohesiveness

between adult and infant, the loss of stable realities creates a general hystericisa-

tion, exposing the precarious nature of subjectivity, unable any more to consolid-

ate itself. At which point hyper-subjectivity appears with its strident demands for

access, for being heard, being cared for, listened to, being visible and recognised,

demanding fame. Like a meteorite, the subject on the point of its disappearance

goes out in a spectacular ball of flame. Take, for instance, Baxter, in Ian McE-

wan’s novel, Saturday. Baxter knows he has a neurodegenerative disease, knows

that his subjectivity will soon fade forever. From the city underclass, as it were,

he brutally intrudes upon the bourgeois Perowne family, holding a knife up to the

throat of the mother who has just arrived home for a family celebration. It is not

clear what Baxter wants, except perhaps to right a perceived humiliation earlier in

the day, but he ends up as an object, ironically, of Perowne’s expert neurosurgical

techniques. The hypersubject is always already an object.

From a crude, quantitative point of view, the binding (bindung) of psychical

energy, emphasised by Freud throughout his writings, culminating in the final

drive theory, in the capacity of Eros to create new unities and maintain stabilities,

is giving way to free or unbound energy (ungebandigt) and the de-fusion of the

life and death drives. Ours has become the nuclear option.

The ego, with its long enlightenment history, is being lost. In Freud’s theorisa-

tion, from the first, in the Project, the ego was assigned an inhibitory function

with a permanent cathexis, inhibiting the primary process and hallucinatory im-

ages. The ego is understood as the censor of the latent dream and the protector of

sleep by 1900. Its task is the testing of reality through the mediation of the in-

stincts for self preservation, and then post-1914 the ego becomes a love object it-

self, as worthy of the subject’s love as any external object. The ego is the reser-

voir of libido, “like the body of an Amoeba”.20 By 1917, the ego becomes formed,

in-formed, by identifications with others, and ab initio is grounded in a primary

identification involving oral incorporation. By 1923, the ego has become its own

agency, a complex system in its own right, gradually differentiated from the Id’s


“cortical layer”, but with a large unconscious component. By now its function is

very wide and varied, being involved in adaptation, regulation, judgement, syn-

thesis and so on. It can even assume its own autonomous functions, more or less

distancing itself from the unconscious. The ego becomes master of its own hyster-

ical potentiality. And as it becomes a master it becomes an enemy.

The relentless Lacanian critique of ego psychology in favour of the subject of

the unconscious, starting with the Rome Discourse, came into prominence and

popularity in parallel with the deconstruction and relativisation of the self and

identity in cultural theory generally, in the last two decades of the twentieth cen-

tury. Abandoned are such egoic notions as personal style, authorship, authenticity,

artistic genius, emancipation, the distinctive individual brush-stroke, the en-

lightened outsider,21 and so on. Modernist pretensions, to do with the alleged syn-

thetic and truth-revealing capacities of the ego as well as narcissistic inflation, are

emptied and replaced by the ephemeral, intermittent, discursive, contingent (non-)

“identities” of postmodernity. What then happens to the narcissistic cathexis of

the ego and all the psychical energies bound up in the huge reservoir of its self-

love? Has the ego just been abandoned? Before attempting to answer these ques-

tions, we must take a brief detour into the blind passion that founds the ego.

ego / pre-ego

In connection with suicide, Freud said,

So immense is the ego’s self-love, which we have come to recognise as the primal state from which instinctual life proceeds, and so vast is the amount of narcissistic libido which we see liberated in the fear that emerges as a threat to life, that we cannot conceive how the ego can consent to its own destruction.22

Borch-Jacobsen has been in the forefront of elaborating the ego’s primal state

and its “violent passion” for itself. The ego is not simply the (secondary, imagin-

ary) ego that Lacan derides – the ego formed during the mirror stage, the specular

ego. There is an ante-specular apprehension of the other (and of the) ego, in the


order of an “affective communication”. There is the identification with the (im-

aged) other, but prior to this Freud talks of the emotional or affective tie (Gefuhls-

bindung). This tie precedes every image or representation out-there. In his article,

“Beyond the Reality Principle”, Lacan acknowledges that the specular identifica-

tion must have taken place on the non-subjectal ground of a preliminary affectiv-

ity. And earlier in the article on La Famille in 1938, Lacan notes an affective

identification which is linked to the maternal imago, what he describes as “a fu-

sional ineffable cannibalism”.23 At this prehistoric “time” of the subject, there is

no distinction between “I” and “other”, only consummation, communion, assimil-

ation, oral sadistic incorporation / destruction. At this point, therefore, violently,

blindly: I am other.

Following Borch-Jacobsen’s analysis further into the genesis of self-affection

and what he calls “the abyssal nature of narcissistic passion”,24 desire, “is pre-

cisely a desire to be a subject, a desire to be oneself for oneself within an unalien-

ated identity and an unalienated autonomy”.25 Following closely Freud’s observa-

tions in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, he notes that all subjectiv-

ity and individuality disappears in the crowd as each is bonded together in love

for the leader (fuhrer). Here, Freud is describing the death of the subject in the

primordial social tie via the primacy of an absolute subject, an absolutely narciss-

istic Father; in present-day terms, the charismatic warlord, the evangelist, the

paramilitary, the chief, the guru, the cult leader, the hypnotist, the therapist – any-

one can become transferentially invested in this fascinating figure: the egocrat, the

egophile, a nobody-somebody, who may be a peasant nationalist leader, a red-

neck, a pervert or a psychotic sprung up from nowhere. Alienation, the feeling of

being just a semblance of a (non-)entity, is passionately overcome by absolute de-

votion, making outrageous fanatical acts a certainty. We ask: how can people do

such (evil) things? The answer, they can do them out of this abyssal blind narciss-

istic passion; this absolutely nothing becoming absolutely everything.

The idealisation of and submission to the Father-Chief of the group, of the

mass, is based on aboriginal guilt created by the murder of the mythic primal fath-


er in Totem and Taboo. But more than this, Freud tells us, “after they had got rid

of him, had satisfied their hatred and had put into effect their wish to identify

themselves with him, the affection which had all this time been pushed under was

bound to make itself felt”.26 As Borch-Jacobsen has it: “This peculiar ‘love’ was

an admiring, identificatory, envious love, and so it necessarily led to the cannibal-

istic incorporation of the model”.27 The sons wanted to be the father, to assimilate

his power, to cannibalise his potency. This was the critical moment, the moment

of blind subjectless identification – the moment of the social tie, consecrated in

the oral erotic / sadistic communal murder that founds community.

Before the subject desires specific objects, it desires the desire of the Other –

the recognition of the Other. This desire is “desire of desire” itself without con-

tent, infinite in its murderous oral cravings and totally gullible, hypnotisable, sug-

gestible and insatiable (in short “hysterical”, although this word is too weak). Be-

low we shall refer to this potential hypnotisability under the heading of seduction.

The subject (surely the wrong term now) thus gives up all differentiated desire

(post-Oedipal desire for difference in culture, in civilisation), to follow – mind-

lessly, without judgement, delay, negation, without a history or any ethical con-

cern for external reality. This “ego” knows neither its origins nor its death. It fol-

lows, the egoic view will always be marked by its narcissistic origins, a denial of

its own genealogy, knowing no limitation and no death, only perpetual delusory

omnipotence.

These properties of the (pre-)ego to do with the affective tie are equivalent to

Freud’s description of unconscious processes. This unconscious ego is representa-

tion’s (both conscious and unconscious) Other. It is neither conscious nor uncon-

scious, but the elusive unconsciousness of consciousness itself.28 Freud famously

states: “The patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and

repressed, but acts it out”.29 Either he does not want to know (via recall, analysis,

etc.) or, indeed, cannot know. Metapsychologically, the conscious and the uncon-

scious should not be opposed. Borch-Jacobsen makes clear,


They are on the same side, as one like the other, prior to that opposi-tion, which is representational ob-position as such, and they resist it tenaciously, obstinately. What Freud, under the names of the transfer-ence and repetition, desperately struggled to think of as a resistance of consciousness to the unconscious was nothing other than their com-mon resistance to that very ob-position, to the becoming-conscious in the sense of being-represented.30

Therefore, “Transferential repetition is not so much resistance to the uncon-

scious [contents] as resistance of the unconscious [as affect]”.31 This is tantamount

to saying that affect is all, affect is one. Fundamentally, life does not (want to)

know itself; it refuses meaning and representation.

If love (also meaning and significance), is withdrawn from the agency of the

ego-master, in a whole cultural swathe, are there not serious consequences? Reph-

rasing the question: from what agency have the cathexes been withdrawn? From

the ego of representation, the ob-posited ego, the ego in front of us, our meaning-

ful image? This is the ego that posed itself as masterful, the ego of modernity that

wants to produce and puff himself up – the phallocrat. It is also the (super)ego

supported by the weight of tradition, that could see its way clearly, still hypnot-

ised by the spectacle of its own enlightened upright autonomy. Both were at odds

with the other, still hysterically embattled with the counterpart, but an ego-self-

identity nonetheless.

The postmodern critique of the ego’s secondary character, alleging masking,

masquerade, duplicitous fictions, bad faith, closure, false holism, and so on,

writes it off, deconstructs, subverts and ridicules it in a long erosive and corrosive

process which opens out, not to a greater truth or freedom, but onto the abyss of

near infinite affectivity and hystericisation, where the specular ego has its con-

tinual beginning in murderous love, intense affectivity where ambivalence is the

law. Paraphrasing Freud: the postmodern subject does not remember anything of

what it has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out – in affective confusion, inde-

terminacy and indifference.

Among other things, the analysis of blind passion confirms that it would be

foolish to believe, as many do, that there can be an unproblematic return to our


primitive nature, a peaceful New Age holism beyond techno-capitalism. Quite the

reverse: to seek to return would unleash, if we follow Freud’s thinking, primal

love, hate and murder. The whole question turns around the notion of whether or

not it is possible simply to install oneself outside language, outside of human cul-

ture. Language has no outside, it is the outside. It creates this lost paradise mirage

of a “beyond the mirror”, of a “before” representation. Ensnared by the signifier

with no escape we imagine a lost Real, the lost object, to support an intolerable

vacancy which is subject. What in fact we “return” to, is ground zero. Dreaming

of another world outside representation, beyond the barbed-wire, an unsullied

world, leads to a pure fanaticism and fundamentalism.

The stripped bare and substanceless “identity”, ego without ballast, without

gravity that cannot offer any elaborated (political) resistance is just what any fas-

cist Fuhrer requires: these empty subjects / objects are infinitely suggestible.

Freud’s theorisations on group psychology have come to pass.

Borch-Jacobsen summarises:

[T]his anonymous man, brutally revealed by the retreat of the great transcendent political and religious systems, is no longer a subject: he is the “man without qualities”, without his own identity, the deeply panicked, de-individualised, suggestible, hypnotisable being of the lonely crowd. From now on, only an absolute Chief... can re-embody, give substantial consistency and subjective unity to, this magma of un-anchored identifications or imitations.32

The result has been complex and disastrous. On the one hand an absence, an

aporia, a hole where the ego should be, leading to failures of basic ego activities,

such as judgement, courage, authority, politics, etc., and on the other the unge-

bandigt energy, or what Kernberg calls narcissistic rage. Consistently disavowed

by postmodern theorists as some version of “moral panic”, the excess of affectiv-

ity, the quantitative factor, resulting from the massive decathexis of the ego, after

the normative, civilising and conservative social bonds are broken, the murderous

“bond” of primitive affection lies exposed in its anti-rational possibilities and act-

ing-out. The modern subject is both full and empty at the same time – full of feel-


ings, blind passions and hysterical intensity, and an empty point of uncertainty,

like an atomic particle, that can be influenced at a distance by even the weakest of

quantum forces.

The classical developmental notion of the ego being built up and strengthened

by ever wider and wider secondary identifications has collapsed. First, because

key identification figures have disappeared or are simply less available; secondly,

because the sum total of these identifications, character as it used to be called, has

become radically critiqued in favour of autonomy, adaptability, flexibility, mobil-

ity, spontaneity and the whole gamut of so-called “relating skills”. These chimer-

as or masquerades can only rest unconformably on the primitive ego’s core in

auto-affectivity increasingly removed from reality, caught in a mad disaffection,

unsupported against the real of death. This ego of pathos, deserving of pity, has

assumed increasingly malignant forms in its compensatory love of cruelty and its

readiness to surrender blindly, or in terror, to paramilitary leaders and its facility

for engaging in crimes against humanity.

This intense suggestibility is what Freud, but psychoanalysis generally, repudi-

ated when Freud rejected hypnosis as a therapeutic technique: “I have been able

to say that psychoanalysis proper began when I dispensed with the help of hyp-

nosis”.33 Similarly, but more radically and ideologically, Lacan and cultural theory

generally, by placing the emphasis on representation and the speaking subject,

abandoned the auto-affective origins of the ego and its critical need for support

and containment if it is to become human in more than just the linguistic sense.

The relentless discrediting of the self and the ego in favour of the lone, abject,

“subject of the signifier”, has rendered the subject deeply isolated and alone – the

consequences of which are clear for all those outside the academy to see. This is

just one more example of psychoanalysis, and its recent too narrow linguistic

definition, being shot through by its abandoned origins – variously called: hyp-

nosis, seduction, the feminine, the real – all of which return to haunt the contem-

porary project.


seduction

If hysteria marks any easy assumption of human subjectivity, then seduction is its

hidden magnetic pulsion. Seduction is the key trope of the post-modern linked in-

evitably with the work of Baudrillard. Seduction is universal. The former epoch

was governed by the modern faith / illusion in productiveness and meaningful-

ness. The decisive shift has been from “Law to lure”, via the capitalist provision

of an infinite range of objects of desire, signalling what Baudrillard regards as the

“terminal phase” of the system: “[i]t’s as if the species has had enough of its own

definition and has thrown itself into an organic delirium”.34 Shopping and drop-

ping, rampant metonymies, product differentiation and proliferation, “releases”

the hysteric, with her complaint, her secret, her demand, from a historically mar-

ginal position. She is no longer mysterious, subversive, pathetic or problematic.

Seduction is as always on the side of the woman over and against the dominance

of rational, productive (un)seducible man, the Master, the producer. However, he

lived in the earlier epoch of the ego and hot seduction. Now, with the Master

gone, seduction is on the side of the system itself (Baudrillard calls this “cool” se-

duction) which coincides with the end of desire based on scarcity.

Seduction replaces production. However, was there ever anything other than

seduction? Was the reality principle, the edifice of the ego, classical psychoana-

lysis, the Law, the power of reason, the whole notion of mastery and the phallic

economy just another seductive game, pitting its alleged normality and often inef-

fective authority against the flood of ecstatic imagery and pleasure of unlimited

desire? Against the (psychoanalytic) illusion of phallic power, Baudrillard speaks

of: “The degree zero of the structure. This is very much what is happening today:

erotic polyvalence, the infinite potentiality of desire... coming from the frontiers

of psychoanalysis free of Freud, or from the frontiers of desire free of psychoana-

lysis”.35 Lacan had something similar in mind perhaps when he said: “our enjoy-

ment (jouissance) is going off the track... [it] takes its bearings from a... surplus of


enjoyment... the ideal of plus-de-jouir – overcoming / end-of-coming / excess of

coming / overthrowing”.36

However, many commentators, for example Roy Porter, are critical of the “ex-

tremism” in writers like Baudrillard when they depict the contemporary capitalist

body politic as hyperkinetic, where everything tingles, radiates, reverberates,

where all is in flux, where everything is reflected, or refracted through various

media “events”. The advent of what in the sixties Marcuse dubbed “repressive de-

sublimation”, has released, concedes Porter, “a long repressed libidinal hedonism

and has created a hyperanaesthetised mass hysteria throughout the body politico-

economic, a multimedia whirl of ‘floating signifiers’”.37 However, it is more ap-

propriate to think in terms of a long historical process. Hysteria came to promin-

ence during the early modern era (arguably the later decades of the seventeenth

century) during a time of expansion, of wealth creation, of banking, of specula-

tion, great urban development, individualism, liberty in ideas, politics, religion

and so on, similar to today. For Porter, it is far too limiting to depict the history of

capitalism as a rationality that has “flipped” recently. Throughout its history, cap-

italism has been permeated with elements of fantasy, of the irrational and mad-

ness carrying all the implications of pathology and psychopathology. This has

been its strength. However, Porter acknowledges that Baudrillard and others are

right to some degree to emphasise the specific revolutionary quality of the twenti-

eth century capitalism, with its “mass society” and “mass media”. But these re-

volutions are also themselves integral to, what Porter calls, “a secular evolution-

ary process – the multiplication of technologies, of literacies, of signs, of markets

– that should be traced back at least as far as Guttenberg”.38 Mass society, mass

communications, the sign-saturated world, have been a long time in coming.

Baudrillard has stressed the radical difference in this, the third stage of capital-

ism and, while it is important to link this latest stage with earlier forms, we should

not be content with just saying this is one more phase in what was always an irra-

tional progression and evolution. That is the liberal position, with its belief in


cycles and onward progress. For Baudrillard, on the other hand, this is not just

one more epoch of radical change; it appears to be the final phase.39

Within the small domain of psychoanalysis, the attempt was to eliminate the

danger of seduction (also, hypnosis, hysteria and suggestion), in order to install a

“serious” problematics of the unconscious and of interpretation. But nothing can

guarantee this substitution. The emphasis on latent content legitimised interpreta-

tion pedagogically, morally, scientifically, cancelling all seductive effects. How-

ever, the interpretive strategy itself is powerfully seductive and mysterious and is

itself a model of simulation. Always a fragile simulation, but one that gave the ap-

pearance of being radical and insurmountable, productive and useful, all the better

to conceal parallel effects. Psychoanalysis is seductive!

Psychoanalysis has placed the emphasis on interpretation and the resolution of

the transference from classical psychoanalysis, through object-relations to ego

psychology. However, the Lacanian emphasis on the material signifier and the en-

igma of the short sessions is subverted by what Borch-Jacobsen, as we have noted

above, refers to as the emotional tie (Gefuhlsbindung), an all-pervasive hyper-sug-

gestibility and blind passion that drives things. The unconscious seduces. It se-

duces by its dreams, parapraxes, fantasies, jokes and indeed the concept itself. It

seduces by its semblance of “depth”, its masquerade as the site of the “truth” of

the subject. Similarly, the superego, posing as conscience, only serves to lure the

subject towards suffering, punishment and pain.

The writings of Freud unfold between two polar positions that radically chal-

lenge his intermediate (rational and psychotherapeutic) construct. These poles are

(1) the foreclosed primal seduction, the pull of the primal repressed, and (2) the

death drive, the pull of the “beyond” of the struggle for survival and the reality

principle. At these two poles and arguably between them, seduction returns, be-

cause it never really went away. The privileged master with his insular economy –

psychological, moral and financial – was only ever a rather cheerless illusion.

Indeed, without seduction, psychoanalysis is dead.40 Just as, without affect, the

transference is dead. Without the personal influence, i.e. the desire of the analyst,


analysis is dead. The “technique” of the analyst may limit but cannot kill off the

seductive effect of the analytic relationship which is part of the “other scene”.

Free association is somnambulistic. It leads to a dream-like stumbling immersion

in language and narrative, a minor trance-like state, reverie, or, conversely, it may

lead to the affective storms and repetitive crises typical of the hysteric who will

go to the limits of unpleasure by dramatising and specularising the enigmatic pain

of human subjectivity and the ultimate impotence of any master discourse. In-

stead, the hysteric is the “master” of the seductive universe, the play of black hu-

mour and mocking laughter at any phallocrat psychoanalyst from Breuer onwards

who might try to put things in order, by making sense of the erotic. The hysteric

stands guard over the seductive universe.

Baudrillard privileges seduction because seduction interposes something

between the subject and his own death. Against the whole rhetoric of meaning and

reason, Baudrillard plays on and subverts Freud’s famous Wo Es war soll Ich

werden, normally translated as “where Id was, there shall Ego come to be”.41

Baudrillard says: “In the place where meaning should be, where sex should occur,

where words point to it, and where others think it to be – there is nothing”.42 The

Ego as meaning amounts to nothing. And this nothing secret of seduction, of af-

fection, flashes “beneath” words and their meanings.

Seduction, no more than hysteria, is not the sole prerogative of women, but, ac-

cording to Baudrillard, it is woman who has “mastery over the symbolic

universe”.42 And it is the hysteric who “knows” how to play this Game beyond the

Oedipal stabilising Law, giving seduction such a bad and exciting name in the

past, requiring eradication, by normalising discourses, including ironically psy-

choanalysis itself.

Buñuel’s last film, The Obscure Object of Desire (1977) plays multiply with

this theme. Before leaving for his trip, Mathieu (Fernando Rey), a wealthy

middle-aged businessman, methodically orders his valet to burn everything in the

room that is associated with a certain woman. On his way to the train station, he is

caught in traffic after a terrorist bomb explodes in a diplomat’s car. From the


train, he spots a beautiful young woman named Conchita (Carole Bouquet / An-

gela Molina), and then proceeds to pour a bucket of water over her, before getting

on the train for his trip.

Mathieu, by way of explaining his bizarre behaviour, tells the strange story of

his relationship with this woman to the group of people in his train compartment,

who seem unnaturally interested. He meets Conchita again. They begin to see

each other often, and Mathieu’s desire for her grows stronger. Conchita is poor

and lives with her mother in a small flat. Mathieu keeps giving them money and

mistakenly tries to “buy” Conchita away from her mother.

Conchita is played by two different actresses symbolising the notion that iden-

tity is not stable and indeed Conchita plays humorously and ironically on all the

feminine guises: the dutiful daughter; the victim of poverty; the seductive lover;

the waitress; the prude; the striptease artist; the hysteric who refuses the master.

And just as “poor” Mathieu is about to be seduced by whatever role she is play-

ing, she changes abruptly. For instance, from the seductress to the prude when

they go to bed together, or from the dutiful daughter to the lover (when her moth-

er leaves the room), or from the “wife-to-be in her lovely house” to the betrayer

who has another lover. She is never quite where she is normally expected to be

found and by this ironic strategy she keeps Mathieu permanently on the move as

he attempts to catch his obscure sexual object. We have no sympathy for him as

he is just a wealthy bourgeois ego who deserves all he gets by way of multiple

subversions of his sexual expectations. Conchita is precisely the master of ab-

sence, the “knowing” player: where sex should occur – nothing!

The viewer is led along the seductive trail of meanings, like the travellers in

the carriage leaning forward eagerly to hear the story. To take this too seriously is

to fall into the bourgeois trap that the universe (of sexual relationships) is mean-

ingful and proceeds by normative and predictable steps. Instead, the universe is

surreal and all the more funny for that because nothing is settled. Even the quiet

peasant woman who is sewing a blood-stained garment is blown-up in one of the

random terrorist explosions that form the backdrop to the film. All the stories that


are running are sentimental at best, because the film at every moment subverts

deep feeling and, if for a moment we did care, or if we cared about the two “lov-

ers”, the laugh would be on us for our naive expectations about love and relation-

ships.

In bars, in clubs everywhere, beautiful women dance naked before old men.

No touching is allowed, only looking, only fantasy. Talking is permitted. Some of

the girls talk kindly to the men. Some of the men go back again and again. Who

can say who has the real power? Clearly, phallic power – power of production, of

visibility and rationality, of psychoanalysis, the only power that counts in the en-

lightened world, is nevertheless an intermittent illusion. It rests only on a greater

subversive and hidden power that secretly circulates and enchants. Only the fem-

inine is enigmatic, belonging to the realm of the secret, a secret pleasure, whereas

the masculine is all too transparent, too open, too exposed and now, finally, flac-

cid. The arteries that once supplied the erectile tissue with blood have become

compromised and sclerotic. The sperm count is dropping.

The male gaze, humiliating to woman, allegedly violent, dominating, con-

trolling, is really an ironically touching sight. In the contemplative pornography

of the live show, etc., man realises the perfection of woman. Against the psycho-

analytic reassurance of the “castrated” woman, who is “not-all”, they know wo-

man as perfection, a body that indeed lacks nothing! The male gaze reflects this

and constitutes its own humiliation. If the feminine body can offer itself naked in

this way, deliver itself up to the eyes without withholding anything, this is the

sign of great power – the secret of prostitution, menstruation, defloration, parturi-

tion, all of which man will never know.

The power of the hysteric is of such strength that it will be enchained and erec-

ted against itself. Women feel this hidden danger as much if not more than men.

Moral and educational philanthropists, including analysts, wanted to help curb

what Freud called the “elemental passionateness” of women as “children of

nature... with such an intractable need for love”.43 But, it is man who needs help

and protection! Baudrillard points to the elemental fear that underlies:


the innumerable rites for the exorcism of female powers... [t]o cast out women’s power of fertility, to encircle and circumscribe that power, and eventually simulate and appropriate it, is the purpose of the couv-ades, the artificial invaginations, excoriations and scorings – all the in-numerable symbolic wounds up to and including the initiation and in-stitution of a new power: political power.44

The interminable arguments about the phallus, about who has it, who’s lost it,

about being it, about not being it, the obsession with castration and the whole

phallic economy, serve as endless reheatings of a violent turn by both sexes

against the feminine real which terrifies men and women alike. To be preoccupied

with “it” (the phallus), to be seduced by “it” serves as a foil against the fatal se-

duction of superabundance, a mad fecundity, symbolic exchange that knows no

boundaries including that of death.

Seduction is the primordial order. It is the strong secret sovereignty of the

world and its complicity with itself alone: auto-affectivity. Marginalised, reduced

to mere games, charms, traps, appearances, the order of seduction was wish-ful-

fillingly marked down as trivial to the phallic mind concerned as it is with the

“deeper” meanings that lie “behind” appearance and mere surface, begging inter-

pretation and analysis. That was then, because now there is no beyond, or uncon-

scious, to secretly divert discourse. According to Baudrillard’s hyperbole, seduc-

tion has freed up the world for nothing less than the total circulation and multi-

plication of signs. Speed and acceleration race way ahead of meaning, as images

flash around the world defeating analysis, destroying thinking in favour of collect-

ive hallucinosis and nihilism of meaning. The global news media have taken over

elemental passionateness, as truth gives way to hyper-affectivity, to non-linear

dynamics of rapid change and turbulent flow. Everything must appear! What ap-

pears must tilt towards an elemental violence of origins, whether it be the relat-

ively benign nuclear magnetic imaging of the body and the brain, right the way

through to smart weapons that image their own trajectories to the target, or the use

of the internet to display torture and beheadings.46


The universe begins, not with the Word, but with an infinity of seductive dis-

placements and the violence of auto-affection. All the rest has been an immense

but maybe failed effort of correction, of setting things straight, in order to find a

dialectic of continuity, the comforts of meaning, reference, reason. But this effort

arises in a field that is quite irreversible. The ego is down because of its begin-

nings in narcissism and paranoia. Lacan claimed the ego is first and foremost the

seduction (captation) of the subject. The ego is based on seduction – the seduction

of mastery first excitingly glimpsed in the mirror. The irony of it: the ego as our

best defence against illusion, a buttoning point against this endless slippage, is

implicated in what it is fighting against. The ego is the primary seducer!47

The hysteric wanted, above all, to shake the Master. The shaking is having its

effect. Now, the Master lacks resistance and is giving up the fight. As if by magic:

there is no war if you give up any notion of mastery. Mastery causes war and that

is why we are against mastery, against war, against resistance and against repres-

sion. Mastery was an aberration!

Look at some contemporary slogans:48

ANSWER: Act Now to Stop the War and End Racism We are all Palestinians Trees are not Terrorists A balloon like a globe with FOR SALE written on it More World, Less Bank PEACE through peaceful means Fuck You CIA No More Bophals. Refuse war. Challenge democracy Stop the Commodification of Water Suffering for African People Lesbian, Gay, Bi & Trans people say stop the war Starbucks Sucks The State of Israel has no right to exist / The American / Israeli white

man is evil / Jihad Death to Israel AIDS treatment now / Coke’s neglect = death for workers in S. Africa


Bush’s pox Americana made us the axis of ignorance & global stupid power

Please stop killing everybody I used to be a white American but I gave it up in the interests of hu-

manity Queer soldiers undermine the military / Sign us up Burn me I’m old and in the way Let us bomb the world with housing Killing is bad; poverty is terrible too; abolish money for a world of

sharing Victory 4 ChechnyaStop bullying; learn to listen

Desperation, disillusion, collapse in the West, particularly Europe. A return to

simplicity: stop killing! Virulent anti-American, anti-Israeli and anti-British senti-

ments. Clearly, there has been a generalised cooling correlated with the achieve-

ment of a widespread therapeutic culture of empathy, where, essentially nothing

bad should happen ever again. Retreat into childhood and a pre-ambivalent sim-

plicity in touch with animals, trees and angels, a world of simple wish-fulfilments

– abolish money! Maybe it runs deeper. It is part of a very thorough-going guilt

and shame in Europe over imperialism, mastery, the enlightenment, technological

progress – the four centuries of achievements, for which the West feels entirely

judged, entirely criticised and envied, and which must be paid for with terrorism.

We have destroyed the world. We must leave ourselves wide open, as part of our

symbolic debt, we must do nothing to defend ourselves, must allow infiltration at

every level: hit us; kill us; infect us; burn me, I’m old and in the way.

Lacan pointed out that, beyond the bodice or the mask of the hysteric, there is

nothing except the terror of the void. The unveiling must never take place. But the

unveiling has happened. From the first television pictures of the liberation of Aus-

chwitz the horrifying Thing behind the veil is revealed.

No longer the bodice to be opened, to be looked behind, but the bodice to be

ripped off, the body to be cut up, injected and penetrated violently – the era of

sub-suicidal violence and auto-affection. The novelist, A.S. Byatt, commenting on


the modern novel, notes: “We seem to be in a world of human bodies seen as ob-

jects of desire and violation, a world in which most of the action was penetration

by the penis or the knife or the needle, where everything dripped with blood or

other fluids”.49 This is the Kleinian part-object schizoid universe, of pieces,

particles, viscera, fluids, of indifference and undifferentiation, the fragmented

body that Lacan regarded as the “ground” of hysteria has become the whole field.

The hysteric creates an inevitable contradiction. On the one hand, the triumph

of the hysteric over the discourse of the Master – the veil removed, unmasked,

hard, cool, exploitative, orgasmic, the de-repression of all passion, the robotic

availability of every (sexual) option without prohibition. With nothing left to sub-

vert, this is the realisation at last of the ecstatically happy consciousness, of the

Reichian dream. On the other hand, if now everything is spectacularised and

everything climaxes, then, there is no more enigma. No longer unsatisfied desire,

but the naked, bare, barren end of desire – perhaps a last desperate heave violently

forcing the body of the other, who anyway has nothing in reserve (he has come

too often), and therefore has nothing substantial to give. Hysteria was sexuality’s

secret strategy. In a world of near total transparency, it is not by chance, then, that

hysteria no longer exists, after playing on all the extreme figures of sexual mytho-

logy. Playing is done with; sexuality is done with.

CHAPTER TWO

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE NIGHT

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it... A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.1

he contract binding, holding together, upholding both the Word and the

World, the Covenant between logos and cosmos, the reality of stable

meanings that endure, held firm until the late nineteenth century in Europe and

Russia. The Old World had some consistency and permanency up to and until this

critical time. For the century prior to 1914, the European bourgeoisie knew noth-

ing but progress in science, knowledge and education, liberalism and civilised

values. There had been a century of growth. But revolution was in the air, the end

was within sight.

T

Its end, symbolised, for instance, by the end of the cherry orchard, cut down on

the big estate (Chekov), Raskolnikov’s peculiarly modern crime, Einstein’s The-

ory of Relativity, the discovery of radium and radioactivity (the billiard ball atom

was mostly empty space), Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Even the material

world was subject to decay, its very solidity is an illusion.

Whether it be Ezra Pound’s make it new, or Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, whoever

wants to be creative in good and evil, he must first be an annihilator and destroy

values. The break-up of this binding covenant virtually defines Modernity itself.


Psychoanalysis was central in this endgame. Freud, after all, was called the “de-

moraliser” by Karl Kraus, the influential Viennese satirist of the time. We entered

what Steiner ominously calls the “after-word” as if language itself was done with.

Writers like Joyce and Stein became part of the 1920s “Revolution of the Word”.

Kafka’s The Trial, begun in August when the war started, opened with the words,

“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K, for without having done any-

thing wrong, he was arrested one fine morning”. The scene was set for the century

to come. Even Dostoevsky, writing half a century earlier, in the epilogue to Crime

and Punishment, imagined a future of war fought in a new age when everyone

was propounding his own theories and wholesale destruction stalked the earth.

Karl Kraus, at this time of the belle époque, predicted a time when gloves would

be made of human skin. He understood that WW1 marked, “the irreparable ter-

mination of what was humane in western civilisation”.

There are two key quotations around which I want to situate some developing

thoughts:

If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS like to drown out the screams of its victims.2

[J]ust as terror, and abjection that is its doublet, must be excluded from the regime of the community, so it must be sustained and as-sumed, singularly, in writing as its condition.3

Later we will take up where the extreme that must measure our thinking, or the

horror that must be a condition of our writing, can be located in our enclave, so to

speak, of psychoanalysis. Fundamentally, this thinking or writing the extreme is

an ethical question for us. For Steiner, the fundamental break, the violent rupture

underpinning and underscoring all others, is that between language, thought and

writing. In short, the Word on the one hand, and the World on the other; the rela-

tion in Lacanian terms between the Symbolic and the Real. This severance, says

Steiner, “this slippage of elemental trust in the word, may prove to be more far-

Psychoanalysis and the Night 37

reaching than any of those political revolutions and economic crises that have

marked our age”.4

The current emphasis on the signifier in psychoanalysis and cultural theory,

while being correct and irrefutable, in the context of “there is no outside of lan-

guage”, involves, let us be clear, an inescapable moral relativity and in-difference

which excludes “the extreme” in advance. This assertion of “an extreme” is

clearly a value judgement, therefore part of a master discourse, which needs to be

deconstructed. Who authorises themselves to say such and such is extreme? Like-

wise, who says this fighter is a “terrorist”? You, yourself, you must have an

agenda. Their extremism is logical under the current conditions; you’re missing

the context, I think. My world is not affected by their “extremism” which seems

entirely reasonable to me under their circumstances. Therefore my conscience is

clear. I am a liberal and I think what they do, they have to do. I would do the same

if I were in their position. So there is no argument. The extreme is diffused and

dispersed. I can maintain an entirely neutral position, an inclusive position that

sounds (morally) admirable to me. There are millions who will agree; look we

were all on the march. No, let’s be clear, we’re against extremism, if you must

use this word: State Terrorism, that’s what we are marching against. That’s where

extremism is. It’s up there with them, with those in power. They create the horror.

There is a further problem with our focus on the (con)text, namely, the margin-

alisation of affectivity. The pre-eminence given to the text, the focus on what is

said or written, narrows our field by leaving aside all the great and essentially eth-

ical dilemmas to do with affect – love, hate, narcissism, conflict, ambivalence,

apathy, separation, unbinding, anxiety and suffering. We are no longer able to

comprehend or register these phenomena in the void where signifiers float off, or

cower on the margins of the unspeakable. Speech hides, wholly inadequate to its

task of confrontation. It averts its gaze, it falters, gasps, dissembles, becomes

knotted up with itself, mired in equivocations.

A man is captured on a police video. They have been called to a house because

of a disturbance. The front door is open and the man is hitting his head repeatedly


with his fists, then hitting the walls, smashing the doors, the lights, plaster is scat-

tering, he is screaming and jumping so hard that his head is breaking the ceiling

and blood covers his face. Parts of the walls are falling around him. The young

policeman, showing great courage, tries to calm him down.

Masud Khan agrees to take on a patient who has just destroyed her previous

analyst’s consulting room. Her analyst, a woman, according to Khan, had behaved

perfectly correctly, listening to her patient over a number of years, and yet it had

come to this. Soon, she was threatening Masud Khan. So he asks her to shake his

hand. She does so reluctantly and he squeezes her hand so hard that she crumples

on the floor – “You see, you cannot wreck my consultation room”.5

Finally, there is Nina Coltart’s controversial and well-known “outburst” with a

psychotic male patient who, over a period well into the analysis, “fell violently si-

lent, exuding ever stronger black waves of hatred and despair”, which, according

to Coltart, represented a “massive beyond words challenge”.6 Eventually, after

many hours “carrying his projections”, she acts out, his alleged “primary hatred of

a genuinely powerful mother”.7 She acts beyond the text, exploding out of her or

his prison.

In a lighter vein, Coltart goes on to wonder, following a remark by Bion as to,

“why there is so little laughter in analysis and how analysts are so often sunk in

gloom”, and are even, “taken by surprise when they discover that there is such a

thing as mental pain. One feels that they have only ever learned that there is a the-

ory that there is mental pain, but that they don’t believe that it exists, or that psy-

choanalysis is a method for treating it”.8 Gloom, humour and pain are poorly

served by language and therefore may cease to exist.

The world has become textualised and intertextualised. Just after the first plane

crashed into the World Trade Centre and it was realised that this was not an acci-

dent, a commentator on one of the news channels remarked, in some desperation:

“Whoever has done this, oh boy! They are certainly making a statement!” As

news media and technologies expand, as computer “memories” double every 18

months, language systems connect, reconstitute everything that the mind touches


in a vast interconnecting code that realises the de Chardin dream of the “noo-

sphere”, a mind-sphere around the earth, a telepathic consciousness. Even the

earth itself (herself) has a voice!9

In the parallel universe, secreted, as it were, by the text, i.e. guarded from dis-

covery, hidden, poured out by, separated from the textual substance itself, comes

the drive, in the guise of the fanatic. Not the conflictual dialectics that moves

between, I am right; you are wrong, but, as Wole Soyinka has it, “I am right; you

are dead”. It is time for us to recognize that there is no regulating mechanism for

the fanatic mind, once set in motion.10 At the point of fanaticism, the resources of

language, the belief in its curative power, its power to heal conflict, is killed off

decisively. Here language is used to deploy its potential for absolute indifference

to mankind, its radical Otherness, its cold inhumanity, for use by the fanatic to

sponsor a world of killing. Language can be deployed, for instance, to tell Hutus,

day after day, to kills Tutsis, until they bring about the real of genocide. Language

creates the world, even a genocidal world view. Then language can be used to

turn around the truth and deny the Holocaust. We are, we become, the play-things

of language, which at a certain impossible point, through the agency of the fanatic

or the fundamentalist, cuts down and cuts through with lethal decisiveness.

In the camps, Steiner points out, language and the dignity of speech, the echo

of Creation itself, came to an end in the “anti-language of the death camps”. He

tells the story of a camp inmate, dying of thirst, watched as his torturer slowly

poured a glass of fresh water on the floor. “Why are you doing this? Why?” The

reply came, “There is no ‘why’ here”. Apropos of this “no why here” statement,

Steiner underlines “the divorce between humanity and language, between reason

and syntax, between dialogue and hope”.11 Here, communication has no meaning,

nothing can be said. Silence.

More recently, the internet has facilitated the spread of information and dis-in-

formation in equal quantities: it is instantaneous and quite often unverifiable. The

real has been summarily dismissed in favour of the text, which is now liberated in

all respects to do as it pleases, co-opted to support virtually any point of view,


promote any falsehood, sell any product, create any difference or indifference.

Language has this carnivalesque quality with endless play and parody – subvers-

ive, mocking, aniconic, irrealist. The joke is on us! A Chinese restaurant in South

Dublin is called “Mao” and his face adorns its walls and windows. People are

queuing to sit and eat under Mao’s guiding face, often unaware of what horror

this image represents. Mass consumption, now globalisation, has trivialised lan-

guage to an inexorable degree against which there can be no resistance. From The

Sunday Times, next to a picture of a youthful-looking Helen Mirren, “Age shall

not weary them and at the going down of the sun... they are ready to party... The

over-fifties are the richest group in Britain...”12

The compact has been broken, and broken not in sadness, but without loss,

with hilarity and celebration. Language no longer has compassion, it no longer

feels with the Real of suffering. It does not come near to articulating suffering. In-

stead, in its dysfunctionality, it often creates suffering, trapping victims in

“worlds” that some come passionately to believe in and willingly die for, morbid

black worlds that capture and act out the Night itself. In our two quotations above,

the plea to bring language, thought and writing to re-join suffering and horror of-

ten goes unheeded. Instead, rather than drowning out the screams of the victims,

language can create the screams and the terror itself in its ethnic cleansing func-

tion, in its fanatical rage.

At the other extreme (with its own extremism), the language world of coun-

selling and New Age spirituality, words can be uttered without gravity. Absolute

light-lite. Here, brokenness, inner transformation, metamorphose into a beautiful

butterfly to reclaim our wildness and allow the wisdom within us to flow forth,

Dear Heart Come Home: The Path of Midlife Spirituality.13 Here the most shop-

worn metaphor is that of the Journey. Everyone seems to be journeying forth and,

on the way, becoming internally free, dreaming of opening my heart more fully to

myself, of shedding the skins, of discovering the awesome uniqueness of my be-

ing, of “taking myself into my arms / Only in that Embrace / will I understand my

wounds / ...come to know my true self”.14 The assertion always repeated that “we


are born with a liberated heart”. In that simple banal statement, the whole prob-

lematic of the Night is simply cleansed, aborted and replaced with a fake narciss-

istic imaginary order, which amounts to therapeutic harassment that hounds out

any negativity by making it work for the soul. Against all expectations, inhuman-

ity returns! For what is missing in this pan-spiritual Gnosis, in this soft preaching

and endless loving is any real listening to the spoken existential details, to the im-

possible limit points of a lived life where the subject bumps into the hard kernel

of the Real. Their extremism (nothing could be further from their thoughts!) is the

excision of evil. Evil is foreclosed and replaced by the scent of oils, by soft words

and music like wind chimes, that stroke, touch and massage us gently into our

healing energies and auras.

The narcissistic discourse of ME! ME! is both a contemporary and an exem-

plary break with the World. The radical failure to even desire to think, to write, to

articulate suffering (the language usage is always regressive, infantile and nurtur-

ing), creates a paradoxical scene totally awash with suffering and every sad senti-

mental cliché and idealisation / denigration. The unrealised collapse of objectivity

(approximate link between Word and World) creates an affective storm of sub-

jectivity, which at an extreme, never far off, inundates every medium with unstop-

pable tears and violence, a hint of the neo-fascism to which it has and will again

give rise.

A different language world is psychoanalysis, although in some more recent

incarnations (e.g. self psychology) it might border the narcissistic imaginary.

However, psychoanalysis seeking recognition has retreated into the university and

the institute, where well-planned courses buy its (text)books, and senior analysts

conduct that marvellous contradiction in terms, the “training analysis”. A deeply

transferential atmosphere is created and goes unresolved, making independent

thinking all but impossible. An academic elite vie for the control and interpreta-

tion of the “sacred texts” and the delivery of training programmes as well as the

sharing out of available analysands. None of this problematic is openly acknow-

ledged. No institution, academic or otherwise, is ever called to account. This is


the simplified history of psychoanalysis – one of corruption, divisive cultism and

un-free associations.

By way of a return to “free associations” (of ideas, affects and people), against

sectarian intolerance and isolationism, we should pause, and allow ourselves to be

subject only to openness; to what Heidegger, in his well-known work on lan-

guage, refers to as a “wandering”, a “gathering”, a “lighting”, a “being on the

way”. Subject means openness. On our wandering way, we are always already

within language before all else. The unity of language is referred to by Heidegger

as “design”. The “sign” in design relates to secare, to cut. To design is to cut a

trace, like cutting a furrow in the soil to open it to seed and growth.15 The key

metaphor of a clearing in the forest, so that something can be presented, shown or

dis-closed, recurs in Heidegger’s writings. A way is made across a snow-covered

field, i.e. transitively – way-making, being the way. Ereignis signifies this propri-

ation, ap-propriation, or, the way that makes a way, bringing about owning a mo-

ment, in the sense of an event – the gift of presence. Language, for Heidegger, is

the flower of the mouth in which the World is made to appear. And it is the “Say-

ing” rather than the Said that is the lighting-concealing-releasing offer of the

world. The world appears and at the same time holds itself in reserve.

the Differend

Set against this Heideggerian free engagement with the openness-hiding rhythm

of Being, witness our descent into poststructuralist language games, splits, dis-

sensus and the Differend. Threat is in the air. Loyalty and tribe are what counts on

the ground. We suffer this in Ireland as elsewhere.16 Everywhere, it seems as if the

gaping void (of values) is being filled with the noise of re-tribalisation.

There is a Differend when there is, “a conflict, between (at least) two parties,

that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to

both arguments”.17 The victim is one who has suffered a wrong yet lacks any

means with which to prove his case. Lyotard’s example is with Marxist theory it-


self, which presents itself not as one party in a suit, but as judge, as the science in

possession of objectivity, thereby placing the other in the position of stupor or stu-

pidity, incapable of making itself understood, unless it borrows the dominant

idiom – that is, unless it betrays itself. With the Differend we are up against some-

thing inhuman, we are left in abeyance, speechless. On the one side, speech; on

the other, silence.

Differends are on the increase as singularities emerge across the cosmos rather

as they are appearing in the universe itself. In a small way, Lacanianism is a Diff-

erend as Lacanians claim the truth about psychoanalysis and will not refer to any

other members of analytic groupings as psychoanalysts, merely psychotherapists.

Those others are left feeling unable to really talk about psychoanalysis unless they

themselves become Lacanian. But the Lacanians will rejoin saying, look it’s okay

to be a psychotherapist! The Catholic Church claims to be the Universal Church.

Just as Lacanians are the true psychoanalysts, so Catholics are the true Christians.

The Jews were condemned to silence by the Nazi Differend. However, accord-

ing to Lyotard, “[b]y forming the state of Israel, the survivors transformed the

wrong into damages and the Differend into litigation”.18 By entering into the com-

mon idiom of International Law they put an end to the silence of the condemned

millions. By entering into discussion and negotiation, they ended the Differend.

As Lyotard stresses, “a Differend is born from a wrong and is signalled by a si-

lence”.19 The wrong described by Lyotard is a double wrong: “a damage accom-

panied by the loss of the means to prove the damage”.20 In the radical sense, this

loss of means is due to death, or loss of liberty, or the right to testify, an impossib-

ility of bringing the wrong to the knowledge of others, for want of a proper idiom.

And this loss occurs in the Real, beyond symbolisation, beyond any speaking

about, because speaking is having to speak in the idiom of the Differend. Yet not

to speak about it, not to seek recognition by the Other, is also a betrayal.

This is an asymmetric situation, where the victim is left breathless, as if rooted

to the spot wanting to scream out, as in a nightmare, yet his position is neutralised

or diffused and what he might stagger to say does not count anyway. The judge is


deaf and the testimony is insane because it is attempting to speak in an unacknow-

ledged genre. You are on the other side of a fault line, where “something ‘asks’ to

be put into phrases”.21

Rather than language being about communication and consensus, there are

walls and, between the walls, a void of silence, “abysses that threaten ‘the social

bond’... a profound dislocation of narrated worlds”.22 The imperative is: belong, or

fall into nothingness, silence between genres, between phrase brands. Where are

you? Oh, I’m between genres. Clearly, there is no agreed authority, no agreed

norm, only rotational ephemeral obligations occasionally up for renegotiation.

Against the void, the Differend, not language as such, but multiplications of com-

peting “phrases” in which you must have your “stake” and you are looking to win,

to be a winner, to succeed. Or, jump genre, like people change political parties to

remain popular. Anyway, wherever you find yourself, you are obligated because

you are obligated; either that or silence. This is brand loyalty, there is no reason

for it, reason ended with the broken contract between the Word and the Real.

There is no “why”. Referring to the Nuremberg trials, for instance, Lyotard tells

us that “the [Nazi] criminal was able to see in his judge merely a criminal more

fortunate than he in the conflict of arms”.23 Therefore, there is absolutely no way

of defeating the Differend. There is no argument that can be mounted against it,

because it is so because we say it is. So, these days if someone makes an excel-

lently reasoned argument and you feel inclined to agree, your next feeling might

well be, so what? The people whom it is aimed at, the Differend people, just shrug

their shoulders and walk off. The argument will melt back into a sea of indiffer-

ence and in any case it will have been heard only by a few and promoted by even

fewer or none. The Differend, however ridiculous or criminal in its persuasion,

will survive because it wills survival, because it obligates. It survives on thought

and language corruption, language backhanders and sweeteners. Cronies are ob-

ligated, because they share the same criminal mental framework. Or, the Differ-

end may unaccountably fade or die, but not by force of counter-argument gener-

ated from the former silence imposed by the Differend, it just falls out of fashion.


Again that has no significance, because meaning, generally agreed meaning (uni-

versalist metanarratives) has departed the scene after the severance.

Lyotard gives the example of a devastating earthquake that destroys not only

people and buildings, but also the instruments used to register earthquakes scien-

tifically. Who is to say that it actually took place? The survivors have a very great

sense of it, but the “silence” of the destroyed instruments puts in question the oc-

currence of the quake itself. This is the “scandal” of the Differend: the instru-

ments (of reason) that might have been used to register the Differend have been

destroyed. There are no instruments to measure the seismic nature of the breach

between the Word and the Real.

What chance has the Real in face of the overwhelming force of our techno-me-

dia to scandalise events with special effects, with repetition on all channels, with

immediacy, and their combined silencing effect? The Real itself is a victim of the

Differend, quaked into silence and terror in the face of its global reach. Once you

start to speak to it, you must play by its rules and the same double loss operates,

firstly the damage by pre-emption and then the lack of the means to right the

wrong. You can speak, but it will be on their terms with their editing. To hide this

effect of the pervasive Differend, the media have provided unprecedented access

to their channels of communication, via phone-lines, chat-lines, internet links,

email, SMS texting, etc., all to give the appearance of openness. But when you

start to speak, your “genre” is translated (even by yourself), and you are likely to

unwittingly betray yourself in the hyper-presence of the media. Paradoxically, it is

the ease of access that should warn us that what we say will immediately evapor-

ate into the vacuum of openness which creates a semantic decompression.

Without obstacle, everything can be said. But what it amounts to is a venting –

filling the void. If everything can be said, nothing is said. This the present state of

affairs.

What emerges here for us with the Differend is the fracturing of language. Not

just the break between the Symbolic and the Real, but fault lines, quake zones or

tectonic plates within the Symbolic itself. Instead of consensus and the rule of


Law, there is opacity and silence. Clearly, the failure to think or write the extreme

“phrase”, the radical failure of the covenant, returns as the acting out of extrem-

ism, the same old icy intolerance and hatreds, “the frozen sea inside us”, beyond

words. The public discourse of “political correctness” heavily polices thought and

utterance, with manuals issued to local government officials and those in the me-

dia on how to refer to minorities. Journalists go undercover looking for racist and

sexist language, trying to catch key public personnel, such as, for instance, police

officers using racist talk. Virtual logic suggests that we might eliminate the Night

by passing laws and censoring people. On the other hand, we have the real of vi-

olence, existing in a coarsening universe, which is now comfortably hidden by the

bland rhetoric of inclusivity, drowning out the screams of the victims. In Dublin,

for example, there is the official stable democratic process and the rule of Law

which structurally coexists with an estimated 17 criminal gangs organised around

illegal drug dealing, terror in certain neighbourhoods and increasingly frequent

contract killings.

lost ethos

There are problems for the humanities in general, as well as psychoanalysis in

particular. An idealized comforting notion of western civilisation persists, derived

from the nineteenth century, assuming high levels of literacy, political freedom,

the rule of Law, the advancement of science, the bourgeois consumerist life-style

and democratic openness. However, during more than a century in which the

Word has drifted off into its own virtual domain, freed from connection with the

Real, the humanities have become inhumane – failing before the Night of the ex-

treme and the horror.

Heidegger, in his well-known “Letter on Humanism”, wanted thinking freed

from technique, from technical application. Instead, he envisaged thinking as the

engagement of Being, where the “of” goes both ways: thinking is of Being; think-

ing belongs to Being. Heidegger suggests that our thinking has become stranded


on dry land: “Thinking is judged by a standard that does not measure up to it.

Such judgement may be compared to the procedure of trying to evaluate the es-

sence and powers of a fish by seeing how long it can live on dry land”.24 Such de-

siccated thinking gives rise to various competing “isms” and what Heidegger

refers to as the devastation of language and its use as an instrument for domina-

tion over human beings which, as he says, undermines aesthetic and moral re-

sponsibility and is a threat to the essence of humanity because it undermines the

proper dignity of man. Heidegger regards man as the “shepherd” and “good

neighbour” who guards the truth of Being. This forgetting of the truth is termed

“ensnarement” (Verfallen), which leads to homelessness and the oblivion of Be-

ing. For Heidegger, we have lost our home, our ethos – dwelling place, habitat,

our natural abode.

However, what greatly troubles Steiner and many others is Heidegger’s 1933

and 1934 pronouncements and his complete silence on the Holocaust after 1945.

In Steiner’s 1989 Armistice Day sermon in King’s College Chapel, he speaks of

the Death Camps and the appalling aporia that opens when, “men and women, ap-

parently sane, could flog and incinerate guiltless victims during their working day

and recite Rilke and play Schubert... in the evening”.25 Further: “One of the prin-

cipal works that we have in the philosophy of language... was composed almost

within earshot of a death camp”.26

Freud created a special form of cultural space in which one is listened to with

“bare attention”. However, this special emphasis on listening to the other, which

Antony Giddens has generalised as the prototypical nucleus of liberal democratic

forms, the absolute freedom implied, has a paradoxical effect: in-discrimination

eliminates difference and becomes nihilistic by default. Nothing matters! The

Holocaust is the unfathomable yet logical end point of this nihilism; equally, as

well as, Holocaust denial – a genre that is gaining ground in this new century.

Does our preoccupation with language as autonomous substance serve as a dis-

engagement from the being of the other? Is what Levinas calls our “pre-originary

susceptibility”, our given and boundless capacity to be affected by the other, al-


lowed to radically and anarchically energize discourse? Or is the potentially ex-

plosive immediacy of the other blocked completely by the mediating effects of

speech, communication and technique – everywhere proposed as “professional-

ism” or formalised in protocols?

Ethics in this radical sense cannot be a question of mere analytic style or tech-

nique. Technique promotes the instrumentalisation of human concerns. For Levi-

nas, the ethical is not an attitude one assumes or adopts, or leaves out by choice. It

undercuts all assumptions. Ethics like language is something we undergo. We are

in Ethics just as we are in language, before we assume any position. So does the

whole psychoanalytic project need to be rethought? Without some ethical struggle

towards right and wrong, truth and honesty, the genuine and the sincere, however

problematic and shifting these values may have become, psychoanalysis is just a

game or indeed a cult, perhaps a smart career move, but not a serious activity. Or,

to put it another way, unless the ethical is allowed to sharpen all discourse, then

psychoanalysis occludes the Real. It remains in a neutral indifferent phase, ulti-

mately unconcerned about the other, spreading its own soft version of the inhu-

man.

Psychoanalysts can never be complacent about their theory or practice as ana-

lysts. The analyst is caught on every boundary: of responsibility and irresponsibil-

ity; of desire and obligation; of being in the Clearing on the Way and in the Night;

haunted by the ethical, by an unacknowledged yet irrefutable guilt and anxiety

about the other and ourselves.

At least as much as any other cultural movement, psychoanalysis and its thera-

peutic offshoots in counselling and psychotherapy have facilitated the privatisa-

tion of life and the retreat from the collectivity and the values required to sustain

it. Post-Thatcher and post-modernity, this is all of a part with the great retreat into

narcissism, the other side of capitalist alienation.

However, in another reading, this private psychoanalytic space can be con-

sidered subversive – a domain of resistance to colonisation by the megalopolis

and the ubiquitous noise of the city. Winnicott, in a former era, was the best expo-


nent of this subversive privacy, a particularly British notion of a secret unbetray-

able silent centre of self, resistant to domination. Ironically, the material of psy-

choanalysis – language – is also the medium of betrayal of this centre. Having to

speak, having to narrate oneself implicitly acknowledges castration, as one speaks

in a “foreign” language (the Symbolic) and the whole dimension of loss and dis-

appointment becomes apparent.

Psychoanalysis takes place against the Night. Yet, slowly, speaking, in this set-

ting of silence, brings about the occasional emergence of the subject (of the un-

conscious), who accounts for herself, as Lacan suggested, to a stranger. A story

bodies forth revealing and concealing. The paradox of psychoanalysis stems from

the paradox of Being itself. Being manifests itself and veils itself at the same time.

In analysis, something appears and is appropriated, but always against a back-

ground of concealment and darkness.

the death drive

The notion of the void of Being may be more a wish-fulfilment than a reality. The

unconscious has become the fetish of psychoanalysis, justifying its existence. It

remains no more than an a priori conceptualised cause of psychoanalysis. What

we live with now is not so much ambiguity or paradox arising because of the

void-space of the unconscious (our shepherds of Being have been laid off). Not

many seriously posit the indecipherability of the world, being forced to live with

the total appearance of the world. This sense of a rhythm whereby the world oc-

casionally appears has been overtaken by the continuous glare of hyper-appear-

ance, where the real of the image, with all its special effects, with all of its viol-

ence, comes to inordinately fill the ontological breach between the Word and the

World.

Freud, intuitively preparing for the passing of the unconscious, developed a

back-up concept, as it were, a more radical cause, to oppose the ubiquitous Eros

of totalisation. Afraid that the non-erotic Eros would mop up all opposition and


that psychoanalysis would fade into ordinary psychology, or the analytic psycho-

logy of Jung, Freud went to the end point of subversion, beyond seduction, and

developed the death drive. When Freud posited the death drive as a defining prin-

ciple, he re-set the agenda for the psychoanalysis beyond humanism (and left most

of his followers behind). Implicitly, he was signalling the extreme, terror and ab-

jection. Freud, as it were, became the “fist hammering” or the “ice-axe breaking”.

The good, the rational, the Law rests uncomformably27 upon a hidden entropic

principle, that is mute, silent and of the Night.

Something foundational occurs via the breach between the Word and the

World where, until recently, the Word was able, to some degree at least, to bind

in, to gather in, the world of suffering. When this binding is substantially undone,

when the book can no longer be an ice-axe, when the link is lost between writing

and the real of extremism, then, ultimately, the death drive is defused and un-

leashed upon the world.

Freud maintained from the Project that the primary function of the psyche was

binding (bindung). According to Freud, in Section 5 of Beyond the Pleasure Prin-

ciple, there are two levels of binding: first, “to bind the instinctual excitation

reaching the primary process...[O]nly after this binding has been accomplished

would it be possible for the dominance of the pleasure principle (and of its modi-

fication, the reality principle) to proceed unhindered”.28 An essential part of this

binding process is the secondary linkage of the reality principle to words, lan-

guage and thought. Freud says: “Thinking must concern itself with the connect-

ing paths between ideas [my italics], without being led astray by the intensity of

those ideas”.29 The potential for binding exists within facilitations of the ego itself

and secondly within the vast resources of language itself. However, this binding

effect is also defensive. Freud describes repression, for instance, as a failure of

translation.30 We are back at the beginning: the Word cannot fully account for the

World. In the final analysis, the Word fails. Linkage slips, there is loss of meaning

and a struggle to represent life and suffering. In Lacanian terms, there is no Other

of the Other. However, slippage is one thing, but to come all the way down to our


current epoch, which Freud anticipated, with its radical distrust of the Word, the

degradation of language and the wholesale equivocation of meanings, the scene is

set for an irretrievable fragmentation and dispersal.

As the Israeli writer Amos Oz declares, “life is pregnant with death”. Life only

lives when it has death in its belly. Or, life can be undone by death, unravelled by

a fatal pregnancy; in this second, “bad” sense, Freud understood the death drive.

The death drive, increasingly casting off, freeing itself from the encumbering,

binding effects of Eros, is a singularity, pure and irredeemable, a radical evil that

potentially ends all recuperative and regenerative cycles. Here, at this zero point,

there is no duplicity, no division or simulation, no chimera; everything becomes

resolved once and for all and glacially clear.31 To be alive, on the other hand, is to

be eccentric, ek-isting, off-centre, where the epicentre that shakes the foundations

is the death drive itself, the inhuman. Life is distorted by this black singularity and

spins haphazardly into movement, into frenetic activity at all costs. Life at the ex-

treme, as far as the Gift of Death,32 where Derrida, at his most religious, contem-

plates giving without counting the cost, is proximate to Freud at the extreme,

where the death drive, qua relentless and repetitive drive, is no gift, but is a given

end point, where the screams of the victims are not drowned out. The death drive

is the Night, an unavowable horror.

For Žižek, though, this reading of the death drive hypothesis would be ahistor-

ical, essentialist and reactionary. “My contention”, says Žižek, “is that the Freudi-

an death drive, which has nothing whatsoever to do with some ‘instinct’ that

pushes us towards (self-) destruction” is, he suggests, a “derangement” linked to

the so-called fundamental fantasy and the primarily repressed, or in Heideggerian

terms, the concealment (lethe) in the very heart of truth (aletheia). Not (rational)

arrangement but de-rangement, a drive towards an ontological madness or an ec-

static void that lies beyond all light, that must be there because of the light, a

blackness that shines through into the world that currently we are blind to. Žižek

acknowledges this “pathological scenario”, but goes on to affirm that it “sustains

our being-in-the-world”.33 For Žižek, it is not clear where he locates the terror, the


extremism and the screams of the victims. As a Leninist, his position on revolu-

tionary violence in general is quite clear: only the death drive liberates the victims

of the capitalist system. More recently, he has understood the death drive as

linked to Benjamin’s notion of “divine violence”.

Baudrillard talks of the transpiration du mal, translated as the transparency of

evil.34 What he has in mind is not so much transparency per se, but a “showing

through” of evil.35 For Baudrillard, evil always carries off the victory, because of

what he terms the “principle of irreconcilability”. With remarkable simplicity,

Baudrillard states that, “whereas the Good presupposes a dialectical involvement

of Evil, Evil is founded on itself alone, in pure incompatibility”.36 He is at pains to

show again and again, how we have “been overwhelmed by an ancestral torpor

and are now succumbing little by little to the grip of ‘dreamtime’”.37

Everywhere, the dream of transparency. Look at the world long and hard

enough and its fallen state is everywhere apparent. In the refracted glare of global

technology there is no room for transcendence. We are already there in the Post-

human – the Nietzschean transvaluation of values has happened with the rolling

out of the ultimate metadiscourse, namely, the base sequence of the genetic code,

ushering in a new molecular ethics. This is the ur-text.38 All former codes will be

required to cede to the genetic code.39 The psychoanalytic insistence on the subject

and fading (the death of the subject in cultural theory) has ironically prepared the

way for psycho-therapy to be swept away by geno-therapy. The metaphorical

translation of the unconscious will give way to the metonymical transcription of

the genome. The guilt of having given ground relative to one’s desire (Lacan),

will yield to the bio-ethical imperative: to act in conformity with your genes. The

ineluctable and the smart move will be away from contemporary approximations

and the relative inefficiency of “psychic cleansing” and “emotional intelligence”

towards the pure eugenic and final form: “genetic cleansing” and “artificial intel-

ligence”.

From digital to quantum and genetic technology, new generations will be able

to achieve what former generations of eugenicists have only dreamt of, namely,


the pure pre-scription of the world. No longer a question of a breach of the coven-

ant between the Word and the World, but a pure writing of the world, a fixed iden-

tity of the code and the world, beyond doubt, beyond equivocation, finally beyond

lethe. The Night of terror and screaming will overtake us.

CHAPTER THREE

THE PROXIMITY OF THE OTHER

ost-Lacan, no one can dispute the central place that language holds in the

practice of psychoanalysis. The son of alcoholic parents talks about “bot-

tling-up” his feelings; the man whose father is a womaniser dreams of “raking”

the autumn leaves. A French analyst reports that his patient dreams of giving him

“six roses”. The patient’s father had died of “cirrhosis” of the liver. A woman

who has troublingly missed her period, dreams of a newspaper “being read all

over”. The significance of the word “rat” for the Ratman is multiple.1 The rat, the

biting dirty little animal, the rat / children lured away by the Pied Piper of

Hamelin, heiraten meaning to marry, raten meaning instalments, or the payments

to Freud for sessions “so many florins, so many rats”, spielratte (a play-rat, a

gambler, as his father was), rat equals penis: the carrier of infections and diseases,

rats burrow into the anus, anal erotism and the pleasurable itching of worms in his

childhood, the rat that runs over his father’s grave, the biting rat (as a child he had

bitten someone), and so on. More condensation is at work in Freud’s description

of the “May-beetle dream”,2 where a may-beetle was crushed by the closing of a

window. The dreamer’s associations were: a moth had drowned in a tumbler of

water the night before; her daughter’s cruelty to insects; the plague of may-

beetles; her birthday was in May, as was her wedding. At the time of her dream,

her husband was away and she had the involuntary thought aimed at her husband:

P


“Go hang yourself”. Earlier she had read that a man who is hanged gets an erec-

tion. Get an erection at any price. The dreamer was aware that the most powerful

aphrodisiac is prepared from crushed beetles. And so on, as we trace out the

weaving, the inter-weaving, the cross-hatching, the multiple determinations that

surround any utterance.

We read from the book,3 recently launched, of Ella Sharpe’s encounter with an

adolescent girl who was threatened with expulsion from her school because of a

sexually explicit letter she had written. Ella Sharpe took her into treatment and re-

ported she spoke only about “superficialities” during the early sessions, but was

observed constantly playing with her hands. Sharpe risked an interpretation con-

cerning masturbation, to which the girl objected strongly, telling her at the next

session the following day, in no uncertain terms, that her mother would be seek-

ing a meeting with the analyst very soon. Feeling uncomfortable, increasingly

threatened by this attack, Sharpe does a piece of self-analysis, whereby she comes

to understand that the “threat” comes not so much from the reality of the session

as from her own infantile superego, part of her countertransference. What is not

said either by her or the commentator on her work, is that such interpretations –

playing with her hands equals masturbation – reductive interpretations, take no

account of the context, the language, even the sexual language that the patient

uses. Instead, they end up objectifying or even humiliating the patient who be-

comes oppressed by the alleged authority of the psychoanalytic “truth” with no

right of appeal. This is the classical psychoanalytic position.

Ludovic Kennedy reported his first session with an analyst who summed up

everything he said by telling him that he was a repressed homosexual. Kennedy

left never to return.

Another illustrative example (of the importance of language) comes from the

Klein-Lacan Dialogues during a discussion on the unconscious. Joanna Swift

talks about a young patient of hers, with whom she has a rather intense relation-

ship, who wants to take grapes from the front of her house. The patient reported

stealing a bunch and putting one in her mouth, saying, “it was a sacrament”. Swift

The Proximity of the Other 57

replies, “My body, my blood”,4 playing on the language of the communion ser-

vice. Now, Swift was in supervision with a Kleinian supervisor. The supervisor

asserted that the grapes were the nipple. The patient’s story, narrative, was trans-

lated into the language of primal phantasy. Whereas, what Swift already had was

a chain of associations connecting the grapes with the girl’s father’s alcoholism,

the past and a whole chain which was closed off by this emphasis on the breast /

nipple.

This brings to mind the well-known joke about the problem of arriving late for

a session with your Kleinian analyst: you have already missed the first few inter-

pretations! But this is no joke, for in a certain sense there is almost no need for the

Kleinian patient to speak at all, as it is not a question of the signifiers which rep-

resent the subject, but instead the biological / psychological mechanisms – split-

tings, projections, sub-selves, objects, etc., that are allegedly operative in the indi-

vidual and her analyst, who allegedly has the expertise to pick them up. This is

the well-known and much criticised “Discourse of the Master”. Here, lip-service

is paid to the “material”, sure enough, but its significance is downplayed in favour

of psychological processes.

However, long contemplation of Kleinian research should teach us not to be

dismissive here. To me, Bion’s work on psychotic anxieties and their containment

rates as highly as any other analytic work or writing. An analyst who does not

have a theoretical and practical understanding of notions such as “containment”

and PS and D and their interaction, does not really encounter a patient or a subject

made anxious by excessive rage or resentment. Only by permitting this “proxim-

ity” of the other in speech and (and this is a critical point) at the level of (extreme)

anxiety can an analytic encounter occur.

However, it can get worse, if this is the right word. I was in touch with a Dr

Raine Krause5 who, at one time, was said to be one of the leading experts on af-

fects. His research involved studying the micro-affective interaction of healthy

subjects with patients classified as schizophrenic, psychosomatic and neurotic. He

set about classifying the affective responses that occur during the interviews. This


work has particular relevance for transference-countertransference affective scen-

arios. I cannot do justice to this work here, but his aim was to produce a “tax-

onomy of affects” that a psychotherapist might find valuable. The “lead affect” of

contempt in the schizophrenic, for instance, together with her apparent lack of af-

fect and cognitive content, fills a naive partner, in the experimental encounter,

with anger and rage. This effect occurs within less than half an hour, no matter

what the topic set up for discussion. I asked him if he paid any attention to the

content of the communications, already clear in my mind that “affective signals”

are what are significant here, particularly those we have in common with our

primate ancestors and our evolutionary past. We have inherited a whole set of re-

sponses that are allegedly more primitive than any structuring effect of culture or

language. Content is unimportant. Often the participants were asked to talk about

the traffic problems of large cities and the same affective confusion ensued.

Much is at stake here in these various approaches: nothing less than the sub-

jectivity of the subject. Who will listen to the subject? Soon we will be carrying

around a CD with our own personal genome, not so much the letter of the uncon-

scious or the unconscious as structured “like a language”, but the pure translation

and pure transcription of our DNA. Then there will be no need for anyone to

listen. All that we will have to talk about is our latest genetic disease and where to

get the appropriate gene therapy. It is widely predicted that biology and with it a

new psychopharmacology will triumph in the new century.

This ethical question of who will listen to the subject, is even problematic for

psychoanalysis these days. The trouble with psychoanalysis (whether coming

from Klein-Bion or from Lacan) is that it is caught up with systems – systems of

language, signifiers, that merely re-present the subject, or, systems of interpreta-

tion which objectify. The radical otherness of the other becomes subordinated to

the generality and totality of a system. The other as other is excluded in advance.

This was not so for Freud for whom each patient was an exception, a singularity,

hence his meticulous attention to all aspects of the patient’s history and the pa-

tient’s suffering. And it is suffering – unmediated – and therefore without mean-


ing, that demands an ethical responsibility beyond any “code of ethics”. Codes of

ethics do nothing more than protect us from each other, whereas the ethical rela-

tion that Levinas refers to, is, “the first philosophy”. Levinas’s critique is that eth-

ics becomes subordinated to philosophical and religious systems. Here we should

include psychoanalysis, with its schools, its institutes, its conservatism, which

preclude, exclude this radical alterity of the other, in advance.

When we ask who will listen to the subject, we mean listen in a more radical

sense than just to what is said, important as this content has proved to be. Freud

suggested, “he [the analyst] must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ

towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient”.6 The analyst must be like a

telephone receiver, “which converts back into sound waves the electric oscilla-

tions in the telephone line”.7 This is an intuitive listening including words and

beyond words, including affects and affective signals, pre-dating subjectivity.

What one does with this “material” thus gleaned, if anything, is a matter of tech-

nique, experience and tact.

Steven Gans in a recent article argues for a renewed ethical sensibility in Freu-

dian practice. “This would mean”, he says, “the analyst turning away from con-

ceptual constructions and artificial groupings, and returning to the between of re-

latedness, in order to attend to the suffering of the other”.8 This other, it must be

clear, is neither the other of the specular relation, nor the impersonal Other of lan-

guage, nor any eternal essence, but who, for Levinas, appeals or calls to me be-

fore I can assume any position. I am caught by the absolute proximity of the oth-

er, before I can decide to give or withhold. I am responsible for the other: both of

us are open before we close off into the world. This “for-the-other” is, according

to Levinas, our originary condition of solidarity from which all ethical systems

and ultimately the Law arise. This is the aboriginal state!


the ego comes to be

What constitutes this “before” of subjectivity? This is none other than the de-

centred subject that preoccupied Freud. The ego is constituted by “deferred ac-

tion” (Nachtraglichkeit). First, there is the scene of seduction (by an adult) which

at the time has no significance for the child. The second event, superficially re-

sembling the first, occurring during sexual awareness of puberty, has a traumatic

effect retrospectively, drawing as it does on (unconscious) memory as well as cur-

rent perceptions.9 In the Wolf Man case,10 it was the wolf dream at the age of four

that precipitated the phobia when his sexual excitations and researches reactiv-

ated, or as Freud makes clear, brought into deferred operation his observations of

intercourse, the primal scene at the age of one and a half.

In Draft K to Fleiss, Freud states that, “Hysteria necessarily presupposes a

primary experience of unpleasure – that is of a passive nature... This first stage

may be described as ‘fright hysteria’; its primary symptom is the manifestation of

fright accompanied by a gap in the psyche”.11 Freud goes on to state that, “Repres-

sion and the formation of defensive symptoms only occur subsequently, in con-

nection with the memory... by the intensification of a boundary idea”. This bound-

ary is so-called because it belongs both to the ego and the traumatic memory.

Later, he says: “Should the traumatic event find an outlet for itself in a motor

manifestation, it will be this that becomes the boundary idea and the first symbol

of the repressed material. There is thus no need to assume that some idea is being

suppressed at each repetition of the primary attack; it is a question in the first in-

stance of a gap in the psyche”.12 Freud has mentioned this notion of a “gap” twice

as if wanting to emphasise this traumatic void at the heart of the psyche.

In a letter nearly a year later, Freud wrote to Fleiss, “As you know I am work-

ing on the assumption that our psychic mechanism has come into being by a pro-

cess of stratification: the... memory traces being subjected from time to time to a

rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a retranscription”.

Freud speaks here of a number of registrations, perhaps three, corresponding to


successive epochs of life. At the boundary between two such epochs a translation

of the psychic material must take place. Repression is a failure of translation, in

which case the primitive conditions persist, and so he says: “Thus an anachronism

persists: in a particular province, fueros are still in force; we are in the presence of

‘survivals’”.13 These retranscriptions, retracings, regroupings of traces, and so on,

indicate that memory is the very opposite of a video library upon which we can

draw.

The notion of screen memories also implies that memory is secondary and de-

rivative. Every presentation of an alleged original memory is always already a re-

presentation, indeed, a screen. As Freud says, “Memories relating to our child-

hood may be all we possess”.14 These “memories” are over-determined by the

present, as if effects create a cause, as if the result sponsors a set of “initial condi-

tions”. Lacan reminds us that the future perfect is the crucial tense: my childhood

will have been in the light of my present project, my current desire. For instance,

it is common enough these days to hear comfortably-off liberal types stress their

working class origins, to validate their current egalitarian principles. Therefore,

my childhood was (will have been) poor!

Events run on ahead of themselves; thoughts are not quite able to catch up. The

ego itself is secondary. For it to be constituted, a “new psychical action”15 has to

take place, which Lacan appropriated for the inaugural moment of the infant’s so-

called “mirror stage”. The ego appears as a unity compared to the anarchy of the

sexual drives, on the basis of an identification with another.

What is clear throughout Freud’s work is that the ego is there to inhibit the re-

lease of unpleasure. Its secondary nature, as it were, is there to play for time, to

regroup, to take stock, to create or invent a (credible) story, to render an account.

The subject lives before having a being, an entity, an ego to live it. We are, to use

Sylvia Plath’s words, “patched and re-treaded for the road”.


suffering

The ethical sensibility of an analyst enters at the point where the ego avoids, tries

to limit to a signal, defends itself against, what is, in Freud’s mechanistic terms,

unbearable quantities of excitation, automatic anxiety, or in phenomenological

terms – suffering. Objective suffering happens.

Levinas makes clear that suffering, especially physical suffering, “entails the

impossibility of detaching oneself from the instant of existence. It is the very irre-

missibility of being... there is an absence of all refuge”.16 With no possibility of re-

treat, we are backed up against being. In one of his major works, Totality and In-

finity, Levinas states that, “The whole acuity of suffering lies in the impossibility

of fleeing it... being cut off from every living spring”.17 Although Levinas is talk-

ing about physical suffering and pain and the proximity of it to the sufferer,

Freud, in his Addendum C to Inhibition, Symptoms and Anxiety, links physical

and mental pain. He says, “Yet it cannot be for nothing that the common usage of

speech should have created the notion of internal, mental pain and have treated

the feeling of loss of object as equivalent to physical pain”.18 Physical pain is

marked by a narcissistic cathexis, whereas mental pain is marked by an intense

object cathexis. Freud continues, “The continuous nature of the cathectic process

and the impossibility of inhibiting it [its proximity in Levinas’s terms] produce

the same state of mental helplessness”.19

Radical helplessness indicates that ultimately suffering remains outside and

beyond any integrating process or theory. It cannot be assimilated, appropriated

or grasped because it is a suffering for nothing, to no purpose, for no meaning.

Levinas states: “Suffering is pure undergoing”,20 more passive than any free

choice of stoical receptivity, prior to any openness of being, any assumed passiv-

ity – suffering is pure submission. Meaninglessness, malignancy, waste and ab-

surdity at the heart of suffering explode the whole notion of redemptive suffering,

much beloved by the therapy industry and soft religions, which everywhere and at

all times assert that suffering has meaning, meaning that may be obscure and


deep, but meaning nevertheless, as part of some (unknown to the sufferer) “grand

design”. Terry Eagleton calls this evasion an “angelic discourse”, where

everything connects, everything is good and harmonious (it only may appear not

to be so at this time). Similarly, Milan Kundera refers to, “shitless discourse”, the

ultimate disavowal of the irreducible and unspeakable excess of nonsense over

sense – gratuitous suffering.

Suffering is exposure, being open, without any possibility of holding back.

Freud has pointed to the gap in being. Levinas refers to “diachrony”, which pre-

vents the ego from joining with itself in the same. The ego arrives too late to re-

cover, unable to stop leaving itself wide open and exposed to outrage, wounding,

sickness, ageing and so on. This pre-original passivity is the obscure source of our

later proneness to feeling exploited, victimised (at work, in relationships, etc.). I

feel victimised by the other. I am already ontologically primed for this trauma.

Therefore, I blame the other out there – racism, sexism, violence, rape, etc. But

the other, as radically unknown, is always already too close – as chaos, disturb-

ance, disruption – the active abyss of an inchoate ego, which, in the instant, will

put on any uniform, any strong ideology, simply to be hard and firm. To go from

nothing to being: to be is not to be.

In his recent meditation on time, Updike comments on the self: “All this super-

fine scaffolding for what? The erection for a few shaky decades of a desperately

greedy ego that tramples... like a blinding lamenting giant”.21 Against the ana-

chronistic clumsiness of the ego with time running out, he continues, “It’s time

that does it. It turns you from 11 to 66 in what feels to you like a twinkling. Once

gone, time leaves no trace. It’s out there in space, out of reach”.22 Heidegger as-

serts that time is “death drenched”. Similarly, for Levinas (he is very close to

Freud here), “the diachronic past cannot be recuperated by representation effected

by memory or history”.23 The past is incommensurate with the present. Levinas

understands the verb se passer – to come to pass – as an expression in which the

ego or the self (se) figures as in the-past-that-misses-itself, as in the ageing of the

body which happens in the Real without our being able to assume or in any way


appropriate it. Things appear in time and consciousness, manifest themselves, be-

fore disappearing into the infinity of the mute world from which they unfolded.

Diachrony is the sadness of the flowing away of things, which pass before they

can be grasped. Like diffusion, the molecules become more and more separated,

diluted, until it is as if they never existed. Everywhere, loss and the draining away

of meaning.

Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep in The Hours, 2002) is a book editor in mod-

ern-day New York, planning a farewell party for her AIDS-afflicted former lover.

In a lull before the party she is recalling the wonderful times of their youth. At the

time, she remembers, we thought it was all ahead of us, that it would go on

forever, never realising then what we realise now – that that was it.

Kristeva cites Holbein’s painting in the museum at Basel, The Body of the

Dead Christ in the Tomb (1522), as leading us “to the ultimate edge of belief, to

the threshold of non-meaning”.24 Here representation occurs on the rim of death it-

self, absolute loss. Holbein’s Christ is not the normal Christ of Italian icono-

graphy, ennobled and certain of resurrection, surrounded by mourners. On the

contrary, this is a minimalist humiliated Christ who has undergone terrible suffer-

ing, unbearable torments, unadorned, utterly alone, any glory obliterated. The

bony, skeletal corpse is stretched out on a slab, gaunt and emaciated yet life-size,

draped with a cloth, with the head slightly towards us, the dark hair partly hanging

over the slab. The contorted right hand is in full view with its stigmata, also

shown, as well as the wound in the chest and feet. The face bears an expression of

hopeless grief, covered in bruises, with the blue-green pallor of death. The eyes

are open and squinting. The tombstone bears down on the corpse, blocking any

possibility of transcendence. Dereliction, horror, dying alone and, Kristeva asks,

does Holbein, “invite us... to participate in the painted death and thus include it in

our own life, in order to live with it and make it live”?25 No Catholic beatific vis-

ion, no eroticised suffering, but rather “another vision – that of a man subject to

death, man embracing death, absorbing it into his very being... as the ultimate es-

sence of de-sacralised reality”.26 Form must be given to the unrepresentable – “a


graphic rendition of pain”.25 The horror of this crucified body points to the void

that sustains it. All the haunting power of this image is drawn from the abyss that

founds it.

A true work of art, according to Rilke, is characterised by its “infinite

solitude”. It aspires to solitude, to remove itself from everything, to be pure ab-

sence. It occupies the Sacred Place, the sublime Void of the Thing, the necessary

“gap” (Freud’s gap in the psyche), into which the artist inserts a sublime object,

that is to say, an object exempted from the everyday economy of exchange al-

though, unavoidably, it will be swept up into that same economy. In this longing

for strangeness art strives to touch the void, to be closer to the moment of cre-

ation.

Lacan has made much of Holbein’s The Ambassadors, painted 11 years after

The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, and five years after Holbein’s conver-

sion to Protestantism. In the corner of the work is the anamorphosis of the human

skull, reminding the new confident upright and sober heroes of the Enlightenment

that death must be inscribed in the world.

Without some attempt to contemplate, symbolise or inscribe radical loss and

severance – the unthinkable elements of psychoanalysis, the abyssal ground

against which we speak – we will fall victim to depression. The death of Christ,

the rupture and suffering at the heart of Christianity, parallel and structure the des-

tiny of loss inherent in becoming human. Freud describes the melancholic as be-

ing unable to let the loved object die, because it is also hated and therefore in need

of love. The process of loss thus freezes with the subject locked in with the object,

guiltily and claustrophobically. The melancholic becomes condemned by the un-

dead object, without psychical “resurrection”. Freud’s famous dictum that, “the

shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged

by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object”,28 bears com-

parison with the more open appeal of Christ, especially the abjected Holbein

Christ – Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me?29


The postmodern subject, suffering from a paradoxical lack of a loss, a negation

of loss permitted and required by structured over-consumption, starting as early

as infancy,30 feels unaccountably depressed in the midst of plenty. Unable and un-

prepared to inscribe tragedy, every negative event, even the most trifling or trivial

losses, are deemed to be “tragic”. Tragedy thus proliferates in a sentimentalised

universe. Further, what is truly tragic is frequently “missed” or dismissed as tri-

fling. In the absence of loss, everything floats at a constant level of near-meaning-

lessness where indifference battles it out with outrage.

Just as loss structures the human qua human – poor people always give most –

a life of plenty and excess structures the in-human, the radical intolerance of and

unpreparedness for loss. The richer our cultures become in the West, the more in-

human they become. Material wealth and safety standards improve and in this

sense living becomes allegedly more human in the official domain, but at the local

level the “human” becomes fragmented, atomised, predatory and hyper-individu-

alistic. Here, in the optimised and operational first world, tragedy is unthinkable

and depression endemic.

In the specific domain of psychoanalysis, we are presented with an ethical

problem for the “talking cure”: namely, that language, mere talking, dissimulates.

The real of loss and separation is often only very poorly inscribed via language, if

at all. In the age of “info-tainment”, language has lost its deep metaphorical range

becoming worn-out through over-usage and waste. Communication, in the deep

metaphorical sense, is barred by sheer volume. Translation into a text is always a

part betrayal (repression) of the mute pre-text. The ethical structure, the first ac-

cording to Levinas, is covered over by the exhibition and massive promotion of

the world and its event-management. Therapy refers to this covering over in very

positive terms – as re-covery! To be “in recovery” means, in effect, to have turned

one’s back on the void in being, talking it down by talking it out and talking it

over! Unable to imagine a sacred void, with a graphic rendition of pain, life con-

tinues on its unsustainable course without any resurrection.


Language assembles and structures the “dispersion of duration” into precipit-

ates – nouns, propositions, particles, lets beings and entities be heard in all their

posturing equivocations and deceptions. Language itself is neutral, disinterested

as well as uninterested, always (humorously) compliant with desire. It owes no

loyalty. It structures, forms and permits the illusion of autonomy: that what is said

is true. Appearance dissimulates or betrays being in its very appearing. As Levi-

nas says, “The unnarratable other loses his face as a neighbour in narration”.31

Friends unexpectedly meet on the street. Speaking ends an instant unbearable

closeness. The wall comes down, like a cell dividing into two. The intense burden

of meeting evaporates, replaced by a banal exchange mechanism, which in an in-

stance revokes the immediacy and irreducibility of that singular moment of prox-

imity. The naked face of the other, with its lines, its deathly pallor, its ageing – in

its unicity – enters the system of exchange and becomes expendable, changing

immediately from a Thou to an It. For a moment there is that connection qua hu-

man, before speaking and chatting. Discourse has the imperialistic impulse to ab-

sorb all, skidding across the human surface in ignorance. The said remains an in-

surmountable equivocation, a kind of fog that comes between us to make each in-

visible to the other, to make our exchange bearable, possible and communicable

and to quench, in some small sense, the deep longing and the equally great fear of

overcoming isolation. Without the medium of language, we might just explode

into each other.32

Language is scepticism. Yet, paradoxically, the failure of language, its huge

margin of error in meaning, creates hope for the talking cure, because by

parapraxes and habitual phrasing, jokes and slippages, truth effects can emerge.

Things can be said! A margin of freedom is insured with wonderful ambiguities,

humour and irony. Most important of all, the equivocations of language allows the

mercurial enigma of subjectivity (with its graphic pain and pleasure) to continue

on in secret. This is the unconscious which can neither be promoted nor de-

ciphered, the origin of Winnicott’s concept of the “true self” – a spontaneous be-

ing-ness without disclosure, transparency and identity.


Discourse recuperates some meaning remnants, like leaves left on a tree at the

end of a wet autumn. The repression of loss, as natural as defoliation during the

fall, enables life to go on, after saying good-bye to the friend. A joke or a phrase,

a flicker of recognition, a memory shared, will be retained – none of which comes

anywhere near to proximity – too much, too much!

ethics

For Levinas, there is between being and Nothingness, between being as what

manifests (things, entities, essences, beings as what appear, as what disclose, what

persist) and, nothingness (the zero point, the void), between these two positions,

there is fraternity or solidarity. Humanity, the excluded middle, excluded from

everywhere, excluded by every discourse, occupies a “null site” between being

and non-being. Before I can speak, I am affected by the other, I am accused by the

other. Before I can choose to be ethical or unethical, I am chosen, by virtue of be-

ing human, by virtue of belonging. There is no escape!

Levinas exposes the Cain philosophy, which asks carelessly: Am I my

brother’s keeper? Asserting instead, what is ethically absolutely unavoidable: I

am my brother’s keeper. I am responsible for his responsibility, infinitely. Levinas

asserts that Cain’s answer is limited and ontological (like the psychoanalytic posi-

tion also): I am I, over here; he is himself, over there. Very much like the cover I

recall on a Gestalt therapy text-book. In big letters: I am I and you are you; if by

chance we meet that’s beautiful. Separated beings occasionally may be brought

“together” by erotic desire – with no ethical determinant to meet. Quite the oppos-

ite: erotic desire (ultimately narcissistic) soon drives people apart unless an ethical

dimension underscores it.

The current position in the West is more than ever characterised by isolation.

Discrete atoms, face down the other, out-sourcing the other, who is exchangeable

and forgettable and, by many accounts, increasingly lonely and depressed. Such

descriptions are haunted by radical proximity, against which, at each instance, at


each meeting, we will turn away. Beyond the current “liberation” of the self,

where people work continuously at every level for freedoms and rights, there re-

mains the accusatory one-for-the-other in his inexchangeability to whom one is

bound in fraternity, where, as Levinas says, “The unity of the human race is in

fact posterior to fraternity”.33 Born together, inextricably linked, like the villi of

the placenta and the loving lining of the womb, exchanging substances, breathing

the same air before any world forms or evolves. What is alleged about the so-

called “unity” of the human race, all the multi-culturalist rhetoric, comes after-

wards as a political ideal, after an originary proximity. For Levinas, conscious-

ness of responsibility is quite literally “ordered”, as in the priestly notion of being

“ordained”, or taking holy orders, for all time.

Clearly, this ethical ordination can never become a question of any (psycho-

analytic) technique with the other. On the contrary, it tears through any notion

self-consciously adopted as to how one might “work” with the other. This is not a

question of, for instance, giving into or not giving into demand, or pacifying or

comforting the distressed patient, however such notions may be claimed as ethical

“positions” of the analyst under the influence of this or that school or training.

Nor is it Rogerian “unconditional love”, which is tied to all manner of hidden

conditions. The ethical tears into discourse, with the “gaping open”, the exposure

of exposure, the absolute proximity of the other in his unicity. The burden is in-

finite! Technique, on the contrary, the arrangement of the consulting room, the

timing of the sessions, payments and so on, save the analyst and patient (no longer

the Levinasian other) from the violating burdensome proximity of the other, an

insufferably suffocating closeness. However, the encounter will become cynical

and manipulative, unless it remains in some sense haunted by its own resistance to

the other, its inevitable ethical failure. Without this accusatory background anxi-

ety, the other becomes an object for whom one has no responsibility at all. The

way that Levinasian philosophy might serve psychoanalysis is simply to remind it

of how unethical it inevitably is: the indifference of psychoanalysis.


However, some “others” are “resisted” more than others. We will compare two

very different examples. R.D. Laing once defined psychosis as radical human

isolation, as being cut-off at source, as “not being able to have any friends, the ab-

sence of conviviality”.34 By his own son’s account, Laing and some of his col-

leagues allowed themselves to be affected by the proximity of very disturbed pa-

tients. This represented an ethical move towards “being-for-the-other”, a refusal

to objectify the other in a system – psychiatric, behaviourist or psychoanalytic. A

colleague testified to Laing’s intuitive empathy with disturbed patients [as] being,

“on the side of the angels, gentle to the fallen”.35 Let the psychotic episodes pass

and there was no need for drug therapy of any kind. His first experiments in this

regard were in the mid-1950s while on military service, working in a psychiatric

unit in Netley. As early as 1951, instead of injecting a raving patient in a padded

cell with insulin, as was routine, Laing went into the cell with him and spent time

talking and listening to him, joining in with his fantasies. Apparently, the patient

calmed calm down and needed no medication. Gradually after several nights with

John, drinking whiskey, Laing said that he felt strangely at home there, lounging

on the floor in the cell. John was later able to be discharged.

Kingsley Hall, Villa 21, the Philadelphia Association, and comrades R.D. La-

ing, David Cooper, Aaron Esterson, Sid Briskin, Clancy Sigal, Joan Cunnold,

Raymond Blake, were all committed to this human way to encounter madness. An

article in the British Medical Journal (December 1965), claimed a 70 per cent re-

covery rate from schizophrenia after an average stay of three months. The therap-

ists were unpaid. Laing summed up their approach to psychotherapy in 1965 thus:

“Paring away all that stands between us; all the props, all the masks, the roles, the

lies, the defences, anxieties, projections... the transference and countertransfer-

ence, that we use wittingly or unwittingly as our media for relationships... Exist-

ential thought... constantly melts and recasts its own verbal objectifications... of-

fers no security, no home for the homeless... addresses no one except you and

me”.36


While on an American trip, Laing was invited to examine a young schizo-

phrenic girl in Chicago. The girl was naked and engaged in no other activity other

than rocking back and forth. Laing stripped off, sat beside her, rocking in time to

her rhythm. After 20 minutes, she started talking to him, something she had not

done for several months. Laing interviewed a paranoid woman from a shelter for

the homeless, which, according to observers, seemed just like a conversation,

which by the end had led to such a rapport that she seemed much less troubled

and was even able to answer questions. From The New York Times, Laing is

quoted as saying, “it is as important just to be with someone in deep rapport as it

is to try and change them”.37

In Lacan’s famous case (Aimée), Marguerite Pantaine, was given the same first

name as her sister who had died tragically in a fire. Her mother was regarded as

“slightly crazy”. Marguerite was clever but given to daydreaming. When she had

her first baby she developed a persecution mania, the child was still-born and she

blamed the death on a former female colleague. Then she had a boy, Didier,38 to

whom she grew passionately devoted, alternately over-feeding him and neglecting

him, so much so that the baby’s godmother took charge. Alienated from child and

husband René, she developed extravagant ideas, acquired a passport in the name

of Peyrols, had dreams of being a novelist and planned to go to America.

Someone mentioned Huguette Duflos, the actress, and Marguerite came to think

this actress was persecuting her. Duflos was in reality leading the sort of life that

Marguerite wanted to have. Instead, Marguerite’s book was rejected. She felt her

son might be being attacked. She sought protection from the Prince of Wales. In

April 1931 she carried out a murderous knife attack on Huguette Duflos. Lacan’s

psychoanalytic explanation was that Marguerite was attracted by famous women

who represented her ego ideal and her “love” (erotomania) for the Prince of

Wales was a way of rejecting her homosexual attractions. By striking at the act-

ress, she was striking at her own ideal and also at herself, bringing about her own

punishment.39


Lacan did not help Marguerite. In fact she came to distrust him and felt used

by him. It might be instructive to compare just for a moment (an unfair comparis-

on perhaps) Laing’s treatment of his first patient and Lacan’s treatment of Aimée.

Both had established themselves outside psychiatry and outside classical psycho-

analysis. Both had revolutionary aspirations. Laing had developed a radical theory

of madness based on existentialism, whereas Lacan eventually turned his back on

the existentialism of Sartre and Heidegger. By the Rome Discourse (1953), Lacan

was departing from any apocalyptic vision of science and any ontology of origin

or presence, although he does make reference in the text to “unveiling” and “let-

ting the word act”. Instead, he was moving with Saussure and Lévi-Strauss to-

wards Jakobson, metonymy and metaphor, science, the Cartesian ego and a re-

volutionary “return to Freud”. Heidegger allegedly said to Menard Boss that he

got nothing out of Lacan’s “outlandish” Écrits, and that “the psychiatrist needs a

psychiatrist”.

“No!”, says my Lacanian colleague when I playfully made this Laing-Lacan

comparison to him. “That is quite ridiculous: Laing was essentially paranoid, be-

lieving that madness was caused by ‘the system’, whereas Lacan understood ali-

enation and madness as structural – the speaking being is always divided. Laing

had no notion of the unconscious. There can be absolutely no comparison”. The

only point I wanted to make before my friend turned away, was quite simply that

Laing had this remarkable capacity for proximity, a hospitality for the other. This

simple generosity started a whole movement of “engagement with the other”,

which produced significant therapeutic effects. Laing’s theory was simple, al-

though it grew out of considerable academic study together with the deep impres-

sion made on him by the brutal treatment of the mentally ill. Clearly, there were

very many problems to do with his drinking, drug use, exhibitionism, etc. But this

question of human proximity, of a capacity for deep rapport with mental suffering

remains of great significance and, to my knowledge, is almost entirely over-

looked. Lacan for his part, according to Roudinesco, “was interested in the wo-

man [Aimée] only in order to illustrate his ideas on paranoia and write a theoretic-


al work that would make him the founder of a new school of Freudian

discourse”.40 There is indeed no comparison between them.

Furthermore, the French anti-psychiatric movement rejected Laing, accusing

him of retreating from radical political and social analysis, back to the “true self”

and its Oedipal dynamics, for the benefit of adaptational forms of familial psycho-

therapy and of community psychiatry. From our perspective here, it seems that

Laing never entirely forgot the real of the other, despite finally losing himself in a

range of mystical and drug-induced states, which led to the floundering of his pro-

ject.41 However, whether it is the celebration of Aimée and her self-punishing

paranoia, or the revolutionary potential of schizophrenia, Oedipus or anti-Oed-

ipus, psychiatry or anti-psychiatry, psychoanalysis or schizoanalysis, our problem

remains the same: the loss of the subject in a system, conservative or radical, it

makes no difference. These arguments take place in a universe that has foreclosed

the proximity of the subject, in advance. While this foreclosure is unavoidable for

the “speaking being”, the proximity of the other should haunt all we do. All the

rest is rivalry, competing systems and counter-systems, each of which may have

some merit, but each of which fails to pay any more than lip-service to the suffer-

ing of the other.

Without this ethical substrate, the most bizarre claims can be made, for theory,

for practice, all of which share something of the authoritarian principle. Once doc-

trine decides, for instance, that only what is said is important, one has already

entered a floating world where concern for the other is marginalised. Instead,

there is praxis or a clinic and there is an agent or a patient. What becomes import-

ant is whether or not one adheres to a doctrine. The movement becomes riven

with splits, where narcissism, omnipotence and fundamentalism reign and you are

either “in” or you are “out”. And if you are out, you do not exist. Not a question

of the proximity of the other, but his infinite distance. It’s not a question of ethics,

but neurotically driven self-serving desire, to which one must give no ground.

As Derrida has noted in his Adieu to Levinas, at his funeral in December 1995,

what has been bequeathed to us is an “immense treatise of hospitality”, where


“the welcome welcomes beyond itself, where it must, in truth, always welcome

more than it can welcome”.42

Into this impossibly burdensome hospitality without limit, comes the third.

Between him and me and my infinite responsibility, to save us from our own

proximity, comes the third, in the shape of the Law, language, discourse, medi-

ation, the media. The third party introduces the limit of limitless responsibility,

namely, justice. We are saved by the Law, from the un-assumed proximity of the

other and the violence and anarchy this persecutory closeness always invokes.

The Law must come between us. However, the Law (like psychoanalytic doctrine

or technique) is nothing unless it is founded on the ethical sensibility which pre-

cedes it and which must always threaten, subvert and disrupt discourse. Tech-

nique in psychoanalysis is the local representation of the limit of the Law. Tech-

nique enables work, but technique jeopardises the vitality of the project by alien-

ating both participants, creating an exclusion zone in which all that is alive and

well shelters, while the rest is mere performance.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE SEDUCTION OF THERAPY

hirty years ago when I had been considering starting work as a psychoana-

lytic psychotherapist, a senior colleague made it clear in an interview with

me that, “analysis was not to be thought of as a way of ‘getting women’, you

know... gratification leads to repression”. I was a little put out by this insinuation,

indeed projective identification.1

T

the hidden erotic

However, my colleague’s comments were right on both counts. First, psychoana-

lysis occurs in a state of deprivation for both participants, abstinence on many

levels. Secondly, gratification of demand, sexual or otherwise, leads to closure.

Freud said as much, “the distressing [sexual] episode would end in remorse and a

great strengthening of her propensity to repression”.2 The silence on the part of

the analyst, the gap, the lack must remain. The rule in analysis is “no touching”,

because touching can signify many things. On one level it may be supportive, on

another, infantile comfort, on yet another, sexual or erotic, and so on. It is not ne-

cessarily what we say it is. Analysis is haunted by the erotic.3 The theory and prac-

tice that comes down to us from Freud (in a number of different forms) both pro-

vokes, invokes and bars the erotic. Free Association, saying whatever comes into


your mind without censorship, tilts towards the erotic, towards chaos, the anarch-

ic. While, on the other hand, the emphasis on words and language, the “talking

cure”, the formalities of the sessions, the couch, the payments, tend in the direc-

tion of reason and the secondary processes.

Above all, the quality of the attention that the analyst gives over an extended

period of time to the patient is attention like no other. No one has ever listened to

us as carefully and as freely as an analyst does. Perhaps only the idealised Win-

nicottian mother comes close. This analytic listening re-creates in the patient a

transferential longing, which may be a repetition of an early experience which

happened, or didn’t happen but should have done, and has been unconsciously

longed for ever since. The patient falls in love with the analyst.

But Freud, in his paper on the erotic transference, already referred to, was

quick to point out that this love is produced by the artificial setting of the analysis

itself, by the position that the analyst has within the structure. To Freud’s credit,

he noted that when his women patients fell in love with him, they fell in love with

an illusion, not with his alleged real charms. This love, he says, “is provoked by

the analytic situation, it is greatly intensified by the resistance... is lacking to a

high degree in a regard for reality”.4 He also pointed out that this love for the ana-

lyst, archaic in origin, acts as a resistance to the analytic process. The patient

would rather fall in love with the analyst than do the work of analysis, which in

the end would free the patient from his incestuous fixations and enable him to

love others. He also noted the analyst’s countertransference temptation to exploit

the situation. However, instead of responding sexually, Freud advocates the stoic-

al work of analysis to uncover the infantile prototypes of this love, driven on by

the persistent transference repetition.

Primal seduction

To put things another way, turning to the work of Jean Laplanche,5 the infant, in a

mythical inaugural moment, is seduced by the mother. As the mother is feeding,

The Seduction of Therapy 77

changing, rocking her infant, she is also deriving erotic pleasure (mostly uncon-

sciously) from her play with the infant. The infant will then be haunted by what

Laplanche designates as an “enigmatic signifier” coming from the erotic mother,

some hidden pleasurable / dangerous, seductive message in that relationship,

which means, from that point on, the infant will be unconsciously prone to other

seductions in an effort to understand the enigma of this primal seduction.

Laplanche, following Ferenczi’s “language of passion”, suggests adult language is

“pregnant with unconscious meanings”.6 For Freud, pride of place in terms of en-

igma goes to the primal scene itself. “It is, I may say, a matter of daily experience

that sexual intercourse between adults strikes any child who may observe it as

something uncanny and that arouses anxiety [because]... what we are dealing with

is a sexual excitation with which their understanding is unable to cope”.7 Not un-

derstood and at the same time arousing, it is traumatic and must be (primally)

repressed. For Laplanche, this scene is also a seduction, opaque to the child and

even to the adults themselves. He likens this to Klein’s “combined parent figure”,

where the parents are believed to be co-joined in coitus permanently, radically ex-

cluding the child.

We must emphasise here that the mother, or the parents, are not acting in any

consciously perverse way towards their infant. This seduction is in the nature of

life itself. Laplanche states, “‘the attentions of the mother’ or the ‘aggression of

the father’ are seductive only because they are not transparent”.8 Laplanche envis-

ages a hierarchy of seductions beginning with the ever-receding first “apophantic

scene”, in the sense of Mysteries.

As Baudrillard is fond of claiming, and as we noted in Chapter One, the uni-

verse was seduced before it was produced. Laplanche could be adding: the infant

is seduced (before it is produced), with so much anticipatory pleasure amongst the

adults. Later in life, the subject (of seduction) will be vulnerable to, pre-prepared

for, a multitude of further seductions, key among these might be counselling and

therapies of all kinds, in an effort to make sense of the primal enigma. Laplanche

states, “[t]he human being is, and will go on being, a self-translating and self-the-


orising being. Primal repression is merely the founding moment in a lifelong pro-

cess”.9

To put Laplanche’s point in more general terms, the infant is born into a world

of language and feelings, the adult unconscious, which far exceeds the child’s ca-

pacity for understanding and deciphering. Talk and excitement is surrounding the

infant / child which it has no way of processing or naming. Add to this, the ex-

treme prematurity of birth and the absolute dependence upon those who care for

him, it becomes apparent how the infant will be swept into, enticed into, trying to

interpret this world of secret messages. With the accession to language and there-

fore the means to knowledge, the impassioned search for understanding begins.

At the beginning, the infant is unconsciously the erotic “plaything” of the

mother. Breast-feeding is an intensely erotic activity. How many mothers will

joke that they want to “eat” their babies in the sensual love they have for the bod-

ies of their babies – smell, touch, sounds, etc. These erotic games, although in-

tensely enjoyed by mother and infant, must fail to be translated by the infant, who

is infans – without words. Later, post-Oedipally, armed with language, the child

will try to make sense of what is now called “sex”, only to discover the eternal

impossibility of doing so. Well-meaning education and enlightenment may fol-

low, but the erotic remains outside any educational process, any speech appropri-

ation at all. Instead, he feels something apparently is profoundly missing in his

life. And this missing thing poses itself as the most potentially exciting thing, be-

cause it is missing. It has the power to divert him off the course, the “official”

course, his life should be taking in developmental and adaptive terms. The child,

for instance, may become vulnerable to paedophiles who know all about the

secret longing of the erotic need. Later still, the adolescent will enjoy the erotic

seductions of others. Or, addictions or gambling may offer themselves as an im-

mediate return to the longed-for missed enjoyment. The world is seduction; the

aporia persists, destined for repetition, or a compulsion for repetition.

The chief concern here, however, will be (the return of) the seduction within

analysis. Its strange artificiality, its little ceremonials – payment, the couch, pri-


vacy, secrecy, confidentiality, seclusion – all will, at some level, activate the

repressed archaic longings to be a plaything of love again. The (unconscious)

temptation will be to give up the onerous work of analysis, even to destroy the

analysis, in the acting-out of the oldest gratifications. Patients will say coming to

the analyst is not unlike coming to a prostitute. The analyst for her part has also

experienced the primal seduction by her (m)other which leaves an unanswered

question for her also, about the enigmatic desire of the first big Other. The analyst

will be aware of this erotic potentiality, primarily through her own analysis, lest

she also act out. In fact her choice of profession may be unconsciously fuelled by

such desire.

against seduction

As is well known, Freud wanted to distance himself from seduction,10 preferring

analysis to hypnosis and the pressure technique, and often refuting the accusation

that analysis proceeded from suggestion. Analysis was to be productive not se-

ductive – productive of interpretations, making the unconscious conscious,

strengthening the ego and so on. Currently, there is a strong demand for profes-

sionalisation, in the interests of controlling and clarifying the therapeutic relation-

ship. All risks to the patient should be minimised. Everything must be formulated,

in terms of “best practice” with detailed monitoring and evaluation in an attempt

to make the whole process transparent and accountable.

The effect has been to create a climate of suspicion and litigation. The attempt

to eliminate the risk-enigma, or the unconscious, creates an ironic return via the

other of today, who is deemed to be abusing me. This makes current therapy train-

ings very cautious, efficient and repressive. Both therapists and students must be

carefully screened. Consumers always want to know what they are “buying”.

When they are buying therapy, it is the same as buying any other product. Will

this product harm me? All guarantees must be put in place. The therapist is pro-


tected, by insurance, registration, the good name of the training institute or the

professional association. The client knows that her therapist has been approved.

However, this “transparency”, inspired by the scientific method, which can

measure all the variable factors, forgets and ignores the radical otherness of the

unconscious, namely, the untranslatable enigma of the erotic.

In this atmosphere, the existential freedom of the patient is compromised be-

fore the analysis gets started, hedged around as it now is with all these safeguards

and protocols. This policing of psychoanalysis is in line with policing in virtually

all other areas of our lives.11 Freud was clear that the dangerous erotic aspects of

the transference must not be acted upon, but at the same time, in his estimation,

they must not be avoided or ruled out.12 In the current climate of fear, this is just

what seems to be being attempted. The patient is now not allowed to approach her

question, the question which is evoked, or the enigma re-posed, by the enigmatic

structure of the analysis itself! The love that she feels she has “missed” (irrespect-

ive of how well cared for in childhood), the excitement left behind, as it were, is

nothing less than the return of the yearning for the One. Is there not a danger that

intimations of this lost object, assuming that they might still exist, could now be

deemed pathological by both patient and analyst alike?

What are we to be protected from, we might ask? The answer is simple and ob-

vious: bad, exploitative practitioners (and patients). This is clear. The public must

be protected. But if analysis is to be more than just a simulation or even a parody

of itself, indeed if it is to be ethical, there must be complete freedom to speak and

to fantasise.13 The analytic encounter must remain open. It stops short of many

things, including even touch, but freedom of expression including erotic longings

must not be elided. There is a real danger now that the analytic process will be in-

vaded by, what we might call, a professional growth-promoting countertransfer-

ence which defends against risk, the erotic, the perverse, the addictive, indeed,

“life” itself. Its practitioners may appear warm, supportive, attentive, but focused

and ultimately very controlling and risk averse.


I was moved, when I heard Christopher Bollas speak in Dublin to analytic

practitioners, many years ago (the lecture was not published), about the need to

respect and pay careful attention to the positive transference in its various mani-

festations. The negative transference is relatively easy to endure and interpret!

The positive transference (at its deepest level) on the other hand is bound up with

the core of subjectivity, touching on the enigma itself. To interpret here endangers

what Winnicott called the incommunicado element, that if exposed in this way is

worse than rape. The love that the patient offers is to be heard, endured but not

either interpreted or acted upon.

The danger with the professionalisation of psychoanalysis is the loss of the si-

lent human solidarity essential in the project. Patients, clients (these are both the

wrong words – part of the problem) are in danger of being returned to the status of

object – being interpreted, being worked on, being cured, all in the passive voice,

in short, being eclipsed in their subjectivity. Patients unconsciously collude in this

objectification, anxious for clarity, progress and growth, unwittingly increasing

their own alienation from the One.

Furthermore, the institutionalisation of psychoanalysis suffers from the same

deep problematics as the institutionalisation of Christianity. Institutionalisation

may be necessary to pass on and safeguard the message, but in so doing, it creates

a lie that leads to the Inquisition, the murder of the secret, the reversal of all the

values that were its original inspiration and freedom.

transference resolution or transformation

In classical psychoanalytic terms, the work is finished when the transference is re-

solved. But Lacan has insisted that the transference is never resolved. In his sem-

inar on transference (1960-61), unpublished in English, Lacan puts it thus:

And as regards this hand which stretches towards the fruit, towards the rose, towards the log which suddenly bursts into flames, first of all to tell you that its gesture of reaching, of poking, is closely linked to the maturation of the fruit, to the beauty of the flower, to the flaming


of the log, but that when this movement of reaching, of drawing, of poking, the hand has gone far enough towards the object, if from the fruit, from the flower, from the log, a hand emerges which stretches out to encounter your hand, and that at that moment it is your hand which is fixed in the closed fullness of the flower, in the explosion of a hand that bursts into flames, what is produced at that point is love!14

Nothing is resolved in psychoanalysis, because the question of the erotic

(transference) can never be resolved, it can only be explored by the seduction of

psychoanalysis itself. On the other side of the work of technique, interpretation

and the production of meaning, lies nothing other than seduction, that possibility

of reaching out, of bursting into flames. To allow oneself (analyst and analysand –

to use a better word) to be seduced, to be led along the pathways of free associ-

ation, mostly eschewing judgement, mastery, cure, and the whole labour of work

on the self, which is itself a defence against seduction.

The state of mind that allows seduction to occur is termed by Winnicott and

Bion, “reverie”. Prototypically, it is the child in the presence of the id-mother

whose (erotic) enjoyment of the child initiates the seduction of the child by the

world. Just as the mother stops short of actual sexual contact with the child,

which, as we know closes down the quest for life, so too must the analyst not en-

gage in actual sexual seduction of the patient which, as my colleague pointed out,

following Freud, leads to repression. It is simply enough for the analyst to be

present, relatively quiet, and fully attentive for the seductive process to have a

chance of coming to life.

From our ethical perspective, it will be apparent that psychoanalysis faces two

ways. First, towards the production of specific meanings via interpretations, re-

constructions, insights, working through, strengthening the ego, and so on.

Secondly, towards seductions and deconstruction of stable realities and meanings,

where both participants allow themselves to be caught by the flow of signifiers

and affects which lead not to the reality-principle but to the uncertainty principle

and the edge of the unknown. Modern psychoanalysis, post-Lacan and post-Bion,


seems to privilege the second strategy, which is really an anti-strategy, a negative

capability, opposed to production, self-mastery and knowing.

However, one can be seduced by anything, not least of course, psychothera-

peutic ideologies themselves, which we will come to, as well as the whole slick

streamlining of the process. However, developmentally, seduction always pre-

cedes production. Production is fragile, seduction is strong. The idealisation of

production, growth and capital in the psychical economy as well as the real eco-

nomy may turn out to be just one more seduction, one more illusion, to trap and

charm us.

Bollas had something similar in mind to seduction when he identified the role

of the “transformational object”. Here, he envisages the mother functioning as a

source of transformation of what he calls the infant’s “self experience” prior to

any representational knowing. For Bollas the mother’s caring activities act as the

first aesthetic experience, the first experience of beauty (of seduction), the trace of

which will inform the search for aesthetic experiences during the course of our

lives. Bollas makes the very interesting assertion that Freud himself, by missing

the importance of the mother-infant relation during the pre-Oedipal period, un-

consciously acts out this elision in the establishment of the analytic situation

which, as we noted above, repeats a dedicated maternal attentiveness. Similarly,

the subject enters analysis with the hope of transformation. Bollas says:

Thus, in the adult life, the quest is not to possess the object; it is sought in order to surrender to it as a process that alters the self, where the subject-as-supplicant now feels himself to be the recipient of enviro-somatic caring, identified with metamorphoses of the self... I will argue, the analytic ecology enacts what Freud excluded: the early object relation of mother and child.15

He suggests that, “What Freud could not analyse in himself – his relation to his

own mother – was acted out in his choice of the ecology of psychoanalytic tech-

nique”.16 Against the purely productive analyst, he warns present-day analysts:

“[If] we insist, at least in more classical formulations, on proceeding to analytic

‘work’, such work cannot take place, I maintain, until the analyst has a full under-


standing of his own profession as a countertransference enactment of an early ob-

ject setting and relation”.17 Bollas notes that the primordial experience of trans-

formation remains a memory which will be re-enacted in the search for transform-

ative cultural experiences (seductions) “that promise total change”.18 As well as

new cars, new jobs, new relationships, and so on, Bollas acknowledges that this

relation can become fanatical, as in revolutionary ideologies which promise total

transformation and, let me add, a fundamentalist identification with the One. Se-

duction can go any way!

Bollas emphasises the mother’s caring and transformative activities; he allies

himself with the British Independent tradition. Added to caring, the “manifest

content” of mothering, should be added the Laplanchian enigmatic darker side of

the mother, namely seduction (Winnicott’s “Id-mother”). With seduction there is

no knowing how things could go, how things did go and how they will go in the

future. The Independents downplay the seductive-erotic, favouring the nurturing

mother, believing the object-relation to be primary. However, the nurturing moth-

er, just like the transparently “safe” therapies she spawns, will still carry an enig-

matic effect, an “adult language” of control masquerading as freedom.

the play of language

Classical psychoanalysis, as noted, privileges the extension and production of

reason and meaning in psychical life in an attempt to educate, to cut across the

primordially seductive power of the mother with the dead Law of the father that

puts a halt to the erotic play. The feminine becomes identified with the diabolical.

Seduction, however, operates with disregard for truth and meaning, preferring in-

stead, the secret, enigma, opacity, illusion, appearance. Seduction secretly circu-

lates in the analytic process as elsewhere, undermining subjectivity, meaning, and

putting everything into play, via displacement, condensation, reversal, metaphor,

metonymy and many other tropes. What is clear is that words have a certain free-

dom with respect to meaning. Whatever the father tries to put a halt to, whatever


meanings he tries to erect are subject to collapse. Just as the satyrs of Greek com-

edy, the wood-demons, paraded their grotesque ludicrous winged phalluses, lan-

guage creates and displaces meanings in equal measure and delight. The phallus,

no less than phallocentric language, is also the site of comic forgetfulness and

freedom, what has been called the grace of language.

Take this young girl’s reversal of terms, when she angrily says to her mother:

“You just wait till my father comes home”. Or the alcoholic, who has a habit of

attracting many others around him, “because”, as he says, “I’m a magnate”. Yes,

he thinks he’s a big man too. The chief of the Irish Rugby Football Union, during

the Apartheid period, hard-pressed by a reporter about the Republic’s involve-

ment with the all-white South African rugby team and trying not to be racist, says,

“I’ve talked about this problem until I’m black in the face”. A woman is “com-

manded home” by an inner voice after working successfully abroad for 10 years,

saying she was “homesick”. In fact, she had left her schizophrenic mother and

was now about to return again to a “sick home”. Consider some of Freud’s brief

dream interpretations where an image has to stand in for a word or phrase:19 A

kiss in a car equals autoerotic; a broken limb is a broken marriage; overflowing

water is superfluous; a deformed skull is a childhood impression; lustre equals

lustful. The skidding play of the primary process we prefer to the inhibition of the

secondary process, as Freud indicates in the joke book: “It must not be forgotten

that the nonsense in a joke is an end in itself since the intention of recovering the

old pleasure in nonsense is among the joke work’s activities”.20

In this sketch from the BBC, a couple are coming to the end of their marriage

counselling sessions and they are at the final so-called “pledging” stage. The hus-

band Peter reluctantly pledges, “OK, I pledge to spend more time with Linda and

my son Samuel”. The female therapist urges Peter, her voice rising – “and that is

my pledge”? Peter obeys, “and that is my pledge”. “Well done, Peter, well done,

marvellous. OK, we’re nearly at ‘resolve’. We’re nearly there. Linda, now it’s

your turn to pledge”. Linda says, “I pledge to spend more time with myself and

take a lover to ease my frustrations, and that is my pledge...”


An Irish comedian updates an old saying: “People in glass houses shouldn’t get

stoned”. The following condensation contains both Irish pathologies simultan-

eously: “A hair of the dogma”.

The smallest change can radically alter meaning, even a change in punctuation.

A woman, without her man, is nothing.

A woman: without her, man is nothing.

A sign seen in New York: NIGGER’S OUT. Under which was scrawled, “But

he’ll be back shortly”.

These examples are taken from Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves,21 or

should it be Eats Shoots & Leaves. Then there was the parody take on Truss’s

book, Eats, Shites and Leaves.

In Freud’s example of the salmon mayonnaise joke, the play is with the dis-

placement of meaning. A poor man borrows money from a rich acquaintance

who, on the very same day, finds the poor man in a restaurant eating salmon may-

onnaise. What, he complains, you borrow money from me and then order yourself

salmon mayonnaise? What am I to do, replies the poor man, if I haven’t any

money I can’t eat salmon mayonnaise and if I have some money I mustn’t eat it?

When then can I eat it?22 Like the man in Freud’s next example who is a tutor, but

his drinking is getting the better of him and he is losing pupils. A friend urges him

to stop so that he will get the best tutoring in town. But this is his indignant reply:

I do tutoring so that I can drink, should I give up drinking so that I can get tutor-

ing? In each case, the amusement is caused by the sensible productive doctrine

being seduced by a logic of enjoyment. It is reminiscent of a cartoon that ap-

peared in The Irish Times some years back, showing two very frail old men bent

over walking sticks in an underfunded dreary old people’s home, with the caption:

“Just think, if we hadn’t given up smoking, we’d have missed all this!”

In Heine’s well-known joke, quoted by Freud, the poor lottery agent boasts

that the great Baron Rothschild treated him quite as his equal – quite “famillion-

airely”. Here, the pleasant thought that a rich man has treated a poor man quite


equally and familiarly is contrasted and condensed with its more repressed oppos-

ite thought – so far as a millionaire can!23 A similar fusion or condensation of

overlapping words is attributed to De Quincey, when he says that old people are

inclined to fall into their “anecdotage”.

More subversive still is schizophrenic logic of the, “my pyjamas have stripes,

prisons have bars, therefore I am in prison” variety. Here is Francy Brady and his

fellow inmate in the mental hospital in The Butcher Boy, where the tenuous link

between two discourses is with a held object.

Some basket it was he was making, I thought mine was bad. All bits of sticks stuck out of it all over the place. When we went to mass what does he do when the priest is holding up the Eucharist. He stands up and shouts at the top of his voice – Good man yourself! Now you have it – run! Into the back of the net with her! By Christ this year’s team is the best yet!24

the paradoxical play of the world

For Baudrillard, only those who lie outside seduction are ill. Psychoanalysis be-

lieves that it treats disorders of the sexual drives, when the real disenchantment

comes from the disappearance of seduction. What else can castration mean, asks

Baudrillard? “To be deprived of seduction is the only true form of castration”.25 To

not want to search for the One, or to not even realise the possibility of the One, is

illness. This search, though ironically but fortunately doomed, may take us from

one sexual partner to another, from one psychotherapist to another, one religion to

another in search of perfection. Although we encounter many abortive variations

on the way, not to be moved in this way, not to dream in this way is to be ill. It is

entirely possible, and common enough, that the so-called normal subject, espe-

cially the analysand, has lost sight of the One. That is, to be content with the

world as it is, as it is presented, incomplete and lacking. Ironically therefore, psy-

choanalysis is part of this castration process. The task of a more radical and ethic-

al psychoanalysis will be to return the subject not to productive meaning, as such,

but to seduction, to the play of the world and beauty.26


Therefore, at the heart of the erotic transference lies not love, but seduction. A

seduction which is related to life itself and its origins in the seduction by the

mother. When an analysis is entered into, both participants, however minimally,

enter into a scene of seduction. There is no knowing how things will go. Seduc-

tion exceeds both participants. Both are subjected to it without knowing and

without the possibility of avoidance. True, the analyst is there to maintain the

structure, but there is something contingent at the heart of it. The structure (re-

lated to psychoanalytic technique, tradition and ultimately the dead law of the

father) is inert, lifeless, unless enlivened by the effects of seduction. The attempt

to rigorously exclude seduction and all risks (insurance policies), deadens the pro-

cess and becomes seductive in itself. All the complex ideological battles within

psychoanalysis, as well as its more recent professionalisation, can be seen as sys-

tematic attempts to stop the play of seduction, and end up becoming immensely

seductive in themselves. Suggestion, hypnosis, all seductive effects, far from hav-

ing gone away, surround the whole theoretical edifice in spite of its reasonable

and scientific pretensions. Even with so-called “codes of ethics”, the possibilities

for seduction are legion. A patient at the first interview with a therapist says:

should I go to a man or a woman? The woman analyst answers: as your problems

seem to be with your mother, it may be better to work these out with a woman

analyst. Similarly, a patient asks: will this form of therapy relieve my depression?

Yes, you will definitely see improvements; it may take time. Yes, you need to do

some work on yourself and your past. By remaining enigmatic and silent, she be-

comes more seductive again: my analyst, says an enthusiastic Lacanian student,

has said nothing for two years. And so on with these little seductions, right the

way up to the gross seductive claims of the global therapy movement.

The discovery of psychoanalysis is that the unconscious seduces, lures us away

from stable meanings and certainties, pulling us towards archaic traces lost in in-

fantile amnesia and primal repression. Psychoanalysis rests on this boundary

between production and seduction with the stakes heavily weighted towards the

latter and technique weighted towards the former. But to designate seduction as


pathological, to call it resistance to the work of analysis is to see things in a very

limited obsessional perspective. One might just as well assert that the “work” of

analysis is resistance to the play of seduction, a joke not lost on some critics of

analysis: you mean you analyse your life... the meaning of your life!

psychosis

We will take one analogy. One form of seduction is improvisation in contempor-

ary jazz. Here the artist is trained in (technique) and has given herself to the lan-

guage and feel of music, just as the speaking subject has given herself to the af-

fectively resonant language of words. The best musicians can be so seduced by

musical ideas that these can play with each other in endless combinations, devi-

ations, subversions, interruptions, involutions, that enchant with their strange

dreamlike beauty or rhythmic intensity and vitality, which we can enjoy if we will

also allow ourselves to be affected by this enigmatic form. What we call psychos-

is, is (1) where this process of improvisational possibility is seriously impaired,

stopped or turned into humourless selective repetitions through fear of the aleat-

ory potential of seduction. Or (2), where the instrument (or more likely computer)

plays itself in a dissonant jungle without the presence of a subject, who pre-empts

the fear of breakdown, not by stopping seduction, but by disappearance from the

scene of seduction which thereby becomes a wasteland of abandoned signifiers

with minimal habitation.27 Unable to inhabit that broad middle zone of abundant

movement with its themes and improvisations, the psychotic, without sufficient

ballast, either grinds things to a halt or allows them to spin frictionless into infin-

ity – because the psychotic subject was failed in his initial seduction into the mu-

sical nature of language. In short, his primal seduction (by the mother) was not

transformative in binding him excitingly to the world. Instead, in some significant

way, it became a terrifying encounter with unbound excess, unmediated reality,

and therefore strange and dangerous. Or, in reverse, the killing-off of seduction,

as happens with a depressed mother. This all goes to show the sovereignty of se-


duction. The psychotic was seduced brutally. For one patient the result was that

he reported himself as being made of a block of ice.

Words, phrases, ideas do not seduce the psychotic or lead him astray but,

worse, they “expropriate” him. According to Roustang, “The mother – or father

[of the psychotic] – speaks in place of and in the name of the child”.28 “The him,

separated from the thoughts that become remote, vague and confused, is now a

destitute force, adrift, and ineffective in organising the thoughts into a coherent

discourse – thoughts that then become ideas from which all investment has been

withdrawn”.29 These thoughts far from being seductive and alluring become un-

linked signifiers, sharp and powerful, that hit the subject from the Real. One pa-

tient spoke of waking in alarm on hearing her name called. What was terrifying

was that her name came from a disembodied voice, “outside” in her head.

The psychotic is an oddball or a misfit because he has not been caught by the

fluid play of seduction in the symbolic universe, handed down and enriched by

each generation. He does not have a genealogy: “it appears that what has

happened to him cannot be connected to the sequence of generations; he is isol-

ated”.30 His failure to be represented in the symbolic system destines him to fall

out of the scene, to fall off the stage. Roustang claims that the psychotic child is

treated like an object. He may be used by his parents to settle a score, in an inter-

generational conflict in which the child becomes merely a pawn to pay off a debt,

to make up for an intolerable lack in the family, a death, or an abandonment. It is

the fixity of position (or non-position) that is fatal. It creates in the psychotic child

such a position of power that it seems as if the whole family stability rests on him

playing his part as object. Here, so the delusion goes, everything proceeds from

him.31 He, not the world, becomes the sole source of seduction! Either way, seduc-

tion for the psychotic is impregnated with death. Here, more than ever, seduction

reveals its malign inhuman, its sovereign face, proceeding without the (psychotic)

subject.


cool seduction

There is a growing sense that not only the psychotic but also culture itself is enter-

ing a phase of instability, superfluidity or superconductivity. Materials can flow

without friction or viscosity. Currents flow in cold metals without resistance. The

speed of transmission of images, their total availability and juxtaposition, begins

to resemble the centrifugal anxieties of the psychotic. This is the phase of cool se-

duction. The aesthetic of Information Technology (well named as IT), and elec-

tronic media in general, spearhead this generalised cooling. We will take just one

example relevant to psychotherapy.

With the media’s intense coverage and “outing” of alleged abuse of all kinds,32

amidst the generalised breakdown of trust and confidence in human relationships,

it is not surprising to come across the following posting:

Therapy Abuse Support List

The Therapy Abuse List is an Electronic Peer Support Discussion List open to men and women alike. It provides a place where therapy ab-use survivors can share their stories, and give / receive support to / from one another.

Who participates on the list? Anyone, male or female, who has been abused in psychotherapy or counselling – whether it be by a pastor, doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist, lay counsellor, or other such therapist.

Not surprisingly, the same search turns up pages on child abuse, diametrically

opposed positions on False Memory Syndrome as well as abuse by therapists.

There is a direct line, so it is believed and promoted, between the abuse of the

child by a trusted adult and the abuse of a patient by a trusted therapist, now

sometimes called “the-rapist”. Abuse is everywhere. The enigma of primal seduc-

tion has been liberated and circulates in the infosphere without restriction.33

The promotion of therapeutic ideologies in every area of contemporary life

also sponsors a parallel hermeneutics of suspicion and paranoia surrounding ther-

apy and relationships of all kinds. A splitting and reversal has occurred that deems

helpers, adults and authorities, generally, as potential abusers, and patients as in-


nocent potential victims. Here the former play of seduction has been transformed

by the cold seductive “outing” power of transparency facilitated by the new in-

stantaneous media. The seductive erotic which should remain hidden and enig-

matic has been forced into the open.34 Information and misinformation circulate

with such intensity that no judgement can be made about either. You can believe

what malignity you want to believe. In the confusion, all seductions run into each

other: illusion, delusion and truth co-mingle with indifference and passionate in-

tensity. Seduction, because it always tends to resist transparency, now raises its

game to a feverish pitch. Then, the fever becomes seductive itself and loses its

playful excitement. Seduction seduces itself with no brakes applied. Seduction be-

comes cold, aleatory and predatory the moment that it ceases to have a truth to

subvert.

Meanwhile, the real pain of loss during childhood, theorised by Melanie Klein

and her work with children, has been converted and collapsed wholesale into the

pain of being the victim; the erotically tinged enigmatic yearning for the forever

lost other, now transformed into rage and revenge against the other. The taming

of risk, in the guise of protecting patients, has the ironic effect of repressing the

real pain of loss which psychoanalysis understands as inherent in the ambivalence

of life itself.

If it is true that seduction has always secretly had the upper hand, we have been

able up until recently to live with the strong illusion, the last illusion, that repres-

sion works. There was seduction but simultaneously some real barrier against be-

ing seduced and against the magnetic effects of erotic excess. Now, the sheer mul-

tiplications of signs, their visibility and the vertigo created, is our current phase,

namely, cool seduction. Cool seduction collapses this last frontier, swept away

while no one noticed by a gathering electronic storm of imagery in cyberspace,

which is expanding faster than the real universe, against which, in the end, there

can be no resistance.

CHAPTER FIVE

ENJOYMENT! FOR NABOKOV AND OTHERS

he borderline situation. The borders are multiple: the border between “nor-

mal” sexuality and perversion; between phantasy and reality; between leg-

al and illegal “pleasure”; between a medical discourse of pathology and human

freedom and responsibility; between truth and lies.

TIn January 2003, a famous chef and good family man at one of Ireland’s best

known hotels pleaded guilty to having a number of child pornographic images on

his computer and having deleted nearly a thousand others. He received a suspen-

ded sentence, commuted to 240 hours of community service and was ordered to

make a donation of €40,000 to an Indian charity that cares for abused children.

People were phoning the Irish radio stations complaining about his avoidance of a

prison sentence because he was rich, because he hired good PR and because his

“shameful” family supported him. The whole nation wanted to attack his secret

“enjoyment”. A number of libidinal streams were tapped here in an over-determ-

ined way: his secret enjoyment of images of children; his enjoyment of wealth; of

good food; of love and the public gaze. Media discussion escalated into moral

outrage and revenge, barely contained by commentators, caught in the frenzy, one

of whom said (with pleasure), “This story will run and run”. The media have a

structural relationship to obscenity, whereby they become the vehicle, the co-con-


spirators of criminal enjoyment. And we, the mediated to, are the voyeurs, enjoy-

ing the spectacle.

This story occurs in the context of the uncovering of widespread sexual abuse

involving the Catholic clergy that has gone on unchecked over many decades. It

also occurs in the context of the growing realisation of internet pornography and

the portrayal of gross indecency involving crimes against young children paid for

by the viewer in private. The internet has facilitated and opened a channel for the

development of a global paedophilia net expanding rapidly and exponentially over

the last few decades.

In Freud’s account, the paedophile is perverse in a twofold sense: with respect

to drive object and aim. The object is a child and not an adult, and the sexual aim

conforms to Freud’s description of polymorphous perversion. As Freud says:

“People who have no hesitation in satisfying their sexual desire upon children

cannot be expected to jibe at finer shades in the methods of obtaining that satis-

faction”.1 What is critical and determinant is the passivity of the child faced with

an adult seduction, spoken of by Freud in terms of aggression, irruption, intrusion

and violence. Any apparent sexual activity on the part of the child is based on a

“substratum of hysterical symptoms which could be traced back to a scene of

sexual passivity that preceded the pleasurable action”.2

Although Freud revised his seduction theory of neurosis in his famous 21

September 1897 letter to Fleiss, replacing the theory of actual seduction by the

father, with what was to become a more complex theory of infantile sexual phant-

asies as causative of neurosis, he never abandoned the seduction theory altogeth-

er.

For instance, he suggests, in the Three Essays, that, “great and lasting import-

ance attaches at this period to the accidental external contingencies. In the fore-

ground [of these] we find the effects of seduction, which treats a child as a sexual

object prematurely, in highly emotional circumstances, how to obtain satisfaction

from his genital zones”.3 Further on, he says: “under the influence of seduction

children can become polymorphously perverse, and can be led into all possible

Enjoyment! For Nabokov and Others 95

kinds of sexual irregularities... the mental dams against sexual excesses – shame,

disgust, morality – have either not yet been constructed at all, or are in the process

of construction”.4 Far from abandoning the seduction theory, Freud says that he

merely “over-estimated the frequency of such [real] events (though in other re-

spects they were not open to doubt)”.5 Referring to sexual abuse by adults or older

siblings, Freud is clear: “It is easy to confirm the extent to which such experiences

arouse a child’s susceptibility and force his own sexual urges into certain channels

from which they cannot afterwards depart”.6 Even as late as 1924, in a footnote

correcting his 1896 paper, “Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of

Defence”, Freud acknowledges his error of not being able, “to distinguish

between my patients’ phantasies about their childhood years and their real recol-

lections. As a result, I attributed to the aetiological factor of seduction a signific-

ance and universality which it does not possess. When this error had been over-

come, it became possible to obtain an insight into the spontaneous manifestations

of the sexuality of children which I described in my Essays on the Theory of

Sexuality”. Freud continues, “Nevertheless, we need not reject everything written

in the text above. Seduction retains a certain aetiological importance, and even

today I think some of these psychological comments [in 1896] are to the point”.7

The problem becomes complex because, psychoanalytically speaking, the child

is clearly not sexually innocent. Therefore seduction may and, in all probability,

will not now be seen as a concrete real which can be assigned a definite place in

the subject’s history, but more of a floating retrospective structuring myth or en-

igma, ultimately unlocatable and indecipherable. Believable, perhaps because the

person speaks and we must listen, but questionable too because of the primacy of

phantasy. So this psychoanalytic view, strongly held to, creates an ethical problem

about the real of sexual abuse and its problematic status as a historical fact.

In the case of our hotel chef, the seduction of children was very real, but at one

remove. He had looked at children being abused. His crime was to be complicit

(because of payment) with the unseen criminals who abuse children and display

their images on the internet. He is guilty of perversion by proxy.


Capturing the Friedmans8 is a documentary about an apparently good Americ-

an Jewish middle-class family from Great Neck, Long Island, whose family life

was destroyed in the chain of events that followed the interception of child porno-

graphic material by the local police, destined for the well-respected father, ex-

teacher, Arnold Friedman. The police arrested him, together with his teenage son,

Jesse, on charges of molesting children who had attended computer classes in the

basement of the family home, and of being in possession of child pornography.

The authorities seemed determined to get a conviction from the evidence given by

the children of the class, who, when interviewed, are led to believe that others had

already testified to being abused. Some, however, admit to camera that there was

no sexual abuse in the class. In fact, no child complained about sexual abuse of

any kind at the time the classes took place. The family vehemently protested its

innocence and the older brother, David, filmed the whole process of argument and

counter-argument as the family became split, the sons lining up with the father,

excluding the mother (Elaine), who later divorces the father. David himself is a

successful child entertainer, able to make children laugh, something his mother,

he says, was not capable of doing. The father’s brother is absolutely certain of

Arnold’s innocence.

What emerges is that the two brothers, when they were small, were made to

sleep in the same room as their separated mother who would have sex with lovers

while the young boys were supposedly sleeping. Elaine tells us that Arnold had

sex with his brother when they were small, and this was clearly not “normal” be-

haviour, although the brother has absolutely no recollection of this having

happened. When Arnold had sex with Elaine, she said, it was “mechanical”. Un-

der questioning by police, Arnold admitted that he had behaved “inappropriately”

with young boys on holiday, some years back, but he said he did not have sex

with them. When Jesse was small, it was alleged by a police officer, that Arnold

had abused him, and Jesse had apparently liked this because he wanted the affec-

tion.


When the case comes to court, the father decides to plead guilty to crimes he

says he did not commit, to lighten, so he says, the blame that would attach to

Jesse. Also Jesse reluctantly pleads guilty and his attorney cites the mitigating cir-

cumstances of his alleged childhood abuse by his father. However, Jesse still goes

to prison for many years, and worse, his father commits suicide while in prison.

The mother marries again.

This film illustrates the problems there are in differentiating historical factual-

ity from fantasy, suggestion and lying. Undoubtedly, the Friedmans are a strange

family, curiously isolated, even before this case blew up and tore the family apart.

The trigger, the day-residue of this bad dream, was the arrival of child porno-

graphy in the post, which led to the “case” against the father and Jesse. But the

suggestion of real child abuse, it seems, was largely fabricated by police inter-

viewing techniques. So much for the manifest content, the latent intent driven by

the young brothers clinging together for pitiful love while their mother screwed

other men in their presence, established a homoerotic trend which extended to

Arnold’s love of his own boys and possibly other boys, from which the mother

was largely excluded or excluded herself. Homoerotism, and the sexual interest in

young boys, the father painfully admits to. He has already been in therapy. His

brother is in an openly gay relationship. But the crimes of which he was accused

in the Salem-type hysteria, hyped-up in this closed community, he probably did

not commit although the latent fantasy was there. Instead, the family becomes the

perverse focus of the community, the police and, by their own filming and exhib-

iting themselves, the tragedy becomes a farce increasingly of their own making.

We see them dancing around filming themselves after Jesse’s conviction. The

descent is complete. The guilty pleas are a suicide pact, a consenting without res-

istance and without truth to punishment and death. As Elaine coldly puts it:

“[Arnold] had a need to confess, and a need to go to jail”. She could have added

that maybe Arnold, without a father or mother and only a little brother to cling to

for love, could offer, in the final judgement, no defence, no truth, no backbone

against the chilling lies of the other.


What we should demand here is the truth – of unconscious desire, but also the

truth of what actually happened out there. But the truth is often asymptotic, a re-

ceding horizon; the best that can be hoped for is a partial reconstruction. In a work

of fiction even this is not possible.

Lolita

Lolita is in many ways a very beautiful book, as Nabokov says of his novel, “a

constant comforting presence”, but also, we must immediately add, a deeply

shocking one. Praise for the book is high – witty, serious and profound – one of

the most evocative depictions of unrequited love in the language. Martin Amis de-

scribes the variety, force and richness of Nabokov’s perceptions as, “the nearest

thing to pure sensual pleasure that prose can offer”. On the other hand, Kingsley

Amis complains about, “the atrophy of moral sense”, evident throughout this

book. The only success of the book, he believes, is in the portrait of Lolita herself.

Against the moralists, against the psychoanalysts, who might want to make a cau-

tionary tale out of the effete Parisian middle-aged college professor’s extreme

love for a pre-pubescent girl, Nabokov asserts: “For me a work of fiction exists

only in so far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a

sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where

art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm” (p.313).9

Thus one can read Lolita in two mental states that exist side by side. One is the

medical psychoanalytic (no matter whether or not one is an analyst or a doctor)

that would immediately incarcerate Humbert as a paedophile, the one who knows

enjoyment (jouissance) beyond the law and the one from whom we, the com-

munity, need protection. As the exemplary John Ray Jr, PhD, who has been em-

powered by Humbert to edit his manuscript, warns, “Lolita should make all of us

– parents, social workers, educators – apply ourselves with still greater vigilance

and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world” (p.7).


How much this anticipates the “Safe Sex” programmes of more than 40 years

later!

The second mental state is the one, as Nabokov says, connected with “tender-

ness, kindness, ecstasy”. Here is the hidden discourse of rapture, of beauty, of

“sin” and “soul”: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins” (p.9). This narrative is

unique, poignant, intensely moving, as well as comic, vile, insane, ridiculous,

cruel, ironic and so on. Here is the narrative in outline.

Lolita was not the first. Humbert’s first love was the tragically short-lived pre-

adolescent ecstatic love of Annabel who died of typhus: “and the ache”, he says,

“remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue

haunted me ever since – until at last, 24 years later, I broke her spell by incarnat-

ing her in another” (p.15). “Consumed”, as he puts it, “by a hell furnace of local-

ised lust for every passing nymphet” (p.18), he was caught between having nor-

mal sex with human females (demeaned as “palliative agents”) and an “incompar-

ably more poignant bliss” (p.18).

In due course, he marries Valeria. But an American uncle dies bequeathing him

an annual income providing he goes to live in America. Valeria refuses to go with

him as, by now, she has a lover in Paris. So they divorce. Humbert goes to the US

and has the first of several breakdowns. After recovery, if that is the right word,

he insinuates himself into becoming a lodger of Mrs Haze in the small town of

Ramsdale. In her young daughter of 12, he sees the same perfect child again as

his beloved Annabel of 25 years before, in the nymphet shape of Dolores Haze

(Lolita). From this moment on, it is clear that Humbert will be carried along on

the fatal curve of desire that exceeds and destroys him. He says, “My own desire

for her blinds me when I am near” (p.44). “Well let us grope and hope”, he says

of his “warm coloured prey”, who incidentally is “more than willing herself”:

they hold hands in the back of her mother’s car; she talks cutishly and impudently

to him; she sits on his knee, and not long after he arranges a secret liaison. On this

occasion he reaches orgasm as she is lying across his lap, apparently unaware,

talking to her mother on the telephone.


But tempestuous Lo must go to summer camp to curb her tomboyishness.

“Double-crosser”, she calls him, thinking he had a hand in her mother’s decision

to send her away. But it is Mrs Haze who gives Humbert an ultimatum in the form

of a desperate letter (she calls it a confession) – marry me or get out. “I know with

absolute certainty I am nothing to you”, she says, “but if you stay I shall know

you want to be my lifelong mate” (p.67). So he marries Charlotte Haze only in or-

der to be nearer Lolita. But the mother has plans to send her hated daughter to

boarding school. However, before the summer camp is over Mrs Haze herself is

dead. She is knocked down by a car and killed outright as she blindly dashes

across the road, having just discovered Humbert’s diary with its terrible revela-

tions about mother and daughter.

Lying to Lolita by pretending that her mother was having a serious operation,

Humbert embarks on a dangerous illicit tour with her from inn to inn, motel to

motel, from tourist site to tourist site, across America. “Say wouldn’t mum be

mad if she found out we were lovers? Good Lord, Lo, let us not talk that way. But

we are lovers aren’t we?” (p.113). At first, he tries to spare her purity by giving

her a sleeping vial so that he can have his way with her, but later, as he says: “Fri-

gid gentlewomen of the jury! [He is always aware of the Law.] I had thought that

months, perhaps years, would elapse before I dared to reveal myself to Dolores

Haze; but by 6 [am] she was wide awake, and by 6.15 we were technically lov-

ers... it was she who seduced me” (p.132). “Why this horror that I cannot shake

off. Did I deprive her of her flower? I wasn’t even her first lover” (p.135). She

goes on to tell him of the sexual experimentation at the camp. He tells her she is

an orphan, that they must keep their secret or he might go to jail and she into the

welfare system. He takes her swimming, plays tennis, goes to perhaps 200 movies

in that year; “I did everything in my power to give my Lolita a really good time.

How sweet it was to bring that coffee to her [in the morning in the motel], and

then deny it until she had done her morning duty” (p.162).

Eventually, she goes to Beardsley School for Girls (some concession to nor-

mality) where they learn the 4Ds – dramatics, dance, debating and dating! Adoles-


cence is happening, or the simulation of normal adolescence (as sexual abuse vic-

tims will frequently testify to), except for the occasional irruption of the banal and

the inevitable (Nabokov does not spare Humbert, nor the reader, the full moral ac-

count): “Lolita would be preparing her homework... lolling sideways in an easy

chair... I would shed all my pedagogic restraint, dismiss all our quarrels, forget all

my masculine pride – and literally crawl on my hands and knees to your chair, my

Lolita. You would give me one look... ‘Oh no, not again’ ...The fragility of those

bare arms of yours – how I longed to enfold them, all your four limpid lovely

limbs, a folded colt, and take your head between my unworthy hands, and pull the

temple-skin back on both sides, and kiss your chinesed eyes, and – ‘Pulease, leave

me alone; will you’, you would say, ‘for Christ’s sake leave me alone’ ...But nev-

er mind, never mind, I am only a brute” (p.190).

The progressive headmistress is reviewing Dolly’s progress at school. She says

to Humbert, mildly, disapprovingly: “You are an old-fashioned continental father,

aren’t you?” She goes on, “Dolly Haze is a lovely child, but the onset of sexual

maturing seems to give her trouble... she is still shuttling between the anal and

genital zones.... [W]hat zones? [he interrupts]... That’s the old fashioned

European in you! ...[Dolly] giggles rather often... [is] a little dreamy... cannot

verbalise her emotions... [But, and here is the greatest irony!] I’m sorry – well, we

were all wondering has anybody in the family instructed Dolly in the process of

mammalian reproduction?” (pp 192-93).

A sexual incident occurs when Lolita is rehearsing for a school play. A

massive row ensues – I loathe you, you killed my mother, you violated me, I want

to leave school. On tour again, but now Humbert is increasingly desperate and

paranoid and he has a gun. A red convertible is following them. He sees the big

man Lo is urgently talking to at the café. She gets a letter from her school friend

Mona. She makes her “escape” from Humbert. But also the beauty of watching

her play tennis, “I felt I could rest from the nightmare of [her] unknown betrayals,

within the innocence of her style, of her soul, of her essential grace” (p.232).

Then, there was another old man watching her playing tennis too. Later, Lo’s


sickness (was it another trick?). And finally, her real disappearance, this time,

planned for all along, by whom, we might ask?

Three empty years pass; another spell in a sanatorium. Then the letter from

Lolita requesting money and the whole “betrayal” is unravelled. By now, she is

pregnant by husband Dick, and needs money urgently. Humbert drives the 800

miles to Coalmount to see Dolly Schiller, as she now calls herself. There, at last,

she tells him the whole parallel story of her original sexual abuse by a man (Clare

Quilty) she was “crazy about”. “I had never counted, of course”, recalls Humbert,

“our poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, dismissed like a

dull party, like a rainy picnic... the past was the past...[Yet] I had been a good

father” (p.270). Quilty had known her mother, was an old friend of the family, son

of the local dentist, and had seduced Lolita when she was 10. It was he who had

written the play for the school. “[D]id I [Humbert] know that he had seen me and

her at the inn where he was writing the very play [ironically entitled The En-

chanted Hunters] she was to rehearse in Beardsley, two years later?” (p.271). At

the camp five years before, Quilty took her to a ranch, promised her stardom in

one of his movies. He was a complete freak in sex matters and when she refused

to take part in his sexual games, because she loved him, Quilty threw her out.

“There she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at 17, with that baby... and I

looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I am going to die, that I loved

her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for any-

where else... you may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am

gagged and half throttled, I will shout my poor truth” (pp 275-76). Here is more

of Nabokov’s cruelty against Humbert, who is incapable of love and therefore all

the more idealising in his lone fantasy world.

As Humbert says to himself during the solitary drive home: “I review my

case... Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spir-

itual solace I might find... nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had

inflicted upon her” (p. 281). “It had become gradually clear to my conventional

Lolita during our singular and bestial cohabitation that even the most miserable of


family lives was better than the parody of incest, which, in the long run was the

best I could offer the waif” (p. 286).

Humbert goes in search of the respected dentist’s son, his counterpart in sexual

abuse, in order to confront him with “kidnapping my daughter”, and then, as

planned, shoots Quilty, following him as he staggers from room to room, in the

early morning light while his friends are gathering to drink his liquor and take him

to a game.

Both H.H. and Mrs Richard Schiller (Lolita) die within a month of each other

in 1952 – she in childbirth, he, in a mental hospital, of a heart attack shortly be-

fore his real trial is due to begin.

discussion

If we follow the official discourse supported by psychotherapy and the good

people of Ramsdale we can be emphatic and clear that Humbert, beyond any

shadow of a doubt, shows all the characteristics of the paedophile: perversion of

the moral law; predatory attitudes; intensely narcissistic orientation (“I was, still

am an exceptionally handsome male! A sob and throb idol of a teen’s dream”);

blaming of the victim (“she seduced me”); secrecy demanded (“or you’ll be

orphaned and I’ll be analysed”); criminal behaviour to get what he wants, treating

the other as object, and so on. Furthermore, is not Humbert one of the character

types cited by Alistair McIntyre in After Virtue10 that characterises the moral vacu-

um of modernity? Namely, the “aesthete”, who only follows his desire. Humbert

is a pervert, a sexual deviant par excellence. He deserves all he gets. He should be

hunted down and locked up, as a friend commented after her own reading of this

book.

Yet this Symbolic universe with its consistency and justifiable moral outrage,

is shot through with inconsistencies, elisions and ironies. Indeed the whole unoffi-

cial sexual underworld of Lolita at the camp, of Lolita and Humbert and finally

Lolita and Cue whose initial seduction of Dolores haunts and subverts the whole


story, complexifies and resists any simple transparency. Indeed, the plot is domin-

ated by secrecy, darkness and death, what Nabokov will call right at the end of his

commentary on the book, “the black velvet backdrop” of his Russian tongue.

Nabokov, the iconoclast, hated psychoanalysis (“Freudian voodooism”) and

psychiatry and he causes Humbert in the book to attack psychiatrists at every op-

portunity. Nabokov was troubled that his friends and colleagues would misunder-

stand Lolita, trying to read it perhaps as a kind of case history or a pornographic

piece. Four American publishers were shocked by the theme. “Why did he have to

write it?” “Why should I read about maniacs?” (p.314). Apparently, an intimate

friend was seriously worried that Nabokov himself might actually be living

among such depressing people. But, Nabokov says: “we are not children, not illit-

erate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of ho-

mosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated

versions” (p.315). Can this story be read (by analysts, as analysts, can we listen to

a story), even a difficult, or maybe a shocking story, he seems to be asking,

without resorting to censorship, especially of the health education kind which be-

lieves only in rational sexuality and leads to the ridiculous and hilarious misun-

derstanding by the headmistress of Lo’s lack of sex education!

What Nabokov is against is the use of this work for sociological or psycholo-

gical analysis, as a case history, for the purposes of covert social control, or in-

deed, to impute motives and pathology to the author himself. With Nabokov, one

should be suspicious of psychoanalysis in this regard as, in America especially, as

has been very well demonstrated recently,11 psychoanalysis has been used as a

means of social control.

the death drive

The idea for Lolita came from a newspaper article about a scientist who managed

to persuade a monkey to draw, the first ever drawing by an animal. And what the

animal charcoaled poorly was a drawing of a caged animal. More than trapped,


everything that Humbert touched became damaged or dead: his Annabel; his

wives; Cue Quilty, his “brother” in crime; Lolita and her child; finally, himself.

He gets what he deserves. He even says of himself: “Had I come before myself, I

would have given Humbert at least 35 years for rape” (p.307). Nabokov spares

Humbert nothing.

For Azar Nafisi, Lolita, the girl herself, is (and she quotes from the book),

“some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall”.12 For Nafisi,

there is a resemblance between Lolita – pinned alive to the wall, as it were, by

Humbert’s fantasy (she has no will or life of her own, she is Humbert’s creature,

without even her own name, but a name that he invents, a reincarnation of his lost

love) and Nafisi’s own situation in the Islamic Republic. Nafisi is a teacher of

English literature, and her young women students come to her apartment in secret,

away from the gaze of the theocratic police, to read and discuss Nabokov and oth-

er writers, but they are forced in the real world outside, at all times to cover up, to

be veiled. She says, “young women who disobey the rules are hurled into patrol

cars, taken to jail, flogged, fined, forced to wash the toilets and be humiliated...

we had become the figment of someone else’s dreams”.13 For their lives too, like

Lolita’s, had been “confiscated” in the name of the past. Like the young women in

Iran, “Lolita belongs to a category of victims who have no defence and are never

given a chance to articulate their own story”.14 But the resemblance is only in part,

as Nabokov has taken his ironic revenge against these totalitarian fantasists and,

“through his portrayal of Humbert, had exposed all solipsists who take over other

people’s lives”.15

There are three levels of seduction in Lolita. First, the story of the criminal se-

duction of a young girl. Secondly, the attempted seduction of the jury-reader (oth-

er) by Humbert himself whose devious charm, erudition and poetry, draw us in,

almost onto his side. (According to Nafisi, Lionel Trilling believed Lolita was a

great love affair). Finally, at the level of Nabokov, the author himself, who by

writing Lolita subverts all our normal categories of meaning and love.


Nabokov is against totalitarianism. This is not a book about paedophile seduc-

tion per se, neither can it simply be used as a metaphor for a regime like the Irani-

an Republic. For while we may be caught by these seductive ruses and Nabokov

spares us nothing, an enigma remains.

Maybe Freud invented the death drive precisely to subvert the kind of Rams-

dale thinking that believes in rational control and predictable meanings. There

was a danger in Freud’s mind that the universal “goodness” of Eros, in Freud’s fi-

nal drive formulation, might mop up all resistance, in other words, mop up

everything that was shocking and antagonistic, creating a banal psychoanalysis of

reconciliation. Here, ironically, Nabokov might have liked Freud with his specu-

lative notion of a serious and ultimate form of subversion that has the capacity to

turn the whole system, any system, on its head. Humbert turns “normal” love on

its head, posing as a lover, using the language of lovers, laughing at love, parody-

ing it, exposing the scandal of the erotic. The laugh is on us, just at that moment

when we start to think morally. To the end Humbert is laughing, perhaps even

when he is crying – laughing at us; he thinks he has the secret of enjoyment.

The death drive can be anywhere. On the side of disturbance, the demonic, the

anarchic on the one hand, and at the same time, part of this analytic, institutional-

ised, oppressive, social control, via the Law and interpretation, which demands

clarity in everything. Indeed, we increasingly demand it for our own protection!

Derrida, after summarising Freud’s five forms of resistance, concludes that the

death drive and the repetition compulsion are the resistances par excellence, the

hyperbolic resistance, the irreducible resistance and “the one that disorganises the

very principle, the constitutive idea of psychoanalysis as analysis of resistances”.16

Paradoxically, Derrida speculates that the very desire to analyse, indeed, the “psy-

choanalytic theory, treatment, and institution represent the death drive or the repe-

tition compulsion at work’.17

For Derrida, this is the resistance of psychoanalysis, where it trips itself up; it

becomes its own blind spot – the part of its retina which fails to see because it is

the very instrument of the seeing itself.18 Like the limpet on the seashore which


can scrape up the algae on the rock surface, but can never reach the algae growing

on its own shell. Winnicott senses this deadly appetite for analysis in his incom-

municado paper where he likens intrusive interpretation to rape.19

Nabokov’s Lolita stands as a complex story worthy of complex readings. It

stands as a narrative which affords entry into another shocking world, namely the

erotic – everything which is obscene or off-the-scene: dark; tender; risible and

definitively Other. A psychoanalysis that takes itself too seriously, that misses its

own subversion, that cannot strike itself out, is worthy of the Nabokov treatment.

With the death drive, indeed with psychoanalysis itself, you learn to “dance

with your jailor”, to use Nabokov’s metaphor from Invitation to a Beheading.

You have to get right up close, even (appear to) enjoy that which imprisons you,

or which threatens to execute you. This is what Lolita does with Humbert, dan-

cing with him, learning better how to make her escape. She in the end, like us, has

no choice. There is no transparent knowing this seducer, this charmer, who

grooms, who loves. Or, for that matter, the revolutionary ideology that Nafisi

fought for, only to become imprisoned by.20 The danger of seduction is imprison-

ment, fanaticism. Liberators are the greatest seducers. As Freud warns, the danger

is as always, passivity in face of “accidental external contingencies” that overflow

the “mental dams”. Finally, there is the danger of seduction by psychoanalysis

and becoming an analyst caught and imprisoned by a doctrine, no longer dancing.

freedom

There is only a small margin in which to Act.21 This “act” might be just an intern-

al act, an act of internal resistance, the “silent negative”.22 Or, there may be no

way out, except via a passage à l’acte, where the deadlock feels complete, debilit-

ating and impossible. When, apparently, there is no imagining an exit, the only

thing left is to strike blindly and destructively in the real. The subject exits the

scene and enters the void via an attempt at suicide. The subject becomes a pure

object. Like Freud’s young homosexual woman, when seen by her father walking


with her lover, immediately throws herself over a wall onto a railway line. Find-

ing her father’s desire impossible, she acts in the Real.23

Finally, the ethical act, the act that changes, alters decisively the relationship

between the dancer and the jailer. We will end with just two examples.

The Danish Play, Festen,24 is about a big annual event, namely the celebration

of a birthday (in this case the sixtieth) of a great and admired father, Helge

(Stephen Moore). This year, the gathering is overshadowed by the recent death of

Linda by suicide, twin sister of Christian (Paul Nicholls). Christian is deep in

thought, preoccupied and grieving for his sister, in stark contrast to the younger

brother, Michael (William Beck), who has come to the party in spite of being for-

bidden as he has caused trouble in previous years. The party clearly has a set

format, with people standing, calling others to listen, making impromptu

speeches, or telling jokes, or singing individually and collectively. There are

dances too, around the table, dancing on the table, with recitations and general ex-

citement.

Christian, in contrast to the general hilarity, is close to breakdown, visibly up-

set yet in control as he gets up to make his speech drawing on all his reserves to

say something he has never spoken about before. He turns to his father, who is

avoiding his gaze. Which speech would you like, he says, the good and positive

one or the other? He delivers the other one in an ordinary tone, telling of his

father’s cleanliness (laughter) and how at bath time he would “choose” to have

sex with one of the twins. The guests both hear and abolish the hearing of these

shocking words,25 and, as if nothing had happened, break into collective singing

more loudly and riotously than before.

Christian has spoken. His father comes over to him during a break in the festiv-

ities and sarcastically praises him for his speech, reminding him in a quieter,

firmer tone of his mental hospital admissions and how his family have helped him

in so many ways to get over his illness. A child’s voice and running or dripping

bath water are heard off stage at different times throughout the play, as if the

whole proceedings are haunted by Linda and her abuse at bath time, as if the


sexual trauma and her suicide have made time stand still – the timelessness of the

unconscious where nothing wears away. However, at this point in the play, we are

now unsure about the truth status of Christian’s words. Could what he has said be

an elaborate fantasy, designed to bring down the powerful father? What is his mo-

tivation for speaking?

It is only later after several more speeches and jokes from other family mem-

bers, when Christian rises again to talk very briefly and succinctly about his

memory of his father’s cock in his mouth and how his mother sees this at the time

and does nothing; in fact, she turns away. It is only at this point that Christian’s

Act is complete in its structural effect.26 Things are transformed by the speaking;

people are clearly shocked and dumbfounded; his mother looks away ashamed.

The play ends with the father saying at breakfast next day that he admits he has

done wrong and that he will henceforth depart the scene, expecting his wife loy-

ally to follow him out of the dining room. She does not, so he goes alone.

The Woodsman is the first feature film directed by Nicole Kassell (2004),

about a paedophile, named Walter (Kevin Bacon), out on parole in his native Phil-

adelphia after serving 12 years for molesting (not harming, he stresses) pre-teen

girls. Bacon captures the furtive, depressed isolation, the shame and self-loathing

of Walter as he goes to work in a local factory. Walter’s apartment overlooks a

school playground. This humdrum existence is interrupted by a woman in work

(Kyra Sedgwick, Bacon’s wife in reality) who fancies Walter, but is shocked for

some time by his (reluctant) revelation that he has served time as a paedophile.

She tells him her own story of being brought up with three older brothers, each of

whom molested her in turn, and whom she now believes are tender fathers that

she says she loves deeply. Walter is maligned and provoked by a black cop who is

sent to monitor him and who remains suspicious of the paedophile. Walter is fi-

nally exposed by a black woman at work who checks his name on the internet and

discovers the paedophile conviction. Word spreads in the workplace and he is os-

tracised and isolated. He is rejected by his sister who has kept him away from her

children. But her husband has maintained contact with his brother-in-law, until


that is, Walter asks him if he ever fancied his own children, which is going too

far.

Walter is still strongly tempted to follow young girls. One in particular is an

isolated little girl called Robin, aptly named, as she is a bird watcher in the local

park. Walter befriends Robin and meeting her is the only time in the film when

his face lights up and he seems freer and more spontaneous. It transpires when

Walter asks her if she would like to sit on his knee, he discovers that she is used

to sitting on her father’s knee and, further, Walter discovers that her father is mo-

lesting her. At that critical moment, Walter does not pursue his request, even

though the lonely little girl will not refuse him. Here Walter acts by not acting. At

another critical moment in the film, Walter violently beats up a paedophile whom

he can see from his apartment window enticing children from the school secretly

into his car. These two ethical acts altered decisively the coordinates of Walter’s

desire and leave us with the feeling that he will not re-offend.

Returning to the complex border between (sexual) phantasy and (sexual) real-

ity, one should note within psychoanalysis and outside an indifference to this im-

portant though difficult distinction. If a victim says it happened then it happened,

subject to the usual deconstructive analysis. It may have happened; it may not. So

what? Psychoanalytic practitioners seem to feel they have no need to probe the

story, however difficult this may be. They may feel that they are above such dis-

tinctions, which are the preoccupations of non-analysts.27

When Freud tells Fleiss, “I no longer believe in my neurotica”,28 and that

“there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distin-

guish between the truth and fiction that is cathected with affect”,29 the scene is set

for the emptyings of reality that plague us today. Psychoanalysis downgrades real-

ity, as reality cedes ground to wish fulfilment and phantasy in every area of

(psychical) life. Freud continues, “It seems to have become once again arguable

that it is only later experiences that give the impetus to phantasies, which then

hark back to childhood”30 (the aforementioned deferred action or Nachträglich-

keit). Reality can be dismissed as “fiction cathected with affect”. Reality becomes


literally what we want it to become. You have your reality; I have mine. There is

no point in testing either, because there is nothing to test either against. There is a

direct line from Freud’s substantial turn against the real of seduction to the post-

structural abandonment of “depth”, in favour of what we now celebrate – plays,

practices, discourses, simulacra – copies for which allegedly no original ever exis-

ted. Liberation for sure. No requirement for reality testing. No requirement for or

possibility of making any judgements. No facts, only structuring myths. The

wholesale loss of objectivity, something that Orwell warned us about, even the

promotion of its loss and all the old values that went with it is paradoxically the

wholesale loss of subjectivity. The best we can hope for is the enjoyment of man-

aging our own disappearance.

CHAPTER SIX

ABSENT GOODNESS

I long ago abandoned any desire to cure my patients... In the final reckoning those patients who are able to develop faith in the truth and goodness of the analytic method and their particular analyst thrive and those who cannot leave.1

question should arise about this paradoxical “faith” and “goodness” to

which Meltzer refers, coming as he does from a mainly Kleinian orienta-

tion. Is this good effect of analysis, of therapy culture generally, in which many

put their faith today, merely a placebo effect? There are indeed similarities with

homeopathy. Psychoanalysis “infects” us again with our childhood pathologies,

treating like with like, in the hope that this inoculation will cure the disease. But

no one knows how homeopathic remedies work. The “memory” of water? Water

can “remember” molecules that are no longer present after they have been infin-

itely diluted to 20C.2 Arguably, no one knows quite how analysis works. Are both

governed by our willingness to believe, our positive transference? Do they work

by magic? Foucault believed that Charcot exalted in the doctor’s “marvellous

powers” and, for nineteenth century psychiatry right up to Freud, objectivity was

from the start a “reification of magical nature”.3 The doctor was a thaumaturge.

Even Freud, in Foucault’s estimation, who investigated deeply and with rigour,

hiding nothing, silencing moral condemnation, “exploited the structure that envel-

oped the medical personage; he amplified its thaumaturgical virtues, preparing for

A


its omnipotence a quasi-divine status’.4 Something of the magical attaches to the

person of the analyst. Consider the Lacanian analyst’s so-called “oracular

speech”, and the analyst as enigma, as incognito, all of which creates a magical

effect like the memory of water. Karl Kraus believed psychoanalysis to be a cult,

a form of gnosticism, which claims to possess secret truths, not for the purposes

of clarification but, rather, domination and as a means of social control.

Psychoanalysis is still well-placed to exploit this ongoing need for magical

cures in a post-rational world. However, compared to the massive growth in

overtly magical new-age therapies and practices, from tree huggers to ear candles,

psychoanalysis looks quite sane and rational, maybe even ethical. And from the

point of view being advocated here, a psychoanalysis of engagement, of proxim-

ity, should be our ethical preference. But who are we to choose an ethical prefer-

ence? This is back-to-front – prior to psychoanalysis is the ethical. We have no

choice. There is no time to choose.

Here are a number of assertions that bear upon this a priori of ethics in psycho-

analysis:

1) At the core of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is the safeguarding of the ana-

lysand’s freedom.

2) The analytic situation is a presentation in silence (never shown, stated or re-

presented) of goodness in which both the analysand and the analyst participate.

This goodness is infinite and beyond knowing.

3) It is “participation in” rather than “possession of”, which correlates with

Bion’s “without memory or desire”, as it cuts across and undermines the analyst’s

omnipotence, always present in some degree because the analyst is a desiring sub-

ject. However, if the analyst or therapist tries to become the good, or presents

himself in any way as master of this goodness, the whole project will be doomed.

4) The psychoanalytic understanding of human desire inevitably means that

analysis is there to be destroyed in fantasy. But it is important that the process sur-

vive in reality, so that it can be destroyed again and again (á la Winnicott).

Absent Goodness 115

5) The goodness of the analytic situation must be “dosed”, measured out (this

is a question of technique), otherwise it would induce regression and psychosis –

a danger inherent in some more active post-Freudian psychotherapies. Therefore,

analysis takes time. The ego will shield itself from truth with hatred (subjectivity)

so that it can maintain its domination.

6) Analysands hate the increase in emotional knowledge (alpha-function) that

analysis ushers in, and claim that they are getting worse, while they may be gain-

ing a capacity to bear feelings and be more alive – the depressive position. Unless

these feelings are held, they may quickly revert to beta elements again. There is a

danger of psychotic breakdown.

7) The background of an unstated goodness is the only basis upon which any

analysis can proceed. Without this faith in Presence behind the absent-presence of

the analyst, nothing can be said and nothing would be worth destroying.

8) The goodness must remain background. If there is an attempt to introduce it

into discourse, then someone will want to possess it. This is the problem identi-

fied already, with therapy and therapy culture: the forcing and commercial pro-

motion of goodness.5

9) Unless the analyst has some acknowledged or unacknowledged faith in this

goodness, he will not be able to bear failure, and will resort to cynicism, power or

manipulation.

10) The ego is in danger of being burst open by the good – dispossessed, up-

rooted, exposed and ashamed. How can it re-cover?

We are unfree to choose the good, no one chooses it voluntarily and there is no

time to choose, as such, because it chooses us, although no one is enslaved by it.

Therefore, “being good”, as such, is a contradiction in terms, because, as Levinas

repeatedly reminds us, how can a being – a subject, that perseveres in its being,

i.e. striving to survive – be good? Goodness is beyond being. This helps us around

the problem of narcissism – self-conscious “being good”. This has little or noth-

ing to do with named goodness as such, which is planned in some sense. The


goodness that comes from beyond, is no one’s possession, is not part of any sys-

tem. Instead, it is accidental, anarchic and contingent. The otherness of the Good,

its violence, is redeemed by its unique effects. As Levinas states, “Goodness gives

to subjectivity its irreducible signification”.6 Because Goodness is sovereignly ex-

ternal to the world and history, it is entirely free of narcissism and of desire. It is

free of us, our history and our values. It is the desire of the non-desirable, “the de-

sire of the stranger in the neighbour”.7 Furthermore it can remain outside, allow-

ing itself to be excluded.8 An unethical psychoanalysis, for instance, is one that

excludes any evaluation of the good, that is indifferent to the fate of the other. An

ethical psychoanalysis responds to the plight of the other, not as narcissistic de-

mand per se, not out of fear or guilt but through engagement or non-indifference.

It shows how far down the road towards the in-human, things have gone when

talk of “goodness” sounds to postmodern ears, complacent, smug or evasive.

Goodness is not cool. Perhaps Levinas himself has this in mind when he says:

“Goodness, a childish virtue; but already charity and mercy and responsibility for

the other, and already the possibility of sacrifice in which the humanity of man

bursts forth, disrupting the economy of the real”.9

The paradox of Klein-Bion

Meltzer refers to “faith” whereas the Lacanian analyst refers to “desire”. The

Kleinian approach has theological overtones and pretensions with its notions of

“good” and “bad” and “reparation” and “fragmentation”. How justified is it to

ponder the Kleinian contribution to psychoanalysis? In the midst of current preoc-

cupations with language and the structuring of the subject, the notion, “existence

precedes essence”, the empty subject, speaking and the text, and so on, there is

another dimension – “life” itself! One feels obliged to put “life” into inverted

commas.

When Freud was forced to make his posthumous return to Lacan, via the lat-

ter’s sole emphasis on the word, psychoanalysis took off in an extreme direction.

Absent Goodness 117

There are many ironies. The discourse based on “lack”, lacks nothing itself, as it

attempts world domination (WAP). It is a master discourse, replete with “master

signifiers”, the trappings of a science, but as François Roustang suggests, “The

Lacanian system is cut off from life, from affects, from subjectivity, and from all

appropriation”.10

This is why something more than Lacan is required. The Klein-Bion axis is

needed, because what should be “appropriated” is affectivity, which is closer to

the subject than speech. The complex problem as to whether or not there is sover-

eign exteriority designated as “auto-affectivity”, or whether affects are structured

by language, part of the interiority of language or structured like a language, will

be left to one side. The whole question of “reductionism” by Kleinians will also

be put aside, together with the danger of getting mired in the Imaginary, in the

Lacanian sense: that is developing theories about the other which bear no relation

to the symbolic truth of the subject. It is necessary sometimes to risk using ima-

gination, to allow imagination to be affected by the other, to contain, to field,

what might never appear in speech. Is this not another direct way to the subject,

but sometimes too intrusive? Kleinian thinking, based on logical positivism,

which assumes in advance what is right and wrong, true and false for the patient,

as if there is just one self-evident reality to which we should become more or less

reconciled, can often be problematic.

What remains exciting about the Klein-Bion axis is the discovery of an anti-

process, analogous to the matter / anti-matter debate in physics. Just as the anti-

particle can eliminate the particle of matter, so the anti-process in life can remain

entirely mute, or bring about non-sense, destruction of meaning, attacks on link-

ing, disarticulation, disaffection, envy, psychosis – all the disruptive manifesta-

tions of the death drive. The critical question here is whether or not the goodness

in which the analytic process participates, but does not own, can withstand these

subtractions or annihilations, which originate, if we believe the theory, from the

first inchoate months of life which begins in catastrophe, persisting, in some way,

as after-shocks until the present. “Subtraction” is a value judgement. However,


another “sub-” word, subversion, implies something liberating. Bion was aware of

this ambiguity when, unlike Klein, he did not regard the paranoid-schizoid posi-

tion as inferior to the depressive position. Instead, might it represent a break for

freedom from integrative burdensome knowingness, sadness and concern?

What has been maintained throughout is that the analytic project needs to be

protected from (a too immediate) knowing, from simplifications: in short, the dis-

course of the Master, the analyst as the “subject-supposed-to-know”. Where this

shows up most often is when the analyst attempts to protect herself (unknowingly)

from her own anxiety stirred up by a difficult patient. Lacan has called this, “the

resistance of the analyst”.

For the Kleinians, the demon, the anti-process, is initiated, not by castration,

but the earlier loss of the breast (the primordial Other), which arouses envious de-

structiveness of a potentially unstoppable nature – the boundlessness of the sub-

ject’s envy and greed, the absolute want of being, which, in the final analysis,

must remain unsatisfied. Its attack is directed against the so-called “good” object,

because of its goodness in that it lacks nothing.

An element of frustration by the breast is bound to enter into the infant’s earli-

est relation to it, because a happy feeding situation cannot altogether replace the

pre-natal unity with the mother. Also, the infant’s longing for an inexhaustible

and ever-present breast stems by no means only from a craving for food and from

libidinal desires. For the urge even in the earliest stages to get constant evidence

of the mother’s love is fundamentally rooted in anxiety.11

This reference to the need for “constant evidence of the mother’s love”, paral-

lels the Lacanian claim that human desire is first and foremost “the desire of (for)

the other”. One desires desire, or to be desired above all else. Kojève, in his fam-

ous lectures on Hegel, speaks of “a fight to the death for ‘recognition’”,12 impli-

citly linking desire with the death drive, and as being a source of human craving

and excess that goes far beyond a reasonable biological explanation in terms of

physical needs.

Absent Goodness 119

Klein echoes this, “I would not assume that the breast is to him merely a phys-

ical object. The whole of his desires and his unconscious phantasies imbue the

breast with qualities going far beyond the actual nourishment it affords”.13 Fur-

thermore, greed, the close relative of envy, again exhibits this quality of insatiab-

ility, “exceeding what the subject needs and what the object is willing and able to

give”.14 The breast, however good and desirable it may be, which is never enough,

is always only a signifier of desire, and can never completely represent desire it-

self.

Disappointment, lack, want of being, therefore, are structural. Psychoanalysis

reflects this void. Other therapies, including some Kleinian analysts, offer them-

selves, or the analytic process, as an imaginary good object to fill this gap. Quite

contrary to the goodness that Levinas has in mind, which is not like any good ob-

ject that arouses greed or envious desire, but instead, comes in from nowhere, is

the simple human act or gesture, par excellence, outside of any system, not sanc-

tioned, not approved, but anarchic!

Therapy, as opposed to analysis, sells the good, the “being good to yourself”

syndrome, serving the purposes of “morality and lies” (Bion), the defensive pro-

motion and application of holism, where the “good” becomes suffocating and en-

feebling. Therapy recycles magic, in the absence of real acts of goodness. Very

far from being anarchic, therapy is a cool strategy of emotional management,

masquerading as freedom and love.

the fear of learning from experience

One effect of the psychoanalytic process involves regaining the ability to feel

things. This is the depressive position, the capacity to take on life’s suffering. The

paranoid-schizoid position involves feelings, but feelings that are like flashes of

lightening, too strong or hysterical to be felt or contained – gone before they are

felt. The feelings can be so charged with intensity, or a sense of catastrophe, the

reaction is to void them altogether, destroying any capacity for (emotional)


thought or self-representation. Anxiety reaches an intense level, becomes so sharp

and persecutory that it has to be evacuated or projected. The openness of the ana-

lytical situation provokes suffering and depression, which Winnicott called “signs

of life”. In theory, there is no end to the linking-up that could be achieved: to

know is to suffer.

The “dead” patient, the patient with flat or absent affect, has no pain, because

he has unconsciously created a splitting attack on the mental apparatus for think-

ing thoughts. Embryonic thoughts that were gathering, disperse, come together

briefly and disperse again. Perception is destroyed in order to survive. Life be-

comes a kind of false container of sorts, a loose agglomeration, a life of avoid-

ance. At the same time he is panicky and hypersensitive to all feelings. The split-

ting attacks were necessitated by being exposed to a violent unreliable early envir-

onment – a way of not seeing what terrible things were going on.

The impact of the analytic situation – its reversal of splitting processes, the

linking of ideas and emotional experiences, the tendency towards the life-drive,

the holding-containing function, can make some patients begin to experience

strong feelings of depression for the first time. Hatred of the analytic process can

follow. The analyst may collude, fearing roaming “beta elements”15 now brought

to mind-full-ness.

Such is the creativity of the analytic process! But Bion warns:

I repeat that I do not think that any cure, however limited, will be achieved if, at the point I have tried to describe to you, the analyst at-tempts to reassure the patient and so undoes all the good work that has led to the latter’s being able to realise the severity of his condition.16

Referring to the analyst, Bion emphasises:

He should strive to keep at bay surgeons and shock therapists alike while concentrating on not allowing the patient for a single moment to retreat either from his realisation that he is insane or from his hatred of the analyst who has succeeded, after so many years, in bringing him to an emotional realisation of the fact that he has spent his whole life try-ing to evade.17

Absent Goodness 121

Winnicott’s notion that “[d]epression has within it the germ of recovery”,18 to-

gether with Bion’s, “realisation of insanity”, is nevertheless a high-risk strategy

for the brutalised patient born into a very dysfunctional set-up. Such awareness

could lead to life or death, even precipitate suicide, for instance.

Words like “insane”, “retreat”, “cure”, “recovery”, seem unproblematic to

Bion. But, where is the subject’s desire and responsibility amongst this medico-

social positivism and certainty? Does the patient want a cure? Does he want to

live? Can he know what he wants? All that can be said here is that the analyst is

not indifferent to outcomes.

The Kleinians are experts in rage, notwithstanding their use of infantalising

terms, like “damaged” or “wounded” – implicitly taking responsibility away from

the subject. Culturally, we are split about rage in a way that we are not about

sexuality any more. The presence of rage in many forms seems to signal defeat of

the benign therapeutic logic on which the whole contemporary is based. Having

unshackled everything, unravelled and disbanded our codes, experts must down-

play the toxic fallout of violence. Instead of recognising this paradox, pundits tend

to be even more upbeat about their democratic therapeutics, while at the same

time being intolerant of or ignoring anyone who questions it.

The so-called “borderline personality disorder”, the modern “malady of the

soul” as Kristeva calls it, is the answer, the affective response, to a culture in de-

cline. In a society without borders, the sufferers are on every border: neurotic /

psychotic; child / adult; male / female; conscious / unconscious; phantasy / reality;

full / empty; life / death; neurotic / perverse. Frequently, the real victims of viol-

ent abuse when young are filled with multiple “bad objects” made worse by their

own rage against them. Suicide, in the Kleinian model, is a strategy to kill off

these bad objects, in order to protect the good objects. The bad objects are

charged with sadism and rage against any emerging subjectivity. The initial and

urgent task is to allow the internal bad objects to be modified through projective

mechanisms with the staff and psychotherapists, preferably in a hospital setting,19

and thereby to increase their capacity for containment. Containment involves a


psychoanalysis of engagement, being-for-the-other beyond technique, leading

eventually, in the best outcomes, to an emerging subjectivity, to desire and a capa-

city to take responsibility and to think before acting.

Kristeva asks, “These days, who still has a soul?”20 Who can enter the depress-

ive position, feel remorse, tragedy and represent themselves without cliché? New

mutisms, autisms, rigidly schizoid and withdrawn states, as well as addictions,

form part of the list of casualties in this contemporary war on the soul. When we

speak of emptyings, rages, depletions, fragmentation, dispersal, it is ultimately the

soul to which we are referring – a gathering place, from which to speak with feel-

ing. Soul implies something in reserve, some inner resilience, a centre of gravity.

Soul implies mystery, rather than identity. The soul is not identical to itself.

When the poet Georg Trakl writes, “Something strange is the soul on the

earth”, he was referring to the Platonic idea that the soul is beyond the senses, or

that the soul is not subject to the decay and the continuous exchanges of the

world. Currently, life proceeds by extension rather than depth. What chance does

the soul have when it is bombarded by a thousand commercials a day, as a distrac-

tion from the yet-to-be-discovered strangeness?

The repetitive horror for the borderline is the sameness of the internal objects,

their omnipotent hold over things, contemptuous attitudes, elisions of otherness.

People whose backgrounds have been of unremitting maltreatment or violence

deal with the overwhelming threat, not by repressing representations (as in the

neurotic), but by blocking key mental processes, such as thinking, understanding

and making judgements about the other’s motivation, about human intentionality.

Stop thinking! Whole sectors of reality disappear. The past is present with no

waiting, only immediacy, alarm, impulse, rage.

For Kierkegaard, on the other hand, one acquires one’s soul in patience. The

soul is a relation between “the temporal and the eternal”.21 There is a tension in

this relation, to retreat into the spiritual, or, on the other hand only into worldly

concerns, violating the soul’s nature. A soul is only acquired over a life-long

struggle in “anguished patience”.

Absent Goodness 123

being and guilt

Be sorry for me? Why be sorry for me, you say? Well you’re right I don’t deserve any pity. I ought to be crucified – crucified and not pit-ied. But crucify him, O Judge, crucify him, and, having crucified him, have pity on him! Then I, too, will come to you to be crucified; for it is not joy I thirst for, but sorrow and tears... He who takes pity on all men will also take pity on me, and He who understands all men and all things, He alone, He, too, is judge... He will say, “Come unto me! I have already forgiven you once. And now too, your many sins are for-given because you have loved much...” He will judge all and will for-give them, the good and the bad, the wise and the meek. And when he has done with all of them, He will say unto us, “Come forth ye, too! Come forth all ye who are drunk! Come forth all ye who know no shame!” And we shall all come forth without being ashamed, and we shall stand before Him. And he will say, “O ye brutes! Ye who are made in the likeness of the beasts and bear his mark upon you, come ye unto me, too!” And the wise men will say and the learned men will say, “Lord, why dost thou receive them?” And he will say unto them, “I receive them, O wise men, I receive them, O learned men, because not one of them ever thought himself worthy of it”. And He will stretch forth His arm to us, and we shall fall down before Him and we shall weep.22

Receiving and giving. What is radical here, cutting across the repetition com-

pulsion, is absolute hospitality. It creates a breach, a rupture in the Symbolic and

for a time resolves or suspends the addictive cycle of repression / transgression.

There is no resolution or integration here, only hospitality. Hospitality is the

“Law” (singular) that founds all laws.23 It is the response to the stranger on the

earth. It is the Law beyond the efficiency and quantifiability of all other law.

More than beyond, it violates the meaning of these laws, as “the wise and learned

men say”: WHY? There is no reason!

Antigone, for instance, sacrifices her life for her dead brother Polyneices, who

has fought against his country, Thebes, while Eteocles, her other brother, fought

for his country, having barred his brother’s return from exile. Antigone wants to

bury Polyneices, to honour a traitor, or a terrorist? Polyneices, it is claimed, in the


play, “came from exile to lay waste his land, to burn the temples of his native

gods, to drink his kindred blood (an image of extreme hatred), and to enslave the

rest”.24 Antigone, who had already accompanied her blind father, Oedipus, outside

the law and outside the border, is reduced to asking foreigners for their hospital-

ity.

Polyneices becomes the Night. The Night is no more of a psychoanalytic figure

than hospitality, but one that operates outside of any human(ist) system – in secret

and in ironic opposition to the conditional laws (plural) of the Symbolic – i.e. the

values and laws of the day. The Night (singular) is unconditional in its absolute

quality of monstrous blackness that it gives to all nights. Beyond the rhythm of

day and night is the absolute Night, a negative perfection, a point of infinite dark-

ness – disconnected, by itself, alone. The Night is uniform and beyond dialectics,

sovereignly external.

When an act partakes of the Night (in secret, covered up, even by the perpet-

rators, from others and from themselves), there is no returning, coming back, or

forgiveness. All that is possible is a tracing out of events, picking over the re-

mains and piecing together the atrocity. The forensic examination can only be a

retrospective attempt to read the Night.

That tracing is all David Albahari’s fictional narrator in his book Gotz and

Meyer25 can do as he anxiously and courageously explores the almost total extinc-

tion of his family along with the rest of the Serbian Jewish population during the

summer of 1942 by the use of a hermetically sealed truck (Saurer) into which car-

bon monoxide was piped through its exhaust system. The prisoners were mostly

women and children, as most of the Serbian Jewish men (4,000) had already been

shot the previous October and buried at various sites around Belgrade. Most of

these transports through Belgrade, across the Sara river bridge, to Jajinci, were

carried out by just two SS non-commissioned officers, Gotz and Meyer of the

title. Later, at the destination, the dead bodies were tumbled out of the Saurer and

carried to shallow graves dug by Serbian prisoners, who were later shot when all

the transports were complete.

Absent Goodness 125

The entire book is an immense effort to imagine these two characters and their

crimes. How, for instance, they played with and gave sweets to the children in the

“Fairgrounds” – camps where the Jews were held before transportation in the

Saurer. To imagine how they might have lived each day, how they chatted,

smoked and joked with each other and their superiors. The camp prisoners mean-

time pretended they were on their way to a better life in Romania or Poland.

“When I first tried to sketch out my family tree”, the narrator says, “it looked

like a blade of grass, like a bare tree, without leaves”. He finds the names of some

of his family who were victims by bribing his ageing cousin who worked for the

Germans as part of the Jewish administration. His cousin was one of only six who

survived out of 67 extended family members. He tries to imagine also the lives of

the Jews and Gypsies of Belgrade, who had to register and be identified by the

German occupying authorities before a deadline of 13 July 1941. The 9,500 Jews

had to wear a yellow armband. They were given 10 days to declare their property

after which they had to surrender their keys to the authorities, clearly labelled

with their names and addresses. Then they were transported, with just as many of

their belongings as they could carry, over the Sara River to the camps, where, hu-

miliatingly, they were within sight of the city of Belgrade. The narrator’s mother,

on the other hand, was sheltering in a village at some distance. She had gone there

in support of her Jewish best friend who was also in hiding with her children.

They remained in safety in that village long after the massacre of the Belgrade

Jews.

He imagines Gotz and Meyer exchanging jokes, saying that they could do the

journey with their eyes closed (no! that wouldn’t be a good idea), while their hu-

man cargo in the sealed truck began to suffer nausea, then headaches and, finally,

a dawning realisation of their fate which led them to try desperately, screaming, to

escape from the exhaust-filled Saurer until, finally, they fell silent. Gotz and Mey-

er drove on. The truck was known as the “soul-swallower” (p.70).

The narrator is also a literature teacher: “We’ll be sorry, I told my students, if

we ever stop telling stories because, if we do, there will be nothing to help us sus-


tain the pressure of reality... But, they asked, isn’t life a story? No, I answered,

and touched my earlobe, life is the absence of story” (p.85). May 10, 1942, saw

the last truckload of Jewish prisoners leave the Fairgrounds. Then silence –

“[T]he cloud of silence that threatened to burst my eardrums” (p.97). Strangers

entered the vacated Jewish properties and the sales of their possessions went curi-

ously slowly, because of what he wishfully calls “the loyalty of things [to their

previous owners]” (p.99).

Gotz and Meyer are “living” with the narrator in a spectral way. In his dreams

all three are sometimes holding hands. All the time the narrator is defending him-

self against, what he calls, “an implacable order of things... that human dignity is

an illusion, that nothing exists except the dark face of evil, which each of us car-

ries within, some people have it closer to the surface of their being” (pp 106-107).

He dreams that he is walking through the labyrinth of his family tree, he at last

finds a way out but it is into the Fairgrounds. He tries to hide. Gotz and Meyer are

walking towards him in white gowns, faceless with arms outstretched.

The narrator-teacher, seeking to make the history class more alive and real for

his students, turns the school bus into the Saurer. He gives the students the names

and ages of his cousins. They are arranged into family groups as they board the

bus at the Fairgrounds. Then, as they travel over the bridge, they imagine they

smell the exhaust fumes, they collapse on each other, straining to breathe. Five

thousand went this way through Belgrade. There was silence in the bus. Later,

when they arrive at Jajinci, he explains about the killings of the Serbian prisoners,

then, how two years later, the bodies are dug up and cremated and the valuables

taken from the ashes before they are dumped in the Sara River.

Meanwhile, the (real) driver of the bus is impatient to get home. As our teach-

er-narrator is signing the papers for the driver, he has an uncanny reminder of

Gotz or Meyer, who also believed they too were just doing a job and should be

able to get home as soon as possible after a day’s work. Then three of the students

ask: “if souls already exist, can they be lost? Of course they can, I said, although

Absent Goodness 127

a soul that remembers can never be lost. Don’t all souls remember? They asked,

surprised. Some of them don’t, I said, some try to forget” (p.160, my emphasis).

A soul that remembers can never be lost. In the case of his narrator, as we have

said, remembering can only be an imaginary tracing, a forensic exercise, but lead-

ing close to madness and suicide, in the midst of all those gratuitous acts of the

Night, done without memory. Stories help us sustain the pressure of the Real. Life

is the absence of a story. Only in retrospect, do we re-collect a story or a series of

stories, distilled from all the contingencies that make up life. The narrator says,

“My life, I say aloud, is like a memory that doesn’t know who is remembering it”

(p.103). This work of remembering, so crucial to psychoanalysis, enables a soul

that might otherwise have been lost, not to be lost. The soul, to recall the earlier

discussion, acquired in “anguished patience”, on the edge of strangeness and

meaninglessness.

Re-writing, historicising now what has been lived, analysis keeps this process

open and ongoing. The soul, which is a singularity, is enriched in secret against

the calamity of forgetting. Linked here is Freud’s famous dictum that we act out

what we do not fully and articulately remember.

Life is unilateral. Being is one-sided – not symmetrical with non-being. Being

is usurpation.26 For Freud, the subject’s first relation to the world is one of hate.

Freud reverses contemporary thinking when he states, “Hate, as a relation to ob-

jects, is older than love. It derives from the narcissistic ego’s primordial repudi-

ation of the external world and its outpouring of stimuli”.27 The ego is founded not

only in the image, but by a primal exclusion. Therefore, the subject’s being is con-

tinually thrown into question by the penetrating and persecutory gaze of the other.

There is no hiding from accusation. The subject is born into responsibility for

which there can be no adequate response. The human, as opposed to the “beast”,

is rent by this impossible consciousness of responsibility for the Other.28 The later

consolidation of the ego reduces the other (ego) to a counterpart. He is the same

as any billiard ball on the table, knocked about like any other in neo-Darwinian

individualism.


Does the guilt for existing, for being, haunt the scene of the social? It is im-

possible to estimate how many people feel that they should not exist per se. The

guilt about being is beyond reason, it is ethical – the first ethics. Beyond psycho-

logy and recuperation, it is unlike the guilt or persecution endured by those beset

by bad object relations derived from the violent contingent circumstances of their

family life and the wider malaise of western civilisation, who may be tempted to

suicidal violence. Psychologically, psychoanalytically, this neurotic / psychotic

guilt is entirely analysable. The Law makes sense of this guilt and “stabilises” it.

It then becomes a question of rehabilitation, while the ethical guilt, the existential

guilt, is incurable.

The first Levinasian ethical guilt that precedes real persecution, the guilt that

precedes any criminal act, the wrong that attaches to existing per se, where Levi-

nas and Klein, coming from entirely different directions, intersect, are a result of

an extreme ethical sensibility that may run way ahead of any existent egoic being,

as such. This sensitivity may be an evolutionary achievement to do with the ex-

plosive development of the primate brain resulting in the sensitivity of reflexive

consciousness of the other – a consciousness for-the-other. The massive concen-

tration of neurones, forming fifteen billion connections, creates a radar of such

potential sensitivity it creates violent effects. Such appalling responsibility may

lead us to kill the other, our persecutor; and / or love him, senselessly. His prox-

imity is anarchic.

At the very least, these extreme anxieties and sensitivities are split-off and re-

legated to the catastrophic margins of consciousness. Their strange effects are fur-

ther mitigated and dulled by various containers: playing; dreaming; speaking; liv-

ing; working and so on. These barriers will enable, will allow the child / adult,

simply to be.

Faith in what Meltzer alleges as the goodness of the analytic situation, also

highlights the danger of feeling the return to shame and dread. Even at the neurot-

ic level the lifting of repression exposes guilt and castration anxiety which meet

with the strongest resistance. The Kleinians know, and some would say are ob-

Absent Goodness 129

sessed by, the constant proximity of this affectivity which has such disruptive

power. As Young says, “psychotic anxieties are ubiquitous, underlie all thought,

provide the rationale for all culture and institutions”.29

Meltzer refers to “faith in the truth and goodness of the analytic method”, an

atheistic faith, no doubt. However, as has been indicated, Kleinian psychoanalysis

implies transcendence, a truth and goodness beyond the immediate situation. How

else is suffering registered? As Dostoevsky’s old man, Ivan Karamazov, is re-

puted to have said, God is dead; everything is permitted. Lacan added, therefore

nothing is permitted. Total permissibility, implies equality of everything, un-dif-

ferentiation and in-difference, ultimately to suffering itself. Much has been said

about the thought that, if God exists, how could he allow such suffering in the

world? Whereas the contrary is true: if God did not exist, there would be no suf-

fering; that is no ethical means to register suffering. When Lacan added, nothing

is permitted, one could read this in the full sense of nothing – “nihilism is permit-

ted”, nothingness is permitted. It is the ultimate post-Nietzschean wild freedom.

Total social breakdown is permitted.

Lacan tried to think nothing(ness) with the void at the heart of being only

“plugged” by the fundamental fantasy. Whatever conclusions we might take from

the early Lacan, and the No / Name-of-the-Father (with its hint of The Father),

the later Lacan was implicitly nihilistic. From Seminar XVII (1969-70), where the

Symbolic Order gives way to the passage from one Discourse to the other, to

Seminar XX (1972-73) and the libidinal economy of consumption ending any pos-

sibility of social cohesion, Lacan was doing no more than following social trends.

Here are Lacan’s negations: there is no Other of the Other; the Woman does not

exist; there is no sexual rapport. Here: nothing means much; nothing is permitted.

What is privileged is the emptiness of the subject, the void between the lovers, the

real absence of God and the end of (sexual) difference. Formerly “full” terms are

increasingly emptied of contents as meaninglessness spreads itself throughout the

fertile void. Nothing becomes a plenitude of radical possibilities. The shift has

been from the Modernist notion of Absent Presence, where the loss of Presence


can be felt and suffered, to the Post-modern notion of Absent Absence: we no

longer know what we have lost.

CHAPTER SEVEN

DON’T DO IT LIKE MACHINES!

Sergei Diaghilev ordered his dancers:

Don’t do it like machines, do it the way you would in real life when you do everything for the first and last time, for if, in real life, time never ends, nothing is repeated either, nothing is exactly banal for us, every moment that arrives is a new moment – the ordinary course of life is the extraordinary, the permanent feature of existence is aston-ishment.1

Here IS a machine, the Russian poet of the October Revolution, Mayakovsky:

Let your axes dance on the bald skulls of the well-heeled egoists and grocers. Kill! Kill! Kill! One good thing: their skulls will make perfect ashtrays.2

heresy

The death drive theory is a secular heresy. The heretic refuses to compromise on

essential principles, refuses the consensus view. It is as dangerous as the Catharist

heresy in the medieval period in the South of France. Last year, we visited the

museum of torture in Carcassonne. All the sadistic apparatus is there, the spikes,

the pincers, the contraptions to inflict maximum pain – all manner of deterrence to

those who might oppose the orthodoxy of the Universal Faith.


The death drive theory threatens four centuries of Enlightenment belief in reas-

on. That is bad enough but, because it is such an outrageous concept, with no

credibility, it is forgotten or dismissed. Or, in a more politically correct fashion,

the death drive is included but sanitised, by being explained away. That is how

our culture (including our psychoanalytic culture) deals with heresies: it includes

them, by finding a reason for them.

The death drive restores to psychoanalysis its subversive potential, just when

everything had gone quiet. The death drive lives on in the black market of psy-

chotherapy. Imagine therapy, with its professionalism and its popularity, and then

there is something else! Something intractable, irremissible, lying hidden at the

heart of things – the black economy upon which the whole white economy de-

pends but without any acknowledgement of that fact, just as the visible universe is

held together by so-called “Dark Matter”.

What is the death drive? Is it another one of those “empty” concepts (like, for

instance, castration, Oedipus, alpha elements, objet-petit-a, signifier, etc.) that

presents an enigma? Take for instance, castration. What is meant by that term?

Can anyone explain it?3 Clearly, the death drive is something more than aggres-

sion or destructiveness. Also, it is more than the cycle of death and regeneration, a

process of change through death and rebirth, all of which are unproblematic for

biology, psychology, as well as new-age spirituality which celebrates death and

regeneration. The death drive lies outside these familiar dialectics. It refuses the

dialectical process. The death drive is a doubling of death, as it were, a death that

deadens; a death that is going nowhere, a reversion, an inversion. Lacan speaks of

two deaths, the death of the body and the death that is part of our entry into cul-

ture – a (deathly) alienation in the language of that culture. And, according to

Lacan, we live between the two deaths.4

The death drive is silent, hidden, mute: it defies representation. As Freud says,

“we have a much greater difficulty in grasping [the death instinct or drive]; we

can only suspect it, as it were, as something in the background”.5 It is beyond. It

haunts normality, being a spectral presence behind the familiarity of the pleasure /

Don’t Do It Like Machines! 133

reality principle. Something more primitive is at work, which relates to the ulti-

mate conservatism and repetitious nature of the drives themselves. Freud says:

At this point we cannot escape a suspicion that we may have come upon the track of a universal attribute of instincts and perhaps of or-ganic life in general which has not hitherto been clearly recognised... [A]n instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon un-der the pressure of external disturbing forces.6

Famously, “the aim of all life is death”.7 Instincts that only seem to be forces

for change and progress are deceptive. Life itself is a complex detour, under the

influence of “decisive external influences”, to do with the self-preservative in-

stincts which ward off this death effect for a time. Eros, the life drives, Freud ac-

knowledges, “they are conservative too in another sense in that they preserve life

itself for a comparatively long period”.8 They prolong the journey.

The life drive saves life for a time, at least, against this active principle. The

poet, Louis MacNeice, has imagined the conflict between the life and death drives

as like walking up a downward moving escalator. For the Irish analyst,

Hanaghan,9 the life drive is represented by the child’s cry to the mother that is the

first manifestation of the instinct for self-preservation. This call to her, reaching

out, joining, via the mother and the family, into ever larger entities, binds the in-

fant to the life of the community. Rather than the accepted norm of the self-pre-

servation instinct, understood defensively against the other, Hanaghan suggests its

original manifestation is turning towards the (m)other in love.10 Only the re-

sponse of the other binds us and saves us from the free-fall of the death drive. (I

have elsewhere stressed the importance of the work of Levinas in this respect.)

The term, apoptosis, is reserved, at the biological level, for single cells that die

when they are isolated from the chemical messages coming from their neighbours.

Apoptosis was discovered in the 1970s. Isolated single cells in petri dishes, even

with full nutrient complement, unexpectedly congeal and die for want of chemical

messages from surrounding cells.


How easy it is to die. Maurice Blanchot links subjectivity with vigilance: “The

ease of dying, such should be the danger watching over us... this vigilance is the

‘subject’ of experience, that which undergoes it, leads it, precipitates it, and holds

it back in order to delay it at its moment of imminence”.11

The death drive is real, the rest is illusion – a play on reality, a secondary de-

velopment, a secondary process. This vigilant life, our life, occupies a transition-

al space, an illusory space. Open to the void, or in danger of being voided, moves

us to articulation.

It is on this thin line that beauty appears, as Bataille has it, “I do not know if I

love the night, maybe I do, for fragile human beauty moves me to the point of dis-

comfort only in knowing that the night from which it comes and into which it

passes is unfathomable”.12 Why are we moved by something beautiful? It is not

just that it stands in for the void, as a screen, or it distorts human reality, or is the

special elevation of an object to the level of the Sacred space of the Thing. It is

because, at that ultimate limit point, the beautiful appears as vulnerable, fragile

and ephemeral in the face of the Real – the Inhuman, the coldness of the universe.

Beauty is a screen that evokes the void but veils it at the same time.

Freud cites Kant (and here he is referring to this secondary process): “time and

space are ‘necessary forms of thought’”. The unconscious is timeless. He goes on

to say: “On the other hand, our abstract idea of time [and space] seems to be

wholly derived from the method of working of the system Pcpt.-Cs.... This mode

of functioning may perhaps constitute another way of providing a shield against

stimuli”.13 To avoid catastrophe (Bion) there are these necessary forms of thought,

like Bion’s mystical theory of “alpha-function”. Or the structuring effect and con-

taining function of language. Secondary processes spread out and slow things

down, binding the so-called hyper-cathexes of the primary process.

The death drive creates subjection from at least two directions. Firstly, from

the agency of the Id, that is the pulsion of the drive with its conservative tendency

to spiral down into pleasure / pain and repetition, the seduction of Jouissance,

from which a distance must be maintained. The other direction is from the Super-


ego, from the Law, which is the dead Law of the father, or the Lacanian register

of the Symbolic. When Diaghilev says, don’t do it like machines, he might have

been saying, don’t do this repetitive addictive behaviour, which Freud linked with

masturbation.14 Come instead to the depressive position, where “nothing is exactly

banal for us, every moment that arrives is a new moment”. Don’t do it like ma-

chines that are dead, or like the machinery of the Law which grinds on in spite of

the subject. The law protects at the same time as it kills with its non-exclusivity,

its preoccupation with sin and its exchange facility. Similarly, psychoanalytic sys-

tems and orthodoxies grind on without us; don’t do it like machines that interpret

repetitively, with clichés and prejudice. Winnicott was foremost in seeing alive-

ness in the “transitional space”, this narrow space set up despite the Real, a nar-

row zone that must be preserved for a time, from the drive and from interpreta-

tion.

For Freud, renunciation and repression create civilisation. “What appears in a

minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection

can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is

based all that is most precious in human civilisation”.15 Freud goes on to point out

that the repressed drive, no matter what sublimations have been put in place,

“presses forward unsubdued”, demanding complete satisfaction. He concedes that,

“The backward path that leads to complete satisfaction is as a rule obstructed by

the resistances that maintain the repressions”.16 In Freud’s version, the vital illu-

sion of the transitional space is maintained by repression.

Civilisation is getting thinner. Take the second reference point (above), the

poet of the October Revolution, Mayakovski: “Let your axes dance on the bald

skulls of the well-heeled egoists”. Here the “backward path” is favoured and

called the “progressive” one. Old resistances are broken down, with the order to

kill the kulaks, the clarion call of the Left to hunt down the bourgeoisie (repres-

enting the egoists), the middle class, overturning resistance to the (death) drive,

followed by the descent into total destruction and the so-called banality of evil.

Post-WW2, no let up, the de-construction (destruction?) of the ego and the self,


brought about by radicalised psychoanalysis under Lacan and cultural theorists of

the soft Left: the “fading of the subject”. In the nineteenth century, Nietzsche an-

nounced the “death of God”, then in the twentieth (the “century of machines”),

many more “deaths”, the death of the subject, the author, the father, in what

Baudrillard refers to as an “orgy of destruction”. Virilio adds, “how can we fail to

see the concentration of accumulated hate in every square metre of the ‘uncivil

cities’ of the fin de siècle?”17 The death drive has become unsubtle. The death

drive has been liberated!18

At the digital level, we have reached a new register of doing it like machines.

Cyberspace is replacing transitional space. The twenty-first century child is

destined to play in virtual reality, a new version of the “me / not me” that plays

with the real? There is absolutely nothing transitional about the digital, nothing

transitional about screens in general. The digital, the screen, is quintessentially

not me and there is no playing with it. On the contrary it (IT) plays with us, under

the smart guise of facilitating communication, it signals the end of communication

as it buzzes off into tweets and twitters and meaningless banalities. There is noth-

ing playful or creative about it. There is no way to subjectify it; you cannot make

it your own. You can only choose from the intensely logical options offered, with

no possibility for creative lateral thinking. Baudrillard jokes that we are in a ter-

minal condition – we are always to be found at a terminal, clicking, many hours a

day. Cybernetics was defined in 1948 as, “the science of communication and

automatic control systems in both machines and living things”.19 This was the be-

ginning of the post-human, the linking of machines and living things, now inter-

changeable, compatible and interactive.

The mind is a biocomputer. In the so-called transitional space there was the

world, out there as radical otherness, as strangeness and, there is me, the subject.

In those days the world was easier and “I” could bend “it” somewhat to my

wishes, to my omnipotence up to a point, so that there was a middle ground

(transitional) of freedom and creativity (subjectification). Now, it is all one way,

the way of the (alien) world, the cyber world.


Google will soon be “wrap-around”, giving us warnings and statements, but no

conversation. Sherry Turkle spoke of her daughter seeing a jellyfish and said with

amazement: “Isn’t it realistic?”20 According to Susan Greenfield,21 we are in

danger of becoming “nobodies” because we are the passive recipients of screen

culture for up to nine hours a day. And this culture consists of rapid flux, bite

“knowledge” and half-formed ideas. Truth is assembled by audience. Children

born since the early nineties have grown up thinking that these new technologies

have always existed. They have known nothing different and the danger is that of

growing up with no pre-existing conceptual framework, there can be no metaphor.

As if to emphasise the mechanical nature of internet usage, Greenfield stresses the

major shift from slow content to fast process, immediate pleasure, here and now

intensity, “a life lived out of context of a sequential narrative: nothing less than

the demise of a life-story”.22

The perfection achieved by digital technology is best illustrated by the well-

known comparison between analogue and digital. With analogue, only a likeness

is required. The vinyl record, for instance, is human and alive. Adorno noted the

paradox that the more the recording device makes its presence known through

scratches and wheezes, etc., the stronger the presence of the singer. Too clear a

recording seems inauthentic and unreal as the imperfection of humanity is re-

moved and replaced by the perfection of inhumanity. The CD version is digital

perfection. The synthesised version where the real is digitally enhanced and re-

mastered is so pure and transparent, it becomes hyper-real, excessively real. To

counter this perfect real, the scratches and wheezes are “brought back” via “dis-

tressing” and special effects. Through (artificial) ageing techniques, the circle is

almost complete: back almost to the real. Similarly, with the signifiers, “natural”,

“organic”, “whole”, “original”, “farmhouse”, “homemade”, “handmade”, “craf-

ted”, etc., we are nearly back, and, for a moment we can forget the radically de-

spiritualised world.

Just as the performer’s voice disappears via digitalized re-mastering, so too

does the humanity dissolve in its automated doubles. Automated machines, barri-


ers, voice synthesisers, voicemail, answering machines, cash dispensers, all these

programmed systems where the inhuman other tells us to fasten our seat belt, to

service our car, to replenish the fridge, and thanks us for shopping, or for waiting,

or for choosing this airline, etc. Even the so-called real humans that are left, that

go through the company training protocols: “My name is X, how can I help you?

Have a nice day”, might just as well be machines, they do the machine-thing so

well. The death drive, everywhere apparent, techno-scientifically seeks to do

away with the human and replace it with perfected techno-simulations of cour-

tesy. We talk easily nowadays like machines about human functioning and dys-

function. What was once the private domain of the subject is now extensively and

increasingly given over to instrumentality and automatism.23

Dr X is professor of Reproductive Biology, president of the International

Academy for Sex Research, works in sex reassignment in intersex cases. Dr B is

president of the World Association for Sexology, president of the International

Gender Dysphoria Association, gained an award for his work on the promotion of

sexual health and responsible sexual behaviour, another award for outstanding

contributions to the field of sexology, sexual orientation, family intimacy.

Doing it like sexual machines. These are the experts who will approve, ad-

vance and promote all new developments in (a-)sexual technologies, sexual pro-

gramming and reprogramming, as the erotic is replaced by the performance prin-

ciple and objective sexuality.

Time and space are “necessary forms of thought”. Time and space have con-

tracted by instantaneous communication – no shield against stimuli, no natural

barriers, but rather a promiscuous mixing and random access. Consider the circu-

lation of the tens of thousands of sexual images of children over the internet via

the multiplying tentacles of global paedophilia networks – the world without re-

pression – the world without renunciation, the pure world of the drive – terrorism

videos, cyber-terrorism. The “human” as a self-explosive device.24

A conservative practice of psychoanalysis now becomes subversive in a new

way, by re-creating these “necessary forms of thought”. Psychoanalysis implicitly


opposes much of what is current and contemporary by creating a shield against

stimuli. Free Association precisely means speaking without controls, i.e. not

speaking like a machine, where to use Diaghilev – Nothing is exactly banal. Or,

for some, it may mean attempting to create such a shield, or, as Lacan says, “a

coating for the drive”, closed down by multiple impingements (re-enacted in the

transference) and revealed by a poverty of representation.

A dream that Freud recounts comes to mind. A father has cared for his sick

child for days and nights on end. After the child has died, the father falls asleep in

the next room, leaving the door open so that he can see into the room where the

body is laid out. He later dreams that his beloved child is alive and standing by his

bed. Grasping him by the arm, the child says, Father, don’t you see I’m burning?

The child’s body has indeed been partly set alight by a candle as the old man who

was charged with staying by the dead body in the next room has also fallen

asleep. The father eventually awakes from his dream and rushes to the dead body,

but not before the wish that his beloved child is still alive is fulfilled in the dream.

As Freud says, “for the sake of fulfilment of this wish the father prolonged his

sleep by one moment. The dream was preferred to a waking reflection [he prob-

ably could have seen the burning body] because it was able to show the child as

once more alive”.25 Freud comments more generally that we prefer to continue

dreaming and sleeping, rather than wake up. “‘Let the dream go on’ – such was

his motive – ‘or I shall have to wake up’. In every other dream, just as in this one,

the wish to sleep lends its support to the unconscious wish”.26

We dream in order to continue sleeping. Freud says, “All dreams are dreams of

convenience: they serve the purpose of prolonging sleep instead of waking up.

Dreams are the GUARDIANS of sleep not its disturbers”.27 Furthermore, “since a

dream that shows a wish as fulfilled is believed during sleep, it does away with

the wish and makes sleep possible”.28 Even the Real can be woven into the dream,

so that sleep can be prolonged. Freud continues, “Every dream which occurs im-

mediately before the sleeper is woken by a loud noise has made an attempt at ex-


plaining the arousing stimulus by providing another explanation of it and has thus

sought to prolong sleep, even if only for a moment”.29

The analytic session, especially as described above in terms of play, illusion

and transitional phenomena, not to mention transference, has a dreamlike quality.

Indeed Freud’s interest in dreams per se is due to their exemplary role in psychic-

al processes in general, dating back to the Project. And his discovery in dreams of

the wish to remain asleep dates back to Letter 108 to Fleiss (9 June 1899).

To my mind, however, the analyst cannot just be a dreamer. More than his ca-

pacity for reverie is called for. Dreaming, reverie, fantasy are the province of psy-

choanalysis but not in the absence of the Real. As true as it is, that access to the

Real is via the screen of the Imaginary and our very limited capacity to see.

Dreaminess is not enough. Dreaminess has become a cliché, an excuse and anoth-

er way of doing it like machines.

Instead, the analyst should be an insomniac; so awake and concerned that, for a

time at least, she is unable to sleep or dream, being caught up in an anonymous vi-

gilance. This agitation is not a failure of technique or a counter-transference. It is

not a return to empathy, unconditional love, or nurturing, but an unavowable and

unavoidable being-for-the-other, a violence done to the analyst in face of the oth-

er. It is not an hysterical or erotic demand, but an a priori ethical obligation. It is

an obsession without the object that is seizing us ever being defined – otherwise

than being. Levinas refers to it as being taken hostage; the analyst is a hostage.

The analyst is the first on the scene, but already too late and guilty for being late.30

Not just the analyst, but the patient too: guilty before being charged; guilty of

sleeping and dreaming; guilty of ignorance and stupidity. Levinas might have ad-

ded, had he a mind to, a new and impossible dimension to psychoanalysis, remov-

ing it once and forever from its doomed therapeutic ambitions, opening the pro-

cess beyond language, beyond the system of exchange (the Symbolic), towards

the extra-ordinary and the in-exchangeable, where there is no mirror, no repres-

entation, no translation, no debt relief. Psychoanalysis via language is an escape,

through wish-fulfilment and the illusion of liberation!


senseless goodness?

Levinas distrusted psychoanalysis because it omits the question of the Good. Lev-

inas cites Vassily Grossman’s book, Life and Fate,31 as a key text. Grossman is re-

garded as the first and the greatest of the dissidents of the post-Stalin era, who

emerged from within Russia. Grossman witnessed totalitarian Europe. He was

present at the beginning of the Marxist experiment. He witnessed the battle for

Stalingrad, around which Life and Fate turns, and the horror equation of the twin

ideologies of Nazism and Communism.

Consider, for instance, the discussion between Liss (Obersturmbannführer),

Himmler’s representative in the Camp administration, and an old Bolshevik pris-

oner. At one point Liss confesses his anxieties about both totalitarian systems:

“When we look at one another in the face, we’re neither of us just looking at a

face we hate – no, we’re gazing in a mirror. That’s the tragedy of our age. Do you

really not recognise yourselves in us...? Isn’t it true that for you too the world is

your will... You may think you hate us, but what you really hate is yourselves –

yourselves in us” (p.395). He goes on, “And if you should conquer, then we shall

perish only to live in your victory (p.397) ...[Y]ou had your Bukharin, we had our

Roehm, your terror killed millions, and we thought, that’s absolutely right, that’s

how it has to be” (p.399).

In absolute contrast to totalisation and the complementarity of terror, what

stand out for Levinas are, “scenes of goodness in an inhuman world... exterior to

all system”,32 where, “the human [qua human] pierces the crust of being”,33 “where

goodness escapes every ideology... goodness without thinking”.34

Grossman describes the uniformity of the wooden barrack huts in the Russian

camp: “Everything that lives is unique... If you attempt to erase the peculiarities

and individuality of life by violence, then life itself must suffocate” (p.19). Gross-

man privileges simple human devotion, like Lyudmila’s grief for her illegitimate

son, Tolya, killed as a boy in the war, at his simple graveside by the rows of


wooden crosses, talking to him in a delirium of grief all the cold night. “Nothing

matters to her; there was nothing she needed. All that existed was some agonising

force that was crushing her heart” (p.154).

Grossman’s ethics turn around the Good, and a consideration of how the Good

soon becomes factionalised as each group claims their Good as universal and

fights other people’s goods that it considers evil. Even Christianity, with its,

“judge not that ye be not judged” and loving your enemies, brought, in its turn,

Byzantine iconoclasticism, the Inquisition, the struggles against heresy (as with

the Cathars already referred to above), Protestant versus Catholic, the intrigues of

the monastic orders, the crushing of science and freedom for centuries, the burn-

ing of Negro villages. He comments, “there is a deep and undeniable sadness in

all this: whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good that will never be overcome

by evil – an evil that is itself eternal but will never succeed in overcoming good –

whenever we see this dawn, the blood of old people and children is always shed”

(p.406). He has seen this new dawn in his own country with whole villages wiped

out by hunger, peasant children dying in Siberia, people declared enemies of the

good idea and transported on trains from every city in Russia. Yet, set against

these terrible crimes, is ordinary human kindness. “The kindness of an old woman

carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a

wounded enemy to drink from his water flask, the kindness of youth towards age,

the kindness of a peasant hiding an old Jew in his loft... unwitnessed... senseless...

kindness outside any system of social or religious good” (pp 407-08).

Grossman envisages the world outside the camps and the camps themselves

becoming equivalent had they been allowed to continue long enough. “[T]here [in

the camps] the principle of personal freedom [becomes] subordinated, clearly and

absolutely, to the higher principle of [scientific] reason. This principle would raise

the camp to such a high degree of perfection that finally it would be able to do

away with itself and merge with the life of the surrounding towns and villages”

(p. 845). Then the repression that created the camps would cease to be necessary.


Against progressivism, against scientific reason, Grossman pits human free-

dom, gratuitous giving, senseless kindness, which is unspoken and is not part of

any system of Goodness and which goes unobserved and unrewarded. It is not part

of any Symbolic or Imaginary register, is therefore unknown, yet specifically and

uniquely human, part of ethics as first philosophy.

The remarkable story of the Jewish concert pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman, is

told in Roman Polanski’s recent film, The Pianist. Polanski returned to his home-

land to tell the true story of Szpilman’s (played by Thomas Kretschmann) miracu-

lous escape from the Holocaust that befalls his city, Warsaw. Polanski was him-

self a child survivor of the Krakow ghetto and Auschwitz. Wladyslaw Szpilman

was a noted virtuoso pianist when the German army swept into Warsaw in 1939.

The story shows the brutalising effect on a strong Jewish family of the increas-

ingly racist regulation by the authorities: the Star of David, the banning of Jews

from restaurants and parks, and eventually confinement to the ghetto, ransacking

and theft, summary executions, finally, the herding onto trains for deportation to

Treblinka. Separated from his family, Szpilman slips from one safe house to an-

other, narrowly avoiding detection, witnessing many killings including the

Warsaw uprising. Finally, when Warsaw is in ruins at the end of the war, he is

discovered by a Wehrmacht officer Wilm Hosenfeld, as he hides in the attic of a

ruined dwelling. Instead of killing him, the officer asks him who he is and what

he does. On being told that he is a pianist, he asks him to play (in the ruined

house). The officer is so impressed, even moved, by the performance, that he re-

turns with food and news that the Russians are on the other side of the river.

Szpilman lives to play many concerts again and survives until 2000, dying at the

age of 88. The German officer, on the other hand, perishes soon afterwards, in a

Russian camp.

Levinas suggests that his ethics turn the normal order of life (the Symbolic) up-

side down. In this attitude of gratuitous giving, Wehrmacht officer Hosenfeld

risked his life for the other. At the end of the film we see the reversal: Hosenfeld

is behind the wire while Szpilman walks free on the other side without seeing


him. “In this attitude of holiness”, emphasises Levinas, “there is a reversal of the

normal order of things, the natural order of things, the persistence in being of the

ontology of things and of the living”.35

However, returning to the normal order and the “persistence in being” in the

Symbolico-Imaginary, violence is done to the other qua other of the Real and in-

exchangeable. There is no avoiding the process of making exchangeable the in-

exchangeable, of violating the unicity of the face of the other and thereby bringing

about his alienation. For Levinas all Being as such is totalising and violating. “It

is terrible”, he says, “because then everything reverts to deduction, to administra-

tion and to violence”.36

P.J. O’Rourke says, “Start thinking and pretty soon you get ideas, and then you

get idealism, and the next thing you know you’ve got ideology, with millions

dead in concentration camps and gulags”.37 However, some totalising ideologies

are better, more just, less machine-like, than others. Grossman himself celebrates

the justice brought about by violence and the fight by the people of Stalingrad.

The Germans were being surrounded in December 1942, and Grossman com-

ments, “who among those doomed men could have understood that for millions of

Germans these were the first hours, after 10 years of complete inhumanity, of a

slow return to normal human life” (pp. 731-2). “We’ve lifted the heaviest burden

in the world. We’ve raised up Truth over Lies” (p.798). However, these same

people were back in the iron grip of criminal ideology as, only 10 years later, a

vast dam was constructed, one of the largest hydro-electric power stations in the

world – the product of the forced labour of thousands of prisoners.

While Fascism and Communism represent the end point of negative perfection,

the nihilistic totalising function of which Levinas warns, they cast a very long

shadow over all administered societies. However, failure to discriminate between

ideologies and state collectivities leads to decadence. In this instance, the drive to-

wards death derives not from the machine-like apparatus of the state, but from a

failure of its inner nerve, a failure to elevate the truth over lies. This father don’t

you see I’m burning failure of ethical vigilance, for instance, led western intellec-


tuals during the thirties to overlook and appease the rise of Fascism, to overlook

and equivocate on the evils of the Communist system for 70 years and, in the cur-

rent century, maybe the worst failure yet, to confront militant Islam. Islamism

may represent the “pure culture” that Freud was looking for, an unalloyed version

of the death drive – no longer silent, no longer mute, but clearly secretive, infilt-

rative and suicidal.

A psychoanalysis without, on the one hand, freedom and the transitional space

of illusion and, on the other, a strong discriminatory function, alert to truth over

lies, to objectivity over narcissism, to fighting for freedom, to wakefulness over

dreaming, is nothing more or less than the soft option of therapeutic neutralisation

and equivocation, essentially indifferent to the other while giving all the appear-

ance of care.38

It is only on the basis of not falling asleep, of not drifting off, of not sleepwalk-

ing into, of not being indifferent to the multiple dangers impinging on the subject,

that we can speak of freedom, of free association of people and ideas, and

Diaghilev again: the ordinary course of a life may become extraordinary, the per-

manent feature of existence may become astonishment. Or, to take Roy Schafer’s

memorable comment: “Analysis raises the melodramatic and the pathetic to the

level of the tragic, and so changes the atmosphere, quality or dignity of an entire

life”.39

Freedom and dignity has to be fought for; everything conspires against free-

dom. The emphasis has been mostly on “outside” machines, the violence of the

system, and so on. But the death drive is not selective, it does not discriminate:

outside and inside – extimacy.40 As has been stressed a culture can fail from with-

in, “extreme violence... paralys[ing] the human spirit throughout whole contin-

ents”,41 so too can the subject decay from within, willing its own mutation, even

execution, or suicide.


into the sacred

The clinical problem, the central problem, is that, in every instance in every case,

there appears at root a more or less distant attachment to pain, to a pleasure-pain

alloy, a catastrophic metallic excitement, covered by the term jouissance. This is

the nuclear secret, the discovery of a primordial masochism, or as Freud refers to

it, a “primary erotogenic masochism”,42 or, in “Analysis, Terminable and Inter-

minable”, he points to “a force which is defending itself by every possible means

against recovery and which is absolutely resolved to hold on to illness and suffer-

ing”.43 This is the bedrock of the death drive heresy, which Georges Bataille, more

than any other thinker, has a right to call “the impossible”.

Bataille lived the death drive.44 He was analysed by Adrien Borel who, at some

stage during the analysis, showed him photographs (taken by Louis Carpeaux, re-

produced in Surya45) of a Chinese prince, Fu Chou Li, being cut into a hundred

pieces. In the series of photographs, the victim’s reactions seem to resemble those

of mystics in states of ecstasy. What so impressed Bataille was the juxtaposition

of divine ecstasy and extreme horror.46 What followed was his lifelong search for

the “sacred”, the absolute beyond of the enlightenment of the civilised world, bey-

ond the pleasure-reality principle.

In the years leading up to the Second World War, the West was in a state of

deep moral crisis with the seemingly inexorable rise of Fascism. Bataille’s re-

sponse was not so much to counter this process of moral decline, but to accelerate

the descent with an (ironic) aggressive and visceral anti-intellectualism and anti-

idealism. He criticised the “idle negativity” of European intellectuals on the Left,

countering with his review, Ancephale, the cover of which reproduced a drawing

by André Masson of a headless man (reproduced in Stoekl47), representing the

“death” of anyone foolish enough to still have faith in cephalic reason and pro-

gress. Following in the tradition of de Sade, Nietzsche, Dionysus and others, the

first two issues carried articles by Klossowski. The first issue, published in June

1936, called “The Monster” asserted the Sadean dream of “total monstrosity”, the


negation of the self and the power of dream over consciousness. The second issue,

on the current state of Nietzschean studies, attempted to rescue Nietzsche from

anti-semitism and Fascism.48 Ancephale conveyed the spirit of a negative religion,

a negative theology, but fiercely religious for all that – in the spirit of the malevol-

ent Aztec gods, of ritual sacrifice, involving the most violent death. It was in the

spirit of non-productive wild expenditure, borrowed from Marcel Mauss,49 – mad

generosity and senseless giving. And it was in the spirit of the bullfight and the

bullfighter, gored by a horn that penetrates the bullfighter’s eye, which also held a

great fascination for Bataille.

Nothing, as far as Bataille was concerned, must get in the way of the totality of

being, no divided consciousness, no Freudian repression or renunciation, no di-

vided subject of language, no language at all. Ancephale was a secret society.

However, there is no evidence that it actually carried out any human sacrifices.50

Against what Bataille, also Nietzsche, regarded as the “weak” forms of servile

morality in decline, like Christianity, Communism, Surrealism, “spineless” bour-

geois democracy, and today we might include “multiculturalism” and “political

correctness”, all of which oppose (sacred) life with some ideal goal, end or pro-

gress, Bataille went into reverse, turning all morality into a hyper-morality of the

sacred, of ruin, of senseless giving, of madness, of sovereignty. For Bataille, the

unconscious is a non-knowing at the heart of consciousness itself. It is the head-

less attraction and fascination felt for abjection and excrement – primary mas-

ochism, or, what he terms a “heterology” – the Other logic. This Other is the

Lacanian Real made flesh, as it were, and, like the Lacanian Real, Bataille is in-

sistent that it has nothing to do with nature or biology, but is profoundly an effect

brought about by the purity and elevation (homogeneity) of Christian religion and

culture. The flesh is subject to decay and putrefaction – torn and lacerated. The

flesh is cursed, because the body is tied inexorably to its own decomposition and

death. There is no sexual liberation (promoting an idealised sexuality) but rather a

black erotics, where the orgasm is the shattering moment of nothing, linked to the

final death which it anticipates and rehearses. The beautification and cosmetic


surgery of the body is only an attempt to placate the sacred, the otherness of age-

ing and necrosis, while at the same time signalling its overwhelming hidden

power.

Bataille makes clear that, “To the extent that we are normally drowned in this

world of mechanisms, a sacred element is completely other for us... irreducible to

the things of the profane world”.51 The mechanisms of exchange in the profane

Symbolic social universe, in which the divided subject exists in its alienated fash-

ion, excludes this radical sacrificial logic. Against differentiation and mechanisms

of exchange, Bataille seeks contagion, prodigality, perversity, crime and anguish.

His mysticism is above all social, but has nothing to do with sociology. After

Ancephale, Bataille set up his so-called “College of Sociology” in 1937 with Ro-

ger Caillois and Michel Leiris. But this was neither sociology nor collegiate. For

Bataille, what constitutes the “social”, what brings people together, is death; death

and sacrifice bind a community. As he says, “Everything leads us to believe that

early human beings were brought together by disgust and a common terror”.52 He

emphasises, “The living only gather together ‘in anguish’; the greater this is, the

stronger being is in them, and the stronger their community, [always of necessity]

a tragic community”.53 Laceration creates communication. Love is based on a

shared death: communing in tragedy. Death must circulate freely without resist-

ance among the living as an awakening to fatality – father, can’t you see I’m

burning. The crucifixion, in the Christian version, was a sacrifice offered to man-

kind to save us from our sins. But Bataille adds, that this crime, this striking at

God himself, leads us to understand that man might now communicate in endless

memory of this primal murder. Christ’s death makes us speak.

In his work, Eroticism, Bataille understands the erotic as connected to element-

al violence and violation, which as discontinuous (castrated) speaking beings, we

go in fear of. “Eroticism opens the way to death”.54 Bataille links desire, terror, in-

tense pleasure and anguish. At the point of rupture, all terms become equivalent

and contagious, and thus, continuity is re-established, as meaning is abolished.

Violent death disrupts the individual’s discontinuity, and, he observes, “what the


tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all exist-

ence with which the victim is now one”.55 The earliest taboos were erected against

the violent surge of life which was seen all around them in the cycles of death and

rebirth. Life in and for itself alone, in continuity (unrepresented), teems, multi-

plies, convulses, circulates and unleashes itself; it is sacred. “Violence alone,

blind violence, can burst the barriers of the rational world and lead us into con-

tinuity”.56

The ugliness and disgust felt for sacrifice, especially as the “victim is chosen

so that its perfection shall give full point to the full brutality of death”, is linked,

according to Bataille, with the ugliness of sex. He notes the paradox: “human

beauty, in the union of bodies, shows the contrast between the purest aspect of

mankind [idealism] and the hideous animal quality of the sexual organs”.57 This

hideousness is not so much caused by any educational training or any repressive

child-rearing, as is often stated, but linked to animality – not to animals per se, but

to our secret knowledge of, and continuity with, death, decay and putrefaction.

More generally, as Bataille says, “Language [like beauty] cheats to conceal

universal annihilation”.58 Language, as per Freud above, provides, “the shield

against stimuli”, against the violence of the death drive. And Bataille confirms its

autonomy, “the silence peculiar to violence”, when the shield is removed; for, “vi-

olence never declares either its own existence or its right to exist; it simply

exists”.59

Finally, scandalously, Bataille links the erotic with the mystical and states of

rapture described by mystics of all religions. Obscenity and perfected love, have

the same significance, “of non-attachment to ordinary life, indifference to its

needs, anguish... until the being reels, and the way left open to a spontaneous

surge of life... which bursts forth in freedom and infinite bliss”.60 Secrecy, silence,

the beyond of ordinary life, eroticism and mysticism are silence, the denial of

which is language: “language scatters the totality of all that touches us most

closely... Through language we can never grasp what matters most to us”.61


And Bataille was well-placed to become the “excremental philosopher” (Bre-

ton). What clearly marked his life as impossible was the blind visceral helpless-

ness of his syphilitic father. Were his father and mother mad or did they go mad?

Bataille’s older brother by eight years, Martial, bitterly denies that either were

mad and wanted no comment made publicly. Their father, Joseph-Aristide, was

35 when he met and married Marie-Antoinette Tournadre. He had previously un-

dertaken medical studies, but had not finished them. He became a civil servant,

working as a college bursar, a prison employee (of Melun prison), finally, a post-

master. Then his illness came to light. He was 44 when George was born (1897)

and already blind. Three years later he lost the use of his limbs and was confined

to an armchair. “He had huge ever-gaping eyes... [that] went almost entirely blank

when he pissed”.62 These eyes were the void, the gaping hole, no doubt, “abso-

lutely obscene”. As Surya says, “These eyes, open to the void or the abyss, this

truth of eyes that were more real than those of the living were the eyes of either a

‘madman’ or a saint”.63 At night George helped his father onto his bedpan, when

stabbing pains tore animal cries from him and he often soiled himself. Surya af-

firms clearly that George Bataille loved his father, “He said so simply without

thinking. He should add that this love owed nothing to pity”.64

However, at 14, hatred took the place of love. “I began vaguely enjoying his

constant shrieks... in one figure the blind man and the paralytic... that supremely

nauseating figure”.65 At this point in 1911, George claimed that his father’s mad-

ness set in. In the same year Martial went off to do his military service and did not

return until after the war. There were violent screams in the night, and the doctor

who had come to help was accused by the father: “Doctor, let me know when

you’re done fucking my wife”.66 His mother made two suicide attempts: the first

by hanging, in the attic; the second by attempting to drown herself in a local

creek. Can we believe all this? Did George, as Martial claimed, just take pleasure

in darkening the story? His father definitely had syphilis for 20 years.

George went to school in Rheims where the Bataille family came to live.

Bored there, he claimed to have been devoted to the joys of self-mutilation: “I


wanted to inure myself to pain”.67 Also, he became convinced that his father had

made obscene advances toward him in the cellar of their house. He used the word

“rape”, and says he saw his father “beckoning his obscene hands [towards him]

with a venomous and blind smile”.68

In 1914, at the age of 17, he discovered God and became a convert to Catholi-

cism. Later that year, from 5 to 12 September, Rheims was almost completely

destroyed by the advancing German army, by which time, along with the civilian

population, George and his mother had obeyed the order (at the end of August) to

evacuate, leaving his father to fire and destruction. By August 1919, Rheims had

been through 857 days of concerted bombardment. He would never see his father

alive again. “On 6 November 1915... two or three miles from German lines, my

father died abandoned”.69 The son suffered from a sense of guilt that would never

leave him: “No one on earth, or in the heavens was concerned with the anguish of

my dying father... I abandoned my father, alone, blind, paralytic, mad, screaming

and twitching with pain, transfixed in a worn-out armchair”.70

There were three abandonments of his father: 1) the flight from Rheims, due to

the evacuation orders; 2) not returning in spite of knowing how close his father

was to death (giving in to his mother’s “madness” – the suicide attempts occurred

at this time); 3) converting to Catholicism and a consoling God, when his father

had lived and died without religion. His conversion is dated precisely to the time

of the abandonment in Rheims.

What his father’s suffering laid bare and manifest in the Real, with his empty

eyes, was the materiality, the absolute presence without mediation, of a slow,

painful descent into death, which George, and perhaps he alone, witnessed as a

helpless child for many, many years. George, later, makes clear his travail: “God,

who watches over my efforts, give me the night of your blind man’s eyes”.71 As

Suyra concludes, praying to his father, entreating him, kept Bataille at his father’s

side, obedient, long before he knew it, to this Hegelian injunction: “The spirit is

this power only in knowing how to look the negative in the eyes and knowing how

to stay close to it”.72


For some 9 or 10 years Bataille was a devout Catholic, then came debauchery

and the plunge into the horror / fascination of the flesh. He had been reading

about the Christian martyrs and their extremes of suffering. According to André

Masson, Bataille’s was a violent loss of faith. He gave up piety, which he felt was

an evasion. As he said himself, “I wanted to escape my destiny at any price, I was

abandoning my father. Today, I know I am ‘blind’, immeasurable, I am man

‘abandoned’ on the globe like my father at N. No one on earth or in heaven cared

about my father’s dying terror”.73 However, it would be an understatement to say

that this was ever an easy return to the body – his body, his father’s body; never a

simple affirmation of the flesh, but quite the reverse, a transgression full of im-

possibility. Bataille was not and never could be a forerunner of the current thera-

peutic evangelists of the flesh where everything appears resolved and reconciled,

at peace – like the anti-depressant wishful fantasy of “safe sex”.

Quite the reverse. To take surely an entirely unoriginal analogy, we are the

moths circulating around the hopelessly intense flame of the sacred-Real, in ec-

static danger of being consumed, sometimes quite unable or sometimes unwilling

to leave the intense light that gives us life and death in excess. As speaking be-

ings, we live caught between the rock of the real of the flaming death and the hard

place of the Symbolic and “death” by alienation. What lies in between can be

fruitful but always lacking.

Baudrillard has this piece at the beginning of Cool Memories IV,74 whereby he

suggests in Zarathrustrian mode, that silent laughter is the background noise of

the universe, the silent laughter of the trees and the flowers and so on, until man

comes along with what he calls the catastrophe of the real world. The real world is

divided, flawed, neurotic; the seamlessness of silent laughter has gone. Similarly,

Schopenhauer suggests that, even if the World is destroyed, music will persist.

Our appearance on the scene, as an unwanted guest, under the illusion of being a

special guest (the anthropic principle) causes a perturbation in the universe and

creates a hell on earth. The emergence of consciousness (meaning, logos) is the

emergence of hell – the hell of lack, the hell of imperfection and limitation, which


Bataille, in his own rigorous way, refused, by silencing everything that lacked and

was divided and weak.

Emergence, or creation, causes a tearing, like giving birth. Form, as such,

leaves a rent in the potential of non-being: a carving is the death of a stone. The

violence of making is “tearing away” of primordial unity and cohesion. I remem-

ber the sculptor, Dick Joynt, spending eight hours a day, every day, chiselling

granite – the violence of beginnings.75

For Bataille, there was no neutralisation or integration of the Sacred with the

Profane. Life and death, the living and the dead, must circulate without reconcili-

ation. Remember Ishi, the last native American, who, when he saw the vast

crowds in San Francisco, believed that the dead must be co-mingling with the liv-

ing. The dead don’t die, they can appear out of nowhere on the street. They con-

stantly reappear in dreams.

“An Irishman’s home is his coffin”, wrote James Joyce in Ulysses. “Nobody

does death in quite the high style of the Irish – it’s just life that we sometimes find

hard to manage”, writes Declan Kiberd.76 He is praising Cré na Cille as the

greatest novel in the modern Irish language. Its author, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, born

in 1906, sets the novel in a Connemara cemetery. There, the buried bodies refuse

to be quiet, but gossip non-stop about one another. In each chapter, a newly-de-

ceased person is interred, bringing tidings of the latest outrages above ground,

causing all tongues to wag even faster. Kiberd suggests that it is more likely that

the talking corpses were Ó Cadhain’s version of the Irish language itself, con-

sidered dead by detractors but still astoundingly articulate. Kiberd quotes Beckett:

“All the dead voices... They make noise like wings... To have lived is not enough

for them... They have to talk about it”.

Bataille did not bemoan his fate demanding narcissistic redemption, but

plunged in, in solidarity with his father’s extreme suffering and abandonment to

illness, war and burning destruction. Give me the night. No retreat, no going back

to religion, but the reverse, facing the blind abyssal eyes of his father.


For Levinas and Bataille, the ethical is precisely the real encounter with the

other: by substitution; by being taken hostage; by sacrifice; by obsession; by sub-

version and black humour, by being accursed with no way of slipping away from

the naked face of the other. Both understood the world in terms of an extreme

shaking. They, after all, experienced criminal ideologies at first hand, which were

secreted as surplus by enlightenment humanism (Communism) and nationalism

(Fascism). They wanted, above all, the awakening from the dream of naïve pro-

gressivism. They were against the century of machines of negative perfection –

machines of death. Both are situated in the same beyond, in the asymmetric uni-

verse of Freud’s death drive. They were moved by elemental fraternity that pre-

cedes yet underpins any political notion of solidarity, by a communion in death

that moves us to proximity – continuity with the other in communion. The uncon-

scious, here, opens, not to the language of the Other that structures it, but to si-

lence. Both had been involved in the celebrated revival of Hegelian studies in Par-

is during the thirties with Alexandre Kojève and Alexandre Koyré and both had

contributed to Recherches Philosophiques.77 They would take up in their different

ways the limitless ethical challenge posed by the void left by the Death of God

and the free-fall of values of European civilisation in the face of totalitarianism.

The atoms will eventually be freed as discrete packages of discontinuity, little

miniature machines as it were, the smallest nanobots, in random opposition to

each other, potentially at war without end.78 Is this the destination of Western so-

cieties, where all social bonds are progressively liberated, where there is no longer

any sense of a Debt to the Other? Instead controls are (re-)imposed in an entirely

rational scientific fashion (biopolitics). Are we not back with Weissman’s

protista,79 that are immortal by virtue of being a-sexual and complete in them-

selves with no need of an other? Condemned therefore to an endless repetition

compulsion – more of the Same? Or to put it in the words of Peter Porter’s poem:

once bitten, twice bitten.


“Please explain”, asks a young analyst of the contemporary Millerian-Lacanian

school, “why an analyst might read Levinas, Bataille, Baudrillard and others that

you say you read? How could they possibly help in the clinic?”

“Not an easy question to answer”, I replied, sensing that she was not enthusi-

astic, merely polite. Later, I thought, they give you a good grounding in nihilism!

And the Ground, not just the unconscious, is where you should stand.

Bataille and Levinas establish the infinity of the ethical dimension, the a priori

of ethics: ethics as first philosophy (Levinas); an ethics of the Real (Bataille).

However, subjectivity is complacency, subjectivity is indifference to suffering.

When I assert my rights, my desire, “my place in the sun” (Levinas is always quot-

ing Pascal), I am indifferent to the other and the Night. When I choose an ethical

position, i.e. to do this not that, to say this not that, I must also be indifferent to

the that, cutting out the other, coldly, just as in a divorce where everything is di-

vided down the middle. There is no getting away from the antagonisms involved.

It is a fight without ceasing, but a fight with responsibility and a fight with what

Levinas refers to as non-indifference.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THEORY AGAINST THE REAL

hen Freud admitted that he had underestimated the negative, “I can no

longer understand how we have overlooked the ubiquity of non-erotic

aggressivity and destructiveness... in our interpretation of life”,1 he was also un-

derestimating the force that was later to be Kleinian psychoanalysis. Within half a

century, a whole cluster of modern maladies associated with atomistic culture,

that might have once been registered as hysteria, had been described. Kleinianism

visits the wordless place of the inhibited, schizoid, psychotic, borderline, autistic

and psychopathic. Klein explores the negative and the obscene, analysing at the

mute limits of the human, where violence operates independently, beyond the

pleasure principle – always beyond. Today, this could be the Kleinian argument:

everything hangs on this beyond, beyond subjectivity.

W

Klein did not envisage the paranoid-schizoid or the depressive positions as epi-

genetic stages of development, like classical psychoanalysis and developmental

psychology. These are not stages of growth. As we enter into, or are inserted into,

language and children, some translation of this mute world occurs, but much must

be left “outside”. As George Steiner says, translation violates the translated. How-

ever, it is to these mute violent remnants that attention must be paid. Klein there-

fore implicitly challenges the hegemony of language.


If the world is structured by language and we cannot think or speak otherwise,

then the Kleinians oppose this with their own pre-biographic demonology. The vi-

olent hegemony of language invokes a mute insurgency of the drives, who are

deeply insulted by the assertion that they themselves were created by language,

that they are no more than an effect of language! The notion of the re-transcription

of biology, that the somatic is somehow re-written, as it were, may be offensive to

the drives who have been fighting for their rights, staging a comeback with their

own violent liberation struggle.

Even Žižek2 has had to refer to the mindless violence in our cities as “id-evil”,

a residue, or violent trash, a revenge of the real, when the real finds itself compre-

hensively globalised, synthetically realised, on a planetary scale. As Levinas has

said, language dissimulates, language betrays. It has a totalising effect that ex-

cludes the other, qua the naked unmediated face of the other. The other has no

choice but to be online or to cease to exist for the symbolic system. People say

today, “What are you into?” Well, you have to be into the techno-info-symbolic.

You have no choice. What resides offline, as it were, is something violent – in

short, unmediated projective mechanisms, forced into the other, to which Kleinian

analysts pay special attention. Beta elements, Bion called them, highly charged af-

fective signals, like shards of glass, the knife, the broken bottle, the random attack

in the city, so to speak, that are more than language can bear and much more than

it can communicate. Affects that agglomerate and cohere in ways that disrupt re-

lationships and workplaces. The Real takes its revenge as the System becomes

haunted by its own excluded terror, what Bion, in another context calls “nameless

dread”. People feel this nameless dread, persecuted in their homes, their work

places, they feel harassed, abused, attacked as these beta elements threaten the

very systems that secrete them. Insurance and the vast array of security measures

may not be enough.

You can now download a ring tone for your mobile of exotic bird species

which are on the brink of extinction. This is the nature of the linguistic-symbolic

system, how it tramples on the other, who becomes a heritage attraction or a folk

Theory Against the Real 159

museum. The other, unique and in-exchangeable, is forced to enter a system of

exchange. It’s like a Peace Process. For the sake of peace and progress (i.e. the

stability of the symbolic), perpetrators of gross crimes are allowed go free. A

peace process is merely a pacification process. Citybus in Belfast has a “Troubles

Tour” where tourists can visit and enjoy the infamous landmarks where atrocities

were only recently committed.

At the level of the computer, multiple security devices stop viruses attacking

and getting through to infect the system. The Kleinians delineate the viral world

that haunts the social. But Kleinians are rejected by Lacanian psychoanalysis, be-

cause of their emphasis on the “Imaginary”, representing, according to Lacan,

“the permanent high point of the subject’s assumption of his own mirages”, and

he goes on to ask, “in what sense would this [Kleinian approach] constitute pro-

gress?”3 Referring to, “this deviant conception”, says Lacan, “analysis can’t be

anything other than the incorporation of the suggested, even supposed, discourse

of the analyst – that is, the exact contrary of analysis”.4 Klein’s theoretical presup-

positions are allegedly “incorrect” or “unfashionable”. Questioning unconscious

phantasy, Lacan asks, “are not phantasies the means by which we provide the sub-

ject with the gratification in which the analysis becomes bogged down?”5 And for

Lacan, the Kleinian school, “is not free, largely because it has been incapable as

even so much as suspecting the existence of the category of the signifier”.6 The

Kleinian focus is on anxiety not desire, but Lacan says, “[t]o efface desire from

the map when it is already buried in the patient’s landscape is not the best way of

following in Freud’s footsteps”.7 As for anxiety, it can only come to light via the

signifier and in our relationship to the Other. More generally, Lacan says, “The

affect – and we shall see what this means for our theory – goes off somewhere

else, as best it can”.8

Klein downplays the role of the father: “It is in the name of the father that we

must recognise the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of his-

tory, has identified his person with the figure of the law”.9 Finally, her interpreta-

tions are allegedly reductive and intrusive. Referring to Klein’s paper on symbol


formation and her analysis of Dick,10 Lacan complains, “she slams the symbolism

on him with complete brutality”.11

Nevertheless, what are we to make of the viral forms – affect-laden violent un-

lost objects, offline or certainly out-of-line, out-of-order? Should they be ignored

as objects of the “imaginary”, mere phantasy constructions of the observer-ana-

lyst? This disavowal is akin to those who suffer on the other side of a Peace Pro-

cess, condemned, through symbolic gestures of compromise and forgiveness, to

silence, or rather, to be silenced, for the sake of peace-talk.

Lacan refers to Klein, at one point, as “the inspired gut-butcher”, or, “la

tripera” (the one who handles tripe [or guts] or whose theory is tripe!)12 Yet this

theory, correctly understood, exposes the contemporary’s own massive theoretic-

al resistance to evil and violence. Terry Eagleton in his recent book, After Theory,

says, “that there is something particularly scandalous about radical cultural theory

being so wilfully obscure”.13 He accuses theory of being short on many things in-

cluding evil, suffering and death. “It is also”, he says, “a rather awkward moment

in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental

questions”.14

Klein ignores the register of the Symbolic, but Klein is more than just biology,

a biological unfolding of the drives that Susan Isaacs15 referred to. The death drive

as such, the Kleinian motor of automatic anxiety, does not exist in biology. Biolo-

gists reject outright any notion of a death drive. How can envy be biological? No

other species exhibits anything like envy. No, what Klein discovered was extrem-

ism that subsists (literally exists “below”, spatial metaphors notwithstanding) the

Symbolic, and is secreted by it. In the Symbolic, things are superficially resolved

more or less adequately on the basis of what Baudrillard calls the “phallic ex-

change standard”. All the fuss about the phallus, the fetishisation of the phallus,

the argument about who has it or who hasn’t, who believes in it or who doesn’t, is

merely a ruse, a screen of primal repression, against the Chora, that non-place of

the abject where the Symbolic universe dissolves into chaos and the black sun.16


On the dark side of culture, beyond the father, Klein found oral sadistic phant-

asies of matricide and infanticide. Her return to the primitive logic of the talion

invokes a sacrificial logic. The talion principle is the law of the Imaginary (liter-

ally an eye for an eye). The mother has to be destroyed in our imagination in or-

der to create the loss (in the depressive position) or the lack where the symbol

comes to be and hence the freedom to think, speak and desire. However, as Or-

estes learned to his cost when he killed his mother, Clytemnestra, freedom comes

with the wrath of the Furies representing the avenging archaic maternal superego.

But failure to kill off the mother leads to a greater calamity as we learn from Pat

McCabe’s short film, A Mother’s Love’s a Blessing,17 where the grown-up son is

caught between incestuous dependence on an omnipotent mother (who loves you

so much!) and trying to shoot, poison or kill “mammy” but never quite succeed-

ing, killing a dog (a bitch) by mistake in the process.

The failure of separation and symbolisation, stabilised by the father and the

Law, engenders the current problematic of Lacan’s ou pire (or worse), where

transgression is celebrated, indeed demanded and where modern therapies often

feel they need do little more than appease narcissistic demands – be good to your-

self, be good to your body – to forestall narcissistic rage at the undead mother.

The escape from ethics by psychoanalysis, highlighted, although not explicitly

so, by the formidable work of Levinas, has been made good, paradoxically, by the

Kleinians who have specialised in “the worse”. If “evil” has disappeared along

with truth, religion and superstition, it returns with a vengeance in Klein. All the

excluded negativity of ethical relativism and cultural theory returns in an undi-

luted form in Kleinianism, concentrated there. What Meltzer has dubbed Klein’s

“theological system”, amounts to psychoanalytic fundamentalism. The best we

can achieve, the best we can hope for is the depressive position: he that in-

creaseth knowledge increases sorrow.18

I was recently told by the editor of a journal, when rejecting an article that I

had submitted, that it was “too Lacanian and, in particular, Lacanians ignore

mental pain”. The Lacanian emphasis on speaking, allegedly distances the real of


pain and suffering. True. However, against Klein, an emphasis on suffering, via

the analyst’s speech, also runs the risk of ignoring mental pain. By repeatedly

translating pain, anger, rage into the register of words, an attempt is being made to

contain and therefore to control an impossible Real, risking finding pain where

there is none, or finding pain where there is too much, or even creating pain.

Therapy, more widely, is accused today of creating a “culture of vulnerability”,

where everybody feels themselves to be stressed and traumatised.19 As Freud ad-

mits, “We know very little about pain... The only fact we are certain of is that pain

occurs... whenever a stimulus... breaks through the devices of the protective shield

against stimuli... against which muscular action... is powerless”. Similarly mental

pain, “concentrated on the missed or lost object... creates the same economic con-

ditions as are created by the cathexis of pain which is concentrated on the injured

part of the body.... The continuous nature of the cathectic process and the im-

possibility of inhibiting it produce the same state of mental helplessness”.20 The

point of passive, unmediated suffering or mental helplessness, the passive heart of

passivity, Klein takes as the implicit void that determines her psychology, the zero

point of “annihilation anxiety”. This acts as a singularity. Klein’s contribution is

to track this void and its aftermath as it generates potential cruelties, id-evil, non-

functional aggression, still seemingly unimaginable to the rational liberal imagin-

ation.

So unimaginable that even Kleinian practitioners themselves proceed in fear of

it. Instead of waiting to hear what a rage “might say” it is often peremptorily con-

tained and interpreted. A “difficult” person in group therapy, who keeps interrupt-

ing, might be asked to leave the group and see a specially designated counsellor.

A man who stalked women was considered to be too great a risk to have within a

group created for men with sexual problems. He too would have to have his own

therapy before being reassessed for group work. “Inappropriate affect” wherever

it occurs, requires therapy. A therapist who gets angry at a meeting, or worse still

with a patient, may be in trouble. An anxious climate of emotional correctness

abounds, which means that one has to tread very lightly wherever one goes.


Klein’s theoretical rigour and deep pessimistic realism, upon which I am draw-

ing here, must be contrasted with some contemporary clinicians and counsellors,

in particular, who seem to fear the worst, seeing potential pathological violence in

many human interactions and not being able to comprehend or countenance inhu-

man cruelties that are quite off-limits to liberal sensibility.21 Klein has disturbed

the sleeping beast of oral sadism only for the Kleinians themselves to be con-

stantly on guard against it in a frantic effort to control it.

Lacan says, “Anxiety is the knife that separates jouissance from desire”.22 It is

also the knife that separates Lacan from Klein. At knife-point, as it were, there is

desire and jouissance on the one side; on the other, anxiety and hilflosigkeit.

These are the two very different representations of human subjectivity, both relev-

ant to contemporary psychoanalysis. They cannot be integrated or resolved. But

neither one is adequate on its own. For Lacan, what does the subject desire? For

Klein, the ego subject to its persecutory universe.

There is a problem in physics. Light or electromagnetic radiation can be rep-

resented in contradictory ways; either by continuous waves (classical theory) or

by a stream of discrete packages or particles called photons (quantum theory).

Both conceptions of light radiation are true in different circumstances, but they

cannot be reconciled with each other. Yet you don’t find physicists who insist that

light is only waveform and just deny all the other evidence that indicates that light

is a stream of photons. You don’t have physicists today declaring from an oracu-

lar position something like “the primacy of the waveform”, although String The-

ory (a theory of vibrating waves) purports (ironically for my argument) to be a

theory of everything. To declare the “primacy of the signifier” is to claim rather

arbitrarily or strategically a psychoanalytic theory of everything, premature in our

current state of collective méconnaisance.

However, this psychoanalytic theory of everything is having a hard time of it.

The Symbolic is not what it used to be, neither is Oedipus. They are now no more

than mythical structures, an ideal state of things, belonging to Lacan, in the first

period of his work with his important discussion of the decline of the paternal


imago.23 Currently, the Symbolic gives way to the Imaginary, the Image being

worth a thousand words. More precisely, the triad Symbolic, Imaginary, Real, has

been overtaken by the hyperreal, an accelerated and aggravated form of the real

which violently dominates all human concerns, leaving nothing hidden, demand-

ing the transparency and forcing of everything.

Even the sacred space of the Thing is compromised, forcing art into ever more

exaggerated grotesque forms. As Žižek reminds us, the necessary “gap”, into

which the artist inserts a sublime object (i.e. exempted from the everyday eco-

nomy of commercial exchange), is itself in danger of disappearing. In order to

maintain a sacred place, the modern artist is forced into more and more extreme

measures – trash, excrement, dead animals, dissection of corpses, etc. If there is

no gap, there is no symbolic order, no sublimation. This represents what Žižek

calls, “the generalised perversion of late capitalism”.24 Here, the problem is not the

lost object thus desired, but the omnipresence of all objects and all enjoyments,

hyper-realised across all networks.

Critical psychoanalytic theory via Lacan et al. has become an ever more com-

plex and obscure system, tenaciously adhered to, into which the patient will fit. In

other words, the patient becomes an object of a system, free to speak, but only

through language. Not only that, but the patient or indeed any aspect of culture

will serve to confirm this theory of everything.

Talking of traumatic war experiences and what he calls a military version of

the false memory syndrome, Žižek says, “soldiers often fantasise about killing the

enemy soldier in a face-to-face confrontation, looking at him in the eyes before

stabbing him with a bayonet... they even ‘remember’ such encounters when they

never in fact took place”.25 More generally, he claims all traumatic memories are

liable to be false. The fundamental lesson of psychoanalysis is: “images of utter

catastrophe, far from giving access to the Real, can function as a protective shield

against the Real”.26 The strong implication here is that we can never get to the ex-

plosive real, of war, of evil, of suffering, because we are trapped in a neurotic

jouissance of “primordial lies”, fictions of our own creation that can only circu-


late around a fundamental fantasy, after the real of the event, après-coup. Or put

simply: there is no real. This is just very unfortunate for those who really object-

ively did stab a solder, or have suffered evil done to them. This absolute real may

now be confused with their imagination, or their imaginative reconstruction of

events. The referent seems now not to be the concern of contemporary psychoana-

lysis, only the fundamental fantasy acting as an impenetrable screen. There are no

events, only retrospective “interpretations” of events.27

It is the same with Kleinian theory. Because of their preoccupation with the

primacy of the internal world, projections and introjections, a prospective patient

who had had a long Kleinian analysis in another country, asked me in our first and

only meeting: do you take real childhood events into account? She claimed that

her analysis had barely touched on the changing and very difficult circumstances

of her childhood. A therapy preoccupied with the so-called “total situation” and

its “processing” eclipses the emergence of the subject and the elaboration and as-

sumption of a unique history.

Because of an excess of theory, of ideological mystification and complexifica-

tion, the subject is barred ab initio from truth, condemned by endless deferral and

displacement, from any objective assessments, however difficult yet absolutely

necessary these might be for the ethical viability of the psychoanalytic project.

Again and again, what appears to be good for theory may be bad for the subject.

As Žižek reminds us, “Lacan reinserts his theory into a long tradition, from

Kierkegaard to Heidegger, of despising mere ‘factual truth’ ”.28 Freed from the re-

quirement to signify anything factual, or, to locate truth, theory is free to take off

on its own. Baudrillard famously claimed that the first Gulf War did not take

place, but, unlike psychoanalysts, he was only joking!

By contrast, Freud’s commitment was always to truth and reality, albeit hidden

behind censorship and repression, but contained in a compound way within the

secret of mental life. On Dora’s cough, for instance, Freud writes, “[I]n the lowest

stratum we must assume the presence of a real and organically determined irrita-

tion of the throat – which acted like the grain of sand around which an oyster


forms its pearl”.29 It is the difficulty of obtaining truth that spurs Freud on. For in-

stance he says, “[I]f you were a detective engaged in tracing a murder... would

you not necessarily have to be satisfied with comparatively slight and obscure

traces of the person you were in search of?”30

Phantasies, especially delusions, are a screen ultimately against truth. Speaking

of the paranoid’s convictions about his delusions, Freud emphasises: “There is in

fact some truth in them”.31 And in the absence of any real facts upon which to call,

in the void of infantile amnesia, for instance, Freud believes truth to be so import-

ant that he advocates “constructions” with regard to truth.

All I mean to say is this: [primal] scenes, like this one in my present patient’s case, which date from such an early period and exhibit a sim-ilar content, and which further lay claim to such an extraordinary sig-nificance for the history of the case, are as a rule not reproduced as re-collections, but have to be divined – constructed – gradually and la-boriously from an aggregate of indications.32

Truth is of such importance for Freud, it has to be invented. “What we are in

search of is a picture of the patient’s forgotten years that shall be alike trustworthy

and in all essential respects complete”.33 Freud talks about the analyst’s task as a

reconstruction similar to the archaeologist’s painstaking slow reconstruction of

the past now long buried. Freud is preoccupied with historical or factual truth. He

says, “if the analysis is carried out correctly, we produce in him [the patient] an

assured conviction of the truth of the construction which achieves the same thera-

peutic result as a recaptured memory”.34 And speaking again of delusions, he says,

“there is not only method in madness... but also a fragment of historical truth”.35

And the delusion owes its convincing power to this element of historical truth.

Just like the hysteric, these patients are suffering from their own reminiscences.

Clearly, for Freud, the efficacy of the treatment depends wholly on our attempt to

clarify the past, albeit complicated by phantasy, but containing a core of truth

which is of utmost concern.

Theory rather than truth has become the fetish by which analysts and analytic

theory can achieve a certain potency and mystification. Theory is deployed to


cover the void of truth, more precisely, the voiding of truth.36 It has become the

metanarrative, in spite of the “end of metanarratives”. Faced with trivial therapies,

sometimes very bizarre notions regarding what might be therapeutic, why not

build a theoretical edifice, a master discourse of such subtle density and obscurity

which, in an uncertain world, acts as a guarantee against any intrusion from the

real, where the only challenge is to keep finding examples that illustrate and con-

firm the theory? There is more than a lifetime of absorption and seduction here. If

one becomes a Lacanian, one is a Lacanian for life. There is no way out. Your

money or your life; Lacanianism takes both.

Lacanian theory becomes its own delusional system37 – larger than life. There

is no possibility of de-briefing. We may become as helpless as those dragged

away from religious cults requiring urgent de-conditioning. Like them, we will re-

main committed no matter what happens in the outside world. Why did it take us

so long to realise, asks the ex-Lacanian François Roustang? Lacanian doctrine is a

determined attempt to regain contact with a lost reality, yet undermined by the

doctrine’s own omnipotence, its own self-designated unilateralism. Having

achieved the required escape velocity, there is no force of gravity strong enough

to pull it back to earth, to the subject, who, as Bion reminds us, is only nourished

by truth.

In Freud’s time, theory attempted to follow, attempted to reflect reality. Now,

with Lacan, theory challenges reality itself, like those paramilitary or criminal

gangs that threaten the stability of the state. Theory puts it up to reality. And the

real is fighting back with a blind vengeance. If Lacanian praxis has eschewed em-

pathy, no “affective smoochy-woochy”,38 how can it have any contact with life it-

self? The Kleinians, at the other extreme, risk total exposure to raw affect of al-

legedly primordial origins, which brings its own problems, in terms of the “quant-

itative factor”, possible regression and a loss of historical perspective.

Foreclosed, are a number of key questions: already mentioned, the question of

objective truth, because it is a question of whose truth and the so-called non-exist-

ence of real truth out there; the important but value-laden distinction between the


generalised polysemy of language on the one hand, and the subject who is a

pathological liar on the other; the question of sincerity, because no one is clean

(L. sincērus); the question of courage, because no one has one heart; lastly, the

question of a man’s relationship to a woman is foreclosed as a man “loves” a wo-

man only as a fantasy object. For instance, Fink explains Lacan’s formulae on

what Lacan calls “sexation”: only the mythical primal father can have a true sexu-

al relationship, whereas “[e]very other man has a ‘relationship’ with object (a) –

to wit, fantasy – not with a woman per se”.39 This is an effect of structure. This

(male) fantasy is pre-set, the default position. Therefore, it makes no Lacanian

sense to really try to distinguish between a narcissistic man who abuses his part-

ner and a man who tries through openness and generosity to build a relationship

of trust and responsibility. Both operate from their phantasy.

When it was decreed by Lacan that there is no sexual relation,40 we were in-

deed spared the loving platitudes of those idealising therapy types who believed in

complementarity between the sexes, only to run into a structural impasse: a per-

manent non-meeting. But the real difference between the two types of men in the

above example is immense, but foreclosed because to discern this difference in-

volves making moral judgements.

Lacanian discourse, and Cultural Theory generally, create the universe of indif-

ference necessary for optimal functioning in an atomistic world of isolated speak-

ing beings grabbing jouissance where they can. Such a discourse of alienation and

individualised aggressive desire is also a perfect structural fit for global capitalism

which requires a Brownian motion of chilled, drifting subjects immune to suffer-

ing, to belonging, and to the Real. It is no coincidence that the popularity of the

Lacanian revolution over the last two or three decades, guarded since the Master’s

death by Jacques Alain-Miller, has approximately coincided with the global cul-

tural diffusion of values.

The analysand’s preparation for this virtual world is prophylactically imposed

and augmented by the hystericising (castrating) and mystifying effect of the ana-

lytic situation. The whole ideology precedes them. They can enter analysis


provided they leave their real lives outside!41 Only Lacanians can have a Lacanian

analysis. If they are young they will have known nothing different. They are ripe

for “formation” by this theory of everything.

At the end of her detailed biography of Lacan, Roudinesco asks:

Where are the present day practitioners of the unconscious who never write books and reject with equal vigour jargon, bureaucracy and in-doctrination? It is difficult to say. And yet they do exist, and they do work. Sometimes out of loyalty they stay in their respective groups, though avoiding standardisation; sometimes they withdraw from asso-ciations and go into internal exile... still others circulate freely among all the groups in search of a difference.

She goes on to talk about others who study what she calls, “other listening

techniques or ponder the history of psychoanalysis”, which she believes is still an

exciting field.

“These practitioners”, she goes on, “have studied clinical practice and theory

with Freud, Winnicott, Melanie Klein, Dolto, Lacan and Ferenczi. They have

been working in caring institutions with emigrants, the insane, marginals, chil-

dren, AIDS sufferers, and in their own consulting rooms, with victims of ordinary

neurosis and depression. They are of all ages and persuasions, and they are the fu-

ture of psychoanalysis, its honour and its passion”.42

The critical divide is between Lacanian theory and the real of clinical practice.

In a drug treatment centre, an addiction counsellor is taking a Lacanian approach

with a heroin addict. Her analytic position is declared to be one of simply waiting

for the young addict to speak and eventually “to speak her truth”, however long it

takes. Even though she is faced with a client who is self-destructive, she must be

entirely open and without judgements of any kind. The analytic situation is sur-

rounded by a whole medico-social team and a wider culture that is largely indif-

ferent to the spread and use of drugs. She can say nothing about her client’s de-

structiveness, omnipotence, and so on, for fear of tipping her over into suicide. A

close relative has recently died of an overdose. She can make no overt judgements

about the lifestyle and she rejects any suggestion of this. And Lacanian theory


would dictate that her client be left until she speaks her truth, however long it

takes. Lacanian theory is hard, cool and indifferent, while by contrast most practi-

tioners, in the main, are non-indifferent to their own powerlessness and the entire

tragedy of wasted lives. As has been stressed, this non-indifference is critical –

the rest is cynicism.

Maybe Baudrillard was right when he claimed that Lacan was the destroyer of

psychoanalysis. In conversation with Michael Gane, Baudrillard refers to the “al-

together crushing, and terrorist machine” of psychoanalysis. Baudrillard goes on,

“I’ve always liked Lacan: not at all as constructor of psychoanalysis, but as its

destroyer, and precisely under the appearance of doing the opposite”.43 Lacanians

become parodies of seriousness as they tease out the impossible mathemes with a

devotion once reserved for religion.44 And this particular form of activism is an er-

satz of religion and thus becomes an object of its own adoration. It becomes a

duty to demonstrate your devotion and any criticism of the system itself or its

methods must not occur.45

In the final analysis, the Lacanian edifice is seduction, the return of seduction

within psychoanalysis: a play-off against the Real, which for its part goes to every

possible extreme and virulence. More generally, Critical Theory in its challenge

to the Real is increasingly out of step as it continues along its delusional path. Its

virtual reality has become so well consolidated over the last half century, it has

become immune to the real. Within its own enclosure, it still believes in its cri-

tique of the “administered society” failing to realise that now it is the administra-

tion, with the rolling out of its global egalitarian agenda46 to which every politi-

cian in every democratic country must sign up to get elected. Far from “speaking

out courageously” as many on the Left believe they are still doing, as a gay man, a

black woman, or anti-war protester, for instance, they are stating what has become

the status quo common parlance.47 Far from breaking with tradition, they are

speaking to the new consensus. Indeed, there is no other way of being heard. Far

from being tolerant, positive and inclusive, as they self-righteously claim, there’s

the same old icy intolerance of dissent towards anyone who represents any link


with past authority outside their own hyper-authority. To speak out against this

new authority is to risk being isolated, ignored or even vilified. That is why few

do so.

There is seemingly no escaping this pervasive hegemony. It is in the very way

we speak, or are afraid to speak. It has given a fresh impetus to censorship in a

way Freud could hardly have imagined! If free association as the guiding prin-

ciple of the psychoanalytic session has any currency outside, it must mean speak-

ing against any kind of language “correctness”.48 One must say the forbidden

thing. The free cultural space, like the smoking space, is shrinking fast.49

CHAPTER NINE

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND INDIFFERENCE

Never had people considered themselves as wise and as strong in their pursuit of truth as these plague-ridden people. Never had they thought their decisions, their scientific conclusions, and their moral convic-tions so unshakable or so incontestably right... Each of them believed that the truth only resided in him... They did not know whom to put on trial or how to pass judgement; they could not agree what was good or what was evil. They did not know whom to accuse or whom to acquit. In cities the tocsin was sounded all day long: they called everyone to-gether, but no one knew who had summoned them, and all were in a state of great alarm...1

On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself.2

ack in the 1950s when fears of nuclear war were rife and Strontium 90

was circulating in the upper atmosphere, my parents’ generation worried

about whether or not to bring children into such a potentially toxic world. Guy

and Hope, fictional mother and father in Martin Amis’s London Fields, have pro-

duced an infant monster in the shape of little Marmaduke: “The moment came

and Marmaduke sprang for the knife. After a fierce struggle beneath the table,

Guy, his father, disarmed him and climbed to his feet, holding his nose where

Marmaduke had bitten it”. The irony is that Guy and Hope always give gener-

ously to the charity Save the Children. But now they ask, “What about our own

B


child? Who’s going to save him?”3 No one can, it seems! He is in a state of per-

manent tantrum silenced only by a parental one. For years, like my parents’ gen-

eration, they had worried about the awful kind of world they were bringing their

child into. Now they were seriously worried about the awful kind of child they

were bringing into their world!

Towards the end of his work, Freud asserted the civilising effect of the super-

ego, taking for granted the necessity for “external coercion” in child-rearing:

It is in keeping with the course of human development that external coercion gradually becomes internalised; for a special mental agency, man’s superego, takes it over and includes it among its command-ments. Every child presents this process of transformation to us; only by that means does it become a moral and a social being. Such a strengthening of the superego is a most precious cultural asset in the psychological field. Those in whom it has taken place are turned from being opponents of civilization into being its vehicles. The greater their number is in a cultural unit, the more secure is the culture and the more it can dispense with external measures of coercion.4

Freud had a formula that went something like: cultural development occurs in

proportion to the restraining, repressing, renunciation of the sexual and aggressive

drives. Although this leads to discontent, malaise or neurosis within civilisation,

the formula of repression must stay in some shape or form.

Melanie Klein took things further, with her concept of the “archaic superego”

which is the forerunner of the mature adult superego. Firstly, by contrast, it is not

a moral agency in any sense. It opposes drive but in an entirely driven way. It op-

erates on the principle of the talion, using aggression to oppose aggression. The

ruthlessness of the infant in procuring its needs is matched by the ruthlessness of

the archaic superego response. Freud had already noted this kind of severity in

melancholia and obsessional neurosis.

How is it that the superego... develops such extraordinary harshness and severity towards the ego? If we turn to melancholia first, we find that the excessively strong superego which has obtained a hold upon consciousness rages against the ego with merciless violence, as if it had taken possession of the whole of the sadism available in the per-

Psychoanalysis and Indifference 175

son concerned. Following our view of sadism we should say that the destructive component had entrenched itself in the superego and turned against the ego. What is now holding sway in the superego is a pure culture of the death instinct...

In obsessional neurosis... the instinct of destruction has been set free and it seeks to destroy the object... The superego behaves as if the ego were responsible for this... by the seriousness with which it chas-tises these destructive intentions...5

Klein pointed out that the early superego is “immeasurably harsher and more

cruel than that of the older child or adult and that it literally crushed down the

feeble Ego of the small child... In the small child we come across a superego of

the most incredible and phantastic proportions”. The younger the child the more

severe is the superego. “We get to look upon the child’s fear of being devoured,

or cut-up, or torn to pieces, or its terror of being surrounded and pursued by men-

acing figures”.6

When aggression is at its height children never tire of, “tearing and cutting-up,

breaking and wetting and burning all sorts of things like paper, matches, boxes,

small toys, all of which represent (unconsciously) parents, brothers, sisters and

bodies and breasts, and this rage for destruction alternates with attacks of anxiety

and guilt”.7 These frustrated and destructive rages within the child cause him great

anxiety, “for he perceives his anxiety arising from his aggressive instincts as fear

of an external object [person], both because he had made that object their outward

goal, and because he has projected them onto it, so that they seem to be initiated

against himself from that quarter”.8 He cannot own up to his rage; instead he will

create terrifying images of his parents who are now felt to rage against him. This

is a desperate attempt at control by turning sadism against the self.

In the archaic superego we have a brutal instrument of self-punishment which

is as impulsive and dangerous as the drives of the Id that it is trying to control.

This is part of our very early development. It remains mostly unconscious and we

only become aware of it during nightmares, certain drug states, during horror

movies, obsessional and paranoid states as well as depressive ones.


Critically, for our argument here, with the alleged loss of the more mature and

benign superego and suitable identification figures, which has occurred over the

last half century, children are increasingly exposed to this frightening internal

world. The more that children and people generally were to be liberated from the

old structures of paternal authority, the more freed up “to do their own thing”, the

more they were to suffer the slavish oppression of the archaic superego. This is

the insight we should reclaim from Freud and Klein.

However, the neo-Reichians continue to be so much more popular and influen-

tial in psychotherapy circles than either Freud or Klein. Many of the early analysts

believed in sexual liberation and were promiscuous and bohemian social utopians

in contrast to the psychoanalytic establishment. As early as 1930, the profession

was completely polarised. Freud had published Civilisation and its Discontents,

maintaining that civilisation demanded the sacrifice of our freedom, but the

younger analysts believed in throwing off repressions. According to Elizabeth

Danto,9 Reich was powerful, brilliant and sexy. He had an electrifying energy all

of his own. Reich thought Freud’s civilisation book was a response to his ideas,

saying that it was Freud who was the one who was “discontented” by civilisation.

Reich wanted to cure the world of sexual repression. In 1928, Freud referred to

him as, “a worthy but impetuous young man, passionately devoted to his hobby-

horse, who now salutes in the genital orgasm the antidote to every neurosis”. That

year Reich created a mobile clinic, Sex-Pol, arguing for “free sexuality within an

egalitarian society”. The radicals were against abstinence, the corrupting influ-

ence of the family and in favour of pre-marital sex. Six free clinics were estab-

lished, staffed by leftish-analysts, which immediately became overcrowded,

boasting membership of over 40,000. In 1930, Reich met Freud and stressed the

importance of removing children from the family if the Oedipus complex was to

be avoided. But Freud replied, “Your viewpoint is no longer compatible with the

middle path of psychoanalysis”. Freud argued that it was not the job of psycho-

analysis to save the world. Reich characterised Freud as a “caged animal”. In-


creasingly radical, Reich joined the communist party. Freud’s New Year’s resolu-

tion for 1932 was: step against Reich!

fathers

However, around the same time, Lacan spoke up for the father (and by implica-

tion his internal representative – the superego) and the absolute value that should

be placed on the “tender virile identification”. However, Lacan acknowledged,

and this acknowledgement is just as valid seven or eight decades later: “The res-

ulting situation for this good father is a remarkably difficult one; to a certain ex-

tent he is an insecure figure”.10

Speaking of neurosis as early as 1938, Lacan says that weak fathers problemat-

ise sublimation and creativity. With foresight, he warns, “Impotence and the uto-

pian spirit are the sinister godmothers who watch over the cradle of the neurotic

and imprison his ambition”.11 Judging by inbox spam, there is much impotence

about and later there will be much to say about the utopian spirit.

It was not actual fathers, but the symbolic father which was the crucial agency

for Lacan. The murdered father of the primal horde “lives” on as this bearer of

language, differentiation, meaning and repression (the superego) on the one hand,

and promise (the ego ideal) on the other. The father is the “spokesman” who ex-

plains the world. He is the one who acknowledges, legitimates, and underscores

us. Without the agency of the father, the Imaginary register, the imagistic-

celebrity culture, becomes hyper-realised.

Borch-Jacobsen summarises the crucial Lacanian position:

[T]he insolvency and “narcissistic bastardising” of the father figure, the growing indistinguishability of the paternal function from the “specular double”, the “tangential movement towards incest” in our societies... In short, it is the competitive, rivalrous world, revealed as the great traditional ordering principles retreat, a world of doubles all the more identical for assuming their autonomy, all the more racked by guilt for declaring their emancipation from every law.12


This echoes our discussion above on the emergence of the archaic superego,

where the criminal and the cop double and interchange. In the free market of feel-

ings, hate crimes emerge, metonymies of hate, searching at random on the streets

for a hate object. The archaic superego becomes the masked hit man, an under-

cover double-agent, the contract killer to “take out” what is already dead. Crimin-

al means justify criminal ends. The war on terror becomes terroristic.

The father has at least two functions in our psychoanalytic mythology. Firstly,

he breaks the incestuous Oedipal bond of the child with the mother, in effect sav-

ing the child from a later psychosis. This is clinically verifiable again and again.

Secondly, the father is the shield against death. In the jealous Oedipal rivalry with

the father lies a narrow footbridge thanks to which the son does not feel directly

invaded, directly swallowed by the Real, i.e. the unmediated confrontation with

the anguish of death. Indeed, the death of the father, whenever it occurs, is felt by

the son as a hole that opens in the Real. Freud puts it very strongly early in the

Civilization book: “I cannot think of any need in childhood so strong as the need

for a father’s protection”.13

Contemporary progressive thinking about the father prefers terms like “signi-

ficant parent” de-differentiating mother from father, significant other, or carer,

etc. Here the father may be important, but certainly no more important than any-

one else. But research in Britain (there has only been one small study in Ireland)

has shown that “fatherlessness” per se is disastrous in virtually every measurable

outcome for the children concerned. An intergenerational vicious circle has been

noted, whereby sons without fathers become so antisocial, linked into gangland

criminality, drugs and alcoholism, siring children whom they in turn will not look

after – low-life that no woman would want to be associated with. Meanwhile the

single mother suffers poverty, having to cope largely on her own.

Here are some of the recent observations from Britain. Half of all co-habiters

split up before their child’s fifth birthday, compared with just one in 12 married

couples. That adds to the army of children being brought up without a male role

model and imposes a heavy burden on society. The financial cost of family break-


down, now £20bn a year (2006), constitutes a third of the UK education budget.

The great majority of young offenders come from one-parent households. Chil-

dren from broken homes tend to fail at school, are twice as likely to have behavi-

oural problems as their friends and 70 per cent more likely to become hooked on

drugs. Many run wild in street gangs, which have become substitute families. Fif-

teen per cent of all babies born in Britain grow up without a father. Family break-

down, in all its forms, is occurring at a greater rate today than ever before.14

Lacan was quite aware that, in contemporary life, the rigour of the Symbolic

register was more of a structuring mythology than a reality. The now chronic defi-

ciency of the paternal function, the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, the un-

dermining of the Law, the loss of familial landmarks leads us to reformulate, the

Freud / Lacanian Oedipus is not the Oedipus as it is; it is the Oedipus as it must

be.

At this point then, we have extracted a number of things: 1) Freud’s ironic

valuation of the superego as a precious cultural asset; 2) Klein’s deepening of this

structure with her understanding of the archaic superego, which is an enemy of

culture, a violent urgent reaction to the drives, leading only to violence and panic,

especially in children; 3) Lacan’s symbolic father as structuring effect which has

been ailing throughout the time of psychoanalysis and modernity; 4) finally the

real flesh-and-blood father, who fails, but even in his failing is a hedge against in-

cest, psychosis and criminality.

The psychoanalytic clinic in parallel with the failing father was also changing:

for half a century psys15 have noticed an increase in the number of people seeking

help who show narcissistic disturbances or borderline conditions. These people

are fragmented. They have very profound mood swings, levels of self-esteem ran-

ging from grandiosity to a sense of inferiority which is a void or empty space. Ko-

hut spoke of a “depleted self... the empty depression, i.e. the world of unmirrored

ambitions, the world devoid of ideals”.16 Kernberg17 pointed out that narcissistic

pathology represents a defence against a fundamental rage that is felt to be so de-

structive, so full of impotent anger, that it threatens to destroy the self and other.


Here the drives and the archaic superego vie for control leading potentially, at the

end of the line, to homicide or suicide.

Recently, Paul Verhaeghe18 refers to contemporary disorders as being quite un-

like Freud’s descriptions of the psychoneuroses. He lists them – panic attacks,

stress disorders, addictions, cutting, self-harming, promiscuity. He notes these dis-

orders have much in common with Freud’s “actual neuroses”. They are indeed ac-

tion-oriented, with the focus on the Real of the body, the here and now, with no

hidden meaning or historicisation. The transference is likely to be, not just a neg-

ative transference per se, but an immediate challenging of our position from the

first instance. These people have not constructed symptoms to repress the drive,

they haven’t the luxury of a sinthome – Lacan’s term for living in a creative way

with one’s neurosis. So what position must the analyst adopt, he asks? One at-

tempts to create and maintain the therapeutic alliance and to provide what Lacan

called “a coating for the drive”.

the new social bond

As Jacques Alain Miller says in his strong defence of contemporary psychother-

apy and psychoanalysis, “the psy is now being expected to substitute himself for

the forebear to assure the transmission of values and continuity between genera-

tions. The listening ear of the psy, qualified or not, constitutes the compassionate

cushion to the ‘society of risk’... the need for personalised attention”.19 Over and

against listening to the suffering other, there is what Miller refers to as the desert

of “abstract and anonymous systems”. Here he lists society’s pathologies: detradi-

tionalisation; loss of bearings; disarray of identifications; dehumanisation of de-

sire; violence in the community; suicide among the young; the passages à l’acte

of the mentally ill. As Miller says, psys are being called upon to be “constitutive

or re-constitutive of the social bond which is going though a process of restructur-

ing probably without precedent since the industrial revolution”.20


We are being called upon to, “assure the transmission of values and continuity

between generations”, on the one hand, and to be “reconstitutive of the social

bond” on the other. To claim that psys are constitutive of the social bond, or trans-

mitting values, or acting in place of forebears, may be somewhat disingenuous.

What values? What social bond? Against this exemplary vision for psychoanalys-

is, we could claim that psys have facilitated, by their “value-neutral” or culturally

relativist position, precisely the opposite: the deconstructing of all social bonds,

identifications and traditions (see the last chapter, below). We are probably closer

to the aims of the Maoist Cultural Revolution in China and the campaign by the

Red Guards against the “Four Olds”: ideals, culture, customs, habits.

One new analysand, from a strong rural community said, when I’d finished ex-

plaining payment, timing of the sessions, payment for missed sessions, etc.: “To

think that it has come down to just this!” The old natural informal social ties have

been replaced by the “professional relationship”. The rural communities in Ireland

have been devastated over the last two decades through the loss of the creameries,

the post office, the local shop, the local schools, because there are so few young

people and, most recently, the rural pub, isolated by drink-driving laws and the

smoking ban.

The values that psys do transmit, the new social bond that they do constitute

can be succinctly formulated. A transactional exchangeable / negotiable social

bond which values listening and speaking in total freedom and without censorship

or discrimination. We value non-judgemental, non-interventionist listening and

that is the ethical example we set in terms of the social bond. And Miller is cor-

rect: this is, in effect, the new social bond. Because what psys practise in their

clinics has now been transposed as a model deployed as an ideal for all social

bonds within a democratic liberal society. We must all work with each other, in

public and private, in a non-judgemental, transactional, negotiated and equal way.

Psy-values have diffused into the whole culture. However, what is good in the

clinic becomes deeply problematic, I am arguing, when diffused into a whole cul-

ture.


What words do we use to describe the contemporary? Fluid, floating, ephemer-

al, rapidly changing, a continuous revolution, migratory, re-cyclable, diffuse,

cool, non-committed, non-discriminatory. All this and more are part of psy-val-

ues, now writ-large in the community, now enshrined in human rights law with

aspirations to globalisation. And this law (from the EU and the UN) supersedes all

previous formulations. The postmodern is also post-history. We have pulled up

our roots. As Terry Eagleton has pointed out, at least modernists still had a sense

of the values they were at the same time destroying, they still had a sense of the

tragic. Postmodernists, on the contrary, are post-everything – values and the tra-

gic. This is the “liberation” that doesn’t even know itself, like the post-feminists

who want to know nothing of feminism, or the post-Marxists, who want to know

nothing of Marxism, and so on.

The well-known Lacanian analyst, Bill Richardson, caused a stir when he ar-

gued in effect that clients in psychoanalysis need a sense of values and commit-

ments to others! A writer to an Irish newspaper recently wrote:

Is there anything other than the lethargy of our legislature that is keep-ing Christianity from being a crime? Is there not a dominant thrust in public discourse to denigrate many things that Christianity used to stand for? Are parapets not being erected all over the place below which any budding Christian would do well to keep his head? Wouldn’t an avowal of Christianity bring about howls of name-call-ing, even that shameful tag of fundamentalism? Surely all those things that Christians held to be wrong must now be permitted by law, since otherwise we would “criminalise” those who do them? So it is smart indeed to be careful about the evidence we leave.21

William Burleigh,22 in a recent MORE4 programme, Dark Enlightenment, put

forward the notion that the West’s desertion of its Christian roots has led to what

Durkheim called “effervescence”, where every bubble of this frothing represents a

populist idea, as the religious impulse fragments into a multiplicity of “solutions”

and pseudo-religions, cults and practices.

The superego, that Freud regarded as a precious cultural asset, is constituted

from the Judeo-Christian heritage. It enshrined rights, but rights with obligations


inculcated by a long enculturation process. Now in the post-Christian, psy-envir-

onment, we have competing rights without obligations. The new social bond that

Miller refers to is a virtual bond; i.e. a bond that isn’t a real bond; it passes itself

off as a minimalist bond. Anything else would be unacceptable in a rights-based,

me-first culture. It is a bond with a light (lite) touch, which permits maximum ex-

changeability. Psy-culture has helped to create this new dispensation. What results

then is a radically subjectivist culture – me first and my feelings first.

Arguably, the effects of the post-Christian culture weigh most heavily on chil-

dren, among other vulnerable groups. Christopher Bollas, in a recent novel, refers

to Attention Deficit Disorder and its increasing diagnosis among children, with

Ritalin treatment running at a third of a million prescriptions a year currently in

the UK. It is not the children, he suggests, who have ADD, it is the parents! The

entire culture projects its own disorder into the child. His fictional analyst says,

“too many parents did not know what to do with them, so their children were

bundled off to pre-pre-school, given homework, and taken care of afterwards by

nannies or childminders. It seems clear to him that those with the attention deficit

disorders were actually the parents, plus the culture that supported this form of at-

tack on childhood”.23

However, this is the nub of the psy confusion, because Bollas and his fictional

analyst would have argued unproblematically for equal parenting and the whole

play of liberation (for adults!) to work and make money, which in turn fuelled the

catastrophic rise in house prices requiring two incomes to buy a house, creating a

demand for universal child-minding. However, he observes that, “each and every

child with this tag [ADD] whom he had seen or supervised had been neglected by

the mother or father. From his point of view it was not a matter of blaming the

parents, but of recognising that children need to have their parents around. They

needed the mother or father at home when they returned from school, as they

were vital characters in helping kids break down from the strains of reality”. He

suggests ominously by way of conclusion, “The world was unwittingly predispos-

ing an entire population to a mordant after-effect: to the inevitability of depression


following adolescence, when millions of people would feel some deep inner loss

but not have a clue about its origins”.24

Run that thought beside these comments from the British survey: “Young

adults are engaging in a new culture of intoxication... [with] the emergence and

growth of a range of addictive behaviours and practices. Self-harm and cutting,

virtually unheard of 10 years ago, are on the rise. Gambling is a national addic-

tion. Britain can also claim the dubious achievement of chalking up the fastest rise

in the prescription of anti-depressants and other mind-altering drugs to chil-

dren”.25

de-moralisation

Thomas Mann on Freud’s 80th birthday in 1936:

The analytic revelation is a revolutionary force. With it a blithe scepti-cism has come into the world, a mistrust that unmasks all the schemes and subterfuges of our own souls. Once roused and on the alert, it can-not be put to sleep again. It infiltrates life, undermines its raw naiveté, takes from it the strain of its own ignorance.26

“Revolutionary”, “unmasking”, “undermining”. Settling of accounts with com-

placency and righteousness, bringing down and breaking up, celebrate, the end of

deference, the breakdown of barriers to social mobility, rights for minorities,

sexual freedom, economic freedom, wealth on a scale undreamt of two genera-

tions ago and so on. Deregulation in every area of life, especially in the arts and

entertainment. It is an amazing success story in wealthy urban areas of the West.

Like the meteorite at the end of its trajectory that burns brightest at the mo-

ment of its extinction and like water that speeds up just before the waterfall, the

huge undreamt-of success of liberal democracies has created the parallel bur-

geoning of criminality on a global scale. I remember John Simpson, the BBC’s

most sober world affairs correspondent, on the eve of the Millennium, saying

how a senior Interpol spokesperson had acknowledged that “global crime was

now out of control”. This reality is largely hidden for two reasons. One, the


conspiracy of positivity – everything has to be seen in a progressive light. Two,

no one can configure postmodernity. It is complexity-chaos in action. Freed

from our Judeo-Christian formation, we have no way of getting our bearings.

Radical success and radical nihilism co-mingle. Anything can mean anything

and 70 years on from Thomas Mann’s speech praising Freud, we have reached

the most advanced forms of “unmasking” and “scepticism”. On the hither side

of utopia – Raskolnikov again – Never had they thought their decisions, their

scientific conclusions, and their moral convictions so unshakable or so incontest-

ably right... Each of them believed that the truth only resided in him [radical sub-

jectivity]... They did not know... how to pass judgment... could not agree what was

good or what was evil. They did not know whom to accuse or whom to acquit...

Perhaps it is a failure of nerve, perhaps it is a senior moment, but the project,

the analytic psy praxis and its wider diffusion, have not ushered in what Mann

and many others hoped for by way of “modesty”, and a more “blithely object-

ive and peaceful world”. Rather the reverse, what has broken free has been de-

moralising – the gradual erosion of the moral basis for our civilisation.

Mann’s speech, as Freud’s biographer Max Schur has noted, was a homage

to Freud and psychoanalysis, but also a passionate plea for resistance to the im-

minent Nazi threat, in the fervent belief and hope that enlightened reason, sci-

ence and understanding would overcome Fascism; a hope that Freud also

shared. In the last chapter of his book on religion, however, Freud is doubtful.

“Man’s intellect is powerless in comparison with his instinctual life”, and fur-

ther on, “the voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has

gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.

This is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future

of mankind... The primacy of the intellect lies, it is true, in the distant, distant

future, but probably not in an infinitely distant one”.27

Freud clearly was not indifferent to the strength of the drives and their “lib-

eration”, and the great danger therein. He warns, “have you learned nothing

from history... Surely you remember the French Revolution and Robespierre?


And you must also remember show short-lived and miserably ineffectual that

experiment was? The same experiment is being repeated in Russia at the

present time, and we need not feel curious as to its outcome”.28

However, many have stood to gain from the intervening liberation of the

drives and the sixties’ slogan to get rid of “the policeman in your head”. On the

one hand, rampant consumer capitalism from the Right; from the Left, the

state-supported therapy industry that is mandated to pick up the pieces of social

breakdown and its escalating costs. De-sublimation, Marcuse’s term, leads, not

to the “coating of the drive”, to use Lacan’s phrase, but to the exposure of the

drive and the kind of frenetic drivenness that widely characterises postmodern

subjectivity. Behind the frenzy of the drives is the ever-changing superego, in

its perverse Lacanian formulation that commands us to: Enjoy!

Addictions arise from the drives. These days one can be “addicted” to any-

thing – not only to alcohol or drugs, but also to food, smoking, sex, work, shop-

ping, etc. This universalization of addiction points towards the radical uncertainty

of any subjective position today. In the absence of traditional predetermined pat-

terns to life, everything must now be “a choice”, down to the trivial decisions in

the supermarket shop. Intimacy must be negotiated. Living is “about choice”, and

so now is dying. Today, there are many young people saying: why live? It’s a

cool question: why live? Camus stressed that suicide is the only real philosophical

problem. And he did so at a time when the question, “why live?” became a real

question, in de-traditionalised societies, with no natural rhythm, when living is a

question of freedom, even the ultimate freedom of whether to live or die. Until re-

cently, suicide was simply a sign of some terrible aberration, hidden despair or

misery, and was regarded as a sinful act.

With the contemporary, however, suicide becomes an existential act, the out-

come of a pure decision – the right to choose death.29 Living itself becomes an ad-

diction. Follow the superego injunction and you must get passionately attached or

stuck to some excess where your very survival may be at stake.


Tom Wolfe indicates that his novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, is about the “de-

moralisation” of sex. The story is about student life at a fictional A-list US univer-

sity. Sex, to these kids, has become just one more aspect of the good, the con-

sumerised life. Wolfe comments, “I think there was actually comparatively little

free love in the 1960s – in the communes, yes, but in the population, no. It’s cer-

tainly in colleges now. The silken slither-slither, the golden spasms: that’s what

it’s all about. These health centres in the colleges, they encourage good sex. It was

going to all these colleges that made me realise that sex has been de-moralised.

And I really don’t think de-moralised sex is as much fun as good old evil sex”.

Wolfe, like Freud, inclines to the belief that sexual repression is one of the

most distinctive things about human beings; removing it, therefore, threatens our

humanity.30

One of our best known and most influential psys is Adam Phillips. In an inter-

view, to publicize his book, Going Sane, where he suggests that “madness has all the

best lines”, he comments on relationships, as an aside, suggesting that they are:

not the kind of thing that one can be good or bad at, that one can succeed or fail at, any more than you can be good or bad at having red hair, or succeed and fail at being lucky. From my point of view, the way mod-ern life is constructed and lived, you can’t make a relationship work by an act of effort or will. The will can’t do that work of imagination in a relationship, and when that happens people grow to hate each other even more. When a relationship feels like it’s over, it is. We should accept that the man or woman of our dreams isn’t someone we could actually have a relationship with, and learn to bear our frustrations.31

Phillips has been called the writer of the floating world. He is paradoxical,

whimsical, ironic – ephemeral like the relationships he is describing. Here, he dis-

plays his high-born indifference and coolness towards values. What does sustain a

relationship, in the final analysis, if not effort, hard work, commitment and much

imagination? With whom should we have a relationship if it is not the man or wo-

man of our dreams, providing these dreams have some base in reality? We all

know young lovers who have grown old together, who will stand by each other, in


spite of difference and even hatred at times. All relationships are ambivalent.

True, but now nothing can be taken seriously; everything must be ironic.

obscene fathers

The symbolic father, the imaginary father, the real father and now a contemporary

myth that coincides with postmodernity and its total skepticism born of psy-val-

ues – the obscene father. The father, the man, the male, male psychology – essen-

tially lewd, lustful, pornographic. Once the father was feared and hated for his

trenchant embodiment of the Law, now, in an absolute reversal, he becomes a ter-

rifying figure. Within two generations, he has gone the way of all authority.

The father has suddenly come alive! Žižek has it:

[The] postmodern shift affects radically the status of paternal author-ity: modernism endeavours to assert the subversive potential of the margins which undermine the Father’s authority, of the enjoyments that elude the father’s grasp, whereas postmodernism focuses on the father himself and conceives him as “alive”, in his obscene dimension – the “anal father” who definitely does enjoy; the obscene little man who is the clearest embodiment of the phenomenon of the “uncanny” (unheimliche).32

This other side of the Name-of-the-Father is revealed in Conrad’s novels, in

the figures of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, and Mister Brown in Lord Jim. Marlow

encounters Kurtz deep in the African jungle. Kurtz is a paternal figure who is the

master of enjoyment without restraint, a representation of radical evil, all power-

ful, cruel to the utmost, for whom there are no limits. Yet he is a “father” who

knows enjoyment beyond the dead neutrality of the Law; a smirking knowing of

absolute destruction / pleasure – law beyond the law. This is the sort of bestial

man, allegedly “behind” or to be uncovered within the stabilising father. He is the

rapist, the paedophile, warlord, drug baron, etc., who boasts of raping, torturing,

ethnic cleansing and the casual enjoyment of killing in excess.

Closer to home, we are constantly told, he is most likely to be in the home, the

father and adults in general, who are no longer to be trusted. The one-time bearers


of values guaranteeing the social bond are radically deconstructed by psy-culture

that argues for the transparency and the openness of everything and the new so-

cial-bond-lite.

The Nazis, the Bolsheviks, Mao’s Red Guards, now the Jihadis, all, in their

times, play the Oedipal card and get the children to snitch on their parents and

adults generally. The adults are suspect and should, if necessary, be denounced

publicly. Today with our perpetual cultural revolution,33 the same trick, get the

children to tell on the adults. In Britain, if you want to work with children or help

out in a children’s activity, you must pay a fee and fill in a 15-page form, then

wait for weeks to be vetted by the State.34

Informal ways in which people relate are going to disappear. Potentially, every

kind of human relationship requires expertise and therefore training provision,

leading to best practice, targeted improvement, evidence-based testing, terms and

conditions, protocols, contractual relations. This requires massive health bureau-

cracies, whole new information “industries” of well-paid psy-experts and service

providers, regulators, funding agencies and inspectors, both in the public and

private sector. People are less and less allowed to act informally without risking

trouble or litigation. The pollution of paranoia enters into every niche of the de-

graded social. How did we get here?

“Blithe scepticism has come into the world, a mistrust that unmasks all the

schemes and subterfuges of our own souls. Once roused and on the alert, it cannot

be put to sleep again”. Paranoid scepticism, driven by psy-thinking and expertise

unmasks every dark secret of the unconscious of every organisation and institu-

tion. And it now seems unstoppable; it cannot be put to sleep.

The “delightful” scepticism that has come into the world via psy-consciousness

and expertise has (hyper-)realised the so-called “science of the unconscious” not

with the quiescence and peace of the rational, but maybe with devastating con-

sequences. An excess of reality, an explosion (terabits, 1012) of information – con-

necting, interacting, exchanging, divulging, revealing – that in turn drives indi-


viduals and institutions into more and more subterfuge and secrecy to evade the

advancing gaze of the System.

Again, there are two worlds. The first world, the official world of credibility,

audits, political correctness, perfection and mission statements, being seen to be

respecting the Law. And the other receding (or is it growing?) outlawed world of

secrecy and criminality thriving in a liberated, globalised world without borders

and without values. The two worlds are forced to share the same space and, as a

consequence, each disavows the other. They were born together in mistrust and

are driven apart by it. And the mistrust spawned by radical scepticism drives itself

with it own rational energy, so that every last hypocritical vestige will be chased

down in a permanent drive towards perfection and realisation.

People do the “correct” thing now, not because they believe in the value of do-

ing it (they may still believe but it doesn’t matter) but more because they will be

breaking the law if they don’t. Their freedom to truly engage with the other (now

called “client”) is so restricted by terms and conditions that their heart may not be

in it. Like those service providers who say:

We hope you’ve enjoyed your shopping / flight / entertainment / other experience with us. We hope we will have the pleasure of serving you again. Rate us.

The psy-ideal has become a neo-Reichian dream of rational freedom from all

obligatory social ties and values while, at the same time, being caught unawares,

for our own “safety and security” in the ever expanding Kafkaesque world of sci-

entific / information / language-based controls and state surveillance security sys-

tems.

Having dispensed with “the father”, we’ve had to invoke his name in a

massively expensive, ruinously expanding state bureaucracy of psy-experts to

stand in his place, to police the liberated drives.

Camus threw out a challenge, a twentieth-century coda to Pascal’s more

famous seventeenth century wager. In a discussion with Sartre, Malraux, Koes-


tler, and Manes Sperber that took place on the evening of 29 October 1946,

Camus suddenly addressed the following question to his four companions:

Don’t you agree that we are all responsible for the absence of values? What if we, who all come out of Nietzscheanism, nihilism, and historical realism, what if we announced publicly that we were wrong; that there are moral values and that henceforth we shall do what has to be done to establish and illustrate them. Don’t you think that this might be the beginning of hope?35

CHAPTER TEN

THE QUEER END OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

his chapter will examine the radical fringe of psychoanalysis that has

emerged post-Lacan under the heading of Queer Theory. The germ of the

theory is to be found in Michel Foucault’s work in the 1970s,1 that turned received

ideas about gender and sexuality upside-down; even the notion of sexuality itself

and the so-called “repressive hypothesis”, which led not so much to the repression

of sexuality but the endless preoccupation with sexuality. Foucault’s idea was that

the various modern bodies of knowledge about sexuality (various “sciences of

sexuality”, including psychoanalysis) have an intimate association with the power

structures of modern society. Modern control of sexuality parallels modern con-

trol of criminality, or madness, by making sex (like crime and mental illness) an

object of science to provide knowledge about and therefore domination over their

“objects” of study. However, there is a further dimension to the power associated

with the so-called sciences of sexuality; not only is control exercised via the Oth-

er, there is also control through individuals, who internalise the norms laid down

and monitor themselves in an effort to conform to these norms. They are domin-

ated not only as objects of disciplines but also as self-analysing and self-confess-

ing subjects.

T

Through the test-case of sexuality, Foucault compared ancient pagan and

Christian ethics to trace the different development of Christian ideas about sexual-


ity from the ideas of the ancients. On Foucault’s account the contrast between the

Christian view and the Greek view was that, with the former, sexual acts were, on

the whole, evil in themselves, while with the latter, they were good, natural and

necessary, although possibly subject to abuse. As a result, instead of the Christian

moral code forbidding most forms of sexual activity (and severely restricting the

rest), the ancient Greeks emphasized the proper use (chresis) of pleasures, where

this involved engaging in the full range of sexual activities (heterosexual, homo-

sexual, in marriage, out of marriage), but with proper moderation. Thus under-

stood, sex for the Greeks was a major part of what Foucault called the “aesthetics

of the self”, that is, the self’s creation of a beautiful and enjoyable existence.

Thus, Foucault was the influential critic of the so-called “normalisation” of

modern disciplinary systems, involved in comparing, differentiating, hierarch-

ising, homogenising and therefore excluding people, and, above all, Foucault was

a critic of modern liberalism’s claim to truth. However, as one critic of Foucault

warned, “the destruction of normalising reason might also herald the overman”.2

Foucault, also critical of psychoanalysis, does cite the importance of Lacan: “he

has explained how through the discourse of the sick person and the symptom of

his neurosis, it is the system of language – and not the subject – which speaks”.3

The stage for the deconstruction of so-called stabilised “sexual identities” had

already been prepared for long ago, by Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality, where

Freud had “scientifically” anatomised sexuality into oral, anal and phallic as well

as demonstrating the variability of the aim and object of the sexual drive. Above

all, he described human sexuality as “polymorphously perverse”. This primitive

sexuality would “normatively” be left behind – repressed or sublimated during

psychosocial development.

It is precisely the reversal of this “leaving behind” that will be celebrated by

Queer Theorists. Similarly, Freud’s concept of “regression” will be de-stigmatised

by queer theorists. Psychoanalysis has in some sense stood roughly midway

between seeing perversion as a specific psychiatric pathology, i.e. seeing homo-

sexuals for example as a specific minority group with an “illness”, and regarding

The Queer End of Psychoanalysis 195

the homoerotic trend as universal but often unconscious. In a key footnote added

in 1915, at the beginning of Three Essays, Freud states unequivocally: “Psycho-

analytic research is most decidedly opposed to any attempt at separating off ho-

mosexuals from the rest of mankind as a group of a special character...It has

found that all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object choice

and have in fact made one in their unconscious”.4 In its latter stance, psychoana-

lysis paves the way for queer theory and undermining the identity politics by

which one defines one’s (fixed) sexual orientation.5 Thus, gay and lesbian sexual-

ities cannot be conflated without this loss of gender specificity, as queer theorists

drive beyond the binary opposition of gender difference.6

Queer theory concerns itself with any and all forms of sexuality that are

“queer”, and then, by extension, with the normative behaviours and identities

which hegemonically define what is queer (purely by being their binary

opposites). Instead, all categories of normative and deviant sexualities are under-

stood as social constructs, sets of signifiers which create certain types of social

meaning. Sexuality is an historical not a natural phenomenon. Queer theory fol-

lows feminist theory and gay / lesbian studies in rejecting the idea that sexuality is

an essentialist category, something forever determined by biology or judged by

eternal standards of morality and truth. For queer theorists, sexuality is a complex

and provisional array of social codes, forces and forms of individual activity and

institutional power, which interact to shape what is normative and what is deviant

at any particular moment, and which then operate under the rubric of “natural”,

“essential”, “biological”, or “God-given”.

Beyond identity politics (gay or straight), queer theory resists any fixed nor-

malities as sanctioned in any given culture. It privileges any and every transgres-

sion of norms, including progressive norms. As we shall see, Queer Theory ex-

plodes any liberal democratic notions of (controlling, rational) inclusion of “oth-

er” identities, being hyper-vigilant for any hint of discrimination or exclusion.

The new militancy overtook the gay identity politics of earlier decades, which

was disrupted by the panic over AIDS, widely regarded, not just by the Right, as


the “gay plague”. The use of the pejorative term, “queer”, was controversial, but

was seen as an ironic reclaiming, a strategy of over-identification, of using the

weapons of the oppressor, thus undermining, ridiculing and parodying those who

would and have condemned “queers”. The term acts as a counter-gift (Mauss) to

the straight-world, and the queer “strategy” as a Potlatch.

As we have noted, not everyone was happy with this queer clearing of the pitch

of identity politics. If the notion of gender is no more than a culturally contingent

social construct, where does this leave feminism? Where does this leave woman?

Where does it leave the gains made up to now in terms of women’s solidarity and

shared interests? It could be argued that the influence of Foucault on “queering

the world” has led to a negative view of gender as purely socially inscribed dis-

ciplines and masquerades that should be overtaken and swept away, by the fluid-

ity and mobility of queer desires regardless.7 Implicit here, no doubt, is the return

of the old (phallic) logic that the gender that is constraining is most likely to be

female.8

The key notion in what follows here is Foucault’s well-known assertion that

pleasure is an event outside the subject.

no future

Lee Edelman’s work9 was the focus of a recent seminar on Queer Theory and the

death drive.10 Clearly at the sharp end of Queer Theory, his work is variously de-

scribed as unflinching, bracing, polemical, “embracing the equation of homosexu-

ality with death, sterility and the anti-social”.11

Here is the initial promo for the book, provided in advance of the seminar:

The traditional Western concept of politics is predicated on making the future a better place and that the accepted – literal as well as sym-bolic – image of the future is the child, he [Edelman] states that “queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children’”. Edelman argues that homosexuality’s perceived social threat has to do with its separation from the act of reproduction, yet, he says, this non-reproductive capacity must be embraced as a social good [my italics].


He illustrates his provocative stance by analyzing numerous cultural artefacts – Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (why do the birds keep at-tacking children?); A Christmas Carol (he favours Scrooge over Tiny Tim); the musical Annie (with its hit song “Tomorrow”). His main tar-get is the all-pervasive figure of the child, which he reads as the linch-pin of our universal politics of “reproductive futurism”. Edelman ar-gues that the child, understood as innocence in need of protection, rep-resents the possibility of the future against which the queer is posi-tioned as the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-negating drive. He boldly insists that the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to embrace this refusal of the social and political order. In No Future, Edelman urges queers to abandon the stance of accommodation and accede to their status as figures for the force of a negativity that he links with irony, jouissance, and, ulti-mately, the death drive itself. One reviewer [Laurent Berlant] says: “I learn so much from the way Lee Edelman grounds a queer ethics and politics outside kinship and reproductive circuits, those spaces of as-similation that use the bribe of futurity to distract us from the ongoing work of social violence and death” [my italics].

The on-going work of “social violence and death” alludes to the century-long

revolutionary fantasy of overturning the System, seen in its bureaucratising, total-

ising, positivistic function (the Nanny State, CCTV, surveillance systems, various

“discourses of power”, etc.). In this sense, queerness / uncanniness is deemed to

“exist” in the Real – “outside” – a force for negativity and absolute refusal, a rad-

ical rebuttal of the System. This begs the question as to how a subject can ever

really exist outside any more – i.e. without representation in the all-embracing

Symbolic. At this limit point, s/he has already disappeared, is already dead to the

world, a world which demands ever more spectacular and promotional effects,

which now includes and indeed promotes irony and celebratory madness – the

more hyped, madder, the more outside, the more wacky and transgressive, the bet-

ter. What Edelman is advocating is nothing new as it is already and paradoxically

central to our contemporary entertainment / celebratory culture which has already

become “the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-neg-

ating drive”. A culture which, as Baudrillard noted, has always already absorbed

everything in advance, let us say, has already colonised queerness and negativity,

in advance. There is no outside. It may be axiomatic for Edelman and queer theor-


ists to stage the contemporary life of the majority as dull hetero-normativity, re-

lentlessly positivistic about the social good, the future and the Rights of the Child.

However, this is only the virtual and virtuous version of the world. This is no

more than the official version of the world, which masks an infinitely larger

“black economy” where good, but especially evil, circulate freely, indeed where

many children already have no future, and nothing is positive or good.

Edelman, as a leading queer theorist, goes beyond “identity politics”, queering

identity as such altogether. Every groupuscule (the atomised mirror of former

solidarity movements) has to scream its narcissism, its difference, its negative-

positivity, its celebratory death drive, its refusal-triumph, and by so doing be-

comes unwittingly included in the vast info-techno-system. There is no other way

to be than relentlessly promotional. The truly radical thing, as Baudrillard indic-

ates, is knowing how to disappear, of how not to be – fatal strategies – or, as Lev-

inas has it, otherwise than being, occupying the “null site” between being and

nothingness – reclusion, disappearance, privacy. Therefore, Edelman’s, “refusal

of the social and political order”, ends up only mirroring that same order and

quickly being included within it. To think that one can remain outside is an illu-

sion, the gay imaginary.12 What was clearly “outside” of Modernity, is included

within Post-modernity. What might have been regarded formerly as radical and

cutting edge, like Edelman’s No Future, now seems rather conventional. Negativ-

ity, ephemerality, chaos, provisionality, once cutting-edge, is now the status quo.

In fact, many liberal commentators and quite ordinary folk are quite willing to ap-

prove or celebrate the West’s giving up on its core values and therefore its future.

As for the politics of “reproductive futurism” and homosexuality’s non-link

with the future, via its separation from reproduction – what’s new? Some Western

countries are increasingly failing to reproduce themselves, with birth rates so low

that young migrant workers are required into the future to support our ageing pop-

ulations. So Edelman’s claim that “this non-reproductive capacity must be em-

braced as a social good”, is clearly no further threat but very much part of how

modern heterosexuals see themselves, calculating whether or not having a child


might compromise their life-styles or future careers. Children, or no children: it’s

a life-style choice. True, people are driving around with “valuing children” rib-

bons on the back of their SUVs, but with increasing rates of separation and di-

vorce, children and their secure futures are more at risk. Everywhere, the virtual

promotion of children, their dignity, their Rights, their futures, and so on, but chil-

dren are suffering in atomised society, surrounded by the “care” of the state’s

child protection industry, which makes many men afraid to work with children

and take responsibility for them, fearing the suspicion of paedophilia.

What is at stake here, and goes largely unchallenged, is that the assertion of

adult rights in general, across the board, gay and straight, has the effect of liberat-

ing adults from children. And if Edelman, in addition, “urges queers to abandon

the stance of accommodation”, gay marriage, gay adoption rights, even the word

“gay” itself, this is only interesting in so far as it appears to fly in the face of mod-

ern democracy’s admittedly patronising attempts to be inclusive. Throwing it

back in our faces! How does it differ for instance from the anger you can incur if

you hold the door open for a disabled person, or fail to do so! Homosexuals want

to reject inclusivity, marriage, children and the whole reproductive future – iron-

ically! So what is really different here; is it just a question of degree? In what

George Steiner calls the “epilogue of the West”, so do many people. Baudrillard

saw the Twin Towers collapsing from within and suggested that this was indeed

the West’s suicide, its suiciding itself. Edelman’s No Future-Death drive will be

avowed by many, “queer” and “straight”, who have long since given up on any

coherent Western values.

the tomb of life

To consider Edelman’s thesis more closely, it will be useful to suggest maybe

four approximate loci for the death drive: 1) The unrelenting mechanised nature

of the (Symbolic) System itself with its paradoxical blend of both “inclusion” and

“compliance”, signalling its immense success in the globalised the world; 2) Ex-


cess as located on the “inside” connected to the nakedness of the drives and their

continuous insistence; 3) Islamist death-cults, suicide cults; 4) Deconstruction /

destruction / disruption of all values, templates and differences, to create the level

killing-field of a value-free culture. Queer Theory embraces both 2 and 4, feeling

justified in its militancy against the over-arching death inscribing effects of 1.13

Edelman’s critique is pitched at the dominant figure of what he calls “reproduct-

ive futurism”, namely the Child, in whom we believe rather hypocritically that we

place all our hopes for the future.

To imply that Edelman levels his polemic at the “silent masses” who live their

lives rather quietly in their homes and workplaces, wanting the best for their chil-

dren and grandchildren, would be to fall into the trap of modernist thinking be-

longing to the civil rights-based protests of the 1970s. No, Edelman is post-mod-

ern, ironic and virtual. His attack is not aimed at ordinary people, classes or chil-

dren per se, but rather at the abstract System itself that imposes its “heteronorm-

ativity” on all of us. To this end, like the anti-humanist revolutionaries before

him, Edelman needs to depict the world of marriage and children as relentlessly

bland, dead and stultifying. No Future is aimed, rigorously and ideologically, at

this bourgeois present and bourgeois future.

Aligning itself with the (death) drive jouissance, and its explosive excess, its

“negativity opposed to every form of social viability”, queerness must always re-

main “outside”. His pitch is that if queers are, and always have been, located as a

threat to civilisation, then they should be so defiantly – refusing all inclusion, per-

sisting instead, “in the stubborn peculiarity that voids every notion of the general

good” (p.6). Conservatives, he suggests, understand this threat better than the lib-

eral left who believe in the progressive rational inclusiveness of the Other, under-

standing “their love” to be merely differently expressed to “our love”, but confid-

ent that both are love and, together with gay adoption, the future is assured!

Everywhere, the queering of the System’s bourgeois terms leads to their re-

versal, ironised by inverted commas. “The child”, “life”, “natural”,

“reproduction”, “the social”, “the future”, “love”, “compassion”, “meaning”,


“family”, “civic mindedness”, “altruism”, “parental love” – all these terms are

queered to reveal the alleged naked truth of their ideological origins. According to

the queer deconstruction of these “normative” terms, “Life” becomes no more

than, “the phantom of meaning” (p.16), the “child” is a “vitalising fantasy” (p.9).

We (sadly) invest ourselves in “reality”, with its “governing fictions” and its “per-

sistent sublimations” (p.18). Because of the Future, “[o]n every side our enjoy-

ment of liberty is eclipsed by the lengthening shadow of the child”, and what he

calls “our fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity” (p.21). Everywhere, he sees

our reality as deadly, boringly repetitive – the closed identity of the same, “the

tomb we call life”, the “calcification of form” with its “fantasy of endurance”

(p.48), over and against “our [queer] freedom [no inverted commas] from the ne-

cessity of translating the corrupt, unregenerate vulgate of fucking into the infin-

itely tonier, indeed sacramental, Latin of procreation” (p.40). As for the rest of us,

we are the “scared straight”, “each and every child by way of an anti-gay immun-

ization” (p.49). Narcissism, jouissance, the death drive, the immediacy of sexual

pleasure without restraint as to aim or function – all good, because they resist the

ego’s un-queering autonomy and the ascendancy of the Imaginary.

Their reversal is quite extreme: immediate sexual pleasure (jouissance) always

“to hand” is the only Real; all of the rest, which has to do with civilisation, is un-

natural, ideologically enforced un-reality of a forever deferred future which repro-

duces more of the Same, namely children, who are equally, unnaturally, violently

conditioned in their turn towards a dead future. Of course, this is the standard

tirade trotted out by radicals ever since the sixties’ cultural revolution. However,

in this work it is more terroristically inflected.

In Edelman’s reverse thesis, Scrooge is good because, he represents the “unre-

generate refus[ing of] the social imperative to grasp futurity in the form of the

child” (p.49). George Eliot’s Silas Marner becomes trapped as the author plots to

“weave him into the social text, making him give up his worship of gold for the

golden curls of the child that he finds on his hearth precisely on New Year’s Eve,

as the assurance not only of his future, but also of hers and ours as well” (p.54).


Praise too for Leonard (Martin Landau) in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, who

is compassionless and pitiless and, by arranging the various violent acts his bosses

demand, “materialises the force of negation, the derealising insistence of jouis-

sance” (p.70).

Worst of all, however, are all those liberals who would try to “normalise queer

sexualities” (p.74). He gives the example of a gay man who “found in a baby’s

gurgle the music to soothe the gay male beast” (p.75), tired of circuit parties, pre-

ferring instead what Edelman refers to as, “this fascism of the baby’s face” (p.75).

Earlier, he had been even more explicit: “Fuck the social order and the Child in

whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les

Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and

small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as

its prop” (p.29).14

Victimised gays, “terrorised” by straight culture, can justify anything, any rant,

although Edelman would be bound to refuse the notion of “justification”, as it

sounds like a concession to reason! Edelman quotes a radical left senator in

France (before he was expelled from the Party), aptly named François Abadie,

who spoke of, “those I call the gravediggers of society, those who care nothing for

the future: homosexuals” (cited on p.74). Edelman attacks Baudrillard, who be-

moans the contemporary “uselessness” of heterosexual reproduction, as we slip

towards the unisexual / asexual “successive iterations of the same” (Baudrillard

cited p.66), and the final liberation of reproduction from sex (via in vitro techno-

logies, cloning, etc.). Edelman is relentless. He posits drive enjoyment over de-

sire, with its endless futurity to screen out the drive’s immediate insistence. He

posits irony (with its shattering of every totalised form) over allegory (idealised

narrative temporalisations and its spreading-out of irony’s explosive negativity).

Irony reduces time to one single explosive moment. Compassion, for instance, is

allegorical in that it “abjects” or negates whomever it sees as a threat to the law.

Hence the need for compassionate liberals to include gays as happy couples look-

ing to the Future. Edelman prefers right-wing rants! Ironically, he agrees with


Father John Miller, when he says, “Gay activism is wholeheartedly determined to

do battle against human life. Mistaken compassion must not allow us to ‘grant’

civil rights to gays” (p.91). Edelman disagrees, on the other hand, with the radic-

alism of Judith Butler and her re-reading of Antigone’s plight in her death-drive

struggle with Creon, the representative of civilised values. “[T]he sinthomosexual

[Edelman’s neologism to combine jouissance and homosexual] refuses intelligib-

ility’s mandate” (p.105), precisely as Antigone does, until, that is, she is rehabilit-

ated by Butler. All that Butler’s new reading of Antigone does is “to provide the

excluded with access to liveable social forms” (p.104), or “the progressive redis-

tribution of meaning” (p.114). Promising Antigone a future is what Edelman

hates. This indefinite enlargement of the Symbolic extends “the tomb itself as the

burial place for whatever continues to insist outside of meaning” (p.105). Thus he

queers “the family”, queers “social capital”, queers “cherishing”. He celebrates

the “stigmatised other”, that “intrudes on our collective reproduction of familial-

ism by stealing, seducing, proselytising, in short, by adulterating those children”

(p.113). Edelman’s rant is merely an extension of the more general later Lacanian

rant against normative hetero-genital sexuality, and the infamous, there is no

sexual relation, or the rant against anything positive.15

The figure Child fills the gap of loss at the heart of the Symbolic. “The sintho-

mosexual, who affirms that loss, effectively destroys that Child and with it the

reality it means to sustain” (p.115), seeking very explicitly to be a “radically neg-

ative force” (p.117) that destroys meaning, the future, etc. Hitchcock’s The Birds

is exemplary here, for its representation of “the violent undoing of meaning”, as

represented by the attacking birds, who attack children in their school. The slo-

gan, in advance of the film, was, “The Birds is coming”. This pleases Edelman for

its violation of grammar (of meaning) and its allusion to, “a radical coming

without reserve” (p.132). He imagines the “ever lurking predators, looking like

scavenging crows... who gather in public parks and school playgrounds waiting...

to pick up some innocent kid for the peck that everyone, even the pecker himself,

perceives as the kiss of death” (p.140). The birds, “merit the title ‘degenerate’ for


such antipathy to generation” (p.140). The bird-attacks represent sex and aggres-

sion, “the antisocial bent of sexuality itself” (p.143). Again Edelman cannot resist

joking about what he calls, “the comic book version of heterosexuality (to be sure

the only version that has ever been given to us to read)” (p.143) as against sex

freed from restraint, freed from procreation and convention, that is live sex, fren-

etic sex, always de-meaning! He is against what he calls Žižek’s “momist” ana-

lysis of The Birds as representing an irrational maternal superego blocking the

“normal” sexual relations of Mitch who is said to be “light in the loafers”. This

account, not too far from what Edelman despises as the “mass market version of

gay etiology” (p.149), blames the over-possessive mother of early childhood who

hates any wife the boy may want.

However, Žižek is not so far from Freud’s early analysis that future gay men,

“in the earliest years of their childhood, pass through a phase of very intense but

short-lived fixation to a woman (usually their mother) and that, after leaving this

behind, they identify themselves with a woman and take themselves as their sexu-

al object. That is to say, they proceed from a narcissistic basis, and look for a

young man who resembles themselves and whom they may love as their mothers

loved them”.16

For Edelman, The Birds reflects the, “radical loss of famili(arity) unleashed by

jouissance” (p.149, my bracketing). Reproductive futurism, on the other hand, is

sadly or pathetically reflected by Cathy’s lovebirds in a cage that cannot be left

behind, the only thing she rescues at the end of the film while fleeing in despera-

tion from the attacking birds.

“Dare we see”, asks Edelman, “this endless line of children – a genetic line, a

narrative line, stretched out to the crack of doom – as itself the nightmare of his-

tory from which we are helpless to awake” (italics mine, p.149). For it is history

(not homosexuality) with its narrative structure with its “determining lack” that

creates only an illusion of life, or in de Man’s words, “an afterlife... not human...

not natural... purely a linguistic complication”. It is history, deemed a “linguistic

complication”, not homosexuality, that creates “the interminable movement to-


wards the closure of meaning in the Symbolic” (p.152, my italics). It is not the

endless “coming” and demeaning and degeneracy, “the pulsive iterations of the

drive” (p.177), that brings closure and interminable repetition, but history itself

with its endless iconic children and, “this fascism of the baby’s face” (p.75). His-

tory, denying and deferring the violence of its origins, negating negativity in the

name of the future generations. True, something has to die for life to be born, but

Edelman perverts, inverts, reverses all the terms for the sake of irony. Life, which

isn’t real life anyway, only an illusion, has to die for death to be born – the “life”

of jouissance sinthomosexually, the only life that doesn’t count! The sinthomo-

sexual (“as saint?”) has no vision, no future; instead, “forsakes all causes, all so-

cial action, all responsibility for a better tomorrow or for the perfection of social

forms” (p.101).

He ends on a threatening note:

Attempting to evade the insistent Real always surging in its [history’s] blood, it lovingly rocks the cradle of life to the drumbeat of the end-less blows it aims at sinthomosexuals. Somewhere, someone else will be savagely beaten and left to die – sacrificed to a future whose beat goes on, like a pulse or a heart – and another corpse will be left like a mangled scarecrow [reference to the killing of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming in 1998] to frighten the birds who are gathering now, who are beating their wings, and who, like the [death] drive, keep on com-ing (p.154).

Far from ironic and playful, Edelman is a fundamentalist, brooking no com-

promise with the System, no place within the System, allegedly out-radicalising

Baudrillard, Žižek and Butler, giving us a clear unambiguous picture of a history

freed from the burden of its dead future – the end of history.17 He is like Christ at

that moment in the Temple scattering the livestock and overturning the tables of

the money changers, queering their authority – you have made it a den of thieves

(Jeremiah 7: 11).

Early in the book, he imagines his critics, without referring to “critics”, as

such. Instead, he suggests, “[t]here are many types of resistance for which, in

writing a book like this, it is best to be prepared” (p.157, italics mine). Resistance


implies defence, like resistance in analytic sessions. Resistance implies the block-

ing of Truth. Resistance implies something we should acknowledge and over-

come. He envisages being accused of, for instance, apolitical formalism, of elit-

ism, of writing from within a theoretical framework whose difficulty will be seen

by some as pretentious. Yes, but nowhere does he envisage being criticised for his

over-wrought narcissism and his fantasies of destruction.

Here, in the open, very clearly articulated, without any irony or laughter, is the

queering / clearing of all Western values. We are given some idea of just how far

this unravelling process of de-meaning, of de-sublimation has progressed. Edel-

man is acutely sensitive to the contemporary ideological frame. He is pushing at

an open door. He sets up a traditionalist politics, a sentimentalised, totalised “re-

productive futurism”, as a polemical devise, as a straw man, against which he pits

his “radical” posturing, which amounts to a plenitude of nothing. He is preaching

to the converted. The hegemonic ideological position, adopted and greatly soli-

cited by the mass media in the West, is that it’s all over, and has been for a long

time, for any traditionalist, dead-white-heterosexist-male ethics. All the “ethics”

lie on the other side – ultra-narcissism and permanent potential for terrifying ex-

cess.

pitilessness

However, Edelman is doing no more than following the standard Lacanian take

on “ethics”, which is an (anti-)ethics of radical refusal, formulated by Lacan over

50 years ago. Taking up an intentionally self-defeating position outside the Sym-

bolic, Edelman advocates a striking against the self and its selfish interests in hav-

ing and being – no accommodation, no giving ground to desire – taking desire

beyond itself and its entanglement with the Law, towards the extreme of pleasure,

towards a singularity of pure loss. No longer the cause of gay rights which oper-

ates within the Symbolic of liberal democracies, but a “selfless” abandonment, a

gesture of pure abjection, staging the symbolic abjection to which gays are sub-


jected in the “straightening” system. Instead of being a little queer, they / we must

become so queer (Other) as to fall off the radar altogether, putting them /

ourselves beyond the pale, like Antigone, before she was rehabilitated by Butler,

and like de Sade who passed beyond desire to the death drive itself, and like

Sygne de Coufontaine who sacrifices herself for her husband, but refuses to ac-

knowledge her act or allow it to be co-opted for the Symbolic. As Lacan himself

says,

If you adopt the opposite of all the laws of the Decalogue, you will end up with the coherent exposition of something which in the last in-stance may be articulated as follows: “Let us take as the universal maxim of our conduct the right to enjoy any other person whatsoever as the instrument of our pleasure” ...everyone is invited to pursue to the limit the demands of his lust, and to realise them.18

This universal maxim, claims Lacan, is no more than neo-Kantian ethics,

where following Newton’s discovery of a universe independent of the human,

Kant developed his notion of reason in its pure form, detached from any senti-

ment and affection. There is nothing personal when you pass beyond desire. What

exists on this other side of the Symbolic, is mechanised lust – pleasure is an event

outside the subject: everything from gay saunas to revolutionary violence, without

sentiment or affection.19

While it is the Symbolic that is portrayed as concealing its violent origins cre-

ating neurotic discontent in civilisation, which is inescapable, how much more vi-

olent and unconcealed is this so-called “ethical” option for “creation ex nihilo” or

jouissance without limit – ultra-narcissism? Maybe this is not just a life-style

choice which we should be “free” to make; it has de-meaning, de-basing effects

which irradiates the culture, as is intended here, increasingly openly.

It is such a commonplace, but is worth reiterating again and again that, 1) lib-

eral, democratic opinion has adopted wholesale what was once limited to the av-

ant garde, namely, the idea that hegemonic power vested in the State, govern-

ments and capitalism itself, are the sole source of violence in the world. 2) This

systemic violence is the only Evil worthy of the name, and, 3) the only true ethical


choice is to fight / resist this power with whatever means available and on all

fronts. What makes the Edelman book exemplary in this respect is its open avow-

al of precisely this “ongoing work of social violence and death” – going for the

iconic child of heterosexuals; going for the future itself. Edelman’s work demon-

strates and advocates violence, no negotiation with the System because the Sys-

tem itself, represented by democratic liberalism, incarnates death itself, the mach-

inations of death. However, radicals will applaud this work as courageous and

groundbreaking! They simply do not see its violence in any sense because they

only see the violence of the System.

Albert Camus characterised the last century as “pitiless” and Paul Virilio

talked specifically of “A pitiless art”. Virilio cites Jacqueline Lichtenstein:

When I visited the museum at Auschwitz, I stood in front of the dis-play cases. What I saw were the images from contemporary art and I found that absolutely terrifying. Looking at the exhibits of suitcases, prosthetics, children’s toys, I didn’t feel frightened. I didn’t collapse. I wasn’t completely overcome the way I had been walking around the camp. No. In the museum, I suddenly had the impression I was in a museum of contemporary art. I took the train back, telling myself that they had won! They had won since they produced forms of perception that are all of a piece with the mode of destruction they made their own.20

They had won? Who had won? It is not clear from this piece. Did the Nazis

“win” by producing images worthy of contemporary art, or did the artists “win”

by creatively anticipating in their work images from the Holocaust, foretelling the

Shoah? Baudelaire declared, “I am the wound and the knife”. The first Futurist

Manifesto of 1909 declared, “War is the world’s only hygiene”. The Dadaists in

1918, “We were for the war. Dada today is still for war. Life should hurt. There is

not enough cruelty”. Flirting with Fascist violence, Edelman cites Paul de Man

whose anti-Semitic writings during the war were discovered after his death. Vir-

ilio suggests, “Avant-garde artists, like many political agitators, propagandists and

demagogues, have long understood what terrorism would soon popularise: if you


want a place in ‘revolutionary history’ there is nothing easier than provoking a

riot, an assault on property, in the guise of art”.21

Just as madness is most often violent insanity and only very occasionally

linked to genius, similarly, violence is often madness and a destructive dead end,

but only occasionally creative. Not to make this distinction is at the heart of indif-

ference. Or, a generalised attitude of indifference, insensitivity and ignorance

leads to a fatal lack of discrimination in art and culture generally, believing that

all violence is ethically prophylactic. This is the zero degree that we have

reached.

Pitiless art to represent and creatively anticipate and demonstrate a pitiless ex-

istence? Or a pitiless violence and destruction that is interchangeable with terror-

ism – terroristic art? According to Virilio, modernity moves art from the Symbol-

ic register to the Real, from the re-presentative and de-monstrative to the

“presentative” and the “monstrative”, paralleling the decline in re-presentative

democracy towards a “presentative multimedia democracy based on automatic

polling”.22 He cites Rothko: “To those who find my paintings serene, I’d like to

say that I have trapped the most absolute violence in every square centimetre of

their surface”.23 In Lacanian terms, these examples are ethical, pursuing desire to

the limit, approaching the purity of drive at its end-point of monstrous inhuman-

ity.

One of the most pitiless end-points of the inhuman is the Tuol Sleng Memorial

in Phnom Penh, where the Angkar, the Pol Pot-led government of Kampuchea,

killed thousands of innocents, photographing each one immediately before their

deaths. Coming almost full circle back to the Parisian intellectual milieu a mere

10 years before Lacan’s seminar on ethics, Pol Pot won a government scholarship,

in 1949, to study radio electronics in Paris. He failed to obtain a degree but be-

came enthralled by writings on violent revolutionary socialism. He forged bonds

with other like-minded young Cambodians, including Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan,

Khieu Ponnary and Song Sen. The members of the so-called “Paris student

group” were destined to become the leaders of the Khmer Rouge.


Is Edelman’s No Future any different than Pol Pot’s Year Zero? Edelman’s po-

lemic remains on the written, Symbolic level, while Pol Pot’s was acted-out in the

Real. But the pitilessness is essentially the same, the impiety, the same. The readi-

ness to inflict suffering, the expenditure in violence, seems justified in advance by

the avant garde and has always been defended, denied or overlooked by the Left

(as a necessary evil), to bring about a greater good. Edelman’s No Future and Pol

Pot’s No Past amounts to the same elimination of the narrative of history (“a lin-

guistic complication”), the same destruction of connectedness, the same mon-

strously explosive NOW.24

Pitilessness extends to the interstices of the social, where the key signifier is

“abuse”. Everyone claims abuse: someone is hurting me. What first emerges as a

loss of trust and solidarity between people and relationships develops into the

second phase, a loss of pity. The distrustful / paranoid view of pity is that, like

compassion, it is patronising / suffocating / abjecting. The third stage is pitiless-

ness, a coarsening of the social, marked by random violence, especially violence

against minorities. Just as loss of piety leads to impiety first against religions, then

towards all former belief systems, as it moves inexorably against all otherness.

The assertion of Rights is coincident with the final phase of pitilessness and impi-

ety. It leads to the creation of a level killing-field.25

All this queering leads inexorably to de-meaning, de-generacy, de-gradation, if

carried to its end-point beyond. Just as the System qua System goes beyond the

human and embodies the death drive with its totalising function, so too can the

anti-System go beyond its ironising function into the totalising barbarism of piti-

less fucking without limit.

Pitilessness, the negation of any bond with the other, derives from narcissism

and the solipsism of the autoerotic. Edelman notes the division within narcissism

whereby the primary reservoir of libido emerges from its objectless state, to love

the subject’s own ego in the image of the other. But this narcissistic fixation on

the ego and the other is always marked by the sense of something missing, some-

thing divided. What Edelman privileges is not the emergence of the narcissistic li-


bido despite this sense of division, but the pulsating fucking at the heart of

primary narcissism, undivided, prior to any differentiation even of this initial

paltry imaginary kind. That the libido might, via a developmental process, be in-

vested in others, the world and life out there, for Edelman occurs only, “in the ser-

vice of statist ideology that operates by installing pro-procreative prejudice”

(p.53), scaring us straight! For Edelman, there can be nothing as simple, nothing

as naïve, nothing as essentialist and biological as attraction between the sexes!

Heterosexuality is forced on us through scary statist ideology with its discourse of

repressive power.26

That such a Statist ideology exists cannot ultimately be refuted, but the silent

masses have always maintained a resistant space, a conservative space of desire

for children and grandchildren and their simple well-being, “our eyes turned to-

wards the light of the future”, a silence that manages to persist in spite of so many

statist ideological assaults. Maybe this persistence of simple values is what so an-

gers Edelman et al. They want to root out hypocrisies and repressive practices that

still go under the negated names of love, compassion and pity. Ironically, the si-

lent masses give all the appearance of embracing these assaults while secretly car-

rying on as before. As is well known, Eastern Europe under communism out-

wardly acquiesced, but family values and religious values remained largely un-

changed, even strengthened in secret, in spite of “the ongoing [socialist] work of

social violence and death”.

On the other hand, it is Edelman and the avant garde that embrace violence

and death, while no one else much listens. Edelman even acknowledges (or celeb-

rates) this when he links, following Freud, the orginary primary narcissism, prim-

al negation, with primary masochism. The failure to turn the sexual death drive

outward towards the other is fatal. In turning the death drive outwards it becomes

simply a disruptive force unsettling the settled. As one commentator puts it:

The queer becomes the name for the death drive itself, which as we know from Freud, Lacan and Žižek is not the desire for death, quies-cence or calm, but very much to the contrary, that which disrupts all


efforts to produce a self-sufficient wholeness. It is what brings death to all systems, that tend towards the settled, the unliving force that in-troduces the Outside into all interiorities.27

This is a lite version of the death drive, as yeast to the dough of the System, a

“nothing” that injects life into an allegedly dead, banal system. This is the aca-

demic / aesthetic version of the death drive, acceptable to many analysts and oth-

ers, which does / does not have a totally destructive intent, or does it? All humour,

irony, creativity and life is here with celebration! Similarly, Edelman insists that

he means no harm to real children but only to the intensely idealised iconic image

of the child, which must be destroyed. He would presumably concur with Serge

Leclaire:

From where the analyst is sitting, what is at stake is the truth. There is no way out: reckoning with the absolute power of the infans, he must never stop perpetrating the murder of the child, even as he recognizes that he cannot carry it out. Psychoanalytic practice is based upon bringing to the fore the constant work of a power of death – the death of the wonderful (or terrifying) child who, from generation to genera-tion, bears witness to parents’ dreams and desires. There can be no life without killing that strange, original image in which everyone’s birth is inscribed. It is an impossible but necessary murder, for there can be no life, no life of desire and creation, if we ever stop killing off the al-ways returning “wonderful child”. The wonderful child is first of all the nostalgic gaze of the mother who made him into an object of ex-treme magnificence akin to the Child Jesus majesty, a light and jewel radiating forth absolute power. But he is already the forsaken one as well, lost in total dereliction, facing terror and death alone.28

True, such majestic immanence must be destroyed. But who, other than a

psychotic mother, keeps such an image (of absolute awe-struck wonder and / or

terror – the ideal ego) to the fore during the life of her child? And what is going to

sustain a real child through all the vicissitudes of life, if not “a” dream of sorts,

not the totalised ideological dream, but a persistent dream nevertheless?

Is this death drive and the icon of The Child at which it is aimed merely an

academic / queering game? A virtual death drive that’s not really a death drive; a

virtual child that’s not really a child; a “no future” that’s not really a no future at


all? Or are we to posit potentially real effects on real children in the real future?

Does language, such as the language that Edelman uses with gay abandon, the

language of social violence and death, illustrated here, not have real effects and

isn’t this the secret aim of all this hard talk, even though when questioned any vi-

olent intent is disavowed? Or, is it only the System’s language that has deadly ef-

fects and that needs deconstruction – queering beyond recognition? Who queers

the queers, or is this where we should all be scared queer?

Finally, is the real child not now caught between two death-dealing alternat-

ives: his idealised, sentimentalised image (depicted by Edelman) in the media pro-

moting the future, on the one hand, and the stripping away of all potential tem-

plates, identities and futures in the name of deconstruction and queer theory on

the other? Maybe this is where we should locate, in this nihilistic space that opens

up between two extremes, the depressions, addictions and suicides said to be in-

creasing in younger and younger children. And, Edelman’s No Future and all that

flows from it, to use his own words, amounts to and celebrates, “the production of

nothing”.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. See various recent books: Furedi, F. 2004. Moskowitz, E. 2001. Hughes, R. 1991. Polsky, A.J.

1991. Showalter. E. 1997. Weatherill, R. 2004.

2. The ethics referred to throughout must not be confused with moral codes derived from

particular religions or ideologies which provide “answers”, but rather the reverse: an existential

openness to the other informed by our Judeo-Christian heritage. The argument being developed

here is not that psychoanalysis should tell people what to do, but rather that psychoanalysis, via

calling people to speak, also calls them to responsibility, otherwise it is nothing but a narcissistic

enterprise. This approach has little to do with the so-called “ethical turn” in poststructuralism:

such notions as performative ethics; inter-subjective dialogue; ecological harmony; the

corporeality of space, beauty as a condition for justice, and so on. At the other extreme, it is also

not the “ethics” of Lacan’s Seminar VII. The ethical is not an attitude one assumes or adopts, or

leaves out. It undercuts all assumptions. Ethics like language is something we undergo. We are in

ethics just as we are in language.

3. “The Night” is a figure that is repeated in a number of the chapters that follow, in an attempt to

represent what is beyond the human, but not external to humanity. What is often termed inhuman

is sadly all too human, marked by a terrifying excess of violence and obscenity. As Žižek reminds

us, in the post-Kantian universe, humans are no longer to be understood as beings fighting to

control their animal inhuman lusts, but rather, “the excess to be fought is absolutely immanent, the

very core of subjectivity itself”, where, according to German Idealism, the metaphor for this core

is the Night or “The Night of the World” (see, Žižek, S. 2006, p.22).

4. Here is one fictional scenario from Frederik Pohl, “The brain drain”: Pohl’s character Wilf is

174 (born in 2734), kept alive by microrobotic surgery, gene therapy and custom-grown

transplants. He is looked after by a housemind who is advising him to put himself, like so many


others of his cohort, into “machine storage” before he dies. After death there are storage problems

because of data degradation. Once in storage one is in a near-perfect virtual world (the nearest

thing to heaven), no hunger, no illness and no death. One can manipulate one’s world at will. One

basically takes no interest in the outside world. This helps to explain a problem that has been

troubling Wilf for many years. His housemind has just given him a text message which turns out

to be another ET message. There have been many of these messages since the first was discovered

in 2063: 37 so far had been logged. They came from all over the sky, some a few light years away,

some more than a thousand. None of them had ever been successfully decoded and the suspicion

was that what was emitted in each case was some kind of inevitable radio leakage from high-tech

civilisations. What was worrying was that now only 11 of these sources were still on air. The

theory was that high-tech civilisations last only a few centuries. Any civilisation that reached the

stage of large-scale radio emissions was also likely to be developing weapons of mass destruction.

Now another theory poses itself: perhaps they have gone into memory storage and have no need to

“communicate” with the rest of the galaxy. Similarly, on earth, when the rest of us are in machine

storage, it will fall silent too. (Frederik Pohl. 2000. Nature. No 408, p.409.)

5. Freud, S. 1933c (1932), pp.181-182.

6. Emphasis added. “Is it not we who should give in, who should adapt ourselves to war... If you

want to preserve peace, arm for war”. In Freud, S. 1915c, pp.299-300. Freud had no (liberal)

qualms here, “a community is held together by two things: the compelling force of violence and

the emotional ties (identifications is the technical name) between its members” (Freud, S. 1933d

(1932).p208). He reminds us that, “the law was originally brute violence and that even today it

cannot do without the support of violence” (ibid., p.209).

7. Freud, S. 1930 (1929), p.122.

8. This hackneyed word “engagement” is here used in the radical sense that Levinas intended: an

a priori responsibility for the other qua human. He will feature in a number of the essays that

follow. Levinas was contemporaneous with Lacan, but the two never met. Levinas was suspicious

of psychoanalysis, regarding it as unethical. He was born in Lithuania to Jewish parents, travelled

to Strasbourg in 1923 to study the philosophy of Bergson, then in 1928 he went to Freiburg to

study with Husserl and Heidegger. He was struck by the ontological analyses of guilt and anxiety

in Heidegger and went on to develop a critique of Western philosophy (including phenomenology,

which he introduced into France) in its aspiration towards universal synthesis, preferring instead a

thought that is open to the proximity of the face of the other, which, in its unicity, cannot be

subsumed into a totality. The face becomes an ethical command which precedes any knowledge

we might have about the other.

9. The page references that follow are to Bollas, C. 2005.

Notes 217

10. Taken from “Broken pieces of a lost life”, by Ariel Leve. The Sunday Times magazine section,

2 September 2007.

11. The page references that follow are to Phillips, A. 2005. For a full review of this book, see:

http://tinyurl.com/68zggy9 (culturewars.org.uk).

12. Carers in Britain today save the State £57bn.

13. Foucault, M. 1961, p.278 (emphasis added).

CHAPTER ONE: CULTURE AND HYSTERIA

1. Irigaray, L. 1991. p132.

2. Perhaps there is an element of wish-fulfilment here on the part of the psychiatric establishment.

If hysteria does not exist, then neither does psychoanalysis or the human subject.

3. Freud pointed out that not all hysterics were women. Mostly, we will refer to the hysteric as

“she”, because it is woman who is compromised in a phallocratic culture.

4. Lacan, J. 1957-8, p.9.

5. Ibid., p.11.

6. Ibid., p.7, italics mine.

7. Tolstoy noted how aristocratic Russian ladies would sob uncontrollably in the theatre during

performances displaying the misfortunes of the poor, whilst outside they ignored the poverty of

the city all around them.

8. Heidegger, M., quoted in Scott, N. and Sharp, R. 1994, p.195.

9. Heidegger, M. 1959, p.131.

10. Ibid., p.155.

11. “Normality” is always culturally relative. To be normal is to be satisfied with one’s lot.

However, from the hysteric’s point of view, it would be the requirement, not to question, not to

think. Much of modern therapy, especially drug therapy, aims to bring about this quiescence. The

problem for the hysteric is that this normality is unbearable, but it is unbearable not to be normal.

12. Zetzel, E. 1968, pp 229-245.

13. Freud, S. 1933b, p.128.

14. See for instance, Phillips, A. 1993, pp 115-116.

15. Khan, M. 1982, p.52.

16. See MacIntyre, A. 1981.

17. Baudrillard, J. 1979, p.20.


18. Ibid., p.26.

19. The Potlatch is a state of more or less ritualised frenzied giving and receiving as part of

reciprocal gift exchange obligations in primitive cultures. The process is excessive and generous

in the extreme. We will be returning to this theme in later chapters.

20. Freud, S. 1914a, p75.

21. This faith in the self came to the fore after the trauma of World War II, when populist versions

of existentialism emphasised subjectivity over and against “reification” – the treatment of

individuals like things – the slaughter of millions of mere “objects” in the camps. The self was

free and transcendent. But it was not to be long before the subject was to be emptied again, this

time in subjection to the Symbolic or the universality of the semiotic code which structures desire.

22. Freud, S. 1917 (1915), p.252.

23. Lacan. J. 1938, pp29-30.

24. Borch-Jacobsen, M. 1993, p.22.

25. Ibid., p.24.

26. Freud, S. 1930 (1929), p.132.

27. Borch-Jacobsen, M. op. cit., p.32.

28. This is a digression on the place of affectivity in psychoanalytic theory and practice. For a

rigorous discussion of this approach, see Henry, M. 1985.

29. Freud, S. 1914b, pp 150-151.

30. Borch-Jacobsen, M. op. cit., p.146. Italics mine.

31. Ibid., p.59.

32. Ibid., p.32.

33. Freud, S. 1917, p.292.



36. Lacan, J. 1974, p.36.

37. Porter, R. 1993, p.5. Italics mine.

38. Ibid., p.16.

39. This may only be an appearance, a simulation, a playing of the end. And “terminal” for writers

like Baudrillard and Lyotard may mean “the end” as final, or the locus of a switch, a computer

terminal, in a vast electronic system.

Notes 219

40. Seduction here, it must be stressed, has nothing to do with an actual seduction by the analyst,

which is nothing more than a giving in, a coming-too-soon, a short-circuiting of the play of

seduction that should be kept in movement to animate the encounter (see Chapter 4).

41. See, Freud, S. 1933a, p.80. Lacan had already challenged this translation by privileging the

subject “I” of the unconscious, not the ego, and rendering it, “Where it was, the I must come to

be”. (See, for instance, Lacan, J. 1953-54, pp.231-32. In the terms used here, the I must be

seduced, as it were, by the unconscious.

42. Baudrillard, J. 1979, op. cit., p.80.

43. Freud, S. 1915a (1914), pp.166-167.

44. Baudrillard, J. op. cit., p.8.

45. Ibid., p.101.

46. The liberal notion that the media just “reports” events is a further ruse. The media create the

world and they are magnetically drawn to “the primal scene” – the ecstatic void of origins – the

best always being the terrorists’ “spectacular”, the epitome of the media event.

47. This well-known Lacanian critique of the ego as imaginary, fictitious, alien and paranoid (see,

for instance, Lacan, J. 1966, pp.5, 17, 20) and his relentless ideological attack against so-called

ego psychoanalysis and the IPA was timely and radical. However, from the ethical viewpoint

being developed in this book, this departure from the later Freud is a disaster. Freud privileges the

ego, all the more so because of its vulnerability and its delusional origins: “Helpless in both

directions, the ego defends itself vainly, alike against the instigations of the murderous id and

against the reproaches of the punishing conscience” (Freud, S. 1923, p.53). But the ego is our only

point of contact with “reality” however provisional and illusory this may still be: “[P]oor

creature...”, Freud says of the ego, “it offers itself, with the attention it pays to the real world”

(ibid., p.56, my italics). Lacan slips over all the complexities of Freud’s arguments, accusing

Freud’s psychoanalytic method of “inducing in the subject a controlled paranoia” (Lacan, J. 1966,

p.15), “Freud seems suddenly to fail to recognise the existence of everything that the ego neglects,

scotomizes, misconstrues...” (ibid., p.22). We will return to this ideological drive and its own

negations.

48. Many of these I have taken from O’Rourke, P.J. 2004.

49. Quoted in an article by Tom Shone, TLS, 2.9.94, p.4.

CHAPTER TWO: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE NIGHT

1. Kafka, quoted in Scott, N., and Sharp, R. 1994, p.159.


2. Adorno, T. 1973, p.365.

3. Lyotard, J-F. 1993, p.210, italics mine.

4. Steiner, G. 2001, p.267.

5. Khan, M. 1983, p.110. Such a literal “holding” would not be allowed now, 20 years later. So

much do we rely on speech currently that such an approach would be considered abusive.

6. Coltart, N. 1986, p.194.

7. Ibid., p.195.

8. Ibid., Wilfred Bion quoted on p.196.

9. Roszak, T. 1992.

10. Wole Soyinka. 2004. Lecture 5. BBC Reith Lectures. May 2004.

11. Steiner, G. op. cit., p.283.

12. The Sunday Times, 16 May 2004, News Review, p.7.

13. The title of a book by Rupp, J. 2001. New York: Cross Road Publishing Company.

14. See Inside Out. The Journal of the Irish Association of Humanistic and Integrative

Psychotherapy. No. 41. Autumn 2003, p.19.

15. Heidegger, M. 1971, see pp 70 and 121.

16. Suffice it to say that the Lacanians in The Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists of

Ireland (APPI) do not associate with The Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (IFPP),

broadly non-Lacanian. The latter do not exist! Another Lacanian negation!

17. Lyotard, J-F. 1983, p.xi.

18. Ibid., p.56.

19. Ibid., p.57. Against Lyotard and indeed most of the contemporary radical Left, the Jews by

remaining silent would be also consenting to their continuing extermination, as the eliminatory

gesture has gradually gained far wider currency, beyond neo-fascist groups.

20. Ibid., p.5.

21. Ibid., p.13.

22. Ibid., p.150.

23. Ibid., p.56. This view has wide currency. Victors mete out victors’ justice. The enemies of the

Nazis are as bad as the Nazis. Exemplary in this respect was Eamon de Valera who declared that

Hitler was just another European nationalist. On the occasion of the death of Hitler, de Valera paid

a visit to Eduard Hempel, the German minister in Dublin, to express his condolences.

24. Heidegger, M. 1993, p.219.

Notes 221

25. Cambridge Review 111, March 1990, p.37.

26. Steiner quoted in Scott, N. and Sharp, R. 1994, p.188. We will leave aside for the present the

thought that Paul Celan “completes” Heidegger in some way.

27. “Uncomformably” is taken from geology where one layer of rock strata rests obliquely upon

another layer from a very different geological era.

28. Freud, S. 1920a, pp.34-35.

29. Freud, S. 1900, p.602.

30. Freud, S. 1896b, p.235.

31. I have tried to trace Freud’s theory of the death drive through Klein, Bion and Lacan and

others. See, Weatherill, R. 1998.

32. Derrida, D. 1992.

33. Žižek, S. 2000, p.82.

34. Baudrillard, J. 1990.

35. See also, Baudrillard, J. 2000, p.36. And, Baudrillard, J. 2001, p.34.

36. Baudrillard, J. 1990, op. cit., p.139.

37. Ibid., p.138. Maybe what he has in mind here is the liberal belief in the onward march of

enlightenment, secular values – the dream of modernity.

38. The four chemical bases, combinations of which produce the genetic code of all life forms, the

“language” of life, could be seen as the ultimate reduction of language to four basic letters.

39. At an increasingly rapid rate more and more illnesses are shown (alleged) to have a genetic

basis to which we, as mere carriers, will have to make a psycho-social adaptation. The formative

experiences of the subject thus become increasingly marginalised and seem less and less relevant

in this codified biochemical world.

CHAPTER THREE: THE PROXIMITY OF THE OTHER

1. Freud, S. 1909, pp 151-249. London: Hogarth.

2. Freud, S. 1900, pp 289-92.

3. Whelan, M. (Ed.) 2000.

4. Burgoyne, B. and Sullivan, M. 1997, pp.170-171. A series of meetings were held by THERIP

during the academic year 1994-5 to debate the key issues in the theory and practice of

Psychoanalysis within the Lacanian and Kleinian schools. The lectures took the form of panel

discussions and were well-attended by leading figures from both sides of the debate.


5. However, I have not been able to reference his work in recent years.

6. Freud, S. 1912, p.115.

7. Ibid., p.116.

8. Gans, S. 1999, p.214.

9. Freud, S. 1895, pp.353-356.

10. Freud, S. 1918 (1914).

11. Freud, S. 1896a, p.228.

12. Ibid., p.229.

13. Ibid., p.235.

14. Freud, S. 1899, p.321.

15. Freud, S. 1914a, p.77.

16. Quoted in Hand, S. (Ed). 1989, pp 39-40.

17. Levinas, E. 1961, p.238.

18. Freud, S. 1926 (1925), 85.

19. Ibid., p.86.

20. Levinas, E. 1991, p.92.

21. Updike, J. 1997, pp.189-190.

22. Ibid., p.202.

23. Levinas, E. 1981, p.14.

24. Kristeva, J. 1987, p.135.

25. Ibid., p.113.

26. Ibid., pp.118-119.

27. Ibid., p.136.

28. Freud, S. 1917 (1915), p.249.

29. The suggestion here is not that Christ is a depressive because he hated God the Father for

abandoning him. Precisely the opposite. Christ has the courage to avow loss, the loss for the whole

of sinning humanity, while the depressive feels condemned by loss.

30. Concern has been expressed recently that children can see as many as 10,000 commercials a

day.

31. Levinas, E. 1981, op. cit., p.166.

Notes 223

32. For Levinas, proximity is ethical. For psychoanalysis proximity is erotic: the gap is overcome,

for a moment, by desire.

33. Levinas, E. op. cit., p.166.

34. Laing was speaking at a large meeting organised in St Patrick’s Hospital Dublin in the early

1980s.

35. Laing, A. 1994, p.53.

36. Ibid., p.97.

37. Ibid., p.224.

38. Didier Anzieu was analysed by Lacan from 1947-1953, who said he wasn’t aware of the

identity of his patient, claiming that he only knew Marguerite by her maiden name. Marguerite

herself, by this time out of hospital, had been taken on as a cook by Lacan’s father. On meeting

her former psychiatrist she asked him yet again to give her back her manuscripts and photographs.

He never did.

39. I have drawn here on Roudinesco, E. 1993, pp 31-43.

40. Ibid., p.35.

41. Recently, I was asked to review Zone of the Interior by Clancy Sigal (UK: Pomona Books

2005). This is the book “they dared not publish” back in 1976, when it was originally written and

has since circulated underground. It is a largely sympathetic portrayal of the anti-psychiatry

movement, an exciting fictionalised first-hand account by someone who was closely involved.

See: http://tinyurl.com/3dkahfx (criticalpsychoanalysis.com).

42. Derrida, J. 1997, p.59.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE SEDUCTION OF THERAPY

1. Here one is forced to carry someone else’s phantasy and for a time you feel controlled by the

other’s thoughts. What was being attributed to me, a young potential analyst, perhaps through

envy, may have been part of this older analyst’s fantasy life; more than just a fantasy, it has since

been confirmed to me.

2. Freud, S. 1915a (1914), p.166.

3. The word “erotic” here is used throughout in the sense of George Bataille. 1962. Bataille, to

whom we will refer at some length, understands eroticism as the primordial desire in (separated)

life to return to a lost continuum through excess, transgression, celebration, sexual licence,

sacrifice, violence, the potlatch. Compare this with the later Freud, who, in his final theory of the

http://tinyurl.com/3dkahfx


instincts, posits a life and death drive. The life drive is referred to as Eros, which creates larger and

larger unities. The erotic, in the sense that it is being used in this chapter, is closer to Freud’s

conception of the death drive, or to his original conception of the erotic as anarchic and

dangerous. What is different from the Kleinian view is that here the subject is implicated, caught,

seduced by the erotic, whereas the psychotic anxieties about fragmentation arise from purely

biological disruption to a proto-ego.

4. Freud, S. op. cit., pp.164-65.

5. Laplanche, J. 1987.

6. Ibid., p.126.

7. Freud, S. 1900, p.595.

8. Laplanche, J. op. cit., p.28.

9. Ibid., p.131.

10. We do not want to fall into the trap of Masson, J. 1984. Here, Masson attacked Freud for

allegedly denying the “truth” of the seduction of children by adults, now called sexual abuse. The

early analysts did not ignore the abuse of children, but crucially included the child’s fantasy. See,

for instance, Stanton, M. 1990, p.104ff.

11. A friend gave me this short piece: “Do you feel old? According to today’s regulators and

bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the sixties or seventies probably shouldn’t have

survived! Because our baby cots were covered with brightly coloured lead-based paint, which was

promptly chewed and licked. We had no child-proof lids on medicine bottles, or latches on doors

or cabinets. When we rode our bikes, we wore no helmets, just flip-flops and fluorescent ‘spokey

dokeys’ on our wheels. As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags – riding

the passenger seat was a treat. We drank water from the garden hose, not from a bottle. We ate

chips, bread-and-butter pudding and drank fizzy juices, but we were never overweight, because we

were always outside playing. We shared one drink with four friends, from one bottle or can, and

no one actually died from this. We could leave home and could play all day and no one could find

us. We made go-carts from scraps of rusty metal and flew down hills without brakes. We did not

have Play-Stations or X-boxes, no video games, no 99 TV channels, no CDs, no surround sound,

no mobiles, no personal computers, no DVDs, no internet chat rooms. We had friends, we went

outside and found them. We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones, but there were no law-suits. We

had full-on fist fights but no prosecutions followed. We walked to friends’ homes, we walked to

school. We rode our bikes in packs of seven and wore our coats only by the hood. No parent

bailed us out if we broke the Law, because they agreed with the Law! We had freedom, failure,

success and responsibility and we learned how to deal with it all”.

Notes 225

12. Freud was very generous in this respect. He acknowledges, “there is an incomparable

fascination in a woman of high principles who confesses her passion”. Freud, S. 1915a (1914), op.

cit., p.170.

13. The real difficulty here is with so-called training analyses. I myself have questioned analytic

training bodies as to why they so limit the range of training analysts who are deemed suitable to

analyse their trainees. Very often these analysts are also teachers on the courses. What freedom

does the analysand have when their analyst also teaches them each week and whose colleagues

will be in on the final assessments? How can she reveal her perverse imaginings, her deepest

longings if in the end she may be deemed “unsuitable” or a “risk”, and her large investment in the

course and a possible future career be put in jeopardy? Immediately, the analysand is locked into

false incestuous double-binds, which make true free association highly unlikely.

14. Lacan, J. 1960-61.

15. Bollas, C. 1979, pp 84-85.

16. Ibid., p.97.

17. Ibid., p.100.

18. Ibid., p.99.

19. Freud, S. 1900, op. cit., p.405f.

20. Freud, S. 1905b, p.176.

21. Truss, L. 2003.

22. Freud, S. 1905b, op. cit., p.49f.

23. Ibid., p.19.

24. McCabe, P. 1992. The Butcher Boy. London: Picador, p.155.

25. J. Baudrillard. 1979, p.121.

26. The question of beauty and desire is trivialised by many modern practices which see (forced)

“beauty” everywhere. The play of language and seduction is radically other to the air-brushed

“beauty” of total perfection.

27. I will give just one example from modern jazz to illustrate this transition from the seductive

play of the neurotic / normal to the end of musical meaning in the psychotic. John Coltrane, a

legendary figure in post-bebop jazz, produced his most critically acclaimed lyrical improvisations

with Miles Davis in the late fifties. Later, however, his work shifted from chord sequences to

repetitive scales and so-called “free” improvisations which were so emotionally intense and wild

that one critic joked about his album, Ascension (1965), “you could use this record to heat up the

apartment on those cold winter days”. This later work bore names with increasingly religious


themes, Resurrection, Meditations, A Love Supreme, as if to move to the pinnacle or the centre of

the symbolic universe, a move favoured by psychotics. The question of the seductive meaning of

the music, always an elastic term in contemporary music, or the “Law” that gives music its

exciting yet minimal internal coherence, is arguably completely lost in this final phase before his

early death in 1967.

28. Roustang, F. 1976, p.134.

29. Ibid., p.137.

30. Ibid., p.149.

31. The eldest son of an old bourgeois family became the one who would redeem the family

fortune, made by the great-grandfather, sustained by the grandfather, but lost painfully by his own

father throughout his childhood through a succession of gambling debts and business errors. The

family was left humiliated and became more and more isolated. The son spoke of “his mission” to

work in the city, eschewed all desire, became a “father” for his brothers and sisters, all against a

background of extreme anxiety.

32. In Ireland especially, the uncovering of clerical sexual abuse has shocked the country and

devastated the Church.

33. Rape and sexual abuse are under-reported. “And remember”, runs one commercial, “these

crimes are often not committed by strangers, most abusers / murderers / rapists are known to the

victim and may be a member of their family”.

34. The email in-boxes of children as well as adults are filled with spam containing explicit sexual

and erotic references. No one is spared this intrusion.

CHAPTER FIVE: ENJOYMENT! FOR NABOKOV AND OTHERS

1. Freud, S. 1896d, p.214.

2. Freud, S. 1896c, pp168-69.

3. Freud, S. 1905a, p.190.

4. Ibid., p.191.

5. Freud, S. 1906 (1905), p.274. My emphasis.

6. Freud, S. 1940 (1938), p.187.

7. Freud, S. 1896c, op. cit., p.168. Footnote added 1924.

8. Capturing the Friedmans. 2003. Directed by Andrew Jarecki.

9. All page numbers, unless otherwise indicated, refer to Nabokov, V. 1959.

Notes 227

10. McIntyre, A. 1981. Incidentally, the other two postmodern character types cited by McIntyre

are the “manager” and interestingly enough, the “therapist”.

11. The Century of the Self. Adam Curtis’s acclaimed series examines the rise of the all-

consuming self against the backdrop of the Freud dynasty. BBC 2, March and May 2002.

12. Nafisi, A. 2004, p.35.

13. Ibid., pp 27-28.

14. Ibid., p.41.

15. Ibid., p.33.

16. Derrida, J. 1996, p.22.

17. Ibid., p.26.

18. The blind spot occurs where the optic nerve carrying all the nerve impulses from the retina

leaves the back of the eye.

19. Winnicott, D. 1963, p.187

20. Nafisi writes, “In those [early] days the secular and leftist forces dominated the universities,

and certain developments were not yet conceivable to some of us. To think that the universities

could be closed down seemed as far-fetched as the possibility that women would finally succumb

to wearing the veil”, op. cit., p.146 (my emphasis). And, “Could my former comrades have

predicted that one day they would be tried in a Revolutionary Court, tortured and killed as traitors

and spies?”, op. cit., p.115.

21. The “act” in psychoanalysis is more than just specific behaviours and behavioural changes.

We can specify a number of different acts. For instance, 1) the hysterical act: the staging of the

compromising solution of the trauma the hysteric is unable to cope with. Dramatisation,

exaggeration – communication to the Other via acts rather than speech (repeating not

remembering). 2) Acting-out: repetition, often impulsively, of some element of the (repressed)

past without consideration, responsibility or memory, which the subject herself fails or only partly

understands. It is an aspect of transference repetition, a symbolic message addressed to the big

Other. The act remains within the Symbolic register. Unlike, 3) le passage a l’act, which belongs

to psychosis proper – a blind act which hurls the subject into the Real as an object. 4) Parapraxes,

bungled actions (acte manque) – “acts” which are successful from the point of view of the

unconscious, albeit in a distorted form. 5) The psychoanalytic act: is an intervention in the

treatment (or into discourse generally) that furthers the desire of the analyst to further the work of

analysis. (See Lacan, J. 1967-68. Seminar: 15. L’acte psychoanalitique.) Finally, 6) The symbolic

act is formal, self-referential, a gesture of self-assertion of one’s subjective position.


22. The silent negative, taken from Hamilton, H. 2003. Here, Hamilton indicates the position of

inward denial necessarily adopted by his mother growing up under the Nazis, where she went to

work for a man who raped her every night. Later, she made her “escape” to Ireland only to be

trapped in Irish history with no friends, being exposed to Irish racism, especially in the repressive

form of Hamilton’s fanatically Irish father.

23. Freud, S. 1920b. Her father knew about the affair with the older woman and expressly forbade

it. When she told her lover about this disapproval, the lover promptly and unexpectedly ended the

affair. Thus, suffering a double blow in love, the young girl tried to end her life. The key word for

Freud was niederkommon (see p.162), which means to fall in the sense of fall down and to fall in

the sense of delivering a child. Her fall over the wall onto the railway line thus represents the

radical failure of her desire – falling for her father – made all the stronger in the past by the birth

of a brother. The fall was not symbolic, it was into the Real.

24. Festen, 1998, a film by Thomas Vinterberg, adapted by David Eldridge (Lyric Theatre,

London, Spring 2005).

25. In psychoanalytic terms, this hearing and not hearing corresponds to a specific defence

mechanism, namely, Verneinung, translated as “negation”, or, Verleugen – the refusal to perceive

an external fact, translated as “disavowal”.

26. Christian (well-named) by his ethical act has re-invoked the incestuous crime, risking

psychosis, and created a new beginning in freedom.

27. In every area of contemporary life, equi-vocation. Both sides are right if they say they are.

Each authorises himself. Like no-fault divorce. The fact that one party might be wholly in the

wrong is immaterial in the settlement.

28. Freud, S. 1897a, p.259.

29. Ibid., p.260. Emphasis mine.

30. Ibid.

CHAPTER SIX: ABSENT GOODNESS

1. Meltzer, D. 1978, p.96.

2. The solute molecules (of the active agent) have been diluted so much that none of the original

molecules can possibly be present in the diluted solution – only the “memory” of them.

3. Foucault, M. 1961, p.276.

4. Ibid., p.277.

5. See, for instance, Weatherill, R. 2004.

Notes 229

6. Levinas, E. 1981, p.18.

7. Ibid., p.123.

8. The Good is returned to in Chapter 7 in connection with a discussion on Stalinism and Nazism.

9. Levinas, E. 1991, p.157.

10. Roustang, F. 1986, p.118.

11. Klein, M. 1957, p.179.

12. Kojève, A. 1947, p.7.

13. Klein, op. cit., p.180. There is a fundamental ambiguity here concerning the good. On the one

hand the breast is good because desirable and worthy of ruthless attack. But something beyond

this desirability is also implied to do with ultimate goodness – the wise breast, alpha-function, the

universal O, of Bion’s thinking. See, for instance, Grotstein, J.S. 1997.

14. Ibid., p.181.

15. Beta-elements are part of Bion’s lexicon which may be thought of as unbound “particles”,

shards of the catastrophic real which terrorise the psyche designed to absorb them. These

“thoughts-without-a-thinker” lead a marginal existence looking for a container to contain them.

16. Bion, W. 1962, p.34.

17. Ibid.

18. Winnicott, D. 1963, p.72.

19. The Cassel Hospital, Richmond, West London, is one well-known example.

20. Kristeva, J. 1993, p.7.

21. Kierkegaard, S. 1843, p.76.

22. Dostoyevsky, F. 1865-6, p.40.

23. See Dufourmantelle, A. and Derrida, J. 2000.

24. Sophocles. 1994, p.9.

25. Albahari, D. 1998. Page numbers in brackets thereafter.

26. Pascal: “This is my place in the sun. That is how the usurpation of the whole world began...

They have used concupiscence as best they could for the general good. But it is only pretence, and

a false image of charity. For at bottom it is only hatred”. Pascal, B. 2003.

27. Freud, S. 1915b, p.139.

28. According to Levinas, as we have noted throughout, we bear an inescapable responsibility for

the Other qua human face as a mark of our humanity. Against the notion of the “natural”

competition between human beings which leads to the ideology of “human rights”, Levinas argues


that humanism is not human enough. Reducing the other to a consumer with rights, obligations,

etc., denies the real Otherness of the other, his strangeness, his uniqueness and our unmediated

exposure to the suffering in his Face, which precedes the form and cultural context of this face.

29. Young, R. 1997. p.71.

CHAPTER SEVEN: DON’T DO IT LIKE MACHINES

1. Diaghilev quoted in Virilio, P. 2000. Source undiscovered.

2. Mayakovsky quoted in Virilio, P. 2000, p.64.

3. Lacan has complexified this term already by taking it through the Symbolic, the Imaginary and

the Real.

4. See, for instance, Lacan, J. 1959–1960, pp 294-5.

5. Freud, S. 1930 (1929), p.121.

6. Freud, S. 1920a, p.36.

7. Ibid., p.38.

8. Ibid., p.40.

9. See Hanaghan in Weatherill, R. 1999, p.229.

10. Hanaghan was the first analyst to work in Ireland. He developed a radical Christian approach

to Freud. For a brief account of his work, see Weatherill, R. 1994, pp 25-27. Also,

http://tinyurl.com/6y37rjb (criticalpsychoanalysis.com).

11. Blanchot, M. 1971, pp 160-161.

12. Bataille, quoted in Surya, M. 2002, p.454.

13. Freud, S. 1920a, op. cit., p.28.

14. “It has dawned on me that masturbation is the one major habit, the ‘primal addiction’ and it is

only as a substitute and replacement for it that the other addictions – for alcohol, morphine and

tobacco, etc. – come into existence”. Freud, S. 1897b, p.272.

15. Freud, S. 1920a, op. cit., p.42.

16. Ibid.

17. Virilio, P. op. cit., p.38.

18. See, for instance, an interview by Ruthard Stäblein (November 2005) with André Glucksmann.

“In your book (Le Discours de la Haine, 2004), you describe hatred as a primal force, which

appeared in antiquity and which is reappearing today in force. And you describe it in three stages:

as pain that is directed inwards in the form of self-pity, which then unloads as rage and hatred into

Notes 231

violence and finally becomes the desire to destroy which can go to the point of self-destruction”.

http://tinyurl.com/62dhljs (signandsight.com).

19. Tulloch, S. Knowles, E. Elliott, J. (Eds). 1998. The Oxford Dictionary of New Words. p.79.

20. Turkle, S. 2005.

21. Greenfield, S. 2008, p.178.

22. Ibid., p.281.

23. In psychoanalysis and cultural theory, the notion of a “private human domain” gave way long

ago to the autonomy of the Signifier / Symbolic paving the way for the post-human cyborgs –

selfregulating human-machine systems.

24. Consider an editorial published in a Lebanese paper on 20 August 2003, the day after a bomb-

laden cement truck destroyed the United Nations’ centre of operations in Baghdad: “Yesterday’s

operation against the Baghdad headquarters of the United Nations exemplifies this mentality of

destruction. Expel all mediators. Banish every international organization. Let things collapse. Let

electricity and water be cut off, and the pumping of oil cease. Let theft prevail. Let universities and

schools close. Let businesses fail. Let civic life cease. And at the end of the day the occupation

will fail”. “‘No!’ protests Joseph Samara, ‘at the end of the road, there will be a catastrophe for

Iraq... The attack against the United Nations’ headquarters in Baghdad belongs to another world: it

is a form of nihilism, of absurdity, and of chaos hiding behind fallacious slogans, which proves the

convergence among those responsible for this action, their intellectual limitation and their criminal

behaviour’”.

25. Freud, S. 1900, p.510.

26. Ibid., p.571.

27. Ibid., p.233.

28. Freud, S. 1901b, p.678.

29. Ibid., p.681.

30. See Levinas, E. 1981, p.87. However, this extreme position of ethical rigour presents such an

actual impossibility that it could lead the reader / analyst to a nihilistic indifference. After all, as a

hostage, I can do nothing. The situation of dreamy indifference to the Real becomes justified and

returns. According to Cunningham, the Church cannot follow this logic, the “Levinasian impulse

to sacrifice self-for-other unto utter selfdestruction”. He goes on, “the Church... can... only give

within the grace of continual reception. It is then our responsibility to receive ourselves for the

sake of the other” (Cunningham, C. 2002, p.266). Maybe we should also cite the Protestant

theologian, Paul Tillich, here speaking of “ultimate concern”. Drawing on the Mary and Martha

story (Luke 10), Tillich states, “Martha is concerned about many things, but all of them are finite,


preliminary, transitory. Mary is concerned about one thing, which is infinite, ultimate, lasting”

(Tillich, P. 1973, p.264). Martha is in the Symbolic; Mary approaches the Real. Neither is

indifferent nor dreaming.

31. Grossman, V. 1980. Subsequent page numbers in brackets.

32. Levinas, E. 2001, p.81.

33. Ibid., p.90.

34. Ibid., p.217, my emphasis.

35. Ibid., p.47.

36. Ibid., p.136.

37. O’Rourke, P-J. 2004, p.5.

38. The strong discriminatory function must be running in the background. But it cannot be part of

any technique, or telling people how to live their lives.

39. Schafer, R. 1983, p.192.

40. Lacan coins the term extimite by applying the prefix ex – from exterieur, “exterior” – to the

Freud word intimite – “intimacy”. The resulting neologism, “extimacy”, neatly expresses the way

in which psychoanalysis problematizes the opposition between inside and outside.

41. Grossman, V. op. cit., p.215.

42. Freud, S. 1924, p.164.

43. Freud, S. 1937a, p.242.

44. Bataille was widely read in psychoanalytic circles and had a founding influence on Lacan in

particular, although Lacan never refers to Bataille specifically.

45. Surya, M. 2002, pp 274-275.

46. Of the victim, Bataille says, “I loved him with a love in which the sadistic instinct played no

part: he communicated his pain to me, or perhaps the excessive nature of his pain, and it was

precisely that which I was seeking, not so as to take pleasure in it, but in order to ruin in me that

which is opposed to ruin” (ibid., pp 274-275).

47. Stoekl, A. 1985, p.180.

48. Nietzsche had already criticised the anti-Semitism of his sister and her husband and had never

adopted any authoritarian doctrine of soil, race or fatherland. On the contrary, Nietzsche avowed a

celebration of freedom in a world without God.

49. See Mauss, M. 1950.

50. Surya, M. op. cit., p.250.

Notes 233

51. Richardson, M. 1998, p.40.

52. Surya, M. op. cit., p.265.

53. Ibid., p.243.

54. Bataille, G. 1962, p.24.

55. Ibid., p.82.

56. Ibid., p.140.

57. Ibid., p.144.

58. Ibid., p.187.

59. Ibid., p.188, my emphasis.

60. Ibid., pp 246-247. On p.256 of this volume, there are two very similar pictures. One is of a

woman possessed (Voodoo cult), the other is The Ecstasy of St Teresa. There has always been a

close connection between divine and erotic love in the Western mystical tradition, from the

Pseudo-Dionysius to St John of the Cross, and it is found also in poets such as John Donne and

George Herbert.

61. Ibid., p.274.

62. Bataille, quoted in Surya, M. op. cit., p.8.

63. Ibid., p.7.

64. Ibid., p.8-9.

65. Ibid., p.9.

66. Ibid. Father quoted, p.10.

67. Ibid., p.14.

68. Ibid., p.15.

69. Ibid., p.18.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid., p.20.

72. Ibid., p.21. Hegel quoted. My emphasis.

73. Bataille, G. 1928, p.78.

74. Baudrillard, J. 2000, p1.

75. Dick Joynt was a well-known and much loved Irish sculptor, who worked in Dublin and later

in Wexford. He died in 2004.

76. The Irish Times, 26 September 2006.


77. See Roudinesco, E. 1993, Chapter 10.

78. The danger now seems to be from synthetic life forms that will be released into the

environment.

79. Cited by Freud, S. 1920a, p.44ff.

CHAPTER 8: THEORY AGAINST THE REAL

1. Freud, S. 1930 (1929), p.120.

2. Žižek, S. 2000, p.8.

3. Lacan, J. 1966, p.43.

4. Lacan, J. 1955-6, p.147.

5. Lacan, J. 1966, op. cit., p.274.

6. Ibid., p.272.

7. Ibid., p.240.

8. Lacan, J. 1964, p.61.

9. Ibid., p.67.

10. See Klein, M. 1930.

11. Lacan, J. 1953-4, p.68.

12. Harari, R. 2001, p.167.

13. Eagleton, T. 2003, p.77.

14. Ibid., p.102.

15. Isaacs, S. 1948 (1952).

16. Kristeva, J. 1987.

17. Currently, this film is not available.

18. Ecclesiastes 1: 18.

19. See Furedi, F. 2003.

20. Freud, S. 1926 (1925), p.170.

21. Ibid., pp 171-172. See, for instance, recent alleged bullying cases brought by some Irish army

personnel. One is entitled to ask, how will they fight a war if they cannot deal with a peacetime

bullying situation? The reluctance to follow Klein in respect of radical violence, beyond normal

ambivalence, puts me in mind of Robert Conquest’s jibe at his publisher when he was asked what

he might call The Great Terror: a Reassessment, his post-glasnost revision of his 1968 book. He

Notes 235

suggested, “How about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?”. He commented, “the reality of

Stalin’s activities was often disbelieved because they seemed to be unbearable... morally and

physically inconceivable”. See Amis, M. 2002, p.262.

22. Lacan quoted in Harari, 2001, op. cit., p.x.

23. See, Lacan, J. 1938.

24. Žižek, S. 2001, p.20.

25. Žižek, S. 2000, p.77.

26. Ibid., p.78.

27. Against this deconstructivist reading of “events”, Žižek will sometimes claim for

psychoanalysis a privileged access to the Real but still, nevertheless, as a hard impenetrable

kernel.

28. Žižek, S. 1998, p.212, italics added.

29. Freud, S. 1905 (1901), p.83.

30. Freud, S. 1916 (1915), p.27.

31. Freud, S. 1901a, p.256.

32. Freud, S. 1918 (1914), p.51.

33. Freud, S. 1937a, p.258.

34. Ibid., p.266.

35. Ibid., p.267.

36. Lacanian theory, or cultural theory is nihilistic. Nothing is. What I assert as the truth about my

life is nothing, beyond my entitlement to say it. It is no more than my truth.

37. See, for instance, Roustang, F. 1986.

38. Lacan, J. 1953-4, op. cit., p.55.

39. Fink, B. 1995. p.111.

40. Lacan, J. 1972-3, p.66.

41. Michel Henry has shown from a phenomenological point of view how a psychoanalysis based

on the signifier, on a representational conscious and unconscious, misses the blind presentational

passion of life in itself. Winnicott, coming from an entirely different philosophical perspective,

believes an analysis invokes and facilitates a richly alive experiencing, re-establishing continuity

of being, to live in one’s own unique non-compliant way, with the “capacity to be alone”. See,

Henry, M. 1985.


42. Roudinesco, E. 1997, p.441. Lacanians claim that only they are Freud’s true heirs. They

reserve the exclusive right to the title “psychoanalyst”. All other analysts are merely

psychotherapists.

43. Gane, M. 1993, p.59.

44. It must be readily conceded, at the level of the individual practitioner and their analysands, a

Lacanian praxis is rigorous and attentive. The focus on speaking (out), subjectivity, the text, the

structured position of the subject, the deterministic signifiers and the assumption of one’s history,

is a major contribution to individual human freedom, in the best sense of the word. It is beyond

this level, at the level of the institution, ideology and transmission where unaccountability

becomes unassailability and which should be the locus of our critique.

45. Recently, in Ireland, we have had our own very small version of the “split”, with any

dissenters being regarded as unethical, told they need more analysis, being barred from editorships

and teaching posts, and so on. A European colleague suggested that we have come of age – you’re

not real Lacanians unless you’ve had a split.

46. In Orwellian fashion, some groups are more equal than others: women get priority over men;

disabled over the able-bodied; criminals over their victims; gay over straight, children over adults,

etc. Former marginalised groups are promoted, patronised and infantilised (by being deemed

“vulnerable” and easily outraged, yet not subject to criticism), in the new rational world order.

This is a subtle form of control masquerading as freedom and liberation, which is “given” by Law.

These groups are now more visible and therefore made accountable and transparent – not an

unequivocal good.

47. Opinion makers, commentators, the mass media generally accept and want to propagate this

egalitarian agenda. Other points of view are often stigmatised as “right-wing”, “tabloid”, “elitist”,

or even “fascist”. Aspiring young journalists readily conform to the new agenda in order to be

seen as progressive and definitely within the new consensus. Any alternative will lead to a zero

career path.

48. There are many forms of “correctness” – political, emotional, sexual, linguistic, ethnic,

ecological, faith-based, etc. A new patient might first ask when entering the consulting room: are

you homophobic? And if one doesn’t answer immediately in the negative (which of course no one

should do), then contact might be broken off.

49. Even friends self-censor. “I know I shouldn’t say this but...”; “I know we flew, but we’re

cutting down the flying...”; “I much prefer gay men, anyway...”; “I always try and shop

ethically...”; “Me? No! I don’t want to be cremated...”; “Supermarkets! Ugh!”

Notes 237

CHAPTER NINE: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND INDIFFERENCE

1. Dostoevsky, F. 1866, p.555.

2. Camus, A. 1951.

3. Amis, M. 1989.

4. Freud, S. 1927, p.11.

5. Freud, S. 1923, p.53.

6. Klein, M. 1933, pp248-249.

7. Ibid., p.255.

8. Ibid., p.250.

9. Danto, E. 2005..

10. Lacan, J. 1959-60, p.181. Italics mine.

11. Lacan, J. 1938, p.46.

12. Borch-Jacobsen, M. 1991, p.129.

13. Freud, S. 1930 (1929), p 66.

14. Centre for Social Justice. http://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk.

15. Psys – a term coined in France to cover psychotherapists in general.

16. Kohut, H. 1977, p.243.

17. Kernburg, O. 1970.

18. An unpublished paper presented at the Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

conference in Dublin in November 2006.

19. Miller, J-A. 2005, pp 50-51.

20. Ibid., p.51.

21. The Irish Times (Frank Farrell, 9 January 2007).

22. January, 2006. Michael Burleigh is one of Europe’s leading historians. He blames society’s

marginalisation of Christianity for the directionless confusion we find ourselves in today. This is a

strongly worded polemic which points the finger at The Enlightenment. Burleigh traces the rise of

“secular religions” from the French Revolution through to communism and the Nazis.

23. Bollas, C. 2005, p.76.

24. Ibid., p.78.

25. Centre for Social Justice, op. cit. There is no direct proof as such that youth intoxication /

depression is linked directly to “baby farming” as John Waters (Irish Times columnist) has


dismissively described child-minding. Clearly, many factors will be involved. My concern here is

to point up the unacknowledged inconsistency between advocating liberation from social roles and

the inevitable deficit disorders entailed, indeed “carried” by vulnerable groups. Infants and very

young children must now be deemed “vulnerable”.

26. Mann, T. 1956, p.114. Interestingly, Mann goes on to say that the analytic revelation, “de-

emotionalizes it [life], as it were, inculcates the taste for understatement, as the English call it – for

the deflated rather than for the inflated word, for the cult which exerts its influence by moderation,

by modesty. Modesty – what a beautiful word! ...May we hope that this may be the fundamental

temper of that more blithely objective and peaceful world which the science of the unconscious

may be called to usher in?”

27. Freud, S. 1927, op. cit., p.53. Freud asserts here that he is not an “obstinate reactionary”, but

from the contemporary state of radical psychoanalytic theorising, this later Freud would, at best,

be regarded as an “ego psychologist”. More on this radicalism in the last chapter.

28. Ibid., p.46.

29. The same kind of logic goes for euthanasia. Life separated from nature and liberated for

pleasure becomes expendable when the possibilities for pleasure decrease beyond a certain point.

30. Tom Wolfe interviewed in The Sunday Times (4 December, 2005).

31. Phillips, A. Quoted in The Irish Times, 20 December 2005, from an interview with Shane

Hegarty. See my comments in the Introduction (above). For my review of Going Sane, see

http://tinyurl.com/68zggy9 (culturewars.org.uk).

32. Žižek, S. 1992, pp 124-5.

33. We have already identified this revolutionary change as coming from the Right and the Left. It

is massively over-determined and this creates its ongoing destructive force.

34. See http://tinyurl.com/yjqafp (manifestoclub.com).

35. Camus, quoted in Judt, T. 1998, p.135.

CHAPTER TEN: THE QUEER END OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

1. Foucault, M. 1976.

2. Preston, W. 1999, p.138.

3. Foucault. M. 1994, p.508. Italics mine. Foucault also stated that “man will disappear like a face

drawn in sand at the edge of the sea”.

Notes 239

4. Freud, S. 1905a, p.145. However, according to Mark Brunswick, interviewed by Paul Roazen,

“if people were decent homosexuals, with good characters, Freud would have been accepting of

them”. Roazen, P. 1995, p.72.

5. Sedgwick, E. 1990.

6. See, Lane, C. and Dean, T. (Eds). 2001.

7. “Fluidity presumably flows beyond established channels, even more newly established channels

such as feminism, and washes away essence entirely. What also goes with this flow is gender,

race, age, class and so on, all restyled as so many moving parts in a generalised performance”.

Ibid., p.413.

8. See Weed, E. and Schor, N. (Eds). 1997.

9. Edelman, L. 2004.

10. “Sexuality and the Death Drive: Reading Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the

Death Drive”. This two-day intensive seminar took place at University College Dublin, Ireland on

3 and 4 July 2007. The seminar was organised by Noreen Giffney (Women’s Studies, UCD

School of Social Justice) and Anne Mulhall (Irish Studies, UCD School of English and Drama)

and was convened in association with Irish Studies, UCD School of English and Drama, the UCD

Humanities Institute of Ireland (HII) and The(e)ories: Advanced Seminars for Queer Research

(which Noreen convenes with Michael O’Rourke). I was invited by the organisers to participate

because a chapter from my book on the death drive was going to act as a trigger paper (See

Weatherill, R. 1999).

11. See http://tinyurl.com/6jnbm8h (abstractdynamics.org).

12. Clearly, to have one’s radical discontent printed, commented upon widely and reprinted,

amounts to some inclusion!

13. The death drive is univocal, but it comes to us in language in a variety of guises. Queering

regards the “bad” death drive as coming from “the whole network of symbolic relations”, while

the “good” death drive brings an explosive irony which desecrates the former.

14. When I questioned Edelman about this quotation, he paused and wondered why I had singled

it out from the text and particularly from the preceding paragraphs. I said that I thought it was

violent rather than ironic or amusing and I repeated parts of the quotation to him. He said he stood

over it. Later, he said, the Child is of course not a real person, but an icon. He wishes the real child

no harm, unlike those who make a fetishistic icon out of the child. As if those who want to offer a

child goals and ambitions are destroying the child by using him as a shield to cover their

impotence. Whereas his queer iconoclastic ideology of “freedom” is non-destructive! Likewise it

almost hides its violence within its ideology of tolerance and freedom. If one wants to look


through the prism of ideology, from whichever side, the real child will be the one who suffers,

while each of the antagonists walks away satisfied.

15. Terry Eagleton once said that deconstructionists have an almost visceral hatred of anything

positive, that is, in this context, pertaining to meaning and the future!

16. Freud, S. 1905a, op. cit., p.145.

17. Edelman tries to have it both ways. When questioned at the seminar, he says that of course he

is for gay rights, adoption rights, for children, progressive politics, and so on. However, he is

writing the opposite – no accommodation – no place for gays qua separate group. Everyone

should be gay! Not unlike the comedian who claims to be “for women”, but whose jokes make it

clear that there is no place for women – queering all their “caring” and “loving”. Like left liberals

shocked by Third World poverty, who queer humanitarian intervention as part of a post-colonial

mindset. Paradoxically, Edelman seems to leave gays with nothing of their own, just like the right-

wing pundits he quotes to such good effect. Perhaps this is his subtext, his secret linkage with the

Right, to deprive gays of everything. It matters little because, in the post-modern world, opposites

can co-exist with indifferent playfulness. Besides, his book will not reach beyond students of

Queer Theory, all of whom endorse Edelman’s views.

18. Lacan, J. 1959-60, p.79.

19. Viagra, over the last decade, has ratcheted up male penetrative sex to new heights in the

instrumentalisation of pleasure: “You get an erection and you are desperate to do something with

it. You ejaculate and soon you want to do it again, and again... If the woman you are with is not up

for it, things can get very unpleasant. You can end up having a steaming row and still having a

hard on” (The Sunday Times magazine section, 15 July 2007).

20. Cited in Virilio, P. 2000, p.28. Italics mine.

21. Ibid., p.31. Reliance on polls to dictate policy signals the end of great political ideas as

politicians chase the ratings.

22. Ibid., p.35. With the “monstrative”, a truly monstrous dimension emerges which has to do with

the excess of death drive, the acephalic undead drive of the Real.

23. Ibid., p.38.

24. This sort of comparison may not be helpful and indeed confuses the argument I am making. In

the same way, people regularly suggest that right-wing Christians can be seriously compared to

Islamist killers. Or, parents who smack their children are nearly the same as child-killers; they are

on the same continuum! Similarly, those who dare to critique gay culture are accused of being

“homophobic” or, worse still, as equivalent to those psychopaths who want to injure or kill gays.

Notes 241

To make these (false) equations creates a lack of difference fuelling moral relativism or the kind

of pseudo-ethics manifest in political correctness.

25. Rights culture emerging as it does out of a post-Christian and anti-humanist epoch, becomes

nothing less than an out and out Darwinian struggle. The gloves have been off for a long time; all

the barriers to transgression have gone.

26. Anything developmental, genetic, biological or having to do with a given, is regarded as being

entirely “over-written” by the violent power of language that structures us in an entirely deadening

way. Not so much “biology is not destiny”, biology has ceased to exist. So much so that in this

seminar a discussion arose about the appearance of words like “rupture” or “tearing” with specific

reference to women’s writing. But this theme was challenged as being too “essentialist”. How

could women “claim” these words as “feminine”? To clear the pitch of biology serves well the

ideological purpose locating suffering as entirely due to statist linguistic violence. There is no such

thing as heterosexuality beyond that structured by the language of power that creates and imposes

it on each successive generation. However, the supremacy of language creates a problem for those

who understand homosexuality as having a genetic basis.

27. http://tinyurl.com/6jnbm8h (abstractdynamics.org). This commentator is wrong, as Freud did

understand the death drive as reducing everything to the quiescence of the inorganic, beyond

living in any form.

28. Leclaire, S. 1998, pp 2-3.

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INDEX

acts 107-8addictive behaviours 184, 186Adorno, T. 137aesthete 103affect 159, 167; emotional correctness 162;

taxonomy of affects 57-8affectivity 37, 117, 128-9Albahari, D.: Gotz and Meyer124-7alpha-function 134Amis, Kingsley 98Amis, Martin 98; London Fields173-4Ancephale (review) 146-7, 148Antigone 123-4, 203, 207anti-process 117, 118anxiety 57, 159, 163, 175; annihilation 162apoptosis 133art: modern artist 164; pitiless 208-9; work of Holbein 64-5attention deficit disorder 183autism 7-8, 157auto-affectivity 31, 32, 33, 117

bad objects 121bar games 14Bataille, G. 9, 134, 146-53, 154, 155, 170Baudrillard, J. 155; on culture 16-17; on evil

52; on machines 136; and Queer Theory 197, 198, 199, 202, 205; on seduction 25, 26-7, 28, 30-1, 77, 87; on silent laughter 152; on Symbolic 160

beauty 134Being 46-7, 49being-for-the-other 70, 121-2, 140belle indifference, la14beta elements 120, 158binding (bindung) 18, 50Bion, W. 4, 38, 167; on alpha-function 134;

on beta elements 158; on containment 57; on fear of learning from experience 120-1; on nameless dread 158; paradox of Klein-Bion 116-19; on reverie 17-18, 82; on “without memory or desire” 114

Blanchot, M. 134Bollas, C. 5-6, 81, 83-4, 183-4Borch-Jacobsen, M. 19, 20, 21-2, 23, 27, 177borderline personality disorder 121breast, loss of 118, 119Buñuel, L.: The Obscure Object of Desire

(film) 28-30Burleigh, W. 182The Butcher Boy 87

Butler, J. 203, 205Byatt, A. S. 33-4

Cain philosophy 68Camus, A. 186, 190-1, 208capitalism 1, 8, 25, 26-7, 52, 164, 168Capturing the Friedmans (documentary) 96-

8castration 87Catharist heresy 131CBT (cognitive-behavioural therapy) 2Charcot, J-M. 11child 189; cry to mother 133; and Queer

Theory 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 212-13child abuse 93-111, 138, 199child-minding 183-4Christianity 64-5, 147, 148, 152, 182, 193-4civilisation 135, 174, 176“College of Sociology” 148Coltart, N. 38combined parent figure 77Conrad, J.: Heart of Darkness188containment 57, 121-2counselling 40-1, 48, 77countertransference 56, 76, 80, 83-4cuddling 5-6cultural theory 24, 160, 168culture: feminisation of 17; and heresies132;

and hysteria 11-34; subject of 16-19; of vulnerability 162

cyberspace 136

Danto, E. 176Dasein (being-there) 14death drive 4, 9, 18; and Bataille 146, 149;

and biology 160; and divine violence 52; and extimacy 145; Freud on 4, 27, 49-51, 106, 132-3, 134, 135, 145, 146; and heresy 131-40, 146; and Islamism 145; and Klein-Bion paradox 117, 118; and Lolita104-7; and machines 131-40, 145, 146, 149, 154; and Night 49-53; and Queer Theory 196, 199-200, 203, 207, 211-13; and sacred

146, 149, 154delusions 166de-moralisation 184-8; of sex 187depression 65, 66, 120, 121depressive position 115, 118, 119, 135, 151,

161Derrida, D. 51


Derrida, J. 73-4, 106desire 163; and hysteria 11, 13, 15, 16, 20,

21, 25diachrony 63, 64Diaghilev, Sergei 131, 135, 139, 145Differend 42-6digital/analogue difference 137“Discourse of the Master” 57Dostoevsky, F. 36, 129

Eagleton, T. 63, 160, 182Edelman, L.: No Future 9, 196-213egalitarian agenda 170ego 3, 8; and diachrony 63; and goodness

115; and hysteria 17-24, 28, 32; and proximity of Other 60-1, 127

Elliot, G.: Silas Marner 201“emancipatory nihilism” 5ensnarement (Verfallen) 47Ereignis 42Eros 49-50, 51, 106, 133erotic: Bataille Eroticism148-9; desire 68;

and Lolita107; mother-infant games 78; replaced by objective sexuality 138; and seduction of therapy 75-7, 78, 79, 80; transference 76, 80, 82, 88

ethics 4, 5, 9, 206; and Bataille 154, 155; code of 58-9, 88; ethical act 108; first philosophy 3, 59, 143; and for-the-other 59; and guilt 128; and hysteria 11-12; and Levinas 3, 8, 48, 59, 143-4, 154, 155, 161; and Night 36, 37, 48; and pitilessness 206, 207-8, 209; and proximity of Other 58-9, 68-74; and psychoanalysis 4, 8, 48, 69, 80, 87, 114-15, 161; and sanity 6, 7; and seduction of therapy 80, 82, 87

ethos, lost 46-9evil 41, 52, 161extimacy 145extremism 36, 37, 41, 50

father 177-80, 190; dead Law of 84-5, 134-5; fatherlessness 178-9; Klein on 159; obscene 188-91; use of “significant parent” 178

femininity 12, 14, 30-1Ferenczi, S. 77Festen (Danish play) 108-9Fink, B. 168Foucault, M. 8, 113-14, 193-4, 196

free association 3, 42; and hysteria 12, 28; and language correctness 171; and machines 139; and seduction of therapy 75-6, 82

Freud, A. 16Freud, S. 47, 83, 184, 185-6; and absent

goodness 113-14, 116; on acting out 127; and contemporary disorders 180; on death drive 4, 27, 49-51, 106, 132-3, 134, 135, 145, 146; on dreams 55-6, 139-40; on ego 18-19, 20-1, 22, 23, 24, 28, 60-1, 127; on father 178, 180; on hate 127; on homosexuals 107-8, 195, 204; on hysteria 11, 12, 13, 15-16, 18-19, 20-1, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 30, 60; on masturbation 135; May-beetle dream 55-6; on melancholia 65, 174-5; on paedophilia 94-5; on pain 162; on primal scene 77; and proximity of Other 55-6, 58, 59, 62, 63, 65; Ratman case 55; on reality 110-11; on repression 135; salmon mayonnaise joke 86; on seduction 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 83, 85, 86, 94-5; on sexuality 194, 195; on superego 174-7; on truth 166; on weltanschauung 4; Wolf Man case 60

Gans, S. 59gap in psyche 60, 65genetics 2, 52-3, 58genital maturity 16Genosco, G. 14Giddens, A. 47goodness 9; absent 113-30; “being good”

115; being and guilt 123-30; fear of learning from experience 119-22; forcing and commercial promotion of 115; paradox of Klein-Bion 116-19; senseless 141-5

Greenfield, S. 137Grossman, V.: Life and Fate141-3, 144group therapy 162guilt 123-30

Hanaghan, J. 133Heidegger, M. 14-15, 42, 46, 51, 63, 72Hitchcock, A.: North by Northwest (film)

202; The Birds(film) 203-4Holbein, Hans: The Ambassadors 65; The

Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb 64-5Holocaust denial 39, 47homeopathy 113

Index 253

homosexuality 107-8, 193-213hospitality 123, 124hyper-subjectivity 18hypnosis 24hysteria: and bodily symptoms 12; and

culture 11-34; and desire 11, 13, 15, 16, 20, 21, 25; fright hysteria 60; hysterical identification 13; and Master 32; and normalisation 15; and seduction 25-34; and sexuality 12, 15, 16, 17, 34; subject of 12-16; therapist as nurturing mother 16

Id 134, 175id-evil 158, 162Id-mother 84Imaginary 159, 161, 164Information Technology 39, 91, 94, 136-7,

138, 159internet 39, 94, 137, 138Ireland 42, 46, 93-4, 159, 181Isaacs, S. 160Islamism 105, 145, 200

jokes 85-7Jones, E. 14jouissance (enjoyment) 9, 98, 134, 146, 163,

164-5, 204Joyce, J. 153Joynt, Dick 153

Kafka, F.: The Trial 36Kennedy, Ludovic 56Kernberg, O. 23, 179Khan, M. 38Kiberd, D. 153Kierkegaard, S. 122Klein, M. 9, 157-71; on archaic superego

174, 175, 179; and goodness 116-19, 121, 128-9; and hysteria 12, 16, 34; paradox of Klein-Bion 116-19; and seduction 77, 92

Kleinianism 57, 121, 157-9; and Lacanianism 159-71

Kohut, H. 179Kojève, A. 118, 154Kraus, Karl 36, 114Krause, R. 57-8Kristeva, J. 64, 121, 122Kundera, M. 63

Lacan, J. 5, 9, 49, 186; on death drive 132, 135-6, 139; on ego 3, 19-20, 32, 61; on

ethics 206, 207, 209; on father 177, 179, 180; on goodness 116-17, 118, 129; on Holbein 65; on hysteria 12-13, 19-20, 24, 25-6, 32, 33, 34; on Kleinian theory 159-71; on language 194; Marguerite case 71-3; on transference 81-2

Lacanianism 43, 116, 203; and Kleinianism 159-71

Laing, R. D. 70-1, 72, 73language: correctness 171; and death drive

149; and hysteria 13; and Kleinianism 157-8; and Lacan 194; linguistic-symbolic system 158-9; and Night 37, 38-9, 40, 42, 45-6, 47-8, 49, 50, 51; phallocentric 85; play of 84-7; and proximity of Other 55-7, 66-7; and psychoanalysis 3, 41, 42, 55-7; and seduction of therapy 78, 84-7; spoken 2-3

Laplanche, J. 76-8Lasch, C. 16Law 59, 74, 123, 128; dead Law of father

84-5, 134-5Leclaire, S. 212Leve, A. 6Levinas, E. 9, 133, 140; and ethics 3, 8, 48,

59, 143-4, 154, 155, 161; and goodness 115, 116, 119, 128, 141; on language 47-8, 158; on otherwise than being 198; and proximity of Other 59, 62, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 73-4

loss 65, 66, 68Lyotard, J-F. 42-3, 44, 45

McCabe, P.: A Mother's Love's a Blessing (film) 161

McEwan, I.: Saturday18machines 131-55McIntyre, A. 103MacNeice, Louis 133male gaze 30Mann, T. 184, 185masturbation 135matricide 161Mayakovsky, V. 131, 135media 31, 38-40, 45, 46, 91, 92Meltzer, D. 113, 116, 128, 129, 161memories 61Miller, J-A. 180, 181mirror stage 61Modernity 35-6


mother-infant relation 118-19, 133, 161; and seduction of therapy 76-7, 78, 79, 83, 84, 89

Nabokov, V.: Lolita 8, 98-107Nafisi, A. 105nameless dread 158narcissism 161; and culture 16, 17; and

goodness 115, 116; increase in 179; and Night 41, 48; and pitilessness 210-11

Nazis 185; and goodness 124-7, 141, 143; and the Night 39, 43, 44, 47

New Age spirituality 40-1Nietzsche, F. 35, 136, 146, 147Night, The 3, 8, 35-53, 124; and death drive

49-53; and Differend 42-6; and lost ethos 46-9

noosphere 38-9normalisation 194“no touching” rule 75nurturing mother 84

Ó Cadhain, M. 153Oedipus 178, 179O'Rourke, P. J. 144Other, proximity of 55-74; and ego 60-1,

127; and ethics 58-9, 68-74; and suffering 62-8

Oz, A. 51

paedophilia 93-111, 138, 199paranoid-schizoid position 118, 119, 157phallic exchange standard 160phallic power 30phallic woman 16phallocrat 22phallus 31, 85Phillips, A. 6-8, 187“The Pianist” (film) 143-4pitilessness 206-13Plath, S. 61play 5-6pleasure 6-7, 196, 207political correctness 46, 147Pol Pot 209-10Porter, Peter 154Porter, R. 26Potlatch 17, 196pre-ego 19-24primal seduction 76-9, 89projective identification 75

psychoanalysis 24; engagement of 4; and ethics 3, 4, 5, 8, 48, 69, 80, 87, 114-15, 116, 161; and faith 8-9; hated by Nabokov 104; and indifference 69, 173-91; is “way-making” 14-15; and language 3, 41, 42, 55-7; and Night 3, 35-53; and non-indifference 8, 170; part of castration process 87; policing of 80; private space 48-9; professionalisation of 80, 81, 88; queer end 193-213; and reality 110-11; resistance of 106-7; and seduction 27-8, 75-92, 107, 111; and systems 58; technique 74; theory against the Real 157-71; theory of everything 163, 164; training analysis 41-2; and unconscious 49; as unethical 4, 8, 69, 116; used as means of social control 104

psychosis 89-90, 115psys 179, 180-1, 183, 188-9, 190

Queer Theory 9, 193-213

rage 121, 122, 162, 175Ray, J., Jr 98Real 43, 48; and ageing 63-4; and

dreaminess 140; ethics of 155; Freud's homosexual woman case 107-8; and hyperreal 164; Lacanian 147; and psychosis 90; and Symbolic 36, 45; theory against 157-71; and Word 8, 44, 45, 46

reality 110-11Recherches Philosophiques 154Reich, W. 176-7relationships between man and woman 187-8repression: and civilisation 135, 174; and

ego 60, 61; and seduction of therapy 75, 77, 78-9, 82, 92

resistance of analyst 118reverie 17-18, 82Richardson, W. 182Rilke, R. M. 65Roth, P. 7Roudinesco, E. 169Roustang, F. 17, 90, 117, 167

sacred 146-55Safe Sex programmes 99sanity 6-7, 8scepticism 189-90Schafer, R. 145

Index 255

schizophrenia 7-8, 58, 70-1, 87Schur, M. 185seduction 8, 111; against 79-81; of children

94-5; cool 91-2; and hidden erotic 75-6; hierarchy of 77; and hysteria 25-34; in Lolita105-6, 107; and paradoxical play of world 87-9; and play of language 84-7; primal 76-9, 89; and psychosis 89-90; seduction theory of neurosis 94; of therapy 75-92; and transference resolution 81-4

sex: de-moralisation of 187; and enjoyment 8, 93-111; and machines 138

sexation 168sexual abuse 8, 93-111sexuality: Christian and Greek views 193- 4;

Freud on 194, 195; and hysteria 12, 15, 16, 17, 34; and Queer Theory 193-213; sciences of 193

Sharpe, E. 56silent laughter 152single occupier households 6sinthomosexual 203, 205slogans, contemporary 32-3Smith, Andrew 6social bond, new 180-4, 188-9soul 122, 125, 126-7; malady of 121; in

patience 122Soyinka, W. 39speaking 2-3Steiner, G. 3, 36-7, 39, 47, 151, 199subject: and affectivity 117; autonomous 3;

and ego 24; and machines 138; and Night 49; and proximity of Other 59, 73

subjectivity 111, 183; and hysteria 14, 18; Kleinianism beyond 157; and professionalisation 81; and proximity of Other 60, 67

suffering: and cultural theory 160; and goodness 120, 129; gratuitous 63; mental 62, 72; objective 62; physical 62; physical and mental pain 62, 161-2; and proximity of Other 58-9, 62-8; redemptive 62-3; and victimisation 63

suicide 7, 121, 180, 186, 199superego 174-6, 179, 182-3, 186; archaic

174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180Swift, J. 56-7Symbolic 49, 134-5, 163-4; and phallic

exchange standard 160; and pitilessness 206, 207; and Real 36, 45

talion principle 161, 174techno-simulations of courtesy 138therapeutic paradigm 1therapy abuse 91-2thinking 46-7totalitarianism 141, 144-5, 154training analysis 41-2Trakl, G. 122transference: and contemporary disorders

180; erotic 76, 80, 82, 88; positive 81; resolution or transformation 81-4; transformational object 83

transitional space 135, 136true self 67Truss, L.: Eats, Shoots and Leaves 86truth 166-7Tuol Sleng Memorial 209Turkle, S. 137

Updike, J. 63

Vatimo, G. 5Verhaeghe, P. 180Virilio, P. 136, 208-9

Winnicott, D.: and absent goodness 114, 120, 121; on environmental provision 17-18; Id-mother 84; on incommunicado 81, 107; and seduction of therapy 81, 82, 84; on subversive privacy 48-9; on transitional space 135; on true self 67

Wolfe, T.: I Am Charlotte Simmons187The Woodsman (film) 109-10Word: and Real 8, 44, 45, 46; and World 35,

36-7, 41, 49, 50-1, 53

Young, R. 129

Zetzel, E. 15Žižek, S. 51-2, 158, 164, 188, 203, 205

With the rise of Neuroscience, the increasing popularity of CBT, the deployment

of the new explanatory powers of Genomics, and healing techniques of all kinds,

who needs psychoanalysis with its complex theory of the subject? Why not forget

Freud?

“To reconnect psychoanalysis with the Night” is the response of the author in this

far-ranging collection of essays that seeks to ground psychoanalysis outside its

rather academic preoccupation with the unconscious and desire. The vital connec-

tion between the WORD and the REAL was progressively severed during the

twentieth century with untold consequences. Psychoanalysis was a necessary part

of this deconstructive process but has failed to take responsibility for the whole-

sale losses involved, not least the losses to the movement itself. Where has the

sense gone that at some point in our analysis we come upon the inhuman? Where

is the struggle with values and ethics beyond our playful self-authorisations in a

world without the Other, a world that abandoned “depth”? Where is the objective

which breathes life into and confronts the subjective?

These ethical questions are addressed by the author in an attempt to get beyond

the moral relativism that bedevils psychoanalysis and cultural theory generally.

Written by a practising and teaching analyst, and drawing on the work of key ana-

lytic figures, Freud, Klein, Bion, Lacan, Žižek and others, the author dramatically

illustrates his argument by reference to Levinas’s ethics “as first philosophy”,

Baudrillard and Laplanche’s differing returns to seduction, Holbein’s suffering

Christ, Steiner’s “real absence”, Bataille’s excremental sacred, Nabokov’s Lolita,

Borch-Jacobsen’s understanding of the affective roots of the ego as other, Heideg-

ger on language, Lyotard’s differend, Grossman’s opus Life and Fate, Dosto-

evsky’s low-life, as well as many other contemporary references, from McEwan

to Albahari, from Festen to The Pianist.

This book will appeal to those who want to rethink the ethics of psychoanalysis,

the nature of the suffering subject and the key importance of psychoanalysis in the

new century. It also should be read by sociologists, philosophers and those inter-

ested in politics and cultural studies.

Rob Weatherill’s most recent book is Our Last Great Illusion: A Radical Psycho-

analytic Critique of Therapy Culture (Imprint Academic, 2004).

“Psychologists and therapists will find the thesis challenging but well worth the

engagement with the author’s deep understanding of postmodern trends”. Net-

work

“A very important book. Deserves to reach a wide audience”. John Waters, The

Irish Times

“Dramatic insight into the spirit of our contemporary reality”. Professor Svetislav

M. Jaric (Serbia)

“Illuminating and witty... Weatherill’s use of Freud to draw a radical distinction

between the agonistics of loss and intimate experience in the crucible of family

life, and the futile blandishments of therapy, is particularly compelling”. Patrick

Turner, CultureWars

“...radical, uncompromising, and brilliantly intelligent – someone who habitually

thinks outside of many boxes (often all at the same time)... Perhaps the nearest

comparison to Weatherill’s quarry is in the work of the prolific Lacanian theorist

Slavoj Žižek”. Richard House, author of Therapy Beyond Modernity

Forgetting Freud

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Transcript of Forgetting Freud