Psychoanalysis, sinthome, symptomal knot, surplus enjoyment and drive However, the late Lacan proposes an exactly inverted formula: the aim of psychoanalysis is to get the subject to come to terms with the sinthome, with his specific “formula of enjoyment.” Lacan’s insight here is that of the full ontological weight of “stuckness”: when one dissolves the sinthome and thus gets fully unstuck, one loses the minimal consistency of one’s own being—in short, what appears as obstacle is a positive condition of possibility. What happens in psychoanalysis is thus not the dissolution of symptom, but the shift in perspective which inverts the condition of impossibility into the condition of possibility. The mode of functioning of lamella is therefore that of suppleance. When, in his seminar 20, Lacan proposes the formula “Y’a de l’Un” (the colloquial French for “There is something of the One”), this One is not the One of a harmonious Whole, or the One of some unifying principle, or of the Master-Signifier, but, on the contrary, the One that persists as the obstacle destabilizing every unity. This One—which is ultimately what Lacan calls the “object small a”—has the structure of what Lacan calls suppleance: supplementing the lack of what is in itself impossible. Thus, suppleance has nothing to do with the standard—false—reading of “suture” as the gesture of filling in the structural lack and imposing a false unification onto the multitude. It is, rather, what Badiou calls the “symptomal knot,” the “supernumerary” element which renders palpable the inconsistency of the social totality. (See note 44 below) Therefore, is suppleance not (also) another name for the object-cause of desire qua surplus-enjoyment and, simultaneously, what Freud called the supplementary bonus of forepleasure? What if, however, this very choice between the dissolution of a symptomal knot and its acceptance as a positive condition is, again, a false one? What if the very structure of a drive (as opposed to instinct) provides a solution? We are stuck on a knot around which drive circulates, yet it is this very stuckness that pushes us again and again forward to invent ever new forms to approach it. Every “openness” has thus to be sustained by a “knot” which stands for a fundamental impossibility. The excess of humanity with regard to the animal is not (only) an excess of dynamism, but rather an excess of fixity: a human remains “stubbornly attached,” fixated, to an impossible point, returning to it on account of a compulsion to repeat, unable to drop it even when it reveals itself as unattainable. Consequently, is the “theological” dimension—without which, for Benjamin, revolution cannot win—not the very dimension of the excess of drive, of its “too-muchness”? Is a solution, then, to change the modality of our being-stuck into a mode that allows, solicits even, the activity of sublimation? 44. The key question of any psychoanalytic notion of society is: can one base a social link on this suppleance? The wager of the analyst’s discourse is that one can do it. And the wager of revolutionary politics is that this is how a revolutionary collective functions. Zizek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence”, in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, Slavoj Zizek, Eric L. Santner, Kenneth Reinhard, The University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp.175-6
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 20:21:16 +0000
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