Superego, Kant with Sade, Master signifier (S1), object small a, jouissance and fantasy In the Sadean scene, near to the executioner and his victim, there is always a third, the Other for which the sadist practises his activity, the Other whose pure form is that of the voice of a law which addresses itself to the subject in the second person, with the imperative ‘Fulfil your duty!’ The greatness of Kantian ethics is thus to have formulated for the first time the ‘beyond of the pleasure principle’. Kant’s categorical imperative is a superegotistical law which goes against the subject’s wellbeing. Or, more precisely, it is totally indifferent to his well-being, which, from the view-point of the ‘pleasure principle’ as it prolongs the ‘reality principle’, is totally non-economical and non-economizable, senseless. Moral law is a fierce order which does not admit excuses – ‘you can because you must’ – and which in this way acquires an air of mischievous neutrality, of mean indifference. According to Lacan, Kant ignores the other side of this neutrality of moral law, its meanness and obscenity, its mischievousness which goes back to the jouissance behind law’s command; Lacan relates this suppression to the fact that Kant avoids the split of the subject (subject of enunciation/subject of the enunciated) implied in moral law. … The presupposition of revolutionary terror is precisely that the subject lets themselves be reduced to their determination as Citizen who is ‘doing their duty’, which brings about the liquidation of subjects who are not doing their duty. Therefore, Jacobinical terror is really the consequence of Kantian ethics. It is the same with the command of real socialism: All people support the Party.’ Such a proposition is not an empirical declaration and as such refutable; it functions, on the contrary, performatively, as the definition of the true People, of the People who live ‘up to their duty’. … That, then, is the split between the subject of the enunciated and the subject of enunciation of law. Behind the S1 – law in its neutral, pacifying, solemn and sublime form – there is always the presence of the object which reveals mischievousness, meanness and obscenity. Another well-known example illustrates perfectly this split of the subject of law. In response to the question of explorers researching cannibalism, the native answers: ‘No, there aren’t any more cannibals in our region. Yesterday, we ate the last one.’ At the level of the subject of the enunciated, there are no more cannibals, and the subject of enunciation is precisely this ‘we’ who have eaten the last cannibal. That, then, is the intrusion of the ‘subject of enunciation’ of law, elided by Kant: this obscene agent who ate the last cannibal in order to ensure the order of law. Now we can specify the status of paradoxical prohibition which concerns the question of the origin of law, of legal power. It aims at the object of law in the sense of its ‘subject of enunciation’, of the subject who becomes the obscene and fierce agent-instrument of law. … And that is how one should also take the Lacanian thesis according to which Good is only the mask of radical, absolute Evil, the mask of ‘indecent obsession’ by das Ding, the atrocious-obscene thing. Behind Good, there is radical Evil; Supreme Good is the other name for an Evil which does not have a particular, ‘pathological’ status. Insofar as it obsesses us in an indecent, obscene way, das Ding makes it possible for us to untie ourselves, to free ourselves from our ‘pathological’ attachment to particular, earthly objects. The ‘Good’ is only one way to keep the distance towards this evil Thing, the distance which makes it bearable. … Furthermore, das Ding, in its Lacanian conceptualization, is precisely such a negative thing, a paradoxical Thing which is only the positivization of a lack, of a hole in the symbolic Other. Das Ding as an ‘incarnated Evil’ is indeed an irreducible object at the level of the pleasure principle, of the opposition between pleasure and pain. In other words, it is a ‘non-pathological’ object in the strict sense, also the unthinkable paradox of the ‘critical’ step for Kant, for which reason he is to be thought along ‘with Sade’. … In ‘totalitarianism’, this illegal agent-instrument of the law, the Sadean executioner, is no longer hidden. He APPEARS AS SUCH – for example, in the shape of the Party, as an agent-instrument of historical will. The Stalinist Party is quite literally an executor of great creations: executor of the creation of Communism, the greatest of all creations. That is the meaning of Stalin’s famous proposition: ‘We are, us, Communists, people of a different sort. We are carved out of a different material.’ This ‘different material’ (the right stuff, one could say) is precisely the incarnation, the apparition of the objet. Here, one should return to the Lacanian definition of the structure of perversion as an inverted effect of the fantasy. It is the subject who determines himself as object, in his encounter with the division of subjectivity. The formula for fantasy is written as $ a. In other words, the barred subject is divided in its encounter with the object-cause of its desire. The sadist inverts this structure, which gives $ a. In a way, he avoids this division by occupying the place of the object himself, of the agent-executor, before his victim, the divided- hystericized subject: for example, the Stalinist before the ‘traitor’, the hysterical petit-bourgeois who did not want completely to renounce his subjectivity, who continues to ‘desire in vain’ (Lacan). In the same passage, Lacan returns to his ‘Kant with Sade’ in order to recall that ‘the sadist himself occupies the place of the object, but without knowing it, to the benefit of another, for whose jouissance he exercises his action as sadistic pervert’. … The authority of the classical Master is that of a certain S1, a signifier-without-signified, an auto-referential signifier which incarnates the performative function of the word. The ‘liberalism’ of the Enlightenment wants to do without this instance of ‘irrational’ authority. Its project is that of an authority founded entirely in effective ‘savoir(-faire)’. In this frame, the Master reappears as the totalitarian Leader. Excluded like S1, he takes the shape of the object-incarnation of an S1 (for example the ‘objective knowledge of the laws of history’), instrument of the superegotistical Will which takes on itself the ‘responsibility’ of producing historical necessity in its cannibalistic cruelty. The formula, the matheme of the ‘totalitarian subject’, would thus be S2/a, the semblance of a neutral ‘objective’ knowledge, under which the obscene object-agent of a superegotistical Will hides. … The monarch is the ‘pure’ signifier, the master-signifier ‘without signified’. His entire ‘reality’ (and authority) rests on the name, and that is why his ‘effectiveness in reality’ is arbitrary; it can be abandoned to the biological contingency of heredity. The monarch is the One who – as the exception, the ‘irrational’ apex of the amorphous mass (‘not-all’) of the people – makes the totality of customs concrete. With his existence as ‘pure’ signifier, he constitutes the Whole in its ‘organic articulation’ (organische Gliederung). He is the ‘irrational’ supplement as the condition of the rational Totality, the ‘pure’ signifier without signified as condition of the organic Whole of the signifier-signified. … The gap between State bureaucracy and the monarch corresponds to that between the battery of ‘knowledge’ (S2, the bureaucratic savoir-faire) and the point de capiton (S1, the ‘unary’ master-signifier) who ‘quilts’ (capitonne) his discourse, who ‘totalizes’ it from outside, who takes on himself the moment of ‘decision’ and confers on this discourse the ‘performative’ dimension. Our only chance is thus to isolate as much as possible S1, to make of it the empty point of formal ‘decision’ without any concrete weight; in other words, to keep a maximum distance between S1 and the register of ‘skill qualifications’, which is that of the bureaucratic ‘savoir (-faire)’. If this point of exception fails, bureaucratic knowledge ‘becomes mad’. The ‘neutrality’ proper to knowledge, in the absence of the capitonnage, appears to be ‘evil’. Its very ‘indifference’ provokes in the subject the effect of a superegotistical imperative. In other words, we come to the reign of ‘totalitarian’ bureaucracy. The decisive thing is thus not to confuse the ‘irrational’ authority of pre-liberal monarchy with that of the post-liberal ‘totalitarian’ regime. The first one is based on the gap of S1 in relation to S2, while ‘totalitarianism’ comes precisely from the non-capitonné bureaucratic discourse of S2 without S1. This difference comes out better when one considers the justification of obedience. The ‘totalitarian’ leader demands submission in the name of his supposed ‘effective’ capacities, his wisdom, his courage, his adherence to the Cause, etc. While, if one says ‘I obey the king because he is wise and just’, it is already a crime of lèse majesté. The only appropriate justification for this is the tautology: ‘I obey the king because he is king’. … Namely: when and in what conditions does State bureaucracy become ‘totalitarian’? Not where S1, the point of ‘irrational’ authority, would exert a pressure ‘too strong’, excessive, on the bureaucratic savoir’(-faire), but on the contrary, where this ‘unary’ point which ‘quilts’ and ‘totalizes’ from outside the field of S2 fails. Bureaucratic ‘knowledge’ here ‘becomes mad’: it operates ‘by itself’, without reference to a decentred point which would confer upon it a ‘performative’ dimension. In a word, it starts to function as a superego. 7. The ‘Mischievous Neutrality’ of Bureaucracy When knowledge itself assumes the moment of ‘authority’ (i.e. summons, command, imperative), a short-circuit between the ‘neutral’ field of knowledge and the ‘performative’ dimension is produced. Far from limiting itself to a kind of ‘neutral’ declaration of the given objectivity, the discourse ‘becomes mad’ and starts to behave in a ‘performative’ way towards the given of the facts themselves. More precisely, it conceals its own ‘performative force’ under the shape of ‘objective knowledge’, of the neutral ‘declaration’ of the ‘facts’. The example that comes to mind immediately is that of Stalinist bureaucratic discourse, the supposed ‘knowledge of objective laws’ as the ulterior legitimation of its decisions: a true ‘uncontrolled knowledge’ capable of ‘founding’ any decision after the fact. And it is, of course, the subject who pays for this ‘short-circuit’ between S1 and S2. In a ‘pure’ case, the accused, through great political trials, finds himself confronted by an impossible choice. The confession demanded from him is obviously in conflict with the ‘reality’ of the facts since the Party asks him to declare himself guilty of ‘false accusations’. Furthermore, this demand of the Party functions as a superegotistical imperative, which means that it constitutes the symbolic ‘reality’ of the subject. Lacan insisted many times on this link between the superego and the supposed ‘sentiment of reality’: ‘When the feeling of foreignness, strangeness, strikes somewhere, it’s never on the side of the superego – it’s always the ego that loses its bearings...’ (Lacan) Does he not indicate by this an answer to the question: where does the confession come from in the Stalinist trials? Since there was not any ‘reality’ outside of the superego of the Party for the accused, outside its obscene and mean imperative – the only alternative to this superegotistical imperative being the emptiness of an abominable reality – the confession demanded by the Party was in fact the only way for the accused to avoid the Toss of reality’. Stalinist ‘confessions’ are to be conceived as an extreme consequence which ensues from the ‘totalitarian’ short-circuit between S1 and S2. In other words, in the way that S1 itself takes on the ‘performative’ dimension on itself, one is dealing with a ‘mad’ variant of the discourse’s own ‘performativity’. The signifying work can indeed ‘change reality’, namely, the symbolic reality, by transforming retroactively the signifying network which determines the symbolic significance of the ‘facts’. But here, signifying work ‘falls into the Real’, as if language could change extra-linguistic facts in their own very real ‘massiveness’. The fundamental fact of the advent of ‘totalitarianism’ would consist then of social Law beginning to function as a superego. Here it is no longer that which ‘forbids’ and, on the basis of this prohibition, opens, supports and guarantees the field of co-existence of ‘free’ bourgeois subjects, the field of their diverse pleasures. By becoming ‘mad’, it begins directly to command jouissance: the turning point where a permitted freedom-to-enjoy is reversed into an obligatory jouissance which is, one must add, the most effective way to block the access of the subject to jouissance. One finds in Kafka’s work a perfect staging of bureaucracy under the rule of an obscene, fierce, ‘mad’ law, a law which immediately inflicts jouissance – in short, the superego: ‘Thus I belong to justice’, says the priest. ‘So then, what could I want from you? The Court makes no claims upon you. It receives you when you come and relinquishes you when you go.’ (Kafka) How can one not recognize, in these lines with which the interview between Josef K. and the priest ends in Chapter IX of The Trial the ‘mischievous neutrality’ of the superego? Already the starting point of his two great novels, The Trial and The Castle, is the call of a superior instance (the Law, the Castle) to the subject – aren’t we dealing with a law which ‘would give the order, “Jouis!” [“Enjoy!” or “Come!”], and the subject could only reply “J’ouïs” [“I hear”], in which the jouissance would no longer be anything but understood?’ (Lacan) The ‘misunderstanding’, the ‘confusion’ of the subject confronting this instance, isn’t it precisely due to the fact that he misunderstands the imperative of jouissance which resounds here and which perspires through all the pores of its ‘neutral’ surface? When Josef K., in the empty chamber, glances at the judges’ books, he finds ‘an indecent picture’ in the first book. ‘A man and woman were sitting naked on a sofa, the obscene intention of the draughtsman was evident enough.’ (Kafka) That is the superego: a solemn ‘indifference’ impregnated in parts by obscenities. That is why, for Kafka, bureaucracy is ‘closer to original human nature than any other social institution’ (letter to Oscar Baum, June 1922): what is this ‘original human nature’ if not the fact that man is from the start a ‘parlêtre [speaking-being]’? And what is the super-ego – the functioning mode of bureaucratic knowledge – if not, according to Jacques-Alain Miller, what ‘presentifies’ under the pure form of the signifier as the cause of the division of the subject; in other words, the intervention of the signifier-command under its chaotic, senseless aspect? Slavoj Žižek, INTERROGATING THE REAL, (Editorial material, selection and translation, Rex Butler and Scott Stephens), (Published in Psychoanalysis and ..., ed. Richard Feldstein and Henry Sussman, London and New York, Routledge, 1990. We have revised the translation and made corrections to certain grammatical and terminological errors [eds].), Continuum, 2005, pp.130-41
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 21:20:57 +0000