Mutation of the Other and becoming of the Subjectivity

CROIX Laurence

Many psychoanalytical texts evoke the Name-of-the-Father. The crisis denounced here is to be structural, however the approaches dealt with will be based upon a conceptual model, as if we were only dealing with a conjectural crisis. A conservatism founded upon the symbolic order known throughout the 2000 glorious years of Christianity calls us to question ourselves and our capacities as analysts, as it calls other thinkers to fulfil their functions; it calls us to be readers and interpreters of history rather than preachers of ideology.

It is without question that the practice of psychoanalysis confirms the fundamental ill-being of the subject in a society of "too muchness", of the absolute, of performance, as described by A. Erhenberg. Clinical practice never leads us endlessly to raise the questions about the ways in which we can maintain, even reintegrate, the dimension of desire, which, after all, should be the only radical goal of psychoanalysis. This should especially be so when patients, of both sexes and of all ages, complain literally of their failure to fulfil the totalitarian norms of a socioeconomic system more psychically invasive than ever before.

Let us take the paradigm of the subjects called "drug addicts". These subjects, in what in is fact an exemplary manner, embody a dysfunction characteristic of modern consumeristic civilization. For them the subject-consumer and the consumed subject are one and the same. Yet, it is the system of supply and demand itself, its juridical and repressive rationality and the absolute power of the circulation of merchandise and money, which are the "raison d’être" of these subjects.

Thus, women are no longer the only ones affected by a surplus of challenges, of demonstrations of power (henceforth utterly profited upon by certain women), a surplus which, at an earlier period, was their condition just for getting by or finding a semblance of an existence. More generally, the articulation between "work and interaction", in Habermas's sense of the term, would also be susceptible to serve as a base for a new examination of the capacities of the subject to desire in A World Without Limit . For all of us, the laws of language find themselves perpetually attacked by the circulation of the object. The subject himself or herself becomes a consumable object. For example, the perpetual recycling demanded of salaried workers concerns the recycling of their beings. Don't we even go as far as to say "recycle yourself"?

Thus, what’s happening "outside", "out of unconscious", wouldn't it have an answer within a psychoanalytical reading?

It's from "Capitalist Discourse" and onwards, that the Other, treasure chest of signifiers, seems to be brought to confuse itself with social reality, that is, to go from the inside to the outside: "Ce qui s'opère du discours du maître antique à celui du maître moderne, que l'on appelle le capitaliste, est une modification dans la place du savoir." Lacan explains this phenomenon - when the social becomes the realm of the Other from the moment when the Name-of-the-Father is replaced by the function of "naming" carried out by the mother. The child thus remains reduced to the status of functions, of projects, moreover of the "plus de jouir" (emphqsized excitement) of destiny.

One can thus realize that performance can become, at the earliest stage of life , via force and violence, a seeming of existence, or worse, the only possible existence. This can be observed for example in the fanatical craze of the masses for sporting events: a sought after collective performance reinforced by an exacerbated nationalism in relation on the opposite side of the spectrum, to the different processes of globalization.

What subjectivity, in fact, could prevail if the whole system of representations makes itself out of the object? Numerous authors in reaction to errantry, to psychosomatic phenomena et other "borderline cases", will note the quasi-absence of formations of the unconscious, a great poverty of fantasy, etc. For us these cases of errantry of the symbolic order, of maintaining oneself "outside-of" are an "errantry of the human, a response to the imposed objectivity. The dereliction of the symbolic and the imaginaire that strikes everyone of us, unveils the common difficulties of the embodiment of the Other, in a system in which the discourse of Science would like to take the place of the Name-of-the-Father.

"La scientifisation" would be the possibility of designing "l'en-pire" de la science" (empire - worst,) in its present capacity to assassinate "Kultur". It would distinguish itself from science and from its will to know by way of its obstruction of knowing, by succeeding to impose upon us only one Truth. From scientific ideology that was only discourse, which sought to make thought objective by way of its capacity to make humanity un-subjective, "la scientifisation" is effective, in terms of research and in terms of practice. Do we need to come up with other examples? Finally, it makes use of "scientisme" and of its "médiatisation" which becomes its tool of favourite propaganda.

This postmodern concept of "everything is possible" that it promotes, was brought about and made possible in fact not with Galileo and Descartes (according to the chosen epistemology), but in a much more recent period, when science has found itself to be fundamentally at the service of the applications of the death impulse, in an effervescence to which they were oblivious just up until the Third Reich.

Science was not at the origin of the final solution but these scientific disciplines have easily and rapidly put themselves to its service (who could resist this impulse?). Nazi politics has gone so far as to reduce considerably the intention of science to produce a society of "Superman" and to exterminate the others. As far as the homogeneity that had been hoped for is concerned, it is not characteristic of science but of all civilization; yet, let’s remember that its implementation could not have occured without science. Scientific ideology has thus encountered at this moment in history the realization of fantasy (and we know all too well in the clinic of the subject what the collapse of the hallmark of desire can lead to ...). This history was for mankind the discovery that the human is capable of no longer being a human, of being reduced to nothingness. To be able to be only pure waste, this is an "heritage that we have to share" where the real and reality are one and the same. That is, we have gone from the reign of the object of industrial, capitalist society, to the omnipotence by "chosification" of the human body itself. A change has taken place at the level of the subjective division of the subject as Lacan raised it in "Encore" about the distinct place of God, as Other, in neurosis and in psychosis: "if thanks to the redoubling of castration in neurosis "one believes in that", with science, "one believes it", there is no other choice.

In fact science has become purely utilitarian. This is what perturbed the assumption of Science that is, its utilitarian side : science is socially hailed by the "jouissance" of the subject, all the more so at the point at which it fails, ie, in the body. Yet, the "scientifisation" succeeds in persuading us that we are only one organism. That is, it reverts to a confusion specific to scientific discourse concerning the notions of bodies and of organisms by insisting upon the fetishizing of the human body. In order to make sure that the organic individuality becomes a body, the signifier must introduce the One. In other words, there is a cleavage, at the level of the organism itself, between the living and the organism individualized. So, the true body, the first body, says Lacan, is language, namely what he calls the body of the symbolic. The symbolic is a body insofar as it is a system of internal relations. That is also why psychoanalysis is not an idealism. If there is what Lacan calls the objectivity of the subject, if psychoanalysis keeps a tie with science, it is because the symbolic is, in a certain way, a body, having its own materiality; "The language is the body, a subtle body indeed, but a body".

Science, which desires to go from the image to the real, confronts itself with the Being, the factory of the signifier, but the organic seems to be the most profitable machine of the factory of death . In short, Lacan has not only braught major conceptual steps within the freudian theory, but has enabled us to capture the real essence of this "Malaise (uneasiness) within the civilization" specific to the second half of the XXth century.

Laurence Croix, Paris, member of Espace Analytique and Psychanalyse Actuelle