The essay begins with a refutation of the commonplace notion that Sade’s work served “as a catalogue of perversions”; a sort of 18^th century Kinsey report that predicted Freud’s exegesis of human sexuality. Sade, however, did “begin the ground work that was to progress for a hundred years in the depths of taste in order for Freud’s path to be passable”, but did so by beginning “the insinuating rise in the nineteenth century of the theme of delight in evil”. Sade then continued Kant’s work and predicted Freud’s, by casting a suspicious eye on the altruistic theory of human nature which prior moralists had utilized. Firstly, it is important to recognize that Kant had both a pathological law (the law of the state) and a transcendental law (the compulsion of the super-ego). The law of the state we follow because we have to, which “entails in itself a kind of distance from them…the universe of social customs and rule appear as a nonsensical machine that must be accepted as such”. (Ideology) Transcendental law then consists of the construction of the categorical imperative, a moral drive which by ‘excluding everything the subject may suffer from due to his interest in an object, whether drive or feeling”, creates a secondary mandate within the subject rather than exterior to it. Or “a law that has no other phenomenon than something that is already signifying, the latter is obtained from a voice in conscience which articulating in the form of a maxim in conscience, proposes the order of a purely practical reason or will there”. This transcendental law “is a necessary, unconditional authority without being true, it is…a given fact the truth of which cannot be theoretically demonstration; but its unconditional validity should nonetheless be presupposed for our moral activity to have any sense”. We then “achieve the maturity proper of the autonomous enlightened subject precisely by submitting to the irrational compulsion of the categorical imperative.” Slavoj Zizek explains this as, “according to Kant, the faculty of desiring does not possess a transcendental status, since it is wholly dependent upon pathological objects and motivations”. In other words, the transcendental good (or moral good) in Kant only emerges after desire and the law of the state is excluded.

This is precisely where Lacan diverges from Kant. Lacan sees even laws encouraging the repression of desire, as consisting of desire in its pure state. This is a very subtle point and should not be misread as a simple contradiction. Men then create an absolute good, not for the sake of morality, but rather to combat the fact that “no phenomenon can lay claim to a constant relationship to pleasure”, and, “the quest to feel good would thus be a dead end were it not reborn in the form of das Gute, the good that is the object of the moral law”. All laws consist of a repression of desire (a point one can easily find in Freud); however, this in itself results in creation of a surplus enjoyment. For example, a vegan who deprives themselves of meat creates an internal categorical imperative to not enjoy meat’s many pleasures. In this rejection, though, is the expression of desire – both the pleasure that comes with the ascetic’s rejection (the delight of self-control) and also the creation of meat as a much more pleasurable object than it is in the eyes of those who don’t think twice when they eat a steak. There is then a surplus enjoyment that is constructed around the object (meat) that has nothing to do with its biological components or the pure physical pleasure of eating animal tissue. Here, the law is not the repression of desire, but also represents a “will tojouissance”.  This object-less cause of desire is its transcendental component. Here we can see that Lacan sees desire as always-already transcendental. When we desire, we accomplish an act only because it is mandated, and when we do this we accomplish a non-pathological act. This is because we remain in “the universal-symbolic domain, without any reference to an empirical-contingent object”. Sade completed Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by creating laws of unmasked desire, exposing the futility of keeping the domain of commandant and pleasure separated. In this, Sade is a satirist in the true sense of the word, a master comedian who exposed the true repercussions of Enlightenment philosophy. Furthermore, if we have learned anything from Freud it is the satirists we must read with the most gravity, since it is the fundamental maxims of psychoanalysis “to take more seriously what is presented to us as not entirely serious”.

The central maxim driving Sade’s work is this:

“I have the right to enjoy your body,” anyone can say to me, “and I will exercise this right without any limit to the capriciousness of the exactions I may wish to satiate with your body”

This is a transcendental moral law for two reasons: firstly, it seeks no rationalization and is justified in and of itself; secondly, it leaves no place for consideration, compassion, or circumstance and for this reason maintains its universality. The fact that it is stated by an unspecified other simply exposes the split of the subject; i.e. the fact that the superego is split in such a way that it might was well be a command from outside. Like my previous example of the vegan’s quandary, the fact that is enacted on an object (in this case another individual) irrelevant, which is something one senses Sade is aware of in the interchangeability and anonymity of victims in his works. Even the pleasure that following this law creates is “no more than a flagging accomplice”, the important part of the Sadean act is preserving the fantasy that accompanies and sustains it.

What I hope the reader has gathered from the following sections is the fact that we create internal moral imperatives that construct and consist of our desires, and that these imperatives diverge from those of the state. Now, a difficulty presents itself. We must stay true to these desires in order to be ethical subjects; however, how do we know what our true desires are and what desires are ingrained in us? The solution, for Lacan, lies in psychoanalysis.

Analysis is driven by the need to uncover the causes of our desires, or in simple terms, to discover why is it that we want what we want. In Lacan’s ‘Presentation on Transference”, the structure of Lacanian psychoanalysis is enumerated. He begins by stating that “what happens in an analysis is that the subject, strictly speaking, is constituted through a discourse to which the presence of the psychoanalyst, prior to any intervention he may make, brings the dimension of dialogue”. He continues by asserting that, “truth is the name of the ideal moment that this discourse introduces into reality…psychoanalysis is a dialectical experience, and this notion should prevail when raising the question of the nature of transference”. Drawing on his early statements in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, not only does the patient construct the imaginary form of the analyst (the Big Other or the pathological law of Kant) of subject onto the patient. This lending of subject-hood occurs prior to intervention, and is part and parcel with the symbolic agreement to begin therapy, rather than a result of therapy itself.

Lacan imparts an interesting aside later in this section to discuss a “new type of alienation of man” that “will come into being as much through the efforts of a collective belief as through the activity of selecting techniques with all the formative scope of ritual”. This means that the particular power invested into therapists, allows for a potential scope of damage they are capable of committing due to the patients reliance on them in the discursive process that constitutes therapy. They have the power of revealing our most secret desires to ourselves, “the core of our fantasy”, which “is unbearable to us”. Within the subject there are unwanted wants that if brought to the attention of the subject by another result in a breakdown in the constitution of the subject, the silencing of the subject, and with that silencing comes the emergence of the symptom. If the unconscious is the other’s language, than the symptom is our other language.

If a therapist exposes the patient too quickly to the real of their desires, they will not only deny them but they are also at risk for another more dangerous breakdown. Lacan contends that it is the therapist’s role to stand in place of the big other, but also to always evade the patient. The analyst participates by questioning and not by mandates. The ultimate goal of analysis is to show the patient that the big other does not exist, and allow them to discover their own authentic desire.

This is where the dangers of therapy lie. A therapist who simply commands the patient to act a certain way does not allow the patient to realize their own desires, but instead forces them to adopt those of the analyst. If an analyst simply pushes normative behavior the patient will adopt that behavior but remain alienated from their desire. Their behavior after therapy will be seen by them as a farce or drag and their psychological problems will be dangerously pushed farther under the surface to reemerge as symptoms more evocative and more damaging than those that landed them on the analyst couch.

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I want to take the opportunity afforded by this assignment to link three seemingly dispersed conceptual fields and practices: 1) the clinical apparatus of American psychology, with regard to its production and its economy of clinical (dis)orders, represented and itinerized in the DSM-III and DSM-IV (the implicit focus of Myers’ text is to outline the possible ways in which we can “read” these “manuals”); 2) the rapid production and proliferation of subjects and their affects to be tallied, described, and pathologized (or not): in short, nothing less than the Modern practice of constituting subjects as objects of possible knowledge (and management); and 3), the machinery and pathos of global(izing) liberal capitalism which, like an invisible horizon (and hence ultimately not another numerary item to be slotted amongst other countable phenomena) poetically calls the former two into being.

Hence this triad is to be given some topological consideration: there are historically material forces that condition the possibility of naming and disseminating as psychology a series of competing theories, ideas and perspectives apropos human behavior, as so beautifully exemplified by Myers’ text. My desire is to bring those historically material forces to bear on Myers’ chosen method. This will not be done through the impossible task of naming a million other social-historical-economic-anthropological contexts that would some how in their totality would explain the existence of the discipline of psychology. Rather, I will speak briefly about that enigmatic sparkling system – Capitalism – and its relation to a certain segment of society that we call the mad. Such a rough and quick outline would ideally have the advantage of revealing the diagnostic and theoretical practices of contemporary American psychology as powerful iterations of a certain epistemic technology that increasingly characterizes Western thought since the 17th and 18th centuries.

(Specifically, what is characteristic of Western thought of the past several hundred years is not simply that we have acquired increasingly vast and intimate knowledge(s) of ourselves (our “normal” and “abnormal” functioning, our dreams, desires, aspirations and capabilities), knowledge that marches hand-in-hand with rapidly advancing technological sophistication; on the contrary, what I am referencing is the fact that knowledge itself, along with its many apparatuses and procedures – e.g. what counts as knowledge, mechanisms and rituals for arriving at knowledge, what objects are worthy of knowledge: in short, all that indexes the legitimacy and the veracity of knowledge in relation to those pursuing it, pursuits that themselves take on a pre-prescribed arc – came to be situated around a new object: the subject, or the self. Especially the self that is mad).

I have of course been channeling Michel Foucault. Rather than use Foucault’s name as a prefabricated marker which signals some link between knowledge, power, and the subject, I want to give a concentrated focus to a short lecture he delivered in 1970, titled “Madness and Society.” It is a remarkably straightforward text, very schematic in its presentation and conclusions. First, he begins by noting that while the typical method in Western discursive history is to focus on positive, observable phenomena, he, following Levi-Strauss, considers that it is “a matter not of knowing what is affirmed and valorized in a society or a system of thought but what is rejected and excluded (Foucault, “Madness and Society” in Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology, 335).” The possibility of such a method and vision based on exclusion, when deployed by the preeminent philosopher of the twentieth century, should cast a minimum of suspicion on Myers’ facile remarks where he states that “Freud’s view of the unconscious–a reservoir of repressed and mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories–has not survived empirical scrutiny” (Myers, 469). As if we could just shutter the blinds of Father Freud’s “view” like that!

(The fact of this method of Foucault’s reveals – if only this! – Myers’ assertion to be political in its nature: its utterance is an attempt to circumscribe the scope and legitimacy of psychology as always excluding any fidelity to a Freudian discourse of the unconscious. There are two objections to be raised here (against me): first, that Foucault is not specifically referring to the unconscious in the above passage; and second, that the invocation of one thinker’s name and method is not proof enough that Myers is attempting to pass off highly partisan thought as truth (truth its “accepted doxa” form, anyway). The first objection is dismissed easily enough, since the unconscious is precisely that which one never sees, measures or quantifies in its own terms: whenever we catch a glimpse of it or a sound of it, it is already not there anymore, in its place of origin, but rather a spectral and haunting organ without a body whose presence is only detectable as a force acting from afar –within, above, behind – bending the phenomenal around its empty arc. Therefore, the unconscious cannot be understood in any naïve sense as the reservoir of “repressed” and “traumatic” content: in important ways, its negative yet determinative space, this very empty container of space (absent any explicit content) is itself the “trauma” to be avoided! In short, we can take Foucault’s interest in the excluded in all its kinetic weight: it takes some effort to keep something out, some knowledge, utterance, practice or morality, and, for those with a penetrating vision, this effort leaves its trace. As for the second objection, it contains my “point”: I am quite content to throw my weight in with Foucault, and to risk being a “partisan” of that truth).

But what I am immediately concerned with is Foucault’s point of departure that takes off around a single instructive fact: “The mad have always been excluded.”

I am not concerned with the mad. I am interested in the mechanisms of exclusion that bring the mad into being as an interrogated subject. Still, what is the madman (in an ontological, not clinical sense)? “Freud said correctly that the madman (he was talking mainly about neurotics) was a person who could neither work nor love” (Foucault, 337). These incapacities (these ghastly figures without love- or labor-power) provoked no systemic reaction for centuries, in Europe or elsewhere. The mad may be forbidden from entering various socio-cultural spheres of activity, but this exclusion is not of a pathologic or medical nature:

In the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance madmen were permitted to exist in the midst of society. What is called the ‘village idiot’ did not get married, did not participate in games, and he was fed and supported by others. He would roam from town to town… (ibid, 341)

However, “in the seventeenth century European society became intolerant toward them. The cause of this,” Foucault bluntly states, “is that industrial society began to form.” “Capitalist industrial society could not tolerate the existence of groups of vagabonds” (ibid, 341).

The next movement is the crucial one:

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, [when] the speed of industrial development accelerated, and, in accordance with the first principle of capitalism, the hordes of unemployed proletarians were regarded as a reserve army of labor power. For that reason, those who did not work but were able to work were let out of the establishments (my italics, ibid, 341).

Thus what began as the formation of institutions essentially of containment at the beginning of industrio-agricultural capitalism, whose primary function was to police subjects inhabiting territorial margins (i.e. vagabonds), suddenly morphed into institutions of a medical or, more specifically, psychiatric nature. And these institutions exercised control no longer over the lazy or unwilling (those types being released back into society to form the critical structural role in capitalism of the reserve army of labor power), but over the unable.

What had previously been a confinement institution became a psychiatric hospital, a treatment organization. In the years that followed, hospitals were set in place: (1) to confine those who were unable to work for physical reasons; (2) to confine those who could not work for nonphysical reasons. In this way, mental disorders had become the object of medicine and a social category called ‘psychiatry’ was born (ibid, 342).

This presents a history of psychology’s origins from the “perspectives” of economy, power and labor (questions that of course interlap with an ethics and an aesthetics, of which there is here not the space to say anything). In light of the textbook’s history, it is absolutely critical to underscore such conditions of possibility of a psychic science (including the unconscious) to begin with.

Here the point is relatively simple: the endless presentation of updated (or out-of-fashion, as it were) perspectives on any number of theories with reference to any number of behaviors or phenomena outlined in Myers’ text all share a fundamental hermeneutic orientation and strategy. Each ranks, organizes, divides (and sub-divides) a little territory of the subject (it’s principle object of knowledge); each makes an appeal to Truth, usually along the lines of empirical verability and predictive capacity; and each accords certain features to its findings, usually of a moral flavor, by proclaiming the relative “sociability” or “effectiveness” of a behavior, trait, region of the brain, social climate, etc. The result is a calculus along the lines of what Michel Foucault has called the “technologies of domination and the self,” in which a scientific knowledge operates on and manages bodies precisely by taking them as objects to be known. In so doing, a potential space of surveillance, modification, restriction, amelioration and discipline arises on the movements, bodies and brains of the subject.

A first emphasis of mine is that a historical component – other than the series of ideas and theories outlined by Myers – is at stake here. Were one to only read Myers’ text, the discipline of psychology would appear to be the history of a vacuous debate, consisting of sediments of ideas successively contesting discredited predecessors. This mode of engagement, completely without rigor or integrity, is what allows a chapter’s concluding note to consist of a simple scorecard: “In science, Charles Darwin’s legacy lives while Freud’s is waning (Bornstein, 2001). In the popular culture, Freud’s legacy lives on” (Myers, 468). Little wonder, then, that the labor of the academic is so often reduced to a keeping track of the latest theoretical consensus, of organizing the intellectual checking accounts, of knowing who is or is not in “currency within academia,” as an author approvingly quoted by Myers says.

Where are my allegiances, then? (If nothing else in this paper, I hope to have shown in some way that the very effort to instantiate a neutral, working-towards-consensus frame in a scientific or theoretical field is always-already ideology at its purest: it de facto marginalizes rigorous inquiry that does not cowtail to its demarcated frame. Moreover, the extent to which such a “frame” is invisible is the extent to which its constitutive ideology is strongest). I am a Lacanian.

It should be noted that the discipline and practice of psychoanalysis is highly sectarian. However, a verifiable empirical claim is also worth noting here: Lacanians constitute the largest international group of psychoanalysts. Their practice is based on the rigorous return to Freud as it manifests in the writing of Jacques Lacan. While the writing of Lacan (and often “Lacanians”) is incredibly challenging, I would like to conclude with a brief note pertinent to the Myers textbook. What would a Lacanian diagnostic approach even look like?

Instead of the infinite amount of smallest-possible-remainder diagnoses, characters, behaviors, and disorders, a Lacanian defines in individual in terms of three possible categories: neurosis, psychosis, and perversion. Each of these terms is a capturing of how a subject relates to (and, more complicatedly, is “ejected from” reality).

Such structural diagnostics

“allow the practitioner to go beyond weighing the relative importance of certain clinical characteristics, comparing them with lists of features in manuals such as the DSM-IV, and to focus instead on a defining mechanism—that is, a single determinant characteristic. For, as Freud was wont to say, repression is the cause of neurosis. In other words, repression is not simply associated with neurosis; it is constitutive of neurosis” (Fink, Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique, 77).

I would only end with a final, ontological note, since what is dearest to me is a theory of the subject which transcends weak, merely “descriptive” (reactionary) thought. “People referred to in common parlance as ‘normal’ do not have some special structure of their own; they are generally neurotic, clinically speaking” (ibid, 77). Such an ontological theory of the subject—taking full account of its psychic histories and structures, while always working to understand what that taking account of means—would perhaps be one tentative step towards not another “human, all too human” discourse and practice.

The point which we frequently make, namely, that the culturization of political issues marches hand in hand with the “naturalization” of capitalism is here captured in surprisingly “clean” terms. Amongst the many significant amendments the board has recommended that “capitalism” be replaced by the term “free market.” Other such truly strange and startling decisions include dropping the radical Thomas Jefferson from the list of the U.S.’s “intellectual founders.”

This is important to document. It is also a good example of a case where, since the extreme right has power, one cannot afford to not present a strong show of solidarity with Liberals who would resist such potentially damaging propaganda.

This dialogue presents the extremely brutal encounter between Socrates and Callicles. This encounter creates a philosophical situation, which, moreover, is set out in an entirely theatrical fashion. Why? Because the thought of Socrates and that of Callicles share no common measure, they are totally foreign to one another. The discussion between Callicles and Socrates is written by Plato so as to make us understand what it means for there to be two different kinds of thought which, like the diagonal and the side of a square, remain incommensurable. This discussion amounts to a relation between two terms devoid of any relation. Callicles argues that might is right, that the happy man is a tyrant – the one who prevails over others through cunning and violence. Socrates on the contrary maintains that the true man, who is the same as the happy man, is the Just, in the philosophical sense of the term. Between justice as violence and justice as thought there is no simple opposition, of the kind that could be dealt with by means of arguments covered by a common norm. There is a lack of any real relation. Therefore the discussion is not a discussion; it is a confrontation.

And what becomes clear to any reader of the text is not that one interlocutor will convince theother, but that there will be a victor and a vanquished. This is after all what explains why Socrates’ methods in third dialogue are hardly fairer than those of Callicles. Wanting the ends means wanting the means, and it is a matter of winning, especially of winning in the eyes of the young men who witness the scene. In the end, Callicles is defeated. He doesn’t acknowledge defeat, but shuts up and remains in his corner. Note that he is the vanquished in a dialogue staged by Plato. This is probably one of the rare occurrences when someone like Callicles is the vanquished. Such are the joys of the theatre.

Faced with this situation, what is philosophy? The sole task of philosophy is to show that we must choose. We must choose between these two types of thought. We must decide whether we want to be on the side of Socrates or on the side of Callicles. In this example, philosophy confronts thinking as choice, thinking as decision.

This is where the feminist allegations against Freud begin. Freud became convinced that Dora was secretly pleased by his acts, and while acting as babysitter to Herr K’s children displaced her affection for the older man onto his kinder. Another important detail about Dora’s father was the diminishment of his sexual faculties. Freud assumes that Dora made the assumption that her father was being orally stimulated by Frau K (Dora “expressed the violent call of the oral erotic drive when Dora was left alone with Frau K there being no need for him to assume she had seen her father receiving fellatio when everyone knows that cunnilingus is the artifice most commonly adopted by rich men when their powers begin to fail them”). This was the source of her oral symptoms (the site of sexual gratification for the woman was her throat- that’s right Miss Lovelace you were seventy years too late). The story closes with female sexual submission as being interchangeable with the feminine pleasure principle, and Freud as Dora’s therapeutic baby-sitter. Freud concludes that Dora should open up about her erotically charged feelings for her father and shift them onto Herr K as a safe substitute.

As an aside, Haneke’s White Ribbon makes way more sense after reading this case study.

Lacan opens up by stating that “what happens in an analysis is that the subject, strictly speaking, is constituted through a discourse to which the presence of the psychoanalyst, prior to any intervention he may make, brings the dimension of dialogue”. He continues by stating that “truth is the name of the ideal moment that this discourse introduces into reality…psychoanalysis is a dialectical experience, and this notion should prevail when raising the question of the nature of transference”. Drawing on his early statements in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, not only does the patient construct the imaginary form of the analyst (one can see a discussion of the Big Other coming up here), but the analyst too imparts the status of subject onto the patient. This lending of subject-hood occurs prior to intervention, is somehow part and parcel with the symbolic agreement to begin therapy, rather than a result of therapy itself. Lacan imparts an interesting aside later in this section to discuss a “new type of alienation of man” that “will come into being as much through the efforts of a collective belief as through the activity of selecting techniques with all the formative scope of ritual”. This part is both extremely interesting, and almost entirely unintelligible. What I believe he means is that the particular power invested into therapists, allows for a potential scope of damage they are capable of committing due to the patients reliance on them in the discursive process that constitutes therapy.

Lacan states that he chose the case of Dora to focus on transference because it represented “the first case in which Freud recognized that the analyst plays a part”. Then Lacan does something wonderful. He clearly organizes his seminar in a series of dialectical reversals. I will replicate this structure for you, here.

First Development: Dora tests Freud to see if he is as hypocritical as her father. She then reveals that she feels that by her father initiating an affair with Herr K’s wife he is in effect giving her up to Herr K. Dora then tells Freud “All of this is factual, being based on reality and not on my own will. What’s to be done about it”.

A first dialectical reversal:

Freud says, “Look at your own involvement,” he tells her, “in this mess you complain of”. Lacan compares this Hegel’s critique of the beautiful soul. Here someone might accuse Lacan of the same misogyny that is evident in Freud.  However, I believe he should be analyzed more tolerantly. Lacan even distances himself from Freud’s allegations of Dora’s love for Herr K, implicating Freud’s homosexual counter transference (!).  He is not stating that the actions that occurred were her fault. He is stating that she got some measure of enjoyment from it, but that is not stating that what Herr K did was ethical. Instead, he gave her what she really wanted and in that he performed an unethical act.  For Dora, as for all women, “the problem of her condition is fundamentally that of accepting herself as a man’s object of desire”. What he is saying is that there was an aspect of her character that repressed the information from her father. This silence does not indicate acquiescence, nor does it simply indicate shame. She was in some way acting to preserve her father’s affair and Herr K’s reputation until a mysterious instigating moment when she finally reported what had happened, was then reprimanded by her father for it, and subsequently begun to develop symptoms.

Zizek states that Freud’s view on rape is that, “it has such a traumatic impact not simply because it is a case of brutal external violence, but also because it touches on something disavowed in the victim”. He quotes Freud as stating “if what the subject longs for most intensely in their phantasies is presented to them in reality they none the less flea from it”. This is because “the core of our fantasy is unbearable to us”. Within the subject there are unwanted wants that if brought to the attention of the subject by another result in a breakdown in the constitution of the subject, the silencing of the subject, and with that silencing comes the emergence of the symptom. If the unconscious is the other’s language, than the symptom is our other language. Not to perform a rhetorical trick that minimizes the destruction wreaked by sexual abuse, but the therapist can learn something from this that extends beyond the travails of rape victims to those of other patients. If a therapist exposes the patient too quickly to the real of their desires, they will not only deny them but they are also at risk for another more dangerous breakdown. Lacan contends that it is the therapist’s role to stand in place of the big other, but also to always evade the patient. The analyst participates by questioning and not by mandates. The ultimate goal of analysis is to show the patient that the big other does not exist, and allow them to discover their own authentic desire removed from the super-ego command. This is where the dangers of therapy lie. A therapist who simply commands the patient to act a certain way does not allow the patient to realize their own desires, but instead adopt those of the analyst. If an analyst simply pushes normative behavior the patient will adopt that behavior but remain alienated from their desire. Their behavior after therapy will be seen by them as a farce or drag and their psychological problems will be dangerously pushed farther under the surface to reemerge as symptoms more evocative and more damaging than those that landed them on the analyst couch.

That is why the hysteric is a perfect patient. The hysteric knows that the subject is split, that their desires are another’s, their rapid vacillation between opposing points of a view show desire at its starkest, their fundamental alienation from power and their inability to truly embody their beliefs is a specific condition that emulates the human one. Hysteria is a woman’s disease, but it is also a feminine position that cuts through the posturing of masculine self-assurance. We are all castrated, and it is the woman who knows it. Women see themselves only as reflected in the eyes of the other. It is the greatest joke of psychology that men do as well yet, for the most part remain ignorant of it. I think, for me at least, that is why the Mona Lisa smiles.

A Second Development of Truth:

Dora’s silence and complicity reveals her own work in perpetuating the affair between her and Herr K. This reveals the fact that “she is caught up in a subtle circulation of precious gifts which serves to make up for a deficiency in sexual services”. Dora is attracted to her father and in some way once to preserve his relationship with the K family (especially Frau K). She doesn’t see his impotence, as a detriment; instead she associates it with his wealth.  Dora turns against her father’s affair suddenly. (remember that in the beginning she liked Frau K). Then Freud,

Second Dialectical Reversal

Freud shows that she’s jealous because she is attracted to her father.

A Third Development of Truth

Dora associates femininity with a passive oral drive and adopts symptoms mimicking this. Lacan concludes by stating that the nexus of treatment is Dora’s identification with Frau K and her conception of femininity, rather than Freud’s emphasis on her attraction to Herr K.

Lacan concludes with the thesis that “transference is nothing real in the subject if not the appearance, at a moment of stagnation in the analytic dialectic, of the permanent modes according to which she constitutes her objects”. Transference is precisely the resistance of the psychoanalytic process that arises from the disparity of the subject’s constitution of the object from that of the therapist’s.  The only analytic neutrality one can hope for is derived from “the position of the pure dialectician, who, knowing that all that is real is rational knows that all that exists including the evil against which he struggles, is and shall always be equivalent to the level of its particularity, and that the subject only progress through the integration he arrive at of his position into the universal: technically speaking, through the projection of his past into a discourse in the process of becoming”.

Something of incredible importance happened relatively recently; Barack Obama gave his Noble Peace Prize acceptance speech. This event desperately necessitates critical elaboration but all the analysis that I have stumbled upon completely misses the mark. It is of unequivocal importance that we don’t get duped into solidarity with an opposition that decries the hypocrisy of giving a “War President” this most prestigious peace award. This reading not only obfuscates the significance of the event but participates in what is truly insidious about it. The problem lies not in the disparity between the image of a Nobel peace prize winner and the reality of Obama’s administration. What unsettles me is that the truth of Obama’s presidency can encapsulate that image because a fundamental realignment of our ethical universe has already set in. This event is a signifier for a shift in the liberal-democratic symbolic order.

Transcendental Materialism, Historical Materialism and Dialectical Materialism

In order to interrogate the nuances of this shift, and how it was accomplished, we first need to deploy a transcendental materialist analysis. I think Brendan nicely summarized transcendental materialism as follows:

Contrary to a [dialectical] materialism that understands the reality we have now as the necessary outcome of previous contradictions, we will rather begin to conceive the present situation as the failure to realize other possibilities; at the core of this position is the thesis that this failure continues to mark, indeed to haunt, our present, and that it is up to us to re-actualize, not the material failures of past movements, but their own radical core which exceeds and surpasses them.

What needs to be elaborated is transcendental materialism’s relation to Marxist Science and why it offers a better conceptual apparatus to think through the problems of Political Economy then dialectical materialism. Despite dialectical materialism, as a fully formed conceptual apparatus, not found in the work of Marx, but in Bolshevism, its deficiency is inscribed into the core of Marxism: historical materialism. To be absolutely clear on this point, Marxism absolutely necessitates one to operate with a materialist conception of history. Under close scrutiny, however, historical materialism discloses itself as not materialist enough.

In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific Engels summarized that historical materialism:

designates that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the change in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggle of these classes against one another.

There is nothing objectionable about this statement as it stands. In fact, its implicit empirical theses are central to an understanding of political economy, two of which are 1) The rise and fall of different relations of  production are strictly correlative to whether said relations facilitate or encumber the productive capacity of the mode of production 2) In every relation of production there is a  determinate mode of production “which assigns ranks and influence to all others” (Marx, Gundrisse). However, historical materialism is situated within what they (mis)perceived as the reversal of Hegelian dialectics.  In Capital Marx writes:

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”

In Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy Engels Writes:

The dialectic of Hegel was placed upon its head; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed on its feet.

From these two statements the conclusions to be drawn is that Marx and Engels are in fact the firsts vulgar Marxist. Lenin, being a very good Marxist, is no exception and also fails to think through the insufficiency of a materialist conception of history predicated on a (false) reversal from the Idea, which Marx importantly identifies with “the life-process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking,” to Materialism.

However, as Zizek explains, not all failures are created equal. Lenin’s failure to re-actualize Hegelian philosophy in his theory of dialectical movement sheds light on Marx’s so-called problematique break with German Idealism.

In his Notebooks, Lenin is struggling with the same problem as Adorno in his “negative dialectics”: how to combine Hegel’s legacy of the critique of every immediacy, of the subjective mediation of all given objectivity, with the minimum of materialism that Adorno calls the “predominance of the objective” (this is the reason why Lenin still clings to the “theory of reflection” according to which the human thought mirrors objective reality).

The problem with this theory of reflection, which is present in Marx himself (“With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”)  is that it betrays idealist presuppositions. Namely, it posits mind as external and independent of the objective reality that it reflects. The radical materialist stance is:

insisting on the absolute INHERENCE of the external obstacle which prevents thought from attaining full identity with itself… partiality (distortion) of the “subjective reflection” occurs precisely because the subject is INCLUDED in the process it reflects.

The subjects very inclusion in objective conditions preclude the “real” material world from coming to full presence. Otherwise we would have to postulate an external positive, immaterial, and omnipresent gaze that see’s the totality of the material world. If we reject this postulation, which a materialist must, it is clear then that the criticism usually leveled at Hegel philosophy, that of a pan-logic monstrosity, is actually applicable to Marx.

This pan-logicism makes itself apparent when Engel speaks of the dialectical method as the  ”communist world outlook fought for by Marx and myself.” A world outlook! This is Marxism at its most vulgar. In one fell swoop Engels reduced Marxism from Science to both some asinine philosophy, philosophy in its most colloquial understanding as the way an individual sees the world, and base metaphysics. Heidegger makes clear that modern metaphysics is defined as such by this notion of the world picture.

“We get the picture’ concerning something does not  mean only that what is, is set before us, is represented to us, in general, but that what is stand before–in all that belong to it and all that stands together –as a system.”To get the picture” throbs with being acquainted with something, with being equipped and prepared for it.. What is in its entirety, is now taken is such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extend that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. Whatever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirely. The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter. (italics added)

It is this very acquaintance with the world that a materialist must uncompromisingly reject. Unlike the Marxist vision presented by Engels, and implicit in Marx, materialism is not, and should not be used, as a philosophical meta-language. It is neither a solution nor the medium in which a solution can be posed. It is a form of vision- the lens through which we see the world and not the world viewed-  that is accorded to a particular form of historical subjectivity which is constituted at the interstices of the de-territorializing wave of capitalism. As such, it reflects that logic of de-territorialization. It violently poses a hermeneutic question in order to unbind, to unground meaning. As such, it can never pose that the world IS anything as it de-terriorializing property of this vision makes it clear that the world is becoming.

Thus, Marxism is in desperate need of a theory of the subject in order to assert a materialist conception of history which preserves the core theses of historical materialism but resists it idealistic trappings. Despite what it may seem at first this does not necessarily entail a rejection of Althusser’s work. Althusser defined the Marxist conception of history as:

a process without a Subject or a Goal where the given circumstances in which ‘men’ act as subjects under the determination of social relations are the product of class struggles. History therefore does not have a Subject, in the philosophical sense of the term, but a motor : that very class struggle

This definition can be revised as history is a process with a subject without substance because a subject without substance is a rejection of Subject, and its philosophical/metaphysical underpinnings.

Alexander Ulyanov, was V.I. Lenin’s older brother. Like his brother he was a revolutionary committed to the overthrow of the Russian autocracy. Unlike his brother, who went on to head the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (later the Communist Party), “Sasha” became a part of the “The Terrorist Faction of the People’s Will,” a small group who conspired unsuccessfully to assassinate then Tsar Alexander the III. Named after the “People’s Will” who had successfully assassinated the Tsar’s father Alexander II on March 1, 1881. “The Second March 1” group (as they were known) were amateurish to such a degree that police surveillance preempted their efforts, the group was rounded up as they prepared to carry out the assassination. Five of the conspirators were later hanged for the attempt. Alexander Ulyalnov, despite the imploring to the Tsar on the part of his mother, was one of those. I recently sat down with Professor Pomper in a cafe in Greenwich Village to talk about his new book.

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