LP+Week+3

Such a reversal engenders, of course, a nostalgic yearning for the "natural" state in which things were only what they were, in which we perceived them straightforwardly, in which our gaze had not yet been distorted by the anamorphotic spot. Far from announcing a kind of "pathological fissure," however, the frontier separating the two ''substances," separating the thing that appears clearly in an objective view from the "substance of enjoyment" that can be perceived clearly only by "looking awry," is precisely what prevents us from sliding into psychosis. Such is the effect of the symbolic order on the gaze. The emergence of language opens up a hole in reality, and this hole shifts the axis of our gaze. Language redoubles "reality" into itself and the void of the Thing that can be filled out only by an anamorphotic gaze from aside.

The reader well-schooled in contemporary theory is likely to view the "gaze" and the "voice" as primary targets of the Derridean effort of deconstruction: what is the gaze if not theoria grasping the "thing itself" in the presence of its form or in the form of its presence; what is voice if not the medium of pure ''auto-affection" enabling the presence to-itself of the speaking subject? The aim of "deconstruction" is precisely to demonstrate how the gaze is always already determined by the "infrastructural" network, which delimits what can be seen from what remains unseen and thus necessarily escapes capture by the gaze, i.e., by the margin or frame, which cannot be accounted for by an "autoreflexive" reappropriation. Correspondingly, deconstruction demonstrates the way the self-presence of the voice is always already split/deferred by the trace of writing. Here, however, we must note the radical incommensurability between poststructuralist deconstruction and Lacan, who describes the function of the gaze and voice in an almost exactly opposite way. For Lacan, these objects are not on the side of the subject but on the side of the object. The gaze marks the point in the object (in the picture) from which the subject viewing it is already gazed at, i.e., it is the object that is gazing at me. Far from assuring the self-presence of the subject and his vision, the gaze functions thus as a stain, a spot in the picture disturbing its transparent visibility and introducing an irreducible split in my relation to the picture: I can never see the picture at the point from which it is gazing at me, i.e., the eye and the gaze are constitutively asymmetrical. The gaze as object is a stain preventing me from looking at the picture from a safe, "objective" distance, from enframing it as something that is at my grasping view's disposal.

Herein consists, also, the fundamental lesson of Lacan: while it is true that any object can occupy the empty place of the Thing, it can do so only by means of the illusion that it was always already there, i.e., that it was not placed there by us but found there as an "answer of the real." Although any object can function as the object-cause of desire—insofar as the power of fascination it exerts is not its immediate property but results from the place it occupies in the structure—we must, by structural necessity, fall prey to the illusion that the power of fascination belongs to the object as such.

It is almost superfluous to add that Lacanian theory compels us to an opposite conclusion, to a radical "anthropocentric" or, more precisely, symbolocentric version: our knowledge of the universe, the way we symbolize the real, is ultimately always bound, determined by the paradoxes proper to language as such; the split into "masculine" and "feminine," i.e., the impossibility of a "neutral" language not marked by this difference, imposes itself because symbolization as such is by definition structured around a certain central impossibility, a deadlock that is nothing but a structuring of this impossibility. Not even the purest subatomic physics can escape this fundamental impasse of symbolization.

We can see, now, why it is absolutely misleading to characterize the passage from word presentations (Wort-Vorstellungen) to thing presentations (Sacb-Vorstellungen)—so-called "considerations of representability" at work in a dream—as a kind of "regression" from language to prelanguage representations. In a dream, ''things" themselves are already "structured like a language," their disposition is regulated by the signifying chain for which they stand. The signified of this signifying chain, obtained by means of a retranslation of "things" into "words," is the "dream-thought."

With this "subjective destitution," his very relation to truth undergoes a radical change: in hysteria (and obsessional neurosis, its "dialect") we always partake in the dialectical movement of truth, which is why the acting out at the climax of the hysterical crisis remains throughout determined by the coordinates of truth, whereas the passage à l'acte, so to speak, suspends the dimension of truth. Insofar as truth has the structure of a (symbolic) fiction, truth and the real of enjoyment are incompatible.

It is only with Lacan that the "postmodernist" break occurs, insofar as he thematizes a certain real, traumatic kernel whose status remains deeply ambiguous: the real resists symbolization, but it is at the same time its own retroactive product. In this sense we could even say that deconstructionists are basically still "structuralists" and that the only "poststructuralist" is Lacan, who affirms enjoyment as "the real Thing," the central impossibility around which every signifying network is structured.

Such a postmodernist procedure seems to us much more subversive than the usual modernist one, because the latter, by not showing the Thing, leaves open the possibility of grasping the central emptiness under the perspective of an "absent God." The lesson of modernism is that the structure, the intersubjective machine, works as well if the Thing is lacking, if the machine revolves around an emptiness; the postmodernist reversal shows the Thing itself as the incarnated, materialized emptiness. This is accomplished by showing the terrifying object directly and then by revealing its frightening effect to be simply the effect of its place in the structure. The terrifying object is an everyday object that has started to function, by chance, as that which fills in the hole in the Other (the symbolic order).

The respective domains of fantasy and symbolic law are radically incommensurable. That is to say, it is in the very nature of fantasy to resist universalization: fantasy is the absolutely particular way every one of us structures his/her "impossible" relation to the traumatic Thing. It is the way every one of us, by means of an imaginary, scenario, dissolves and/or conceals the fundamental impasse of the inconsistent big Other, the symbolic order.

The subject is perhaps nothing but a name for this circular movement, for this distance toward the Thing which is "too hot" to be approached closely. It is because of this Thing that the subject resists universalization, that it cannot be reduced to a place—even if it is an empty place—in the symbolic order. It is because of this Thing that at a certain point, love for the neighbor necessarily turns into destructive hatred, in accordance with the Lacanian motto I love you, but there is in you something more than you, objet petit a, which is why I mutilate you.

In other words, the study of structure – especially in the context of linguistics – indispensible, according to Lacan, in any attempt to grasp the workings of the unconscious, and therefore to comprehend the discipline of psychoanalysis. So, without denying the difficulty of following Lacan’s commentary, without going beyond accusation that Lacan’s mathematics are irrelevant or arbitrary with respect to psychoanalysis cannot but ring hollow. (702)

The unconscious, in other words, is not simply that which must be read but also, and perhaps primarily, that which reads. (21-22)

Unconscious desire proceeds by interpretation; interpretation proceeds by unconscious desire. The unconscious is a reader. The reader is therefore, on some level, always an analysand – an analysand who “knows what he means” but whose interpretation can be given another reading than what it means. This is what analytic discourse is all about. (22)

It is a return to Freud untranslated as a symptom of the essential untranslatability of his subject matter. Freud himself, indeed, often compared the conscious to a foreign language and defined repression as a constitutive “failure of translation.” It is thus no coincidence that Lacan’s return to Freud is dramatized as a literal, concrete return to a foreign language, to something that defies translation: it is a return whose function, paradoxically, is not so much to render Freud familiar as to renew contact with his strangeness: a return to a Freud constitutively foreign – even to himself; (54)

“intersubjective play in which truth enters in the real.” (57)