Universal Truth III

Even when it is not only a matter of ontic experience, but of ontological understanding, the interpretation of being initially orients itself toward the being of innerworldly beings. Here the being of things initially at hand is passed over and beings are first conceived as a context of things (res) objectively present. Being acquires the meaning of reality. Substantiality becomes the basic of characteristic of being…. like other beings, Da-sein is also objectively present as real. (Heidegger, Being and Time I.vi 43)

At the backend of human existence, there is always the haunting spirit of our own desire. Psychoanalysis tells us about desire – originated from primitive lack which is our memory of primitive love toward parental unity.  What is it? The parental unity is what exists before we are (being). The lack is what haunting us since the day we acquire the partial characteristic of being – materiality of being, the body, the sense, the Real. The haunting spirit constitutes our primitive fear; its basic is our drive to transpass the symbolic borderline and gain access to the unspeakable jouissance to the Real. In the Realm of the Real, there is nothing being “objectively presented” as the lack, desire, love and fear are the polemics posed to itself and have never been answered except we see our own death face to face.  That is the impossibility of being as object, for object is not a priori knowledge and it is an impossible agent.  For an object can never be an object without already being assigned the position of the Subject as a subject. But the argument is who authorizes the Subject as a subject while the position of being as being has to be worked through the background of the lack as the Real.  If at the end of our human existence, we see only lack and emptiness, what is the value of being if put into the framework of a universal truth.

Is philosophy the theoretical framework to access the Universal truth? Or rather is psychoanalysis the framework for the possible Universal truth?

Psychoanalysis has never tried to answer the philosophical question of being. Its knowledge about being is more from its interest in subjectivity as reflected in structure of paternality. There is no psychoanalytic truth without the structure of a family. The truth in psychoanalysis, if there is any, is a form of truth which we can achieve through dialectics between the love and loss in relation to parents.  But is this paternality a form of Universal truth? The love and loss in psychoanalysis create the first cause (desire) which formulates the structure of the Universe. Desire is the unfulfilled want for perfection. Perfection have never been a truth in psychoanalysis although it is what the Subject has been looking after. It is the impossibility in psychoanalysis, the zero degree in the subject’s relationship with the external world. But there is no dimension in psychoanalysis which could cover the position of achieving perfection.

Perfection is only a philosophical realm which at least logically we can have the conceptual capacity to describe it in philosophical understanding. It could be infinity in mathematics or it could be holistic experience in religion. Perfection is ultimate in philosophy but it is impossible in psychoanalysis.

However, philosophical understanding about perfection has never satisfied us as it have not fulfilled the logics of the lack. Desire has never been a philosophical problem, but it has created the neccessary constituent for our knowledge about perfection. Perfection comes out of desire, but desire has never been well explaint or simply it has denied its own validity.

Filed under: Lacan

Paris Lacan Seminar

WHEN THE CURE STOPS…

PARIS ENGLISH SEMINAR 2009

The Paris English Seminar is an activity of the Institute of the Freudian Field held under the aegis of Paris 8 University ( Psychoanalysis department) and with the support of the New Lacanian School.

THIS YEAR’S PARIS ENGLISH SEMINAR WILL TAKE PLACE ON MAY 11TH AND MAY12TH, JUST AFTER THE NLS CONGRESS ON LACANIAN INTERPRETATION.
SINCE THE CONGRESS IS GOING TO BE FULLY TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH, ENGLISH SPEAKING COLLEAGUES MIGHT WANT TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS OPPORTUNITY TO REGISTER FOR BOTH EVENTS
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THE PES WILL BE HELD IN ENGLISH ONLY

REGISTRATION AND INFORMATION
VENUE: 31, rue de Navarin Paris IXè

SCHEDULE: Monday May 11: Morning session: 9AM-12.30 PM
Afternoon session: 2.30 PM-5.45PM
Evening session: 8.30 PM-10.30 PM
Tuesday May 12: Morning session: 9AM-12-30 PM
Afternoon session: 2.30 PM-5.45 PM
Evening: Farewell party from 8.30

REGISTRATION: You will find attached a registration form to be filled in and sent by email to Natalie Wulfing : nwulfing@blueyonder.co.uk
Payment can only be accepted in cash (on the premises) or by cheque (in the post to NW – address is on the form)
FEES: US $ 100 / student rate: $ 70

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WHEN THE CURE STOPS…
A cure has a beginning, and, with a few exceptions, it does not last for all of the analysand’s life. A variety of stops and ways out can be elicited and differentiated.
When the cure is part of the training of the analyst it is expected to last until its “logical end”: what Lacan called the “pass” between the analysand and the analyst.
Sometimes —and should we say often— patients leave their analysis before reaching this stopping point and, at times, unexpectedly.
During the PES we will try to qualify the different ways a patient might put a stop to his cure: acting-out? act? error of the analyst in the direction of the treatment? satisfaction after a therapeutic result?
In the book “Rapid therapeutic effects in psychoanalysis”, Jacques-Alain Miller invited his colleagues to consider an analysis from the vantage point of a theory of cycles. The theme of this year’s PES concerns issues that have not been treated systematically so far within the Lacanian orientation.
Jacques-Alain Miller and Eric Laurent have accepted to bring a personal contribution to the Seminar.

Filed under: Lacan , Lacan Paris Seminar

Transference (love or others)

Transference has been regarded as an important yet less accessible issue to analysts.  Josef Breuer,  Freud’s earliest collaborator, gave up his discovery in psychoanalysis, just because he could not handle the “management of transference” which Freud regarded as “ the only serious difficulties” of psychoanalysis. (Freud SE 12, 159)

As an analyst, it seems that this is a reliable signal that is between the client and us analyst.  Why does the client keep complaining about an analyst’s wording that she thinks is not an appropriate description about her status?  Why does she keep sending email to us at night and the emotion expressed on the email can never be reproduced during the session? Why the client does not want to terminate a session even though she can not show any progress but keep repeating the same pattern (love or hate) in relations with the analyst.

Lacan says, analysis starts with transference. What he says is perfectly true and is helpful to remind the analyst about the momentum of the clinical session. This short article is intended to investigate the work of transference as symbolic politics in clinical relation which mirrors the scene of internal (imaginary) work of desire that analyst shall follow as a force to open up the unconscious.

Some analysts after Freud have tried to analyse transference as what is done with dream images. However, this change in analytic technique has created even more problems than it expects to solve. If analysis is not intended to be didactic practice as to getting the subject to adopt consciously the kind of behaviour imposed by the analyst, transference should be the starting point to reconsider the position(s) of the analyst and the momentum peculiar to the analytic situation.

Read Theoretical Writings

Filed under: Lacan

Universal Truth II

Is Psychoanalysis a framework available for universal truth?

However at the backend of human existence, there is always the haunting spirit of our own desire. Psychoanalysis tells us about desire – originated from primitive lack which is our memory of primitive love toward parental unity.  What is it? The parental unity is what exists before we are (being). The lack is what haunting us since the day we acquire the partial characteristic of being – the materiality of being, the body, the sense, the Real (for this partial being has not yet fulfilled the validation of the symbolic which is the structuration of language). That is when being is not yet being, or not yet full validated as being, as in the stage of pre-being, in the stage when lack, fear and jouissance embody yet hinder the awareness of beingness. This is also the time when being as being is still unthinkable or only partial. This is also the time when the haunting spirit of the Real constitutes the basic of the Subjectivitiy as an I upon the background of our primitive fear. In the pursue for Subjectivity, what is at stake is our drive to transpass the symbolic borderline.

In the Realm of the Real, there is nothing being “objectively presented” as the lack, desire, love, fear is a question posed to itself and is never have an answer except we see our own death face to face.  That is the impossibility of being as object, for object is not a priori knowledge and it is an impossible agent.  For an object can never be an object without already being assigned the position of the Subject as a subject. But the argument is who authorizes the Subject as a subject while the position of being as being has to be worked through the background of the lack as the Real.  If at the end of our human existence, we see only lack and emptiness, what is the value of being if put into the framework of a universal truth as lack.

Is philosophy the theoretical framework to access the Universal truth?

Philosophy has no idea what lack is and how it drives our cultural artifact to constitute human subjectivitiy through language. As philosophy is the truth to knowledge which inborn tendency is to violate the status of the Real by hindering the lack as the Universal truth. The Real is indifferent to emotional, sensitive change in human psychoanalytic field, but it will answer to our call with message. Environmental issue is at the core of this aspect of the Real. The destruction of the natural environment shall warn us to recall the effect of surplus jouissance upon the very existence of the earth as the Real.  That’s why we have no way to access to environmental issue by philosophy for the latter is based upon human knowledge which has no ideas what the Real as lack is.  Knowledge can not access to emptiness for knowledge itself is to defend the status of being/truth in unity, the Da-sein as the characteristic of beingness.

The Real has the ability and integrity to maintain its own balance as it has always already embodied the Universal truth as its final resort that links up the web of existence. The imaginary, as reflected on the surface of the Real has tried every means to invade the Real (as a paranoia psychic structure) – making possible by the fatal “foreclosure” of the symbolic law which has been dominated by ideological truth that reflects only the logics of the post-industrial world. For the culture of modern world is itself a paranoid structure. The symbolic law is not constructed for the betterment of the Real as a Universal truth; it provides only a partial understanding of the Real as serving the industrial needs for producing surplus jouissance.

If we want to understand environment issue based on the ideological truth as constructed for industrial age, we may miss the reason why non-stop production of surplus jouissance is based on a rationale to reinforce the status of ego as a unified entity.

The Real is direct reflection of the primitive lack – this lack is always there before the subject is constituted as the first cause. It is lack that is substantiated into the cause for any possible duplicating, multiplying, mutating, effact or performance. The lack is the basis of human being as an animal that does not have the capacity to exist in the Real only through his inborn capacity by his mobility, hunting technique, ethnicity. For he cannot live within the world that animal rules. He can only create what can be said as intellectuality to protect himself from the invasion of the Real. Intellectuality is the basis for linguistic communication. Intellectuality creates the mechanist talent and knowledge that facilitates the living of the human beings. But paradoxically at the end, it is intellectuality created out of lack constituted the production of surplus jouissance that has explored and drive the world into destruction.

Filed under: Derrida, Heidegger, Lacan , environment issue, Lacan, psychoanalysis, truth

Universal Truth I

Is philosophy a valid theoretical framework for the access to Universal truth?

Psychoanalysis is not the philosophy of human psyche for it tells us nothing about the truth that a philosopher would be interested in. Upon the couch, Freud has opened up the space for imagination, fantasy, lie and joke, but he has never required his patient to tell the truth.  Truth is not the imperative, for what psychoanalyst interests is the unconscious truth which may always be beyond the daily articulation.

But what could be the truth in psychoanalysis if it could not within the discourse of the patient. Lacan says the truth in psychoanalysis can only be found in jouissance, in lack, in the place where we are not present.  This truth is possible only within the larger framework of the Universal truth as lack.

Living in the world (in Heidegger’s sense) that we are trained to play the role as a subject or an object (master or slave) and we have no idea this only reflects what would be our misconception of the inwardly circumcised mediation (logics) of our status as an unified order. If the master/slave dialectics is put onto the larger background of a Universal truth, (i.e. the order of physical existence puts into interaction with the order of human existence, either in the form psycho-theological way or as a Kantian transcendental) the interface can only be the field of the freudian. The Freudian field opens up the internal world that enables the human psychoanalytic field interact, reflect, change, engage or restructure the substantiality of the Real.

Even when it is not only a matter of ontic experience, but of ontological understanding, the interpretation of being initially orients itself toward the being of innerworldly beings. Here the being of things initially at hand is passed over and beings are first conceived as a context of things (res) objectively present. Being acquires the meaning of reality. Substantiality becomes the basic of characteristic of being…. like other beings, Da-sein is also objectively present as real. (Heidegger, Being and Time I.vi 43)

This is what Heidegger taught us about the real and how it validates Da-sein as “objectively present”, as the basic of being.  And it also show us the importance of being “seen” or “discovered” as the basic of being/truth. Being as truth while it validates the connection between subject and object in discoveredness.

To say that a statement is true means that it discovers the beings in themselves. It asserts, it shows, it lets beings “be seen”in their discoveredness. The being true (truth) of the statement must be understood as discovering. Thus, truth by no means has the structure of an agreement between knowing and the object in the sense of a correspondence of one being (subject) to another (object). (Heidegger, Being and Time I vi 44)

Filed under: Derrida, Heidegger, Lacan, psychoanalysis, symbolic order, the Real , Being as being, Derrida, environmental issue, Heidegger, Lacan

Causality & Pure Word

What is at stake in this (Lacan’s) first shift from hermeneutics to structuralism, therefore, is precisely the question of cause. As we move from signification to its cause, signification is conceived of as the effect-of-sense: it is the imaginary experience-of-meaning whose inherent constituent is the misrecognition of its determining cause, the formal mechanism of the signifying structure itself. (Zizek 1994, 29)

Zizek is right to say that Lacan’s move from Freudian hermeneutics to structuralism is a major theoretical shift in psychoanalysis, but he may not be right to elaborate this shift as a problem of cauality. Zizek’s ideas about causality is basically from Hegel — the causality of telos (purpose), a highly difficulty concept. To Hegel, he has completely discarded the principle of the linear, mechanical causality (causa efficiens) in reality. What is at stake is the causality with meaning and purpose. This may be a transcendental intentionality in disguise. One may question about the purpose: who is behind the purpose of its causality. Buddhist causality (causation) explains the self-encirclement of enquiry, an inwardly circumcised meditation. Hegel’s causality is exactly a religious temptation if it has been disguised by the coverup of absolute negation. His principal of the Spirit as a continous, gradual, historical process with series of steps through which Spirit logically returns to itself as self-actualizing. This is religion. Causality is in some sense of religious sensation while structuralism is not.

Zizek is possibily right to stress the causality as the logic that constitutes the substantiality of sign, but he is not quite right to put the signified as an object. It may be related to Zizek’s Marxian Hegelian dilemma which makes him impossible to differentiate the Real object as a perfect objectification of substantial self – which is impossible without signification – from the Marxist socio-political agent as base structure. The Real object is the product of linguistic operation,  the interactive performance of the self.  Signification is the transformation that goes through the substantial body of the being and achieves what could be the mutation of spirit and self. The signification process is the work of WORD, the big word that will change the quality of the body, the immaculated self of pure existence. This inwardly diverted process precisely is what make an object as physical existence, pure objectification.

Filed under: Hegel, Lacan, Zizek, object a, psychoanalysis, the Real , Hegel, Lacan, object, objet a, substantiality, Zizek

Guess, where is the object of the Real?

See, if you can find Analia.

Filed under: Gaze, Lacan, Zizek , Analia Hounie, psychoanalysis

Rusty Existence in the Real – I

Materialism is not the direct assertion of my inclusion in objective reality (such an assertion presupposes that my position of enunciation is that of an external observer who can grasp the whole of reality); rather it resides in the reflexive twist by means of which I myself am included in the picture constituted by me — it is this reflexive short circuit, this necessary redoubling of myself as standing both outside and inside my picture, that bears witness to my “material existence.” (Parallax View 17)

Materialism exhibits what Zizekian project may intend to involve but may not want to be exposed in the Real. Talking about dialectic materialism in the situation when marxist logics has undergone serious interrogation may sound idiosyncratic. But materialism may go farther than marxist logics if we put it into the spectrum initiated by Lacan. Lacanian object opens up the access to the “object cause of desire” (Parallax View 18). Zizek is right to point out that “what is an ordinary object to you is to me the focus of my libidinal investment;” (Parallax View 18) however this objet petite a would neither be “transubstantiated” nor transformed into a Kantian “transcendental object.” For every singular subject, in contrary to Zizekian populist subjects, it seems unlikely that he will share his very private secret love to lost object within intrasubjective relations. It sounds logically and ontologically invalid for the very existence of objet petite a presupposes an individual process. This is also a relevant polemics if we have tried to find the photos of Ms. Zizek in our cyberworld. To share Zizek’s secret jouissance in a public accessible world seems inappropiate; for Zizek’s objet petite a is Zizek’s and it is neither Kant’s nor Lacan’s. Even though one tries to share it on the internet and what actually shared is not a populist cult, is still a privatized psychic reality. It is pointless to say there is transcendental objet petite a.

The substantiality of the psychoanalytic object is not relied on the minimal difference between the intrasubjective position in the parallax stance. For the minimal difference can only exhibit the infant’s play of coordination in the scenario of the Mirror Stage from which it is the subject itself entering into libidinal identification based on the imaginary reflection of his own existence in the Real with the change in partial bodily form rather than in the perspective of the subjective gaze. The pre-oedipal subjectivization is constituted from the framework of substantiality – an imago of the objectification in bodily coordination. Materialism shall be the existence of the Real “out there” which goes through the internalization of the imago and occupied the spatial preoccupation of human identification. Without this, the reflection of the imago, the identification process as well as the transaction of libidinal dynamism seems groundless.

Filed under: Lacan, Zizek, object a, the Real , imaginary order

Zizekian Twist

It is by the famous intellectual star Slavoj Zizek that parallax is the observed difference, displacement of object. The parallax [Greek: parallassein = shift] is the minimal shift in object in contrary to nano-difference in space and time of the gazing subjects. It connotes the partial blindness, the intentional and deviant swap of gaze with or without the affirmative of a unique subjectivity.

The philosophical twist ….. is not simply “subjective” due to the fact that the same object which exist “out there” is seen from two different stances or point of view. (Parallax View 17)

It seems that the Lacanian gaze is radically twisted like a mobius stripe and there is no longer a verification of the very subjectivity of the Subject, or what exist is simply but the pluralistic twist of subjectivity. If there is more than a subject or the subject itself presupposes a close approximation that could be an apparent resemblance, a friend of politics, a dialectics of twins, the nano-difference between the twos could be the impossible of distance which can only be understood as a dialectics in topological twist.

Lacanian subject presupposes a subjectivity within the clinical field of psychoanalysis which Zizek may not agree with. The intrasubjectivity within our clinical experience is unlikely a reference for us to understand Zizek: it may connote that social reflectivity within the clinical session may become equivocal as it comes to contextual and worldly environs. The pluralist twist from a clinical subject to consolidated subjects radicalizes and opens up what could be the impossible volition, violation toward a dialectical revision of Lacan’s prima. The parallax view assumes the view from partial blindness, intentional acceptance of the partial truth. It is not unusual among the Chinese, especially from those with authority or extreme authority, making approval, justification, testimonial, licensing, validation with one eye opens and one eye closes. There is parallax shift only when we act with one eye opens and one eye closes. The shift itself is preoccupied with ideological blindness that is known and accepted among the members of the environs. The Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) has a famous scene of spying over a tiny holes. It is not usual among man who enjoys the jouissance of spying over woman that one see with same eye all the time. The parallax view will never be an access to jouissance as jouissance itself comes mainly from a unique pleasure of an imaginary unique of one’s desire. The gaze itself may never be a parallax gaze.

The gaze can also be prohibited, not to go into parallax stance, if one has search “Analia Hounie” in google picture, one will find it really difficult for one to have a gaze of our Zizekian Idol.

Filed under: Gaze, Lacan, Zizek, symbolic order , Analia Hounie, Gaze, Lacan, Parallax View, Renata Salecl, Zizek

Lust, Caution

Sorry to say it is not easy to view the award winning film from Ang Lee “Lust, Caution” as a romantic story as it is supposed to be (although someone may not agree). For us, lust is the language of Lacan – the jouissance of the impossible, the pleasure out of extreme painful experience. Sexual excitement may not be the only possibility of desire – as desire is someone one can not have or afraid of getting hold.

Desire is the alibi of the Other, the impulsive seeking of fulfillment which is impossible except with Death.  I do not see any lust in the movie although it is the dilemma of lust and caution putting into question.  Who’s lust? The Man’s or the Woman’s or no one at all.  I think this is basically a love story about scarification, socially unacceptable (barred) love and the secrecy of romance that both the Man and Woman do not aware.

What the girl seeking for in the plot against the enemy she sleeps with is nothing but negation -  against the father in absence, the coward schoolboy and at the end the miserable of life. Neither does she identify with the non professional spy group formed by her old schoolboys, nor does she need to be a patriot in whatever sense. She is indifferent, subtle and knows exactly her own demand, but she never shares the vision of being  an assassin. She may need the extreme kind of revenge against her schoolboy’s cowardice, against her father’s insufficiency, against the nation. Revenge at the end of existence is a kind of jouissance through which she identifies with the Thing that she may not have for life. The Thing could be, in face value, the marvelous diamond ring in question – the extravagance of existence, love or peacefulness.

But at the end, who cares where does the Thing drift. It ends up in void – the signification of the Thing dissolved as the substance of the Thing archived.

Filed under: Lacan, object a, psychoanalysis, symbolic order, the Real , , Ang Lee, Caution, Chinese Film, Lust, The Thing