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.

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)

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.

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.

Interrogation

Yesterday, I am delighted to have joined a reading group online. Technology is exciting especially we read Heidegger via our skype. Heidegger has books on the question of technology though I do not know much yet. It is still an experience.

In Heidegger’s Being and Time, we have just gone through an discussion of interrogation & questioning about. To us, it seems to be two similar things. But Heidegger differs “interrogation” as process from “questioning about” which is more or less targeting on the object of “about”. It is told that Heidegger has worked our his project to negate the duality of “subject & object”. With that in mind, interrogation approximates the logics of a psychoanalytic session where the separation between analyst and analysand is eliminated and revised. Interrogation presumes the two counterparts: are there different between asking and being asked? This is the question we will have find in this text, but in Lacan, the very unique experience in a clinical session with operation of language in interrogation would be the answer.

Le point de capiton

Point de Capiton or “quilting point” “anchoring point” is the interaction of the signifier and the signified which they are knotted together, fixed and stablized. In the daily symbolic world of discours, the continuous unstable sliding of the signifier is separated from that of the signified. If not with the point de caption, there would not be a fixed position to situate the dissemination of meanings. On those quilting points, the meaning is distributed, disseminated and stablized just like an upholstery button stitching on the material.

“It’s the point of convergence that enables everything that happens in this discourse to be situated retroactively and prospectively.” (Lacan, Seminar III, 267-8)

Lacan has a strong resistance to be categorized as structuralist in the sense that psychoanalysis, although it has stressed on signification process, is not only a problem of linguistic operation. Point de Capiton illustrates a possible materiality of the signifier
that its meaning is resistant to symbolic process. This point can be a signifier entering into the realm of the Real.

Zizek has used the point de capiton to illustrate the operation of ideology. Any particular signifier such as “democracy” or “freedom” could mean very different depended on the situation it is being pinned down. The meanings are disseminated, radicalized or doubled and means more than it should have. A signifier acts more than the function of that signifier but becomes a kind of icon. He argues that freedom can mean free action and non interference of economic decision in right wing while the same signifer may mean the freedom from control of capitalism to the right wing.

It seems that Zizek has used Lacan’s concept to build a political interpretation creatively, but at least we understand that to Lacan this Point is validated by its own materiality. In Hong Kong, the highly sensitive discussion about upcoming election with Anson Chan,
ex-chief secretary joining the run with pro-Beijing Regina Ip, the discussion about election has pinned down our fixed but contradictory meaning of democracy. The discussion of democracy raised a never ending dissemination of the meanings. Its meanings are nothing more than the operation of the master discours, not the signifier itself.

There is no point to keep finding the meaning of the signifier within, but to the encirclement of the externalities of the situation that the signifier is being used and positioned.