Notes

Chapter 1

1. See Shalev and Yerushalmi 2009.

2. For more on these questions, see Zupančič 2008, 20–23.

3. See, for example, Laplanche 1999, 258.

4. In De nuptiis et concupiscentia (On Marriage and Concupiscence), chapter 7.

5. See, for example, Alacoque 1995.

6. For a really impressive collection of these images, it suffices to search the Internet for Saint Agatha (and Saint Lucy)—images.

7. The “doctrine speaks of the incarnation of God in a body, and assumes that the passion suffered in that person constituted another person’s jouissance” (Lacan 1999, 113).

8. They sometimes do very “strange” things as part of sexual (mating) rituals, but they do not seem to find anything “strange” about it, it does not seem to bother them in the least.

9. Žižek made this point by suggesting that “there is no sexual relation” should be changed to “there is sexual non-relation” (Žižek 2012, 796).

Chapter 2

1. For an exhaustive commentary on these questions, see Dolar 2007, 14–38.

2. This is why the only way to approach sex, to talk about it, is to take it as a logical problem (or an onto-logical problem). In this way we perhaps stand a chance of getting at some kind of real. On the other hand, if we approach it as a problem of the body and its sensations, we are bound to end up in the imaginary (or in metaphysics).

3. See also Slavoj Žižek’s powerful discussion of the non-relation in Žižek 2012, 794–802.

4. To some extent, the more recent idea of the “post-human” also belongs to this tradition of conceiving emancipation as essentially emancipation from the “human.”

5. See Lacan 1987, 194–196.

6. The formulation “concrete constitutive negativity” requires further explanation. In general theoretical terms, we should say of this configuration: it is not that there is one fundamental non-relation and a multiplicity of different relations, determined by the former in a negative way. It is, rather, that every relationship also posits the concrete point of the impossible that determines it. It determines what will be determining it. In this sense we could say that all social relations are concretizations of the non-relation as universal determination of the discursive, which does not exist anywhere outside these concrete (non-)relations. This also means that the non-relation is not the ultimate (ontological) foundation of the discursive, but its surface—it exists and manifests itself only through it. To put it differently: it is not that there is (and remains) a fundamental non-relation which will never be (re)solved by any concrete relation. Rather: every concrete relation de facto resolves the non-relation, but it can resolve it only by positing (“inventing”), together with itself, its own negativity, its own negative condition/impossibility. The non-relation is not something that “insists” and “remains,” but something that is repeated—something that “does not stop not being written” (to use Lacan’s expression). It is not something that resists all writing, and that no writing can actually write—it is inherent to writing, and repeats itself with it.

Chapter 3

1. For more on this, see Lacan 1987, 151.

2. I will not discuss here whether the Kantian gesture simply closed the door behind ontology, or laid the ground for a new and quite different kind of ontology.

3. See, for example, Butler 1990.

4. “It is essential to understand clearly that the concepts ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine,’ whose meaning seems so unambiguous to ordinary people, are among the most confused that occur in science.”

5. See Zupančič 2008, 59–60.

6. This, of course, is also one of the key points of Žižek’s reading of both. See, for example, Žižek 2012.

7. For more on this, see Dolar 2010.

8. Copjec 1994, Žižek 2012, Le Gaufey 2006, Chiesa 2016—to mention just a few.

9. Lacan insists that the Woman is one of the names of the Father.

10. This, of course, is also what is at stake in fetishism.

11. As Mladen Dolar summed this up most succinctly: “the sexual difference poses the problem of the two precisely because it cannot be reduced to the binary opposition or accounted for in terms of the binary numerical two. It is not a signifying difference, such that it defines the elements of structure. It is not to be described in terms of opposing features, or as a relation of given entities preexisting the difference. … The two that we are after is not the binary two of equal or different ones, but the two of the one and the Other. One could say: bodies can be counted, sexes cannot. Sex presents a limit to the count of bodies, it cuts them from inside rather than grouping them together under common headings” (Dolar 2010, 88).

12. This difference between two kinds of differences, a relational one and a non-relational one, is what Lacan develops in detail, and in relation to set theory, in his late seminars, and I will discuss it in chapter 4 below.

13. Mladen Dolar developed this in some detail in Dolar 2010.

14. Starting with her magnum opus L’effet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, 1995).

15. Badiou recounts this anecdote in “The Scene of Two” (see Badiou 2003, 43).

16. See Badiou and Cassin 2010, 109.

17. Lacan keeps repeating that he is a “realist” rather than a nominalist or an idealist.

18. In a lecture delivered in Ljubljana in February 2016.

19. Mladen Dolar, “Two Shades of Gray,” lecture delivered at the Beckett Conference, Freie Universität Berlin, February 1, 2016. Emphasis added.

Chapter 4

1. This is why Slavoj Žižek is right to point out that the cost of this kind of materialism might well be a re-spiritualization of matter (see Žižek 2010, 303), as is the case of Jane Bennett’s notion of “vibrant matter.” Needless to say, however, my cursory reference to Malabou here fails to do justice to her argument in its entirety, as well as to some very valuable points that she makes in presenting it.

2. See Chiesa 2010, 159–177.

3. “If I am anything, it is clear that I’m not a nominalist. I mean that my starting point is not that the name is something that one sticks, like this, on the real. And one must choose. If we are nominalists, we must completely renounce dialectical materialism, so that, in short, the nominalist tradition, which is strictly speaking the only danger of idealism that can occur in a discourse like mine, is quite obviously ruled out. This is not about being realist in the sense one was realist in the Middle Ages, that is in the sense of the realism of the universals; what is at stake is to mark off the fact that our discourse, our scientific discourse, finds the real only in that it depends on the function of the semblance” (Lacan 2006b, 28).

4. His argument in this respect is that correlationist philosophy, precisely since it claims that we can know nothing about things in themselves, forces us to admit that even the most irrational obscurantist nonsense talked about things in themselves is at least possible.

5. Zupančič 2008.

6. And we actually find this idea in Nietzsche, when he says: “Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type” (Nietzsche 1974, 168). We find a similar idea (with an additional twist) in Freud, and we shall return to it in the Conclusion.

7. See Chiesa 2016.

8. I was led to make this connection between the Freudian death drive and fatigue when I was invited to speak at the Pembroke Research Seminar (Brown University) on “Fatigue,” led by Joan Copjec, in 2015–2016.

9. “The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been inanimate substance endeavored to cancel itself out. In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state.”

10. Freud 2001b, 53. Jung adopted the Freudian notion of the libido and, with an apparently small modification, gave it an entirely different meaning. With Jung, the libido becomes a psychic expression of a “vital energy,” the origin of which is not solely sexual. In this perspective, libido is a general name for psychic energy, which is sexual only in certain segments. Freud immediately saw how following this Jungian move would entail sacrificing “all that we have gained hitherto from psychoanalytic observation” (Freud 1977a, 140).

11. Germ cells are capable of an independent existence. “Under favorable conditions, they begin to develop—that is, to repeat the performance to which they owe their existence; and in the end once again one portion of their substance pursues its development to a finish, while another portion harks back once again as a fresh residual germ to the beginning of the process of development” (Freud 2001b, 40).

12. In this precise sense, Lacan will identify instincts with a “knowledge in the Real” as precisely “knowledge” of these paths.

13. In “The Ego and the Id,” Freud famously defined the superego as “pure culture of the death-instinct.”

14. In the context of the Freudian theory of the sexual seduction of children (and the possible “trauma” related to it), Jean Laplanche has convincingly argued that this kind of alternative is wrong, or too simple. Freud first posited the sexual seduction of children by adults as real, that is to say, as a factual/empirical event in the child’s history, which is then repressed and can become the ground or cause of different symptoms and neurotic disturbances. Later, he abandoned this theory in favor of the theory of the fantasy of seduction: generally speaking, seduction is not an event that takes place in empirical reality, but a fantasy constructed later, in the period of our sexual awareness, and it exists only in the psychic reality of the subject. Approached with the tool of the distinction between material reality and psychic reality (fantasy), the question of sexual seduction leads either to the claim that everything is material seduction (for how exactly are we to isolate and define the latter: does touching a baby’s lips, for example, or its bottom, qualify as seduction?) or to the conclusion that seduction is entirely fantasmatic, mediated by the psychic reality of the one who “feels seduced.” Laplanche’s answer to this conflict between raw materialism and psychological idealism is profoundly materialistic in the sense that he recognizes a properly material cause, yet a cause that cannot be reduced to (or deduced from) what has empirically happened in the interaction between the child and the adult. In other words, according to Laplanche, the true trigger of the subsequent constitution of the unconscious lies neither in raw material reality nor in the ideal reality of fantasy, but is the very materiality of a third reality, which is transversal to the other two and which Laplanche calls the material reality of the enigmatic message. For more on this, see Laplanche 1999.

15. Again, we find a similar move in Laplanche’s theory according to which “psychic reality” is not created by us, but is essentially invasive; it comes, it invades us from the outside, where it is already constituted (as the unconscious of others). See Laplanche 1999.

16. Deleuze uses the term “death instinct,” following the then current French translation of the Freudian Todestrieb.

17. Hence Deleuze writes, for example, that even when we are dealing with something that appears to be repetition of the same (such as, for instance, the rituals in obsessional neurosis), we have to recognize in the element that is being repeated—that is, in the repetition of the same—the mask of a deeper repetition (Deleuze 1994, 17).

18. And Deleuze actually attributes this reversal to Freud, and to his hypothesis of “primal repression.”

19. “For when Freud shows beyond repression ‘properly speaking,’ which bears upon representations—the necessity of supposing a primary repression which concerns first and foremost pure presentations, or the manner in which the drives are necessarily lived, we believe that he comes closest to a positive internal principle of repetition. This later appears to him determinable in the form of the death instinct, and it is this which, far from being explained by it, must explain the blockage of representation in repression properly speaking” (Deleuze 1994, 18).

20. Quoted in Deleuze 1990, 331.

21. Ibid., 321; emphasis added.

22. Ibid., 322.

23. Ibid., 325.

24. Discussing his “myth” of the lamella (related to the death drive), Lacan writes: “It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say immortal life, or irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents. The objets a are merely its representatives, its figures. The breast—as equivocal, as an element characteristic of the mammiferous organization, the placenta for example—certainly represents that part of himself that the individual loses at birth, and which may serve to symbolize the most profound lost object. I could make the same kind of reference for all the other objects” (Lacan 1987, 198).

25. In this sense, what Foucault says about the “repressive hypothesis” is quite correct (and he is actually repeating Lacan’s point here): In modern societies, sexuality has been anything but repressed; we have been witnessing—with respect to sexuality—a gigantic “incitement to discourse,” an “implantation of perversity,” a gesture of bringing sexuality into focus and under the spotlight, seeing it everywhere, making, even forcing it, to speak all the time. What is lacking from Foucault’s account is, quite simply, the notion of the unconscious and of “repression” in the Freudian sense (Verdrängung), which is not mentioned one single time in the entire first volume of the History of Sexuality. From a Lacanian point of view, the discursive proliferation of sexuality (and its exploitation) is made possible only by its structural relation to the unconscious as the “founding negativity” of sexuality itself. For a more detailed discussion of this, see Zupančič 2016.

26. Although one should stress that very often they do not come even close to the complexity of Deleuzian philosophy.

27. Quoted in Žižek 2012, 32. I will not repeat Žižek’s argument, which I cannot but agree with, but will use this quote for my own purposes.

28. This, for example, is the basic move we find in Levi Bryant’s otherwise very complex work The Democracy of Objects (Bryant 2011).

29. In this sense, Hegel may well be the philosophical materialist par excellence. As Mladen Dolar has pointed out: in direct opposition to a long (Aristotelian) tradition, aligning truth with the principle of non-contradiction, Hegel took a very different step with the first of his “habilitation theses” (which served as the basis of his PhD defense in August 1801) when he said: “Contradictio est regula veri, non contradictio falsi”—Contradiction is the rule of truth, non-contradiction of the false (Dolar 1990, 20).

30. Slavoj Žižek has developed this point on several occasions.

31. As Lacan puts it in a lecture from his Seminar Les non-dupes errent (May 21, 1974).

32. This, for example, is what Gabriel Tupinambá suggests in an article where he picks up this topic. See Tupinambá 2015.

33. If we have a multiple of, say, five elements, the possible combination of these elements—that is to say, the number of the “parts”—exceeds by far the number of elements (more precisely, this number amounts to 2 to the power of 5).

Conclusion

1. See, for example, Freud 1977b.