“Desire must be taken literally”
—a few words on death, sex, and interpretation
We often abuse the word “literally,” claiming that we literally died laughing or literally jumped out of our skins when we actually only ever figuratively accomplish such maneuvers. How literally, then, can we take Lacan when he insists that “desire must be taken literally” (1966f/2006: 518)? What would it mean, and where would it take us, if we were to take Lacan at his word?
In Lacan’s own words—as registered in “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or, Reason Since Freud”—to take desire “literally” means to take it “à la lettre” (1966e/2006: 413), to the letter. And the “letter” to which Lacan takes us here would seem to follow the same script as the letter we find in l’être pour la lettre, the slogan Lacan uses to describe our exchange of being for meaning, the loss of real being that we all incur upon our anthropogenetic gain of recognizably human significance.
So when Lacan writes that “desire must be taken literally,” to the letter, he means that “desiring” and “lettering” are pretty much the same thing, or rather the same non-thing, that desire and signification are both precipitated by the same “no” to the real thing, the same negation of the real that we encountered and belabored in the previous lesson. Because “for Lacan, human desire (in contrast to animal instinct) is always, constitutively, mediated by reference to Nothingness” (Žižek 1999: 126), we should take his phrase “desire must be taken literally” to mean both that “desire” itself is literally nothing—“the revelation of an emptiness, the presence of the absence of a reality” (Kojève 1947/1980: 5)—and that the signifier itself is, again, literally nothing, “a presence made of absence” (Lacan 1966d/2006: 228), never (again) the completely real thing. Insisting that desire means incompletion, that in desire, as in signification, something real always goes missing, Lacan means that meaning always means the loss of the real thing, that language presupposes a radical subtraction of being, that signification is always constituted around a central and defining lack. And since we ourselves—as distinctly human beings, or non-animal animals—are always constituted in and by signification, we ourselves must be subjects of this very lack.
For better or worse, Lacan chooses to speak of this situation, of our situation (in contrast to the non-human animal’s completely instinctual situation), in terms of symbolic castration—in terms, that is, that are not to be taken anatomically or biologically, but are to be taken, quite literally, “literally.”
Taken literally, then, desire involves our significant (albeit unconscious) attempts to get the missing real thing back, to overcome our symbolic castration, strenuous efforts animated by nostalgic fantasies of “totally” returning to the lost homeland of the real. But because these attempts and efforts are totally fantasmatic—imaginary and symbolic, not “really real,” but only ever the signifying traces of the real’s inexorable withdrawal—nothing is more impossible than our desired recovery of the real thing. Because the word “must” in the slogan “desire must be taken literally” corresponds intimately to the same imperative in the axiom “the world must be made to mean,” nothing is less possible, nothing is less meaningful—and, finally, paradoxically, nothing is less desirable—than our desired restoration of really real being, our desired return to the real. It’s literally the last thing we’d ever want to happen.
To begin to hash these matters out, let’s return not to the real, but to Lacan’s distinctions among need, demand, and desire, touched upon but lightly in a previous lesson. Let’s see if we can see how these three modalities might instructively be mapped onto Lacan’s three registers of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. Let’s see if we can see how need seeps into the real, how the imaginary reflects demand, and how the symbolic order provokes and perpetuates—but never fully satisfies—desire.
Since I desire to interpret these inter-knotted trios under the general rubric of anthropogenesis, or the question of what “makes us human,” let’s begin by noting that at the most basic level of organic need, there’s really nothing that radically distinguishes us from nature, from animals and plants, from eagles and oak trees or earthworms and algae. Fish, flesh, or fowl; flora, fauna, or fledgling folk—all organisms need air, water, food, maybe a little light, to live and not die. At this basic or beginner’s level of sheer nutritional need, then, we’re all pretty much in the same boat. Or rather, since at this level “we” living organisms are all missing the metaphorical boat—missing, that is, if we’re plants, animals, or human infants, any firmly differentiated ego-coherence or buoyant personhood or ship-shape sense of self—let’s say that at the level of need “we” all seem to sink, swim, or “run together” in the undifferentiated “ocean” of the biologically determined real.1
But there is one particular aspect of incipient human existence that does distinguish us from every other chicken in the sea, and that’s the fact that we really need more than all those other organisms in the real, thanks to the “vital insufficiency” (Lacan 1966b/2006: 72) stemming from our specific prematurity at birth, discussed at some length in Lesson Two. The fact that our earliest needs are more pronounced (compared to those of the more vitally sufficient neonates) inevitably compels us to have to pronounce them, to make them known to others, even if, as newborns, we can’t yet make them nouns. In terms of the Lacanian registers, we might say that our capacity while as yet still mewling infants to express without nominating our real needs situates us at the imaginary level of demand. Demand allows us to make our first feeble movements out of the oceanic real, where all things run together, to crawl up and flop around on relatively drier land. The capacity for demand, that is, separates us, though only partially, from the swirling stew of sheer mute need—demand-capability, that is, distinguishes us from all vegetable matter (from seaweed, for example, which as far as I know can’t demand anything) but not from all animals. For just as human infants can and do issue demands, quite vocally, in the form of grating inarticulate bleats and squeals, so can certain non-human animals let their pressing needs be known. My dog Joni, for example, never fails to let me know—and in “terms” that are no less certain for not being put into words—when her canine highness needs to be fed or petted or taken out for a walk.
Demand, then, like need, remains an aspect of animality; it is not yet desire, which, in this interpretation, exclusively involves the human. Demand, that is, can be said to correspond to the register of the imaginary, the embodied realm of the visible world (in which all animals with eyes take part), but demand does not yet coordinate with the symbolic, which organizes or structures specifically human reality. Animals can of course not only see but communicate, can send and receive “vital signs,” signals that (again, as far as I know) pertain only to the protection-enhancement-continuation of their biological species-life, with which they are (again, arguably) completely identical, as per Georges Bataille’s claim that every animal is in its world “like water in water” (1973/1989: 19). But even “signaling” animals, from warblers to whales, lack language in the “vitally mortifying” sense that is specific to human reality; their signals, that is, can neither separate them from nor ever become more significant than their immediately animal life, whereas our signs not only can and do but must separate us from our purely corporeal existence, our simply anatomical destiny, our merely animal instincts. Unlike human desire, which must be taken literally, to the letter, animal instinct is never “mediated by reference to Nothingness” (Žižek 1999: 126). Unlike us, animals don’t have to repress or negate some aspect of their animality in order to become or remain the animals that they are. Unlike us, animals shake off nothing of their “real being” in their ecstasies of communication, while we non-animal animals can be said to lose everything but our symbolic meaning—lose our sense of being (lost in) everything—when we first find ourselves distinctly located in language. This “total loss” as loss of totality turns us from organisms of real need, or animals of imaginary demand, into symbolically ordered subjects of desire.2
Now, it should be fairly easy to see how need corresponds to the organic real, how animal demand can be distinguished from botanical need, and thus how human beings are a bit closer to monkeys than we are to moss. But other than the fact that irises don’t have eyes, what decisively links demand to the imaginary? To grasp this connection, let’s momentarily bracket the difference between need and demand and consider instead the difference between the imaginary and the symbolic. And, to use a few terms from Freud, let’s say that the difference between imaginary demand and symbolic desire involves the difference between “thing-presentations” and “word-presentations.”3 As we should be able to see, both physically and psychically, “thing-presentations” function as visual images in a clear-cut, either/or sense—whether in perception or apperception, whether in the eye or in the mind’s eye, a “thing-presentation” exists in such a way that “now you see it, now you don’t.” Thing-presentations, that is, are typically either present or absent; basically, they’re either there or they’re not there. And it is in this respect that images, as thing-presentations, might be said to correspond to demand, at least insofar as demand, in Lacan’s book, is always “for a presence or an absence” (1966g/2006: 579, emphasis added). In other words, what the organism that can demand does demand of a needed or unneeded thing, of some wanted or unwanted thing-presentation, is either for it to “be there” for the organism or for it to get the hell away from the organism. What the “organism of demand” most basically demands is that the image/thing-presentation either appear or disappear, either come closer or keep its distance. Thus, barring some complex visual effect or tromp-l’œil in which “objects may be closer than they appear,” thing-presentations are always clearly either/or—they are never both/and—for the organism of demand. Animal or infant, barking dog or squealing kid, the organism physically capable of demand is nonetheless psychically incapable of sustaining the ambiguity and/or ambivalence that the simultaneous both/and of presence/absence demands (of us).
And so here’s the crux of the matter—very much unlike imaginary “thing-presentations,” “word-presentations” are nothing but ambiguous instances of the both/and of presence/absence. To re-present Lacan’s and Derrida’s presentations of the “absentations” of words, a word is always a “presence made of absence” (Lacan 1966d/2006: 228); a meaning is always the appearance of the “disappearance of natural presence” (Derrida 1967/1997: 159). A “word-presentation” is both a “thing-presentation” and a “non-thing-presentation” at the same time. This both/and condition obtains for the word because, as we’ve read, the word presents or shows itself as a thing but can never be the real thing that it names. Thus a word, rather like a king in Prince Hamlet’s bitingly low estimation, is always ever a “thing of nothing.” And the reference to Hamlet—for whom the famously soliloquized question is “to be or not to be”—isn’t exactly infelicitous here:
For the signifier is a unique unit of being which, by its very nature, is the symbol of but an absence. This is why we cannot say of the . . . letter that, like other objects, it must be or not be somewhere but rather that, unlike them, it will be and not be where it is wherever it goes. (Lacan 1966a/2006: 17)
Now, we should be able to recognize that real need, imaginary demand, and symbolic desire all bear on the question of the satisfactions necessary to sustain “life” and/or human reality. And because to be or not yet to be or not at all to be (satisfied) is indeed the question, we should be able to imagine how the tensions among real need, imaginary demand, and symbolic desire coordinate with the conflicts between the pleasure and reality principles that we examined in our earlier lesson. But we should also be able to understand the following distinctions among our inter-knotted trios:
In the real, all living organisms have needs. Moreover, organic need can actually be completely fulfilled. The orchid in the swamp, the mollusk in the shell, the fetus in the womb, can all really, naturally, or umbilically obtain amounts of nutrition vitally sufficient to their days, however numbered, without having, or even being able, to ask.
In the imaginary, some living organisms do have to ask and are quite capable of demand. Moreover, some demands can be fully met—for if demand is always for a presence or an absence, all things or thing-presentations can either be (seen) or not be (seen), can either be brought closer or chased away, killed off or kept at the ready.
But while in the imaginary any given organism may demand a presence or an absence, once the human organism is ensconced in the symbolic, once the fledgling human organism finally learns to turn its needs into nouns, what this non-animal animal gets, and gets to be, is only ever a presence made of absence—a “letter” (like the letter “I”) that will both be (a thing) and not be (the thing that it is), wherever it (or “I”) may go. And the “letter” in question here is of course the letter to which we’re taken if we “take desire literally,” as Lacan insists we must. The letter thus reveals all of human reality as not-all, as never completely here or there, as nothing but the problem of desire. The letter turns all incipient subjects of human reality from demanding organisms with merely real needs into symbolically ordered subjects of anthropogenetic desire. I don’t mean that upon this transformation the subject of human reality no longer experiences any real need, or that it completely gives up on all its merely imaginary demands. I mean that in entering/following the symbolic order the subject of desire suppresses and surpasses its own real needs and imaginary demands by symbolizing them, putting them into words, taking them literally, to the letter. Only by taking its needs, its demands, and itself “literally” can it “truly” (i.e., not really) become a subject of human reality/desire—a being driven, to be sure, but driven much less by animal instinct than by an ongoing reference to (its own) nothingness.
It is not not for nothing, then, that Lacan writes that language “grabs hold of desire at the very moment it becomes humanized by gaining recognition” (1966d/2006: 243). For Lacan, that is, the desire for recognition, the desire of meaning, is the meaning of humanized desire. If desire is the presence of the absence of a reality, and the word is the presence of the absence of the thing, then linguistically determined or humanized reality is nothing but the appearance of the disappearance of natural presence, the presence of the absence of the real. To insist, then, that “desire must be taken literally” is really only to reiterate our first three lessons (in reverse order), to say once again that “language is by nature fictional,” that “meaning is the polite word for pleasure,” and that “the world must be made to mean.” And having repeated these lessons as often as we now have, we should be better positioned to return all the way back to our “introductory matters” and to better appreciate “what theory does,” to better understand why theoretical writing must reflect on “meaning” as a problem rather than as a given, why theory lives to denaturalize and defamiliarize the desire for meaning as the meaning of desire—particularly when theoretical writing gropes and grapples with the meanings of human sexual desire.
OK, you might be thinking, it’s about fucking time—all this “theoretical” chatter about “pleasure” and “desire” with only the slightest mention of “real sex”! Well, yes, it is about “fucking time,” so to speak, and we are finally going to say a few words about desire in relation to “real sex” and in relation to real death.
But we’re going to have to let death come first.
You might have already noticed its shadow falling upon this discourse. Back in the first lesson, for example, when I asked you to list everything you could think of that separates humans from, say, roosters, you might well have included “awareness of our own mortality” on your roster.
Or maybe you got a whiff of the necrotic back when I was giving you the low-down on the pleasure principle’s prime directive. When you read that this principle’s goal is to “reduce unpleasurable tension,” to restore homeostatic quiescence, the thought might have crossed your mind that it’s hard to be much more quiescently homeostatic than stone-cold dead. Freud himself reached the same conclusion, by which I don’t mean that he died, though of course he did, but rather that, in his attempts to think through the problems of the pleasure principle, Freud ends up speculating on Thanatos, the unconscious death drive, which, along with Eros, the unconscious sexual drive, works to shape human psychical reality.4
Well before trotting out the couple Eros and Thanatos, however, Freud begins his great study Beyond the Pleasure Principle by addressing the phenomenon of “repetition compulsion” and by posing the following thorny question—if the goal of the pleasure principle is to avoid unpleasurable tension and restore homeostatic quiescence, why on earth would we compulsively repeat unpleasurable activities or disquieting memories of tense or even traumatic experiences? Freud provisionally answers this question by speculating that we compulsively repeat unpleasure in the attempt to gain a sort of ideational mastery over it and so to recover our lost equilibrium, fantasmatic endeavors fundamentally in keeping with the pleasure principle’s overriding goal.
Freud bases this “masterful” hypothesis upon a number of clinical observations, but what particularly leads him to posit an unconscious death drive is his interpretation of a seemingly simple game played by his 18-month-old grandson, Ernst. In what is now called the fort-da game, little Ernst—a “good boy” who “obeyed orders not to touch certain things or go into certain rooms” and who “never cried when his mother left him for few hours” (1920/1989: 599)—would be observed (by Freud) fooling around with a wooden reel tied to a piece of string. The child would repeatedly throw the reel away while holding onto the string, making urgent staccato sounds (rendered in the text as “o-o-o-o”) that for Freud approximated the fully fledged German word fort, meaning “gone.” Then, typically, Ernst would pull the reel back in and greet “its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ ” [‘there’]. “This, then, was the complete game—disappearance and return” (1920/1989: 599). And, in Freud’s view, the “interpretation of the game” is, at least initially, “obvious”:
It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation . . . he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this . . . by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach. (1920/1989: 600)
But this interpretation, if obvious, is also complicated for Freud by the fact that Ernst sometimes throws the reel away without reeling it back in. This repeated pattern of disappearance and no return contradicts any purely happy reading of the ludic reel as unambiguously representing an unambivalently desired maternal object (since Ernst would ostensibly always want that object back, constantly da rather than ever distressingly fort). As Freud explains:
The child cannot possibly have felt his mother’s departure as something agreeable or even indifferent. How then does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle? It may perhaps be said in reply that her departure had to be enacted as a necessary preliminary to her joyful return, and that it was in the latter that lay the true purpose of the game. But against this must be counted the observed fact that the first act, that of departure, was staged as a game in itself and far more frequently than the episode in its entirety, with its pleasurable ending. (1920/1989: 600)
Now, the fact that in the observed performances of the fort-da game, the forts sometimes outnumber the das leads Freud to posit “another motive” behind the Liebestoddler’s staged loss of the reel.5
At the outset he was in a passive situation—he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part. These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery . . . But still another interpretation may be attempted. Throwing away the object so that it was ‘gone’ might satisfy an impulse of the child’s which was suppressed in his actual life, to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him. In that case it would have a defiant meaning: ‘All right, then, go away! I don’t need you. I’m sending you away myself.’ (1920/1989: 600)
Freud’s interpretation of this pint-sized revenger’s tragedy subtly connects “play” in the ludic sense, as game, to “play” in the literary sense, as dramaturgy (note the references to staging, first acts, taking on parts, etc.). And the main piece of dramatic literature Freud has in mind here is pretty obviously Oedipus, for the evidence of Ernst’s being a “good boy” includes his never crying when his mother goes away and his obeying orders not to “go into certain rooms” (forgive me, if you possibly can, but one has only to imagine Fudd rather than Freud reading that line to get the Oedipal gist of which chambers Ernst has been symbolically ordered not to go back into).6
Somewhat less obviously, but perhaps no less Oedipally, the fort-da also plays out the whole three-act drama of real need, imaginary demand, and symbolic desire. The game thus leads us, as it led Freud, to the death drive, to the radical idea that “an instinct [or drive] is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things” (1920/1989: 612) and to the fateful conclusion that “the aim of all life is death” (1920/1989: 613). We are taken to this conclusion literally—that is to say, figuratively. For figurative language allows us to suggest that the earliest “state” of little Ernst’s big ocean of “things” is immersed in the real (if only by virtue of the homonymic coincidence that one of these things is in English called a reel). If the aim of the death drive is to return to an “earlier state of things” that resembles being in the real, then, we might argue, Ernst expresses his desire to return himself to the real when he returns the reel to himself. We might also argue that Ernst “masterfully” manipulates the real reel both to vocally register imaginary demand (for an absence or a presence, a fort or a da) and to aggressively negate real need (as in the puny and punitive ad-lib “all right, then, go away! I don’t need you”).7 But what separates Ernst’s anthropogenetic antics with the reel from a puppy’s fetching a stick or a kitten’s toying with a piece of string is the fact that in Freud’s reading this reel means something other to the boy than what it really is. In this sense, the reel is symbolic, and as we are significantly told, the “good boy” manipulates this symbolic object all the better to compensate himself for the very “instinctual renunciation” by which he becomes “good” in the first place, by which he becomes undemanding, able to allow “his mother to go away without protesting” (1920/1989: 600).
But it takes more than throwing real things around in the play-pen to turn imaginary demand into symbolic desire—it takes, so to speak, a figurative ink-pen, the magical “wand” of words, to perform that anthropogenetic trick. For what’s actually decisive in the fort-da game is not any physical manipulation of real objects but rather the way little Ernst must literally “write” his way out of the real, must linguistically designate his own relationship to any real object’s disappearance and return. To “literally” free himself from the here and now, Ernst must irrevocably bind his fate to that of the letter. In other words, whatever he may or may not have in his mitts, nothing will be anthropogenetic for Ernst until language grabs hold of the nib of his desire. And, to tell the truth, anthropogenesis just isn’t going to be happening for Ernst until it finally occurs to him to lie—to fabricate, to make stuff up, make the real “go away,” to turn his back, as it were, on “the not-as-if of things.” For it really is as if language will have “truly” grabbed hold of Ernst’s desire only when he becomes a playful liar, a bit of a poet, a ludic little “man of letters” (even if the first letters attributed to him are but the compulsively repeated revelations of an emptiness, an empty set of naughts, a meager series of zeroes strung together in a hyphenated line—“o-o-o-o”).8 Only when simulation and dissimulation become vital sources of stimulation—only when he realizes that he doesn’t have to have a thing in his little hand to give birth to a da, or that he can at any time let out a fort without having cast out any actual reel—does little animal Ernst “literally” begin becoming human.
But Ernst enters human reality not simply by using words—presences made of absence—to designate the tangible alternation between presence and absence that he himself causes. No, Ernst liebestoddles into the big empty house of fiction, the world of desire—becomes, again, figuratively speaking, human, a non-animal animal at the mercy of language—only when he accepts that it is figuratively speaking, not really having, not really being, that constitutes the only true “habitat for humanity” in which he or we will ever meaningfully live. In this interpretation, it is only ever language that builds what Martin Heidegger calls “the house of being” (1947/1977: 193), only ever the “world of words that creates the world of things” (Lacan 1966d/2006: 229).9 This world, the only world there is, must always be made to mean, and “to mean” must always mean to lose real things, to lack real being—in other words, to desire.
But I’ve yet to toss out a compelling interpretation of how this interpretation of desire relates to the death drive. To grasp this relation, we need to return, not to an earlier state of things but to some earlier statements about nothing—specifically, to Kojève’s neat description of desire as the “revelation of an emptiness, the presence of the absence of a reality” (1947/1980: 5) and to Žižek’s assertion that “for Lacan, human desire (in contrast to animal instinct) is always, constitutively, mediated by reference to Nothingness” (1999: 126). Taking these lines of thought literally, we can better comprehend not what desire literally is (because it literally isn’t any thing) but rather the way desire formally works (with “formally” here meaning without regard to any particular content, any specific object of desire).
Formally, then, if there is desire, if desire exists, if desire is “present,” then some reality or object of desire must be absent. If the desired reality weren’t absent, then desire wouldn’t be present—the desideratum’s “full presence” would spell desire’s complete cancellation. Desire as emptiness, as nothingness, would necessarily terminate itself in its utter fulfillment. Thus, in the purely formal sense, the desire of desire must be to end itself, to cancel itself out, as desire. By definition, then, desire desires to kill itself; structurally, desire desires suicide, and so on.
But if there’s something structurally and constitutively “self-destructive” about the desire of desire, there’s also something animatedly “self-protective” about it as well. Desire, that is, may very well desire to end itself, but at the same time desire desires to sustain itself, to go on and on, to continue to make its presence felt by literally “staying hungry,” by remaining insistently empty, dissatisfied, discontented, constantly deferring or negating or “sending away” the absent but approaching “reality” whose fully satisfying presence would inevitably bring desire to its (un)desired conclusion. Desire in this sense desires to keep playing fort/da—it is nothing but the longing to keep on longing to reach the end, the longing to keep on longing to grasp the thing at the end of the line. Formally, then, desire “literally” self-perpetuates by putting off its ending, by only ever circling but never seizing its object, remaining the garrulously active revelation of its own emptiness or nothingness or restless discontent.
It is in this sense that desire can be conflated not simply with “death” or “the dead” but, more strictly speaking, with the death drive. And the vital irony of the death drive involves this very discrepancy between merely “being dead” and actively “being death”—the tension between, on the one hand, the idea of “death” as necrotic state, as passive stasis, an “earlier” state of things where we all “eventually” end back up (ashes to ashes, womb to tomb), and on the other hand, the idea of “death” as an eternally destructive, “reicidal” force that actively negates all things (I take the word “reicide” from “reify,” from the Latin res, for “thing”) but just keeps going and going because it’s always already “nothing” itself and negates everything but itself. Death in the latter sense is actually quite lively—it apparently “lives” forever. This “death” can never ever die, which is why we rarely personify “Death” as unlucky stiff or motionless cadaver—we imagine “Death” as the grimly active reaper, never one of the grimly reaped.
Now, we might desire to grimly read the difference between death and death drive, between being dead and being death, as the difference between an “earlier state of things” and our active (albeit unconscious) desire to return to that “state.” Or, to put the death/death drive difference in somewhat more “literary” terms, we might think of it as the distinction between “lying in state” and lying through our teeth. We might read the desire to return to an “earlier state of things” as a desire to return to the real, to the “not-as-if of things” that all run together, a desire to dissolve that isolated and desiccated residue called “the self” back into the greater “sea of yolky enjoyment” (Žižek 1992: 40) that we fondly remember as lost oceanic feeling. But the law of language can only ever tear us away from real dissolution; the law can only ever say “no, not really” to the yolky enjoyment of the not-as-if of things. Real death—not the active death drive but the passive state of dissolution—would be the only conceivable result of language’s becoming really real, of its no longer lying, of its ceasing to be fictional and fatally merging with the real. Stirred to the only life it knows by its “no” to the real, language can stay alive only by keeping the real at a distance, maintaining its actively destructive stance toward the thing. “All right, then, go away! I don’t need you.” Such “reicidal” labor—the very work of antiphysis—is the ludic, liberatory, and transformative “fiction writing” that makes and keeps all human reality (all too dishonestly) human.
Let’s remember, though, that, in the interpretation of desire being pushed here, it is not language per se but language’s specific and “vitally mortifying” fictiveness that allows us to conflate it with symbolic desire and the death drive, that arguably sets it (and us) apart from natural need, corporeal demand, animal instinct, or any merely “biologically determined” method of “communication” between physical bodies (those of “the birds and the bees,” for example). As we learned in Lesson Three, language is constitutively fictional both at the level of the solitary word and in the sequential or “narrative” dimension of the sentence. At the level of the word, language is fictional because of the word’s necessary separation from and negation of the thing. Literally, the word both lacks and kills the thing. This linguistic “reicide” is what leads Lacan to refer to words as “lethal symbols” (1966d/2006: 249), what compels him to comment upon “the profound relationship uniting the notion of the death instinct to the problems of speech” (1966d/2006: 260), what causes him to insist both that “the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and [that] this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire” (1966d/2006: 262).
Taken literally, however, desire tends to be perpetuated mainly in the form of sentences, seldom in random strings of murderous words but more typically in grammatically organized and syntactically ordered patterns of meaning that are, again, arguably narrative in structure. As suggested in the previous lesson, every completely predicated, grammatically correct sentence “tells a story,” narrates an action, features a beginning, middle, and end, and so on. But insofar as they do participate in narrative, sentences also implicate themselves in the death drive, for, like the beginning of any well-told story, the beginning of any minimally well-crafted sentence presupposes its ending and literally provokes a reader’s desire for closure, her desire for “the end.” According to this interpretation of desire, we “readers” at a very basic level want the same “thing” from our sentences, our stories, and our lives—that by the time we reach their and our conclusions, they and we will have “totally” meant something.10
But believe it or not, this notion that we all desire to obtain a satisfying sense of “totality” or “completion” from syntactical, narrative, and autobiographical “closure” is what finally connects “the problems of speech” to the problem of . . .
If taking desire “literally” means anything at all, it means interpreting language and sex as the same knotty problem—to take desire literally means to read all language as “sexual” and all human sexuality (the avian and the apian won’t count for much in this discussion) as linguistically rather than biologically determined.
As befits an argument based on linguistic determinism, what justifies this theory of linguistic sex qua sexual linguistics is neither empirical research involving microscopic investigation of physical, chromosomal evidence nor exhaustive ethnographic research quizzing every child, woman, and man in the history of the world about the minute particulars of their actual “sex lives.” Rather, what justifies the assertion that human sex is (and has always been) a problem of speech, and that speech itself is (and has always been) a sexual dilemma, is the purely etymological “fact” that the English word “sex” comes from the Latin secare, meaning “to cut.” Because the word “sex” shares its root, so to speak, with other “cutting” words (scission, scissoring, sectioning), the “meaning of sex” can be said to involve nothing but “coming to terms” with “the cut” of materialist language, in which not just “sex” or “scissors” but all words in all languages are (strictly speaking) serrated.11 For here, the sexual “cut” is to be read as nothing but the “no to the real” that initiates (us into) the symbolic order, tearing us away from the here and now, turning our oceanic world of runny things into a more sharply defined world of articulated phrases, routing our polymorphous perversity through the defiles of unimorphous normality, and so on.12 Just as Marx alerts us to the fact that “to be radical means to grasp things by the root” (1844/1978: 60), so too a radically linguistic account of human sexuality holds that language cuts us off at the natural root, scissors or sections us away from the real, tears us a new hole—castrates, so to speak, every one of us who manages to speak, regardless of any merely anatomical origin or destiny.13
While actual castration in the “anatomically correct” sense would seem to make it impossible for some people to really “have (a) sex,” symbolic castration—always articulated, never anatomical—is for Lacan the very condition of possibility of “sex” of any kind for everybody—yes, everybody. For if human sexuality can be described in the universal terms of a desire for some form of erotic merger, union, or more-or-less lubricated orificial friction between one desiring/desired body and some other(s), then this description presupposes a division between such “bodies and pleasures,” however infinitely varied they all might be (for if there were no division, no separation, there would be no desire to speak of). Human sexual desire thus presupposes a certain incompletion or “missingness”; it presupposes our being “cut off” from others with whom we were “originally” merged, from others to whom, mythically or umbilically, we were “originally” attached—others back into whom we would like ourselves to melt, others up against whom we would like to rub ourselves or some part of ourselves again (and again).14 In other words, in contrast to animal instinct, human sexual desire presupposes a sort of “personological” discontinuity with the totality of “things [that] at first run together in the hic et nunc of the all” (Lacan 1966d/2006: 229); it presupposes a radical separation not only from designated “others” but, back behind them, and more primordially, from that anonymous “sea of yolky enjoyment” that both “resists symbolization absolutely” (Lacan 1975/1991: 66) and saturates our earliest experience-of-ourselves-as-everything in the undifferentiated real.
Note that in this interpretation of desire, Eros and Thanatos are disturbingly indistinguishable. The two become “as one,” so to speak, insofar as both the erotic and the thanatical can be imagined as a single drive, “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things” (1920/1989: 612). Just as all desire, regardless of particular object or orifice, is structurally suicidal, always urging self-cancellation, so, as Lacan comments, “every drive is virtually a death drive” (1966h/2006: 719). This interpretation of desire thus couples the idea that “ ‘the aim of all life is death’ ” with the notion that the aim of all sex is jouissance.15 In this interpretation, both Eros and Thanatos aim to dissolve themselves into their “others.” Both desire to erase the boundary that separates each into its own discontinuous confines.
But what if this boundary demarcating “the limits of the human” person were initially nothing but the “no to the real,” the no to nondifferentiation, that first installs any speaking subject into the symbolic order? If “the moment at which desire is humanized is also that at which the child is born into language” (Lacan 1966d/2006: 262), then the initiating law of language dictates that words must be separated from real things in order to symbolize them, that signifiers must be divided from signifieds in order to join together and become signs. This law decrees that the very letters comprising signs must be separated from each other, must not occupy the same space at the same time, so that each individual letter might be “more productively” organized and combined with other letters in properly spaced, grammatically correct, normatively sequential and thus socially consequential ways.
In this “legal” interpretation of human desire—in which all merely “animal instinct” is always already trumped by a “law” that isn’t simply “of the jungle”—language structures and enforces the anthropogenetic social norms that make all versions of human reality everywhere possible. For Lacan, however, the most rudimentary law and most constitutively social norm that language enforces is the “paternal prohibition” against incest. As we rehearsed in the preceding lesson, the “no to the real” that separates words from things is for Lacan structurally analogous to the “Oedipal” law that separates moms from their spawn. Just as a word cannot immediately merge with the real thing that it names but must “wait” to be combined with other words in order to form a grammatically correct and complete sentence, so the child cannot “merge” with its real mother as illicitly desired sexual object but must wait to grow up in order to be legally “combined” with some more appropriate “other” in a institutionally sanctioned matrimonial alliance. Intimately bonding syntax to kinship, Lacan marries the syntactical rules that establish which linguistic combinations are permitted and which are proscribed to the sexual regulations that establish which erotic combinations are legally recognized or encouraged and which are abominated, reviled, or (in some cultures even capitally) punished.16 As Lacan insists:
The primordial Law is . . . the Law which, in regulating marriage ties, superimposes the reign of culture over the reign of nature . . . The prohibition against incest is merely the subjective pivot of that Law . . . This law, then, reveals itself clearly enough as identical to a language order. For without names for kinship relations, no power can institute the order of preferences and taboos that knot and braid the thread of lineage through the generations. And it is the confusion of generations which, in the Bible as in all traditional laws, is cursed as being the abomination of the Word and the desolation of the sinner. (Lacan 1966d/2006: 229–30)
But, outside of the fact that some infractions of the sexual laws of a given society are punishable by execution of the desolate “sinner,” how might these syntactical/sexual analogies relate to the death drive?17 As it turns out, they are quite intimately related, for, in a sense, all three (Eros, Logos, and Thanatos) involve our old friend—perhaps our oldest friend—antiphysis; all three involve the initial and ongoing separation from the real “reign of nature” that is human reality’s “cultural” condition of possibility; all three intimately involve the social question of the various ways in which we must psychically deal with this physical separation.
Let’s pause to consider this intimate involvement in the light of the distinction between the physically impossible and the socially prohibited. As we learned in Lesson Three, it is physically impossible for the word “elephant” ever to be an elephant, or for the word “moonlight” ever to be moonlight. Analogously, it is physically impossible for “the little animal produced by the union of a man and a woman” to “unproduce” itself back into that woman, to disappear up into its mother’s womb, to physically re-occupy that “real place” with the entirety of its miraculously re-fetalized body (umbilicus reattached, placenta stuffed back in to boot, all needs met before they can even be experienced as needs, much less turned into demand or desire, and so on). Both of these “mergers” (word with thing, tot with mom) are physically impossible, not just socially prohibited—in other words, there’s no “law” imposed from elsewhere, the “repeal” of which could allow these events to transpire.
Ontheotherhanditisphysicallypossibleforanexperimentalwritertounseparatewordsandlettersandtoomitpunctuationaltogetherandyetstillhavewrittensomethingmoreorlessreadablealbeitnotwithoutsomedifficulty. It is even physically possible, in some graphic media, to “do away” altogether with the spaces separating individual letters (like, say, the letters i, n, k, s, t, a, i, and n), so that they all can be made to occupy the same space at the same time. Nothing physically prevents a writer from “experimentally” superimposing in one single space all the letters in an independent clause— such as, for example, “the word for ink-stain is ink-stain”—thus breaking the “law” that “says” that individual letters “must” be divided from each other. Such a real merger is prohibited (by the symbolic order) but not impossible. Our “experimental writer” will have really taken these letters down, transgressively merging one with another, aggressively destroying the discrete individuality of each; s/he will have really negated the prohibitory “no to the real,” the no to “sexual” undifferentiation, that makes “normal” human reality possible. But the end result of this scoff-law experimental writing will be only a real but unreadable stain, a dark spot of abjection, a traumatic/ecstatic blotch marking the “place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 182: 2).18 In other words, our experimental writer’s “ink-stain” will have achieved being a real ink-stain but only at the expense of ever legibly meaning “ink-stain” or anything else at all.
Analogously to this botched experiment in transgressive writing—it is quite possible to really break the law against incest and actually “return to the mother’s womb” by having honest-to-god sexual intercourse with said mother, whether “wittingly” or not.19 The trouble here, however, is that our “wits” are constituted in such a way—through socio-normative regulations and prohibitions—that to really and wittingly have sex with our own mothers could very well cause us to lose them (our wits, that is). If the very structural coherence of consciousness is established through being made to mean, through an ordered separation from or loss of the real, then to lose the loss of the real and re-merge with it could mean to lose ourselves, lose our meanings, lose our minds. In other words, overcoming the social prohibition against incest, negating this particular form of the prohibitory “no to non-differentiation” that initiates human reality, may very well be physically possible, but it may not be psychically viable.
Now, since the adjective “viable” relates to life and the liveable—the word literally means “capable of living outside the uterus”—what the preceding examples suggest is that neither experimental ink-stain nor accomplished incest can be a viable subjective or “authorial” enterprise. Literally speaking, one might say that both spell death, the collapse of conventional meaning. In other words, “incest” might be read as a name for “the place where meaning collapses,” but insofar as the word “incest” itself remains a legible name for that unspeakable stain, a “lethal symbol” that can be used to murder that murderously meaningless “place” from a distance, the word “incest” is not that place, says no to the “primal scene” of undifferentiation.20 In other words, the word “incest” can mean incest, can designate whatever incestuous desire we might unconsciously harbor, but the word “incest” can never finally be incest—and we have nothing but the “sexual” cut of the symbolic order to thank for that.
But let’s flesh these analogies out a bit by considering a few pieces of fiction that thematize incest as symbolic death-match, watery silence, structural collapse, and so on. At the end of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” for example, Roderick Usher’s “eroto-thanatical” tussle with his own freshly “unencrypted” sister precipitates the crumbling collapse of his “House” (a gothic mansion of a metaphor for both his psyche and the Usher “family line”)—at the moment of narrative climax, the whole show fissures and falls back into the miasmic “tarn” from which it seems to have emerged.
In Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the suicidal Quentin Compson—obsessed with temporality, mortality, and thoughts of having sex (or of claiming to have had sex) with his sister Caddy—takes a little time before drowning himself in the Charles River to think “If I’d just had a mother so I could say Mother Mother” (1929/1984: 197). But if I were to rewrite Quentin’s line to let it support the interpretation of desire being developed here, I would have him think instead, “If I’d just really had mother, I never would’ve had to say Mother, not even once.” For if Lacan is correct to say that the prohibition against incest “reveals itself clearly enough as identical to a language order,” then it’s the fact that Quentin has to say “Mother”—is ordered to symbolize Mother, to put her and everything else into words, to “matri-reicidally” mean her rather than uninterruptedly be with her—that keeps him from ever “really” having “had” her in the first place. If he had never been separated from that “first place,” he wouldn’t have to think about tossing himself into the body of water that finally substitutes for it. If he had just had Mother, had never been expelled from the oceanic/maternal real, he wouldn’t have had to say Mother or anything else at all.21
But of course the symbolic order insists that we all do “have to say.” Even if we don’t all get to have our say, “our say” is, in this interpretation of desire, all we ever really get to have, all we ever really get to be. The linguistic “limits of the human” ensure that we never really get to be but must always be made to mean. It is nothing other than the radical unavailability of being to meaning that guarantees that desire must be taken literally. As whorish as it all may seem to Prince Hamlet, this interpretation of desire tells us why we can only ever unpack our hearts with words.
Now, I keep unpacking my theoretical heart with the words “in this interpretation of desire” because, in this interpretation of desire, “desire, in fact, is interpretation itself” (Lacan 1973/1981: 176). In fact, my own heart’s desire at this juncture is nothing but to marry Lacan’s matter-of-fact statement about desire’s being “interpretation itself” to Nietzsche’s radical claim that there are no facts, only interpretations.22 In other words, the “fact” that I have been giving this account of desire in a language that is by nature fictional means that what I am offering here is not “the truth” about desire, but “merely” an interpretation. And yet, as Nietzsche would have it, any competing set of truth-claims about desire can’t finally amount to anything more or other than interpretation, either. For in this interpretation, there is no empirical, objective, or absolute “truth” about desire or about anything else in human reality to be had; there is only ever a potentially infinite set of competing, more or less engaging, more or less lively—but never anything other than perspectival—interpretations.
Of course, it may come as no surprise to read that what you’re reading here purports to be nothing more than an interpretation, given from a particular perspective, and not an objective report on absolutely axiomatic conditions. But if reading this stale news leaves you unsatisfied, wanting more—not because you want fresher revelations but because you are at heart a reader who hungers after timeless truth and aren’t likely to be content with “trendy” artifice—then you may already have an unconscious sense of what links interpretation to desire (and hence, to sex and death). For what, one might ask, is “interpretation itself” if not the revelation of a certain emptiness, the presence of the absence of certainty or finality, the limning of one’s lack of some satisfyingly conclusive explanation? And what would we want “the truth” to be if not the final answer to all our interpretive prayers, the explanation to end all explanations, the “absolute knowledge” that would bring the restless activity of interpreting to its final destination?
But here, our “prayers” can pretty much be damned—for in “the end,” our actively “interpreting the text” of human reality must presuppose that some firm and final knowledge of its significance will always remain missing. The phrase “interpreting the text” of course implies our wanting to know “the truth” about it, wanting to know exactly “what it all means.” But what does “wanting to know” mean except not knowing? And what would knowing “the truth” or the “total meaning” of anything mean if not being in a state of no longer wanting to know, no longer desiring, no longer interpreting, no longer restlessly reading?
Paradoxically, then, Roland Barthes knew exactly what he was talking about when he wrote that “literature is the question minus the answer.”
What do things signify, what does the world signify? All literature is this question . . . but it is this question minus its answer. No literature in the world has ever answered the question it asked, and it is this very suspension which has always constituted it as literature. (1964/1972: 202).
And because Barthes is, ironically enough, perfectly correct—“literature” is the right answer to the question of the missing right answer—literary interpretation might be read as the very “restlessness” of the active death drive itself. However, such articles of faith or kisses of death as “the answer,” “firm knowledge,” “unshakeable belief” in “absolute truth,” etc., could be considered the anti-literary tropes par excellence, representing the necrotic “state of things” that interpretation may think it desires to restore (since interpretation ostensibly “wants to know,” wants to have knowledge) but which interpretation may “literally” want to defer. In other words, active interpretation ceaselessly puts off possessing the knowledge it supposedly wants to have because the vital process of interpretation ends, cancels itself out, when its “revelation of emptiness” fills itself up (with satisfying “truth”); interpretation dies when the restless negativity of being death settles into the pure positivity of being dead certain, being dead right. In a literally literary interpretation of desire, then, desire desires only desire, not absolute knowledge; interpretation interprets only interpretation, minus final answers, minus the honest truth.
Now, I have written the words “literary interpretation” above as if there were some other kind. But if we buy Derrida’s interpretation that “fictional” language has “invaded the universal problematic” and everything become “discourse” (1966/1978: 280), if we subscribe to Lacan’s interpretation that all human “desire must be taken literally” and that “desire, in fact, is interpretation itself” (1973/1981: 176), then might we not also want to submit ourselves to the interpretation that all interpretation is literary, fabricative, creative writing? If the beating heart of any interpretation must be unpacked with words, expressed in language that is by nature fictional, then might not “interpretation” be most richly interpreted as an aesthetic rather than veridical or moral phenomenon, a strong exercise in the art of the sentence emerging from a strong aversion to any honest-to-god “truth”? Interpretation, in this radically Nietzschean interpretation, wouldn’t desire the intuition of “truth” or the acquisition of “knowledge”; it wouldn’t want answers at all but rather the strength to live without final answers so as to proliferate more engaging fictions about fiction in a world that must be made to mean.
I call this interpretation Nietzschean because it was Nietzsche’s radical claim that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world justified” (1872/2006: 58). Well before Freud or Lacan got around to it, it was Nietzsche who first interpreted interpretations as matters of life and death (drives), as particularly dense transfer points for libidinal energy and relations of power. It was Nietzsche who first framed the arts of interpretation as perversely erotic, even sadomasochistic, but in any event always richly aesthetic endeavors, and it was Nietzsche who correspondingly considered the “will to truth” as an austere and impoverishing form of priestly asceticism, a pacifying renunciation of interpretation grounded in a rancorous hostility to sensuality, to art, to sex, to violence, to “life” itself. Perhaps the first philosopher wise enough to love fiction more than “wisdom,” it was Nietzsche who first desired to call the value of “truth” into question and who first connected the epistemological drive, the “will to truth,” to the “will to death.”23
For Nietzsche, there is neither “absolute truth” nor “divine will,” only competing and “all too human” interpretations. All interpretations are humanly “embodied,” situated in individual perspectives, and all perspectives are contingent upon, and determined by, the relative strength or weakness of the interpreter’s “will to power” or “instinct for freedom.” The relative strength or weakness of any interpreter’s “will” depends in turn upon the type of “instinct for freedom” it expresses in relation to “life” interpreted as perpetual change or becoming, as a (not exactly painless) process of self-transformation—the ecstatic, self-shattering, “Dionysian” reality of creatively human suffering. Nietzsche, that is, pretty much endorses the Buddha’s first “noble truth,” that “life is painful,” but he veers away from Buddhism or any other “world religion” in terms of the question of what to do with or about the pain. For Nietzsche, strong interpretation not only “takes the pain” but eagerly uses it to express itself as the instinct for freedom for “life” as perpetual becoming, while weak interpretation flees the pain, flinchingly expresses an instinct for freedom from “life,” conducts itself as a “spiritual retreat” into hypostasized being. A strong or “noble” interpretation “masochistically” enjoys the pain of vital self-transformation, finds a constitutively aesthetic “happiness in great tension” (1886/2006: 356); a weak or “slavish” or “herd” interpretation, however, finds its “promise of happiness” only anesthetically, in conventional “truth” or the congregationally “fixed idea” (1887/2006: 396) and in whatever “slackening of tension” (1887/1992: 474) such “fixings” can provide.
Rather obnoxiously, at least from our contemporary perspective, Nietzsche frequently depicts the difference between “noble” and “slave” moralities, between strong and weak modes of interpretation, in explicitly gendered, racialized, or nationalized terms. More interestingly and productively, however, Nietzsche, anticipating Freud, also suggests that this “prepositional” conflict of interpretive wills—desiring freedom for life vs. desiring freedom from it—can obtain within a single individual’s psyche.24
Now, the idea that a mode of interpretation can be grounded in an instinctual desire for “freedom from life” allows Nietzsche to link a certain type of interpretative “will” to the death drive. But Nietzsche also appreciates the difference between death drive and death itself; he understands the difference between active and passive annihilation. Nietzsche thus posits that although the “will to truth . . . might be a concealed will to death” (1887/2006: 364), even the weakest will in the world “still prefers to will nothingness than not will” (1887/2006: 435). In other words, though interpretive desire may desire to complete or “end itself” as desire, it also desires to perpetuate itself as interpretive desire, as the continuing revelation of emptiness, as an ongoing “reference to Nothingness” (Žižek 1999: 126), an indefinitely literal and literary suspension.
Little wonder, then, if, after Nietzsche, the “essential incompleteness of interpretation” becomes one of the most prominent “postulates of modern hermeneutics,” as Michel Foucault writes in the essay “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx.”25 Foucault suggests that in Nietzsche’s work in particular “it is clear that interpretation is always incomplete.”
What is philosophy for him if not a kind of philology continually in suspension, a philology without end, always farther unrolled, a philology that would never be absolutely fixed? Why? As he says in Beyond Good and Evil, it is because “to perish from absolute knowledge could well form part of the basis of being.” (1967/1998: 275)
In Foucault’s strongly Nietzschean interpretation, any strongly Nietzschean interpretation refuses to fix meaning or be fixed by it; such an interpretation declines “to perish from absolute knowledge.” Rather, interpretation in the Nietzschean mode suspends and sustains itself, persists in perpetually becoming rather than finally or completely being (itself), and it pulls off this hat-trick of modern hermeneutics by reveling in language’s vital but brutal fictionality. In Foucault’s “violent” interpretation of Nietzschean violence:
Interpretation can never be completed . . . quite simply because there is nothing to interpret. There is nothing absolutely primary to interpret, for after all everything is already interpretation, each sign is in itself not the thing that offers itself to interpretation but an interpretation of other signs . . . so that it is as much a relationship of violence as of elucidation that is established in interpretation. Indeed, interpretation does not clarify a matter to be interpreted, which offers itself passively; it can only seize, and violently, an already-present interpretation, which it must overthrow, upset, shatter with the blows of a hammer. (1967/1998: 275)
Interpretation “with a hammer” enacts its “will to power” against certainty, against the fixity of non-fiction, against the self-cancellation of desire, against reification, positivism, or any absolute truth. This interpretive desire expresses—and always in a language that is by nature fictional, always in words that negate real things, always in symbols that are reicidally “lethal” (Lacan 1966d/2006: 249)—an instinct for freedom for rather than from “life”:
The death of interpretation is to believe that there are signs, signs that exist primarily, originally, actually, as coherent, pertinent, and systematic marks. The life of interpretation, on the contrary, is to believe that there are only interpretations. (Foucault 1967/1998: 278)
In the end, then, taking desire “literally” requires a suspension—not of disbelief, but of belief itself; for if taking desire literally requires “believing” that there are, originally and ultimately, only all-too-human interpretations, it also requires believing that this very belief is “only” an interpretation as well. But while this interpretation of interpretation is, no doubt, radically atheistic, it is not an expression of so-called “nihilism”; rather, believe it or not (and if you’re trained to believe that atheism equals nihilism, then you’ll probably not), radically incredulous interpretation maintains itself as a way of overcoming nihilism, as a way of saying yes to “life”—or at least to what Nietzsche calls “everything strange, unusual, and questionable” (1887/2006: 368) in the interpretive experience of life.26 For Nietzsche, and for Foucault, the “death of interpretation” (and hence of desire) would indeed be the wages of believing “in the absolute existence of signs” (Foucault 1967/1998: 278), of believing that such signs can actually ground objective knowledge, faithfully represent absolute truth, finally decipher the real’s big secret, and so on. This faith in some firm and final significance, in what Derrida calls “the transcendental signified” (1966/1978: 280), expresses a weak interpretation that completely “abandons the violence, the incompleteness, the infinity of interpretations” (Foucault 1967/1998: 278). Faith in the “transcendental signified” signifies a spiritual retreat from “life”—it enacts or “wills” a veritable “freedom from life.” But the “life” of “faithless” interpretative desire, as the perpetual revelation of human (and cosmic) emptiness, as the ongoing reference to our own nothingness, the perpetual presence of the absence of the answer—as, in other words, literature—involves affirming that signs only ever signify more and other signs. In this interpretation, saying “yes” to this “life” means nothing but affirming that “everything is [always] already interpretation” (Foucault 1967/1998: 275).
Ultimately, then, taking desire literally involves affirming human reality as a montage of the imaginary and the symbolic, as a rich tapestry of ambiguous and conflictual fictions—suspended over the void. To affirm (rather than bemoan) this “empty” or “aesthetic” reality means learning, with Nietzsche and other bad company, to savor the unsettling of sedimented ways of making sense of the world, to affirm that it is “only as an aesthetic phenomenon [that] existence and the world [are] justified” (Nietzsche 1872/2006: 58). Such affirmation involves refusing the comforts of fixed meaning, swearing off absolute knowledge, swearing to tell anything but “the truth,” lying with a good conscience, even dancing at the edge of the abyss. It involves nothing less and nothing more—and, for Nietzsche, nothing more becoming of a “free spirit”—than affirming “life as literature.”27
But taking desire literally also involves affirming or asserting oneself as literature, accepting one’s own “textual anthropogenesis,” reveling, so to speak, in the revelation of one’s own emptiness, the referential nothingness of subjective desire. Not that there’s anything particularly self-assuring about such “self-relating negativity” (Žižek 2006: 64). Indeed, affirming one’s own textual condition or symbolic castration takes a sort of existential courage, or perhaps just a strong sense of irony, a willingness to put the self at risk, if only by virtue of not being cocksure about identity, not taking one’s own or anyone else’s dead-seriously. Perhaps taking desire literally requires taking all identity ironically, for both forms of “taking” require that we “recognize ourselves as always already altered by the symbolic—by language”; both forms invite us to “hear in language that basic incompleteness that conditions the indefinite quest of signifying concatenations.” Taking desire literally, taking identity ironically, affirming “life as literature,” interpreting the self as text—all these linguistic endeavors finally add up to nothing but “joying in the truth of self-division” (Kristeva 1982: 89), engaging in the work of antiphysis, the violent art of self-transformation. As Foucault puts it in “The Minimalist Self”:
For me intellectual work is related to what you could call aestheticism, meaning transforming yourself . . . I know that knowledge can transform us, that truth is not only a way of deciphering the world (and maybe what we call truth doesn’t decipher anything) but that if I know the truth I will be changed . . . This transformation of one’s self by one’s own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting? (1983/1988: 14)
Or, to change the medium, but not the self-divisive aesthetics of the experience in question, why should writers desire to write if “writing” isn’t actively interpreted “as the very possibility of change” (Cixous 1975/2007: 1646)? Why would we ever find ourselves dying to write if we didn’t think we were going to be transformed, turned on and torn apart—literally—by our own writings?
Coming to Terms
Critical Keywords encountered in Lesson Four:
need/demand/desire, Eros/Thanatos, fort-da, polymorphous perversity, jouissance, abjection, hermeneutics
Notes
1 There are a number of sources for all this “nautical” talk about the undifferentiated real, this “sea of yolky enjoyment” (Žižek 1992: 40) where “things . . . at first run together in the hic et nunc of the all” (Lacan 1966d/2006: 229). For Freud, as we’ve seen, the infant in the “primary narcissism” of the real experiences a putatively “oceanic feeling,” the overwhelming sensation of “an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole” (1930/1989: 723). Freud’s “oceanic feeling” of course precedes anyone’s sense of ego-coherence, predates any firm “sense of self”; in Civilization and its Discontents, Freud writes that “originally the ego [das Ich] includes everything, [but] later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of . . . an all-embracing . . . feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world” (1930/1989: 724–5). For Georges Bataille, this all-embracing and relatively ego-free world is both dissolutely oceanic and saturated with animality; in the “Animality” chapter of his Theory of Religion, that is, Bataille writes that “every animal is in the world like water in water” (1973/1989: 19), and in Bataille’s thinking, the difference between animals (thoroughly saturated with their own being) and humans (relatively dessicated by their own meanings) involves the difference between continuity and discontinuity with this water-world. Anticipating Freud and Bataille, Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, discusses the formation of the principium individuationis—the Apollonian “principle of individuation,” as opposed to Dionysian self-dissolution—in notably nautical terms, quoting Schopenhauer, “As a sailor sits in a small boat in a boundless raging sea, surrounded on all sides by heaving mountainous waves, trusting to his frail vessel; so does the individual man sit calmly in the middle of a world of torment, trusting to the principium individuationis” (1872/ 2006: 44). Arguably, Nietzsche’s “frail vessel” and Freud’s “shrunken residue” and Bataille’s all too human “fish out of water” are all figures for ego-coherence or ego-syntony, for the firm “sense of self” that the pre-linguistic “little human animal,” like any other piece of yolky flotsam in the real, lacks. It’s this lack of a discernible “sense of self” that I’m addressing when I suggest that, in the realm of real need, “we” are all “missing the boat.” Correspondingly, those of us organisms who come to possess a sense of self, who are “on board” and thus no longer “missing the boat,” are, by definition, missing the real. In other words, persons qua persons are always missing the real, and the real is always missing persons.
2 If we lose our sense of being (lost in) everything by finding ourselves cohering as individual selves in language, then we can regain that sense only by “losing ourselves,” losing our singular and isolated sense of self-coherence, escaping our enclosure in what Nietzsche in Birth of Tragedy calls “the miserable glass shell of human individuality” (Nietzsche 1872/2006: 82). We can experience loss of self as ecstasy (sex, drugs, rock n roll, sports, mysticism, religious fervor, or some combination thereof) or as trauma (war, assault, natural disaster, animal attacks, etc.). But the line separating ecstasy from trauma is easily transgressed (when great rough sex gets too rough to stay great, or when we overdose on drugs or religious fervor and turn into fanatics, or when the drunken crowd in the “Dionysian” mosh pit or sports arena riots and “Apollonian” people get their “principles of individuation” crushed to bloody pulp). The point here is that “you” as a point, as a coherent self, can never return to the real as such, mainly because you were formed as a “you” by being separated from the real by the symbolic order. Like language, “you” exist, but you’re not real; if “you” were to become real, to merge with the real, “you” would cease to exist, lose your “personal identity.” The real, again, is always “missing persons,” and persons qua persons are always missing the real, so if anything returns to the real, it’s not going to be “you personally.” Any return to the real would involve a violation of human limits, an ecstatic/traumatic encounter with the “not-as-if of things.” The great benefit of language, art, and other cultural forms of representation (high and low, tragedy and Wagnerian opera or theatrical S&M, war and horror films, porn) is that they allow spectators to approach a close encounter with the ecstatic/traumatic “not-as-if” of the real without ever really being blown away or torn apart. So Nietzsche argues in Birth of Tragedy (minus, of course, the bit about porn).
3 According to Laplanche and Pontalis in The Language of Psycho-Analysis, these are “terms used by Freud in his metapsychological works in order to distinguish between two types of ‘presentation’—between the (essentially visual) type which is derived from things and the (essentially auditory) one derived from words” (1973: 446).
4 According to Laplanche and Pontalis, Thanatos is the “Greek term (=Death) sometimes used by analogy with ‘Eros’ to designate the death instincts; its use underscores the fundamental nature of the instinctual dualism by lending it a quasi-mythical sense. This name is not to be found in Freud’s writings, but according to [Ernest] Jones he occasionally used it in conversation” (1974: 446).
5 I claim full responsibility for this atrocious word “Liebestoddler,” which mashes up the English “toddler” with the German “Liebestod,” or “love-in-death” (taken from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde)—all the better to adumbrate Freud’s argument that the desire for love and the desire for death are disturbingly merged in the playful dynamics of the little boy’s fort-da.
6 “Loony Tunes” cartoon character Elmer Fudd, hapless hunter and principal adversary of Bugs Bunny, is represented as having a speech impediment that causes him to pronounce “rabbit” as “wabbit,” just as Ernst in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is represented as pronouncing “front” as “fwont” (1920/1989: 600). The really bad Oedipal joke here is that in a Fuddian/Freudian reading the word “room” would sound like “womb.”
7 To grasp how Ernst’s physical manipulation of the reel expresses imaginary demand, we can note two details. The first is that when Ernst plays fort-da with the reel, he throws the object “over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappear[s] into it” (1920/1989: 599). Significantly, the game of disappearance/reappearance stresses the visual over the tactile. The second detail is that Ernst would sometimes be observed playing fort-da or “Baby o-o-o-o” with his own image in a mirror, “the child had found a method of making himself disappear. He had discovered his reflection in a full-length mirror which did not quite reach the ground, so that by crouching down he could make his mirror-image ‘gone’ ” (Freud 1920/1989: 599n2).
8 How many o’s does it take to make a fort? In Freud’s first inscription of Ernst’s approximation of the German word for “gone,” there are four letters, or four instances of the same letter: “o-o-o-o.” But in a second inscription, there are, perhaps not insignificantly, only three—as Freud reports, “When this child [Ernst] was five and three-quarters, his mother [Freud’s beloved daughter Sophie] died. Now that she was really ‘gone’ (o-o-o), the little boy showed no signs of grief” (1920/1989: 599n2). What to make of this emotional no-show, of the fact that here, in Freud’s writing, one lower-case “o”—which can already be read as a zero, a hole, a sign that something’s missing—is itself quite conspicuously missing, no longer “da”? Insofar as that “o” might be read as representing the departed Sophie (not for the son Ernst, who showed no signs of grief, but for the bereft father, Freud), we might speculate that by letting that “o” be “gone” from his writing, by himself staging the absence of a particular presence made of absence, the “philosopher” Freud is showing by not showing the very sign of his grief—“o.”
9 Although some theoretical writers, like Derrida, consider Heidegger to be terribly important, and despite the clear relevance to the present discussion of Heidegger’s notion of “being towards death,” I am omitting any further mention of Heidegger’s philosophy in this book for this simple reason—I really really hate Heidegger. I’ve just never been able to get past the whole business of his having been a Nazi. Concerning Heidegger’s Nazism, see, for example, Farias (1991). For what passes for a critique of Derrida’s “retention” of Heidegger, see the chapter on Heidegger and Derrida in Thomas (1996).
10 This interpretation was first and most famously developed by Peter Brooks in the essay “Freud’s Masterplot,” in which Brooks employs Beyond the Pleasure Principle to conflate our desire for narrative closure with the death drive.
11 Of course, not all languages derive from Latin, nor is it likely that the word for “sex” in each and every language in the history of the world derives or derived from some primordial word for “cut.” But these historicist objections are actually quite immaterial to the properly structuralist argument that antiphysis, this reicidal “cut” or lacerating “no to the real” that I’ve been yammering about in these lessons, is not simply a “secondary characteristic” of one or more languages but is rather the condition of possibility for human language (and human sexuality) as such.
12 Freud characterizes infantile sexuality as polymorphously perverse, which means that for the infant erotogenic stimulation comes from many different sources and that its various component drives are not yet fixed in relation to any orifice or object. For Freud, the infant’s polymorphous perverse disposition entails an original bisexuality and is part of what the child loses when subjected to the social prohibitions that produce “unimorphously normal” erotic experience/fantasy/object choice.
13 Toril Moi ends her splendid essay “Is Anatomy Destiny?: Freud and Biological Destiny” with this observation—“psychoanalysis is a form of thought that attempts to understand the psychological consequences of three universal traumas: the fact that there are Others, the fact of sexual difference, and the fact of death. Freud might have said that it is our destiny to have to find a way to coexist with others, to have to take up a position in relation to sexual difference, and to face death. To say so is not evidence of biological or any other kind of determinism” (2000: 88). I would add that Lacan might have said that language is the universally traumatic condition of possibility for all three of these “universal traumas,” that language is our specifically human way of coexisting with others, of taking up positions in relation to sexual difference, and of facing up to death.
14 In one of the richer moments in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud turns to “myth rather than . . . scientific explanation” to trace “the origin of an instinct to a need to restore an earlier state of things” (1920/1989: 622). After having dwelt at tedious length on the topic of germ-cell division, Freud abruptly trots out “the theory which Plato put into the mouth of Aristophanes in the Symposium, and which deals not only with the origin of the sexual instinct but also with the most important of its variations in relation to its object. ‘The original human nature was not like the present, but different. In the first place, the sexes were originally three in number, not two as they are now; there was man, woman, and the union of the two . . .’ Everything about these primeval men was double: they had four hands and four feet, two faces, two privy parts, and so on. Eventually Zeus decided to cut these men in two . . . After the division had been made, ‘the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and threw their arms about one another eager to grow into one’ ” (1920/1989: 622–3). Note how in this myth whoever is subjected to the sexual drive desires to return to a state before “the cut.” Note also how neatly the myth accounts for variations in regard to sexual object—accounts, that is, for male and female homosexuality and heterosexuality for we obviously should read the three sexes in the mythic time “before the cut” not as “man, woman, and the union of the two,” but as man–man, woman–woman, and man–woman.
15 Jouissance is a “French term derived from the verb jouir,” to enjoy, to play, and to come. Jouissance “denotes an extreme form of pleasure: ecstatic or orgasmic bliss that transcends or shatters one’s everyday experience of the world” (Malpas and Wake 2006: 211). Jouissance thus relates to la petite mort, or “the little death,” as French writers have been known to refer to orgasm.
16 In 2010, for example, the government of Uganda, after hosting a series of anti-queer talks by visiting American “evangelicals,” got to work proposing “a bill to impose a death sentence on homosexuality” (see “After US Evangelicals Visit, Uganda Considers Death for Gays,” The New York Times, 4 January 2010, A1). In 2011, however, “after receiving overwhelming criticism from across the globe, Uganda’s Parliament . . . let the time expire on a contentious anti-homosexuality bill that had threatened this East African country’s international standing. The Anti-Homosexuality Bill sought to impose the death penalty for a number of reasons, including being a ‘serial offender’ of the ‘offense of homosexuality.’ The bill also called for Ugandans to alert the government to known cases of homosexual behavior within 24 hours. Religious leaders said they had obtained more than two million signatures in support of the measure” (“Antigay Bill in Uganda is Shelved in Parliament,” The New York Times, 14 May 2011, A4).
17 I refer in the first part of the sentence not only to legally sanctioned hangings of convicted “sodomites” in early modern Western Europe, and the stoning to death of homosexuals that is permitted under some contemporary Islamic law, but also to the extralegal (but still ideologically encouraged) murder of homosexuals and transsexuals in the United States (Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena, for recent historical examples).
18 From the Latin abjectus, meaning “cast out,” abjection involves the acts of psychic, social, and corporeal exclusion and expulsion by which symbolic order, cultural identity, and personal hygiene are maintained. The abject, writes Kristeva, is thus that which “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (1981: 3). Thus “filth, waste, pus, bodily fluids, the dead body itself are all abject,” for “the abject represents what human life and culture exclude in order to sustain themselves” (Childers and Henzi 1995: 1).
19 Oedipus was unwittingly incestuous, had no idea that Jocasta was his mother when he was once again inside her. Nor does Hamlet seem to know what he’s asking with the line “How stand I, then, that have a father kill’d, a mother stained?” (IV.iv.58–9). Ambiguously mixing possession with commission, this line is usually taken as the clincher for the Oedipal interpretation of the play, for though Hamlet is consciously stating the obvious—that he has a father who has been killed (poisoned, by Claudius) and a mother who has been “stained” (inseminated, by Claudius)—Hamlet inadvertently owns that he himself has done the killing/staining in his unconscious.
20 Normally in Freud’s discourse the phrase “primal scene” refers to the real or imagined observation of one’s parents having sex. I am misusing the term here by letting it represent the image of one’s having sex with one’s parent.
21 You can add Usher’s tarn and Quentin’s river to your list of bodies of water that represent “self-destructive” immersions in the oceanic real. You can also throw (yourself) in Buffalo Bill’s bathtub in The Silence of the Lambs. In Jonathan Demme’s 1991 film, Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is a serial killer and all-too-real gender-bender who “wears” the skins of his female victims. He also sports lipstick and eye-liner and poses “self-castratedly” naked in front of a mirror, penis tucked between his legs, etc. When FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) ventures into the killer’s basement, she obeys the literary/cinematic convention that misreads unconscious as subconscious and compels the protagonist to enter some subterranean space in order to confront her own unconscious fears and desires. And what Clarice finds in the cellar is of course a horrific scene of sexual undifferentiation, a place where meaning has collapsed because the primordial “cut” separating the symbolic from the real, life from death, one sex from the other, has been inhumanly “sutured.” The money-shot of this sequence comes when Clarice beholds a bathtub filled with some “unspeakable” dark gunk, from which protrudes what appears to be the “iceberg” tip of a submerged skull. This tank is of course the acid bath in which Buffalo Bill dissolves the remains of his victims, and it is the last hideous thing Clarice sees before the lights go out and she loses herself in the darkness. A good cinematic example of the bad oceanic feeling, the sequence does a neat job of depicting the ecstatic/traumatic “kernel” of the real.
22 In The Will to Power, Nietzsche writes, “Against positivism, which halts at phenomena—‘There are only facts’—I would say: No, facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact ‘in itself’—perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing . . . In so far as the word ‘knowledge’ means anything, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no [single] meaning behind it, but countless meanings.’ ” (1901/1968: 267). Anticipating this theme in “On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense,” Nietzsche writes, “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to . . . be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions” (1873/2006: 117).
23 In Book V of The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes that the “will to truth . . . might be a concealed will to death” (1887/2006: 364); in Genealogy of Morals, he writes that truth-driven ascetic idealism entails the “renunciation of any interpretation (of forcing, adjusting, shortening, omitting, filling-out, inventing, falsifying and everything else essential to interpretation),” and that “on the whole, this [renunciation of interpretation] expresses the asceticism of virtue just as well as any denial of sensuality (it is basically just a modus of this denial). However, the compulsion toward it, that unconditional will to truth, is faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even if as an unconscious imperative” (1887/2006: 431).
24 In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes, “There are master moralities and slave moralities. I would add at once that in all higher and more complex cultures, there are also apparent attempts to mediate between the two moralities, and even more often a confusion of the two and a mutual misunderstanding, indeed sometimes even their violent juxtaposition—even in the same person, within one single breast” (1886/2006: 356).
25 Hermeneutics is generally understood as “the study of understanding” (Malpas and Wake 2006: 201), is generally interpreted as “the theory of interpretation in general” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 132).
26 Overcoming nihilism for Nietzsche means getting over the “death of God,” getting over “monotonotheism,” getting over one’s disappointment and hurt feelings that an interpretation turned out not to be the one—“One interpretation has collapsed, but because it was considered the interpretation, it appears as though there is no sense in existence whatsoever, as though everything is in vain” (1887/2006: 386). For Nietzsche, our overcoming nihilism and affirming life mean our allowing “the world [to] become ‘infinite’ for us all over again, in as much as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations” (1887/2006: 379).
27 In Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche designates “art” as the realm “in which lying sanctifies itself and the will to deception has good conscience on its side” (1887/2006: 431–2). In Gay Science, Nietzsche writes that “one could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the ‘will’ that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence” (1887/1974: 289–90). “Life as Literature” is the subtitle of an excellent book on Nietzsche by Richard Nehamas (1987).