The Duplicity of the Good on the Potlatch the Discourse of Science Forgets Nothing Outrage and Pain
It seemed to me this morning that it wasn’t inappropriate to begin my seminar by asking the question, Have we crossed the line?
I don’t mean in what we are doing here, but in what is happening out there in the world in which we live. It isn’t because what is occurring there makes such a vulgar noise that we should refuse to hear it.
At a time when I am speaking to you about the paradox of desire – in the sense that different goods obscure it – you can hear outside the awful language of power. There’s no point in asking whether they are sincere or hypocritical, whether they want peace or whether they calculate the risks. The dominating impression at such a moment is that of something that may pass for a prescribed good; information addresses and captures impotent crowds to whom it is poured forth like a liquor that leaves them dazed as they move toward the slaughter house. One might even ask if one would allow the cataclysm to occur without first giving free reign to this hubbub of voices.
Is there anything more disconcerting than the transmission via those little machines that we all possess of what are known as press conferences? Or, in other words, questions that are stupidly repeated to which the leader replies with a false casualness, while he calls for more interesting questions and even on occasion engages in witticisms.
There was one somewhere yesterday, in Paris or in Brussels, that told us about our gloomy future. I swear it was absurd. Don’t you think that the only way to adjust our hearing to what is proclaimed may be formulated along the lines of “What does it mean? What is it aiming at?” Yet everyone falls asleep on the soft pillow of “It’s not possible” – whereas, in fact, nothing is more possible, the possible is above all that. That’s possible because the possible is that which can answer man’s demand, and because man doesn’t know what he is setting in motion with his demand.
The frightening unknown on the other side of the line is that which in man we call the unconscious, that is to say the memory of those things he forgets. And the things he forgets – you can see in which way – are those things in connection with which everything is arranged so that he doesn’t think about them, i.e., stench and corruption that always yawn like an abyss. For life after all is rottenness.
And it is even more so recently, since the anarchy of forms, that second destruction that Sade was talking about the other day in the quotation I read you – the destruction that calls for subversion even beyond the cycle of generation-corruption – are for us pressing problems. The possibility of a second destruction has suddenly become a tangible reality for us, including the threat of anarchy at the level of the chromosomes of a kind that could break the ties to given forms of life. Monsters obsessed a great deal those who up to the eighteenth century still attributed a meaning to the word “Nature.” It has been a long time since we accorded any importance to calves with six feet or children with two heads. Yet we may now perhaps see them appear in the thousands.
That is why when we ask what is beyond the barrier erected by the structure of the world of the good – where is the point on which this world of the good turns, as we wait for it to drag us to our destruction – our question has a meaning that you would do well to remember has a terrifying relevance.
What is beyond this barrier? Don’t forget that if we know there is a barrier and that there is a beyond, we know nothing about what lies beyond.
It is a false beginning to say, as on the basis of our experience some have, that it is the world of fear. To center our life, even our religion, on fear as a final term is an error. Fear with its ghosts is a localizable defense, a protection against something that is beyond, and which is precisely something unknown to us.
It is at the moment when these things are possible but wrapped in the injunction “Thinking about them is prohibited,” that it is appropriate to point out the distance and the proximity that links this possible to those extraordinary texts that I have chosen this year as the fulcrum of my proof, namely, Sade’s works.
One doesn’t have to read very far for this collection of horrors to engender incredulity and disgust in us, and it is only fleetingly, in a brief flash, that such images may cause something strange to vibrate in us which we call perverse desire, insofar as the darker side of natural Eros enters into it.
In the end, any imaginary or indeed real relationship to the research appropriate to perverse desire only suggests the incapacity of natural desire, of the natural desire of the senses, to go very far in this direction. On this path, this desire quickly gives up, is the first to give up. It is no doubt understandable if modern man’s thought seeks the beginning, the trace, the point of departure there, the path toward self-knowledge, toward the mystery of desire, but, on the other hand, all the fascination that this beginning exercises over both scientific and literary studies – witness for example the revels to be found in the works of the not untalented author of Sexus, Plexus and Nexus1 – founders on a rather sterile pleasure-taking. We must be lacking in the proper method, if everything that has been elaborated on the topic by writers or scientists was outdistanced in advance some time ago, was rendered thoroughly outdated by the lucubrations of someone who was only after all a country squire, a social example of the degeneration of the nobility at a time when its privileges were about to be abolished.
It is nevertheless the case that Sade’s extraordinary catalogue of horrors, which causes not only the senses and human possibilities but the imagination, too, to flinch, is nothing at all compared to what will, in effect, be seen on a collective scale, if the great and very real explosion occurs that threatens us all. The only difference between Sade’s exorbitant descriptions and such a catastrophe is that no pleasure will enter into the motivation of the latter. Not perverts but bureaucrats will set things off, and we won’t even know if their intentions were good or bad. Things will go off by command; they will be carried through according to regulations, mechanically, down the chain of command, with human wills bent, abolished, overcome, in a task that ceases to have any meaning. That task will be the elimination of an incalculable waste that reveals its constant and final dimension for man.
Let us not forget that that has, in effect, always been one of the dimensions in which we can recognize what a fond dreamer once charmingly referred to as “the humanization of the planet.” There’s never any problem in recognizing man’s passage through the world, his footstep, mark, trace, touch; there where one finds a huge accumulation of oyster shells, only man can have manifestly been. The geological ages have left their waste, too, waste that allows us to recognize order. But the pile of garbage is one of the sides of the human dimension that it would be wrong to mistake.
Having sketched the outlines of this sepulchral mound at the limit of the politics of the good, of the general good, of the good of the community, we will pick up again where we left off last time.
What is the sphere of the search for the good composed of, once it has been undeceived of the error of judgment that I cited by way of example in Saint Augustine?
His reasoning is as follows: it is by the mental process of the subtraction of the good from the good that one ends up refuting the existence of anything else but the good in being, given that that which remains, since it is more perfect than that which previously was, can in no way be evil. Saint Augustine’s reasoning here is calculated to surprise us, and we cannot help wondering what the historical emergence of such a form of thought signifies. It’s a question I will leave open.
Last time we defined the good in symbolic creation as the initium that is the point of departure of the human subject’s destiny in his coming to terms with the signifier. The true nature of the good, its profound duplicity, has to do with the fact that it isn’t purely and simply a natural good, the response to a need, but possible power, the power to satisfy. As a result, the whole relation of man to the real of goods is organized relative to the power of the other, the imaginary other, to deprive him of it.
Let us recall the terms around which, in the first year of my seminar devoted to Freud’s Technical Writings, I organized the ideal ego and the ego ideal, terms that I represented in my graph. The big I designates the identification of omnipotence with the signifier, with the ego ideal. On the other hand, as image of the other, it is the Urbild of the ego, the original form on the basis of which the ego models itself, sets itself up, and operates under the auspices of pseudomastery. We will now define the ego ideal of the subject as representing the power to do good, which then opens up within itself the beyond that concerns us today. How is it that as soon as everything is organized around the power to do good, something completely enigmatic appears and returns to us again and again from our own action – like the ever-growing threat within us of a powerful demand whose consequences are unknown? As for the ideal ego, which is the imaginary other who faces us at the same level, it represents by itself the one who deprives us.
At these two poles of the structuralization of the world of goods, what is it we see outlined?
On the one hand, starting with the unveiling with which the revelation of classical philosophy terminates, that is to say, starting with the point at which Hegel is said to have been stood on his feet, the social conflict proves to be the thread which gives meaning to the enlightened segment of history in the classical sense of the term.
On the other hand, at the other end, there appears something that looks to us like a question offering hope.
Scientific research conducted in what is problematically referred to as the “human sciences” has revealed that for a very long time, outside the domain of classical history, man in non-historical societies has, it is believed, invented a practice conceived to have a salutary function in the maintenance of inter-subjective relations. In my eyes this is like the little stone that was miraculously made to inform us that not everything is caught up in the necessary dialectic of the competition for goods, of the conflict between goods, and of the necessary catastrophe that it gives rise to, and that, moreover, in the world we are exploring, there have existed signs that positively show how men have thought that the destruction of goods as such might be a function expressive of value.
I assume you are all well enough informed so that I don’t have to remind you what a potlatch is. Let me just note briefly that it concerns ritual ceremonies involving the extensive destruction of a variety of goods, consumer goods as well as luxury goods and goods for display. The practice is found in societies that are now no more than relics, vestiges of a form of human social existence that our expansion has tended to wipe out. The potlatch bears witness to man’s retreat from goods, a retreat which enabled him to link the maintenance and discipline of his desire, so to speak – insofar as this is what concerns him in his destiny – to the open destruction of goods, that were both personal and collective property. The problem and the drama of the economy of the good, its ricochets and rebounds, all turn on this point.
Furthermore, as soon as that key is given us, we clearly see that it is not simply the privilege of primitive societies. I couldn’t find today the piece of paper on which I noted that at the beginning of the twelfth century – that through courtly love marked the rise to the surface in European culture of a problematic of desire as such – we see appear in a feudal rite the manifestation of something wholly analogous. The rite in question occurred at a festival, a meeting of barons somewhere in the region of Narbonne, and it involved huge destruction, not only of the goods that were consumed directly as part of the festivities, but also of animals and harnesses. Everything occurred as if the foregrounding of the problematic of desire required as its necessary correlative the need for ostentatious forms of destruction, insofar as they are gratuitous. Those who in the community claim to be privileged subjects, feudal Lords, those who set themselves up as such in this ceremony, throw down challenges to each other, rival each other in attempting to destroy the most.
This is at the other extreme the only example we have of the order of destruction that is carried out consciously and in a controlled way, that is to say, in a very different way from that massive destruction which we have all witnessed, given that we belong to generations that are relatively close to it. This latter destruction seems to us to be an inexplicable accident, a resurgence of savagery, whereas it is rather necessarily linked to the leading edge of our discourse.
A new problem arises for us, one that even Hegel found obscure. For a long time inThe Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel tried to articulate the problem of human history in terms of conflicts between discourses. The tragedy of Antigone especially appealed to him because he saw the clear opposition there between the discourse of the family and that of the state. But in my opinion things are much less clear.
As far as we are concerned, we find in the discourse of the community, of the general good, the effects of a scientific discourse in which we see revealed for the first time the power of the signifier as such. That question is our very own. As far as we are concerned, the question raised is subsumed beneath the order of thought that I am trying to present to you here.
The sudden, prodigious development of the power of the signifier, of the discourse that emerged from the little letters of mathematics and that is distinct from all previously existing discourses, becomes an additional alienation. In what way? Insofar as it is a discourse that by reason of its structure forgets nothing. That is why it is different from the discourse of primary memorization, which carries on inside us without our knowledge, different from the memorizing discourse of the unconscious whose center is absent, whose place is identified through the phrase “he didn’t know,” that is precisely the sign of that fundamental omission in which the subject is situated. At a certain moment in time, man learned to emit and place the discourse of mathematics in circulation, in the real as well as in the world, and that discourse cannot function unless nothing is forgotten. It only takes a little signifying chain to begin to function based on this principle, for things to move forward as if they were functioning by themselves. So much so that we even wonder if the discourse of physics, as engendered by the omnipotence of the signifier, will reach the point of the integration of nature or its disintegration.
This fact strangely complicates the problem of our desire, even if it is doubtless no more than one of its phases. Let us just say that, as far as the man who is talking to you is concerned, it is there that one finds the revelation of the decisive and original character of the place where human desire is situated in the relationship of man to the signifier. Should this relationship be destroyed?
I take it that you might have heard in the report we had on the contribution of one of Freud’s disciples – an open-minded and cultured man, but not exactly a genius – that it is in that direction that the question of the meaning of the death drive lies. It is insofar as this question is tied to history that the problem is raised. It is a question of the here and now, and not ad aeternum. It is because the movement of desire is in the process of crossing the line of a kind of unveiling that the advent of the Freudian notion of the death drive is meaningful for us. The question is raised at the level of the relationship of the human being to the signifier as such, to the extent that at the level of the signifier every cycle of being may be called into question, including life in its movement of loss and return.
And it is this that gives a no less tragic meaning to something that we analysts are the bearers of. In its own cycle the unconscious now appears to us as the field of a non-knowledge, even though it is locatable as such. Yet in this field where we have to function everyday, we cannot fail to recognize the following fact that every child could understand.
The desire of the man of good will is to do good, to do the right thing, and he who comes to seek you out, does so in order to feel good, to be in agreement with himself, to identify with or be in conformity with some norm. Now you all know what we nevertheless find in the margin, but also perhaps at the limit of that which occurs on the level of the dialectic and progress of the knowledge of the unconscious. In the irreducible margin as well as at the limit of his own good, the subject reveals himself to the never entirely resolved mystery of the nature of his desire.
The reference the subject makes to some other seems quite absurd, when we see him continually refer to the other – and we certainly see more than a few of these others – as if he were someone who lives harmoniously and who in any case is happier than the analysand, doesn’t ask any questions, and sleeps soundly in his bed. We don’t need to see this other come and lie down on our couch, however solid and together he may be, to know that this mirage, this reference of the dialectic of the good to a beyond that, by way of illustration, I will call “the good that musn’t be touched,” is the very text of our experience.
I would even add that this register of ajouissance as that which is only accessible to the other is the only dimension in which we can locate the strange malaise that, if I’m not mistaken, only the German language has managed to point to – along with other psychological nuances concerning the gap in man – with the word Lebensneid.
Lebensneid is not an ordinary jealousy, it is the jealousy born in a subject in his relation to an other, insofar as this other is held to enjoy a certain form of jouissance or superabundant vitality, that the subject perceives as something that he cannot apprehend by means of even the most elementary of affective movements. Isn’t it strange, very odd, that a being admits to being jealous of something in the other to the point of hatred and the need to destroy, jealous of something that he is incapable of apprehending in any way, by any intuitive path? The identification of this other virtually in the form of a concept may in itself suffice to provoke the movement of malaise concerned; and I don’t think one has to be an analyst to see such disturbing undulations passing through subjects’ behaviors.
Now we have reached the frontier. What will enable us to cross it?
One finds at this frontier another crossing point, which enables us to locate precisely an element of the field of the beyond-the-good principle. That element, as I have said, is the beautiful.
I just want to introduce you to the problematic today. I will limit myself to two articulations.
Freud was extremely prudent in this connection. On the nature of the creation that is manifested in the beautiful, the analyst has by his own admission nothing to say. In the sphere that calculates the value of the work of art, we find ourselves reduced to a position that isn’t even that of schoolchildren, but of pickers up of crumbs. Moreover, that’s not all, and Freud’s text is very weak on the topic. The definition he gives of sublimation at work in artistic creation only manages to show us the reaction or repercussions of the effects of what happens at the level of the sublimation of the drive, when the result or the work of the creator of the beautiful reenters the field of goods, that is to say, when they have become commodities. One must recognize that the summary Freud gives of the artist’s career is practically grotesque. The artist, he says, gives a beautiful form to the forbidden object in order that everyone, by buying his little artistic product, rewards and sanctions his daring. That is a way of shortcircuiting the problem. And Freud is perfectly aware of the limits he imposes on himself in a way that is perfectly obvious when the problem of creation – which he leaves aside as outside the range of our experience – is added to it.
We are thus brought back again to all the pedantic thoughts that in the course of centuries have been expressed about the beautiful.
Everyone knows that in every field those who have something to say – that is in this case the creators of beauty – are understandably the most dissatisfied by pedantic formulas. Yet something that has been expressed by almost all of them, especially by the best but also at the level of common experience, does make the rounds, namely, that there is a certain relationship between beauty and desire.
This relationship is strange and ambiguous. On the one hand, it seems that the horizon of desire may be eliminated from the register of the beautiful. Yet, on the other hand, it has been no less apparent – from the thought of antiquity down to Saint Thomas who has some valuable things to say on the question – that the beautiful has the effect, I would say, of suspending, lowering, disarming desire. The appearance of beauty intimidates and stops desire.
That is not to say that on certain occasions beauty cannot be joined to desire, but in a mysterious way, and in a form that I can do no better than refer to by the term that bears within it the structure of the crossing of some invisible line, i.e., outrage. Moreover, it seems that it is in the nature of the beautiful to remain, as they say, insensitive to outrage, and that is by no means one of the least significant elements of its structure.
I will show it to you then in the detail of analytical experience, show it to you with pointers that will enable you to be alert to it when it occurs in an analytical session. With the precision of a Geiger counter, you can pick it up by means of references to the aesthetic register that the subject will give you in his associations, in his broken, disconnected monologue, either in the form of quotations or of memories from his schooldays. You don’t, of course, always deal with creators, but you do deal with people who have had a relationship to the conventional sphere of beauty. You can be sure that the more these references become strangely sporadic and peremptory with relation to the text of the discourse, the more they are correlative of something that makes its presence felt at that moment, and that belongs to the register of a destructive drive. It is at the very moment when a thought is clearly about to appear in a subject, as in the narration of a dream for example, a thought that one recognizes as aggressive relative to one of the fundamental terms of his subjective constellation, that, depending on his nationality, he will make some reference to a passage from the Bible, to an author, whether a classic or not, or to some piece of music. I mention this today to show that we are not far from the very text of our experience.
The beautiful in its strange function with relation to desire doesn’t take us in, as opposed to the function of the good. It keeps us awake and perhaps helps us adjust to desire insofar as it is itself linked to the structure of the lure.
You can see this place illustrated by the fantasm. If there is “a good that mustn’t be touched,” as I was saying earlier, the fantasm is “a beauty that musn’t be touched,” in the structure of this enigmatic field.
The first side of this field is known to us, it is the side that along with the pleasure principle prevents us from entering it, the side of pain.
We must ask ourselves what it is that constitutes that field. The death drive, says Freud, primary masochism. But isn’t that to take too big a leap? Is the pain that denies access to the side the whole content of the field? Are all those who express demands for this field masochists after all? And I can tell you right off, I don’t think so.
Masochism is a marginal phenomenon and it possesses something almost caricatural that moral inquiry at the end of the nineteenth century has pretty much laid bare. The economy of masochistic pain ends up looking like the economy of goods. One wants to share pain as one shares heaps of other things that are left over; and one even comes close to fighting over it.
But isn’t there something there that involves a panicky return to the dialectic of goods? In truth, the whole behavior of the masochist – and I mean by that the perverse masochist – points to the fact that it is a question of a structural feature in his behavior. Read Mr. Sacher-Masoch. He’s an enlightening writer, although he doesn’t have the stature of Sade, and you will see that in the end the point aimed at by the position of the perverse masochist is the desire to reduce himself to this nothing that is the good, to this thing that is treated like an object, to this slave whom one trades back and forth and whom one shares.
But one shouldn’t after all proceed too quickly to break inventive homonymy, and the fact the masochism has been called by this name for so long by psychoanalysis is not without reason. The unity that emerges from all the fields which analytical thought has labeled masochism has to do with the fact that in all these fields pain shares the character of a good.
We will continue our inquiry next time with relation to a document.
It’s not exactly a new document. Down through the centuries longwinded commentators have cut their teeth and sharpened their nails on it. This text appeared in the field where the morality of happiness was theorized and it gives us its underlying structure. It is there that its underlying structure is the most visible, there where it appears on the surface. That which over the centuries has caused the greatest problems, from Aristotle down to Hegel and Goethe, is a tragedy, one that Hegel considered the most perfect, but for the wrong reason, namely, Antigone.
Antigone’s position relates to a criminal good. One would have to have a character that was deeply out of touch with the cruelties of our time to attack the subject, if I may say so, by focusing on the tyrant.
We will, therefore, take up the text of Antigone together, since it will enable us to point to a fundamental moment, to reach an essential reference point in our investigation of what it is man wants and what he defends himself against. We will see what an absolute choice means, a choice that is motivated by no good.
May 18, 1960
1 The author referred to is, of course, Henry Miller.