As Badiou says in “What Is Love?” (2000), thought depends on the impossibility of angels. I see Badiou, angel like, in all white— with his mysterious smile and self-avowed dignity. He knows the place that he holds in a long line of important French philosophers in whose path he has followed. Badiou is in the impossible position of the master. It cannot really be any other way. He bears the burden more or less well. The axiomatic nature of his work means, following Lacan, that it is only necessary that he authorize himself—and yet, he is authorized. He stands between the two impossible poles of desire and mastery.
His work is attracted to a realm just beyond that which desire inhabits and this attraction is both Badiou’s virtue and his potential failing. Being the master, he cannot entirely dissociate himself from a mastery that is detrimental to this life of desire and whatever possibility it affords—a possibility that Badiou has carefully conceptualized. Fidelity to truth, the immortal of a resistance, militant subjectivity, the ethics of universality, and so many of his other terms, are always directed to what lies beyond the confines of mastery. Such is the revolutionary agenda of his thought.
For reasons that will hopefully become clear, Badiou has disavowed the value of semblance that I have tried to underscore. Semblance gnaws at the edges of mastery. With Badiou, what he is doing is always very real, never merely a fiction. His philosophical system seems unable to sustain itself if there is too much of this ir-reality. It is perhaps for this reason that what appeals to Badiou is not Lacan’s antiphilosophy, as he calls it, nor certainly the practice of psychoanalysis, which he ignores, nor even a theory of desire, which is subsumed under other categories. Rather, it is Lacan’s more systematic thought grounded in topology and mathematics.
I learned this system of his. It was an important step in learning how to rethink Lacan, to think against Adorno, to get out from the traps of nihilism and melancholia. But what once evoked enthusiasm, his belligerent rhetoric and the audacity of his formalization, left me, in the end, rather cold. It had less to do with his concepts—whose range and force of application is undeniably admirable—and everything to do with the place from which one encounters his voice. Perhaps this is the place where one would assent to Badiou, agree to follow him as master. I for one could imagine such a thing, all the while knowing that after Adorno this wasn’t an open possibility for me any longer.
Badiou, one could say, is this real master that Lacan said everyone has failed to understand—the father of the primal horde. He is the one who outlines the eternal place held by the father in all his many dimensions. He is, if we are to work through a continuing petit hysterie, the most important figure for psychoanalysis to begin to comprehend again. The real master is the one we have to read out from Freud’s myths, Totem and Taboo (1912–1913) and Moses and Monotheism (1939)—the primal father with all the women, his problematic enjoyment, the one who is always destined for murder, in which case we carry this burden of envy and guilt, narcissism and aggression.
This first appearance of the death wish directed at the father is at the foundation of our structures of kinship and community. The structure of this father is the structure that evokes a cut—the necessity of this space carved between you and you, as we saw in Hamlet. Discourse must be something held beyond each one of us, a beyond whose cutting edge becomes our saving grace. It is my hope that in this concluding section on Badiou, we will come to understand the implication of this space, no less this figure of the father.
The master is someone who we believe incarnates the exception to the rule, the first and final transgressor of the Law. As Joyce (1922/1986) humorously put it at the end of Ulysses, when it was a question of whether Bloom could find it in himself to be a father to Steven Dedalus:
If he smiled why would he have smiled?
To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a proceeding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone, whereas he is neither first nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity (p. 731).
The master is the one who imagines himself to be first, last, only, and alone—the beginning of the series. Is this not close to Freud’s primary desire as articulated by Leclaire? Desire at its foundation and this foundational desire—as a wish to transgress, unveil, rip into, and possess—cannot be. It necessitates a cut. “I am,” receives its negation, “you are not.”
Badiou’s smile comes to you as something that originates from himself. But even in the exchange, it always seems to return there once again. If you’ve ever heard him laugh it is something charming, disarming even, but it is, in its way, radically self-contained. It is different with Lacan. He initiates laughter, addresses you with it. Lacan’s humorousness is something infectious. It departs from its point of origin, generates movement, and like desire tries to transcend its own boundaries only to have to begin again, which he does.
So the master’s strategy is to present himself as something glorious and unpassable, and we feel him to be unassailable, an impasse. And yet, what we learn from Freud is that this identification with the master is a participation in the master’s own denial. As Freud writes in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921):
In many individuals the separation between the ego and the ego ideal is not very far advanced; the two still coincide readily; the ego has often preserved its earlier self-complacency. The selection of the leader is very much facilitated by this circumstance. He need only possess the typical qualities of the individuals concerned in a particularly clearly marked and pure form, and need only give an impression of the greater force and of more freedom of libido; and in that case the need for a strong chief will often meet him half-way and invest him with a predominance to which he would otherwise have had no claim. The other members of the group, whose ego ideal would not, apart from this, have become embodied in his person without some correction, are then carried away with the rest by “suggestion”, that is to say, by means of identification (p. 102).
We agree, more or less, to supplement and act as his support—identifying with him, we live out a wished for mastery. We are caught like a mouse in this trap of the phallus which is the cause of the disappearance of love and desire; “the members of a group stand in need of the illusion that they are equally and justly loved by their leader; but the leader himself need love no one else, he may be of a masterly nature, absolutely narcissistic, but self-confident and independent. We know that love puts a check on narcissism, and it would be possible to show how, by operating in this way, it became a factor of civilization” (Freud, 1921, p. 93).
Where I have come to question Badiou’s work is in relation to love and desire. Desire has become intrinsic to this work on the question of the life and death of psychoanalysis. Badiou, despite a trenchant Lacanianism, dislikes the category of desire. In fact he never uses it. In Philosophy as Biography (2008), he describes the development of his thoughts on love and desire:
Just like everyone, in the 50s and 60s, we were tormented by sexuality … . In the end, this trouble is foreign to philosophy strictly speaking, in conformity to its great classical tradition. I would say that I learned little by little why. It is certain that sexual situations are fascinating, and it is also certain that the formalism of these situations, the erotic formalism is extraordinarily poor. And all its force depends on a repetitive injunction, with variations of little amplitude. I would say then that little by little in life a relation of charmed connivance is established with this formalism. Finally neither transgressive fascination, nor the repression of the superego, are really at their place in this affair. All that is delicious, and, after all, without great consequence for thought. I have come to conclude philosophically, that as acute as this pacifying charmed connivance might be, at least for me, desire is not a central category for philosophy, and cannot be. Or rather desire only touches philosophy—just as well as jouissance—as bodies are seized in love. That is why, from this long crossing through sexual torment the final result is, as I had already said for other reasons, that love, and not desire, must instantly return into the constitution of the concept (p. 15).
So while love is one of the central categories for Badiou, desire, reduced to sexuality in its material bodily dimension, carries no traction. Desire’s formalism is poor and of little interest to Badiou and this disinterest of his is equated with a lack of any consequence it might hold for thought.
The formal character of desire is siphoned into the formalism of Lacan’s mathemes and contained therein. Badiou will include psychoanalysis only under the generic truth procedure of love, one among four, his three others being mathematics, art, and politics. What psychoanalysis proper becomes is a discourses on love that thinks the difficulty of the two, be it the unhappy coupling of life and death drives, or man and woman.
As much as he talked about love, mathemes, the real, Lacan is always for me a theorist of desire; what holds the greatest traction for my work as a psychoanalyst. Desire is never reduced to being blatantly sexual. There was always a knot formed between, love, desire and jouissance. Imaginary solutions to the complexity of this knot proliferate throughout history from divine love to courtly love, to pornography and debasement. The same holds just as much for the solutions offered by philosophy, which, Lacan says, seems to search for a new ontology that is nothing short of a question centered on being in love as the love of being.
For Freud, at the very least, the impasse is the impasse between love and desire. Psychical impotence, for example, is a psychic division such that “where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love” (Freud, 1912, p. 183). The tendency toward debasement in the sphere of love follows a certain logic, a special-type of object choice—the object must be a taken one, one of ill repute, including the continuous series of objects despite the pronouncement that their love is an event whose “demand for fidelity” appears singular (Freud, 1910, p. 167). In short, the object serves merely as an exchangeable prop for some failure with respect to love and desire.
Freud says, “we have learnt from psychoanalysis in other examples that the notion of something irreplaceable, when it is active in the unconscious, frequently appears as broken up into an endless series: endless for the very reason that every surrogate nevertheless fails to provide the desired satisfaction” (Freud, 1910, p. 169). The last word for Freud is that the debasement of the love object is rather a result of an elevation of love above desire; with a wry smile Freud says that perhaps man should learn to think less highly of his wife and come to terms with the idea of incest.
The fantasy for Freud, inherent in the debasement of the object, stems from a failed prohibition with respect to incestuous desire. Desire, registered and repudiated in this way, is treated like a pollutant of the body that must be kept away from the idealized incestuous object. The decision engenders a certain logical division: there are objects which deserve to be polluted with desire on the one hand, and objects that are preserved from desire’s pollutants on the other. What is preserved is a realm not necessarily for desire, but rather a realm within which to deny incestuous love.
Badiou, in seeking not only to dispense with a theory of desire, but to clear away the mistakes of philosophy—the traps it has fallen into from modernity onward—seems caught in this dilemma. It is as if philosophy must rid itself of desire. In fact, Badiou declares that he wants to depollute the body of philosophy. In psychoanalytic thought, one does not find fidelity, in Badiou’s manner of defining it, without desire; and certainly not without an uncompromising work with desire in all its singular formality for a subject. I suppose for Freud and Lacan, love is only a possible horizon thereafter.
Paradoxically, quite in the spirit of Badiou, Freud said that the impasse between love and desire is our “universal affliction under civilization” (1912, p. 184). Where Freud stops short of saying anything more than this universal descriptive fact, Badiou reaches for a solution. This solution is something like a steady rearmament of philosophy with its original weapons systematic thought, a sharp line drawn between true and false philosophy. Badiou says he would like philosophy not to be so “flaccid,” “defeated and limited,” to stop acting like a “valet” that serves one master, for philosophy to finally quit the “self-accusatory vacillation” in the face of the crimes of the holocaust.
Like a good hysteric who loves obsessional men, his constant and rather distant labor of love grabbed my attention. If it is true that where one knows one does not enjoy, then Badiou’s labor would be too much without enjoyment to be at all satisfying, precisely there where he would really have to risk his own continuity in the face of what is always going to be beyond himself. I too feel the weight of impotence, but as a psychoanalyst there is a know-how with it that doesn’t translate into the kind of knowledge that Badiou seems to push for. And I think he knows this, which is why Lacan, along with psychoanalysis, drops out of the picture in his later work, relegated to the field of love.
So I wouldn’t say that it was Badiou’s systematizing or mathematizing that attracted me but instead his attraction to saintliness, his hatred of simulacrum. It is a fantasy of purity where the stakes of the game are this inviolate body as a body that refuses to let itself be used; the fantasy of something beyond a process of desire and signification. This inviolate body of philosophy puts the categories of language, semblance, and desire, under contestation.
This choice makes sense to me to the extent that for Lacan (1991/2007) the master always makes use of what he calls the crystal of language—a mythic cry embedded in the signifier at its birth. This cry mimics a kind of sufficient totality—signified like and noumenal. In using this crystal, the master tries to break with the law of the signifier, namely, the law that it always be radically independent of the signified and displaced into an endless series of which it is never its own origin. Presenting his voice as this purified cry, he makes his presence an interminable vanishing point.
So while the cry appears as “univocal,” “self-identical”—it is a lie. But, it is a lie that has certain enduring effects. “Everyone jumps” when this master speaks, says Lacan, like when a baby cries or a wolf howls. As Lacan elaborated its structure, language is useful in bringing us closer to this mythical “violation of the law of the signifier,” the “ultrareduced myth of being identical with one’s own signifier” (Lacan, 1991/2007, p. 90). Primal repression, the divided subject, the division between word representation and thing representation, the absence of the object at the foundation of psychic reality, are all held in opposition to this myth. The myth is a myth. A cry is just another signifier.
So my rather tenacious tendency toward hysteria is most useful to me here with Badiou—locating the position of the master, locating where a discourse lapses on the question of desire. And yet, as a self-declared master one doesn’t necessarily have to work so very hard. If there is an undoing, it will be his own. It will have nothing to do with others, no less myself. One cannot invest either as its support or its undoing. Neutrality demands that we, as psychoanalysts, steer clear of such tactics. While the hysteric is loath to know this—as Lacan says, she wants to be the price of his knowledge—perhaps here, for the first time I can see my own way through. The series articulated in this piece of work— Adorno, Lacan, Badiou—while ending in this figure of the master, in fact should be seen as one that is in fact set off by him.
In a strange turn, Badiou, much like Adorno, declares an end to the age of poets culminating in Celan (2005). Somewhere he must know that he is breaking this law of language, the barre, and preemptively, like Plato, he banishes the word. Not because of Auschwitz, as was the case with Adorno, but because the circle has been completed—from poetry to philosophy, from the presocratics to Plato, and in one more turn, from philosophy back to poetry, from Plato to Heidegger. Now philosophy must take up the reigns once again.
In praise of the poets, Badiou will say that while their project bears out a kind of truth, attempting to break through the threshold of presence, it does so only in order to orient us once more to the task of philosophy. If philosophy after Heidegger sutures itself to poetry, if philosophers from Derrida to Gadamer, and onward, relegate the project of philosophy to poetry, then to remain in this suture is a betrayal of Celan because it means that his poetry was the end of thought. Philosophy must discern its future—and it seems as if it culminates precisely in the work of Badiou himself.
With an air of justification, I can say that Badiou is, for his part, always oriented, never dislocated. He is impassable. His dream of the axiomatic principle at the heart of thought, what Lacan called Yahweh’s invective ferocity, becomes the site from which he announces his sovereignty over the prostitutes of philosophy. And to the extent that this impasse also requires the exclusion of psychoanalysis—perhaps one more sophistry—his discourse depends on that which he must make his slave. Philosophy will act as no valet to psychoanalysis, no less to the poets or desire.
Badiou has been in this work from the beginning, but for me there is something in iterating this series such that now, at its end, he is a very different character then the one he was in the beginning. This isn’t to say that I don’t remember who he was to me then, I do, but something has changed. Is that not what we hope for when we engage in an act of writing? The encounter with Badiou is the right encounter for me at this cross roads. It is an encounter with what Lacan called the Other side of psychoanalysis—the discourse of the master.
I would like to elaborate on what I have learned from Badiou in relation to psychoanalytic thought. Badiou’s use of Lacan is important, not only for gaining some traction with Lacan, but also in thinking through the particular relationship that psychoanalysis holds with respect to truth. The question of truth strongly informs the project of Badious’s philosophy, a project that can be read as a renewal of its place and prominence. Lacan, Badiou says, helps us define truth such that we can steer our way through the twin obstacles of obscurantist theories of truth and scientistic theories of truth. Badiou says, “[the] twist is not at all to put forward that the Real is unknowable, nor that it is knowable either. Lacan’s thesis is that the Real has an exteriority to the antinomy between knowing and being unaware” (Badiou, 2006b, p. 3).
Badiou’s work articulates this cutting edge between possibility and impossibility as occasioned by this way of rendering truth. While Badiou has a lot to say about truth, and from this we have a great deal to learn, we cannot forget the difference between the analytic position and that of the master, which turns precisely on this question of truth. What place does truth hold for us as psychoanalysts? What the master’s discourse teaches us is the way in which one gets caught in this trap of truth precisely as an effect of the position one holds. If psychoanalysis does not cure through insight, knowledge, or force, how does it cure? How do we situate truth in this realm of effects that we procure?
Truth, Lacan says (1991/2007), is always to some degree impotent. It is always positioned in relationship to contingency and particularity in psychoanalysis. It gives the real back its shine, but only for a time. The radical maintenance of the place of the analyst is one where he does not get bitten by this bug of truth. Truths come—of that the analyst has had some experience—but it is not something he lays his hands on.
Rather than speaking about a doctrine of truth, psychoanalysis says something about the important relation between a subject and truth. Lacan calls this the place of the agency of a subject where truth is more than anything a relationship of cause. The meaning of the word “agent” contains the equivocation in its definition that includes the notion of being driven, being the agent of, being a representative or delegate of an agency. The relationship between truth and agent or agency is where I will now turn. I will do so through a reading of Badiou’s work Metapolitics (1998/2005c). This work is essentially a critique of the concept of Human Rights and an exploration of the idea of evil that I will link back to psychoanalysis.
Under the rubric of Human Rights, Badiou shows that truth is equivalent to the capacity to determine evil a priori. From this definition of evil, one determines a set of laws, namely the laws of Human Rights and the threshold of their violation. Evil is determinative both of a notion of the good and of the subject. Law in this case, Badiou will say, is first of all law against evil.
For Badiou, a metaphysical notion of truth creeps back in through this door of Human Rights. In Badiou’s reading, Human Rights cannot abide by a doctrine of universal truth. More egregiously, it does not ask who has the right to be the agent of truth, nor in what way, suggesting a cluster of convictions uncritically held by the ethical system of Human Rights. Badiou writes:
We posit a general human subject, such that whatever evil befalls him is universally identifiable (even if this universality often goes by the altogether paradoxical name of “public” opinion), such that this subject is both, on the one hand, a passive, pathetic, or reflective subject—he who suffers—and, on the other, the active determining subject of judgment—he who, in identifying suffering, knows that it must be stopped by all available means (Badiou, 1998/2005c, p. 14).
Human Rights structure a conception of ethics that easily determines a course of action—a humanitarian agenda. This structure splits the field between a passive suffering subject and one who identifies and judges suffering, acting on the basis of this. Critically, Badiou states, “finally, thanks to its negative and a priori determination of Evil, ethics prevents itself from thinking the singularity of situations as such, which is the obligatory starting point of all properly human action” (Badiou, 1998/2005c, p. 14).
In this connection one might note that the kind of singularity that is the obligatory starting point of psychoanalysis—we must begin as if anew, each time, with each patient—is foreclosed in the a priori determination of evil. There is something at odds between this philosophy of Human Rights, its relationship to truth, and the conceptual system of both Badiou and psychoanalysis. If we do not determine truth in advance, no less any conception of evil, then what can our agency be?
In the system of Human Rights, these poor, suffering, passive, victims of evil, can only identify with the power implicit in the agency of Human Rights. This figure of agency determines all the others. It is as if to say, be strong like me, I once knew suffering but know it no longer, I will help you, I know what is right. And yet, Badiou notes in Hegelian fashion, who is defining whom in this master-slave dialectic? Without this victim, or even without this demarcated realm of evil, Human Rights cannot define itself. Or, to put it another way, this is the logic of identification, a logic that always carves an inside edge by virtue of creating an excluded exterior.
While this is an admittedly extreme characterization, it is useful for making evident the logic of this problematic structure. The seemingly naturalized and rather conservative ethics of Human Rights, has as its counterpart a nihilistic and relativistic ethics. The latter includes, for example, the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre who famously said that the belief in Human Rights is on par with a belief in unicorns and witches. Both the absolute conviction in Human Rights and a kind of postmodern relativism fail to the extent that in the place where one solidifies truth in advance, the other equates this failure with nothingness.
Lacan is again crucial to Badiou because he represents neither of these positions at a time when these were held as the dominant paradigms. Lacan did not give up either on a concept of the subject, when this was broken apart in postmodernist theory, or a concept of truth, which was under vigorous attack as well. For Badiou, through Lacan, we find the possibility of a radical desubstantialization of truth and a subject who can seize its effects.
In analysis do we not abide by a conception of truth closer to this line of thought? The requirement of the analyst’s position is such that we empty ourselves of any preconception of truth—truth always being something beyond us, articulated in a discourse that is not our own, that, if you like, belongs to the unconscious. Like Bion (1967), we are without memory and without desire. This subtractive dimension of truth is formalizable, close to Lacan’s concept of the real and the crossing of fantasy.
The truths that a patient encounters are often about the effects of a supposed truth taken as substantial—for example fantasy, family mythology, identifications. These are not substantial truths, but contingent ones which define the ground of psychoanalysis starting with the impact of the accidents of life on our subjective constitution. Nowhere is this truer than in the realm of sexuality. As Jean Claude Milner (1995) powerfully renders the impact of the contingency of sexuality:
I will advance that sexuality, in as much as psychoanalysis speaks of it, is nothing other than this: The place of infinite contingency in the body. That there is sexuation, rather than not, is contingent. That there are two sexes rather than one or many is contingent. That one is on one side or the other is contingent. That such somatic characteristics are attached to sexuation is contingent. That such cultural characteristics are attached to it is contingent. Because it is contingent, it touches infinity (cited in Johnston, 2010, p. 150)
What Milner refers to in the end with this notion of infinity can be read as universal. Psychoanalysis attends to this crossing between the particular and universal as it appears with respect to the unconscious.
On the other hand, in the logic of identification at the core of Human Rights, one has little room to be anything else beyond the preconceived categories of evil, or the figure of justice/victim of injustice. Badiou calls this the logic of the same. As he says with sarcasm, “become like me and I will respect your difference.” The action is always generalizable, and your choice as a subject is to be like this, or be nothing—a perverse mirror of Lacan’s ethical subject.
This is not the concept of difference as rendered by Lacan. Difference, from within this logic of the same, renders truth insignificant. There is literally an a priori foundation upon which anything may be discovered. For Badiou, this forbids the naming of that which, as yet, has not come to pass, namely what he calls the event. The event creates difference, it is not difference that creates the event. The question should not be about difference, but about the conditions under which a subject seizes truth through the event. “It is only through a genuine perversion, for which we will pay a terrible historical price, that we have sought to elaborate an ethics on the basis of cultural relativism. For this is to pretend that a merely contingent state of things can found a law” (Badiou, 1998/2005c, p. 28).
Human Rights is not an ethics of tolerance. It is not aimed at a tolerance of radical otherness. It is a disqualification of the Other, which, we have seen so often in modern liberal politics. It is only in relation to what is truly Other for Badiou that a new ethical relationship can be established between a subject and a world. In the words of Badiou, the system of Human Rights is a betrayal of truth. Any predetermination of the subject, let’s say also of the contents of the unconscious, any prescription for how one should be in the world, is to foreclose the possibility of anything new actually emerging. In fact this kind of status quo, this normativity, is what best defines ethical systems wed to a metaphysics of evil—reified standards of one to be followed by all.
And we cannot forget the passive, pathetic, victimized subject who is at the center of this system. “At the core of the mastery internal to this ethics is always the power to decide who dies and who does not” (Badiou, 1998/2005c, p. 35). So we return once again to the problem of knowledge and mastery. Badiou’s work with this problem, taken as a problem with respect to the question of truth, gives it a new characterization—the fantastic power that mastery tries to exert is always one over life and death. Unraveling the logic of identification, Badiou finds this insoluble tie between locating evil and the victim of evil in a perverse fantasy of the power to chose who lives and who dies. Become like me, or die unhappy.
I would like to elaborate this structure in relation to Freud’s (1919a) work, A Child is Being Beaten. This fantasy, in the form of a scene where a child is beaten by a father figure, represents for Freud the scars of the Oedipus complex. This sado-masochistic fantasy powerfully induces jouissance or masturbatory excitement, the consequence of which is an erosion of agency and a loss of desire. In the fantasy, the self occupies multiple positions—the spectator of the beating, the aggressor, and the victim. The effect of these multiple identifications is not in the service of unraveling fantasy, but rather of sustaining it. The wish to stay a helpless child bound within the family complex, incestuous love, and the fantasy of the alleviation of guilt through punishment, circulates in this scene unbeknownst to its author.
One can identify this structure in the ethical system of Human Rights. The figure of Human Rights is the spectator of victims of evil. In positioning himself against this evil he determines his place as free of it, virtuous. In fact, this system is a system of purification, and one might speculate on the relationship between fantasy, jouissance, and this moral masochism. For Badiou, Human Rights is caught between these three demarcated positions.
I am slightly amused by the fact that we have come back around to the original argument concerning the seduction theory in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis hinges on this change from a concern with reality and veridical truth to the truth of fantasy. This change of frame provided a measure of freedom. Freud would begin to read the derivatives of the unconscious rather than seek to uncover traumatic memory. The consequence of this turn also changes the meaning of cure from one of abreaction to the subversion of a neurotic structure that often takes the form of transference to overvalued figures of authority, figures by whom, I would dare say, we wish to be beaten.
The analyst is not someone who holds a position against, before, or above such a wish. The wish is taken as universal—a scar of Oedipus. The wish, embedded in the fantasy, is unraveled in the direction of a truth that neither the analyst, nor the patient, knows in advance. The wish contains a contingent truth whose appearance is likewise characterized by some contingency. But there are, neverthless, structures that psychoanalysis formalizes—the pain of submission to life, the constraints of language and body and gender, the safety of being outside of desire, and the problems of identification with the aggressor. These act as a guide in helping a patient seize hold of their particular truth therein.
The problem of materializing or substantializing, rather than elaborating this truth can be seen in the example of Human Rights. At the very least, we begin to map the unstable identifications which force us all too fluidly to lapse between the positions of the omnipotent beating father, the victimized, beaten, but loved, child, and the “neutral” third party voyeur who cries out, “a child is being beaten!” What it is that can be found in truth that is shared universally is what defines truth as such for Badiou, for example, the impossibility of escaping the contingent effects of Oedipus on fantasy life. And yet, this universal can only be found in relation to what is most particular.
Without this ethic that aims for both absolute particularity and universality, Badiou feels we will only find a perversion of truth in the form of a disavowed attachment to the spectacle of suffering and death. As he puts it rather strongly:
Here ethics is at the junction of two only apparently contradictory drives: since it defines Man by non-Evil, and thus by “happiness” and life, it is simultaneously fascinated by death yet incapable of inscribing it in thought. The upshot of this compromise is the transformation of death itself into a spectacle made as discreet as possible, a mere disappearing, regarding which the living have the right to hope that it will not disrupt their delusional habits of contented ignorance … ethics oscillates between two complementary desires: a conservative desire, seeking global recognition for the legitimacy of the order peculiar to our “Western” position—the interweaving of an unbridled and impassive economy with a discourse of law; and a murderous desire that promotes and shrouds, in one and the same gesture, an integral mastery of life—or again dooms what is to the Western mastery of death. Against this we can set only that which is not yet in being, but which our thought declares itself able to conceive” (Badiou, 1998/2005c, p. 36–38).
The ethics of that which is not yet in being, but which we can conceive, is synonymous with Badiou’s event of truth. This definition of truth undercuts the complimentary system of a masterful desire for happiness and resolution that lapses into a desire for death. “It is not an easy matter to spell out the ethic of a truth: Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds your perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you” (Badiou, 1993/2002, p. 47).
We persevere in the tension of desire. To my mind, the elusive continuity provided by the unconscious and its logic can never be entirely determined a priori. We have a formal knowledge of it, certainly an experience of it in a personal analysis, but in our clinical work these only function as guidelines. The unconscious has no direct line to consciousness, and yet some truth will manifest if we can uphold a certain position.
At the very least, to subscribe to an ethics of the unconscious means that we are not bearers of the law, freedom, justice, or truth. For Lacan, the hallmark of perversion is seeing oneself as the law, as the one who has this power of dispensation. Law and truth, exceed us, seize us, and break us. They must always be beyond. In Badiou’s words, truth “befalls.” Commitment takes the form of hope or faith that has no representation of a future outcome (neither in the form of reward nor punishment) and is thus the meaning of fidelity. We are not agents of truth, rather, in relation to truth—on its path—we find our agency, our cause. It brings us into being, if I might put it that way.
Badiou gives us back the transformative power of such categories as thought and truth, much like psychoanalysis lends transformative power to the categories of desire and speech. What Badiou posits as thinking (linking, delimiting, persevering) is close to the Freudian notion of sublimation, abstinence, and evenly suspended listening. Psychoanalysis asks that one confront the void within a given situation. There is no object of knowledge—no saving authority—that can smooth over the abyss that stands between oneself and desire.
It must be said that I find Badiou’s thought useful to psychoanalysis perhaps in a broader fashion then he would ever be comfortable with. But, I’m fine with these mere instructions, exactly in the way that I can read Badiou’s philosophical political commentary as formal instructions for thinking through the question of psychoanalysis. Through his work I can more easily grasp this cutting edge between the discourse of the analyst, the master and the hysteric. It seems to me that being used in this way should be in character with his system of thought—truths are a truth for all.
What if the French are right? Let us assume that I haven’t drawn conclusions already. Let us assume that I am not offended as a woman by the diagnostic category of borderline psychopathology. Let us assume that I haven’t found legitimacy to the feminist pleas to be spared this fate. Let us assume that I am not deeply worried about the ramifications of these ideas for the future of psychoanalysis. Let us assume that my outrage does not overshadow my attempts at clarity. Let us assume that I can believe for a minute, so as not to echo the sentiments I seek to deny, that we can have a reasonable discourse on such matters. Let us assume that I will now proceed from a point outside these two sides, to find out what it would mean if the French were right—without presuppositions. Let us assume, on one side or the other, that we feel the stakes are high. Let us assume that these assumptions are possible when we both know that they are not.
The hysteric is a relic of the early 20th century. We have the new feminine diagnosis—Borderline Personality Disorder. It is recognizable by: (1) nonspecific manifestations of Ego weakness (2) identity diffusion (3) shifts toward primary process thinking (4) primitive defenses such as splitting and denial resulting in blurring of ego boundaries such that (i) lack of the development of primary autonomy (ii) lack of anxiety tolerance (iii) excessive frustration in reality (iv) excessive aggression (5) omnipotence and devaluation of self and other (Kernberg, 1967).
From this I might recognize myself. Affirmatively I have ego strength, a coherent identity, and well functioning thought. I am reflective, integrated, bound and autonomous, and beyond this I am not only satisfied, but also capable of genuine love and empathy. To move on to the negations, I am, shall I say, not deficient, not intolerant of anxiety, not full of rage, not full of myself, not empty of myself, not needy, not desperate, not naively hopeful, and not crudely pessimistic. I am, in a word, not Borderline.
Once, a friend told me that in a meeting of some psychoanalytic association they were trying to define the difference between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. In the end it seemed as if the only thing that determined whether one was a psychotherapist or analyst was the position of the patient, lying or sitting, in front of them. “All you have to do is look, and you can know what you are,” he said to me. Perhaps it is through the Borderline that I know who I am as a psychoanalyst. And yet, by the very necessity of an external position giving me this locus internally, I am stripped of the very image and place of my authority and supposed autonomy. Is there any way around this logic of identification? Is there any way around the image taken in, the other who defines—positive or negative—in an unceasing dialectic?
The psychiatrist Otto Kernberg was one of the key figures in defining this category of the Borderline psychopathology. The Borderline’s confusion of self and object land the analyst in a place where nothing new will arise except a situation such that one never seems to know who is doing what to whom. Kernberg says this with a sense of negation—the analyst should be clear on such matters. She, as he says, is out to defeat his capacity for thought.
What is interesting about this split between the one who thinks and the one who does not has everything to do with borderlines. Contemporary psychoanalysis itself is caught in an unending dispute precisely about these borderlines and the consequent split halves found in the dichotomies that define psychoanalytic groups so often these days—intrapsychic or intersubjective, repression or dissociation, the interpretation or the relationship, insight or speech. The French went so far as to say that the Borderline comes closest to the dream of psychoanalysis. She is a new mask for the question Freud brought to the surface when he drew his absolute line between consciousness and the unconscious.
It should come as no surprise that the Borderline is defined in essence by lack and excess (lack of development of primary autonomy, lack of anxiety tolerance, excess aggression, excess frustration, excess of impulse) in such a way that reproduces the very phenomenology of the drive at the cutting edge between soma and psyche. She is literally taken on the model of desire. It is not surprising that we have such trouble with her. Under the best of circumstances, this woman gives the doctor back his work as a psychoanalyst and the doctor restores to this woman her body in the form of her desire. In this, they find a dependence upon one another. To denounce one is to obliterate them both, you cannot choose which one to destroy.
Is there another way out of this fortunate or unfortunate coupling, this logic of identification? Moustapha Safouan formulates the question this way:
The social bond consists in hatred toward the outside, is also woven on the inside out of a refusal to mourn. But to whom or to what might the mourning refer? It would be flying in the face of the evidence to answer that mourning here concerns those we have loved and lost. For the fact is that we feel such losses only too deeply. But those whom we have loved and lost are also those whom our titles to love would seem to have uncontested validity, and it is only natural that we should think to hold these titles by virtue of what we are. And yet we need to know what we are, or rather, to know the absence of what we are beyond the reference to our image (Safouan, 1993/2003, p. 67).
For Safouan the bond between the hysteric and her doctor mirrors a problematic social bond sustained with reference to an image. Because of this reliance on the image, identification in the best and worst of circumstances cannot be the path of psychoanalysis. What must be mourned is, like the case of Hamlet, beyond the reference to the image, centering more broadly on the question of crossing the castration complex. To say that there is a problem with the phallus in this couple, psychoanalyst and Borderline, is an understatement.
There is something about carving out and delineating space that haunts this dialogue about the Borderline contained in her very name. To be unborderline is, I imagine, to dream of a limitless land and to occupy that ground. The borderline, on the other hand, seems to fail to occupy any space, maddeningly liminal and evanescent. What does she want? She has all symptoms, neurotic and psychotic, which she inhabits at their border between one another. Whatever might hold beyond these two, their intractable competition for presence in an image, even in negation, is relegated to the dream of another land. What has become of our beyond? Where is the unconscious?
I am reminded of a talk I saw by a psychoanalyst who was trying to map the deficient brain of the Borderline. He glossed over it, but I caught it out of the corner of my eye—they had discovered the area of the brain associated with psychic emptiness. What a marvelous and strange idea! If you remove this part of the brain, make a hole there, what do you get? Do you get an intensification of emptiness or its relief, which would be paradoxical to say the least, if not totally absurd, such that making a hole in the brain would bring psychic fullness? The Borderline seems to throw at psychiatry the very question of presence and absence.
I had come across this a long time ago in a text by Kernberg, Seltzer, Koenigsberg, and Carr (1989). Taken from reality, no one could have written it any better. It carries within it the majesty of Beckett, actions that run through themselves with vacuity but seem necessary none-the-less, affect absent or utterly exaggerated, indifference to human difference and human difference so extreme it begs indifference, and in the last analysis, theatrical combat which persists in a form so drained and depleted one cannot help but laugh. Beckett’s work is always on the borderline between comedy and tragedy.
Could we not have specified more clearly the play of the Borderline patient and her doctor? It needed its proof from the transcript:
| Therapist: | Well, so we are starting our psychotherapy today. |
| Patient: | Uh-huh. |
| Therapist: | Is there anything on your mind? |
| Patient:: | (long delay) No. |
| Therapist: | I have been talking on the phone with your brother, who called me to tell me that you wouldn’t come to the Tuesday session because you made a suicide attempt and were in the hospital … Of course this raises immediately the question about whether you’re really being able to go through this. You didn’t call me … |
| Patient:: | I did call. . |
| Therapist: | You called after your brother talked with me. You told my secretary that you thought that I might be annoyed because you hadn’t called … |
| Patient:: | I was very out of it (silent laugh). . |
| Therapist: | But, but you didn’t really take the initiative to start out with, to let me know that you wouldn’t show up at your session, at a point when you knew that— |
| Patient:: | (interrupting) can I tell you that I didn’t even know what day I called. I was very out of it. |
| Therapist: | Well, let me share with you what your brother said. He said that you had been taking some kind of medication … that’s why you conveyed the impression of being out of it. Is that a fair statement?. … So I am talking about the decision you made to take those drugs. |
| Patient:: | Hmmm. . |
| Therapist: | From experience you know that once you take drugs you are out of it and you should have called me saying “I am about to take those drugs and I am not showing up on Tuesday.” And you didn’t do that. |
| Patient:: | It doesn’t seem to me to be a normal course of procedure to call someone up and say, “I’m going to be taking an overdose.” . |
| Therapist: | Well then we have to talk about this, because unfortunately that will have to be normal procedure if you want to go through with this treatment … For you to undergo this treatment, to come regularly … it is important that you take responsibility for your daily life. Otherwise you cannot commit yourself to such a treatment. So what I would like to do is to spell out what I see as a minimum requirement for our really carrying out this psychotherapy and then see what you have to say about that. OK? |
| Patient:: | If you like. . |
| Therapist: | What I would expect for you to do is whenever you feel that you are about to make such a gesture … at that point you go into a hospital immediately. |
| Patient:: | I won’t go into a psychiatric hospital. |
| Therapist: | Ok, then I won’t be able to treat you. (pause) Then we have reached the end at the beginning. . |
| Patient:: | You were the one that said to me that you do not feel that I would benefi t from hospitalization. |
| Therapist: | Absolutely sure, but this is not in contradiction … certainly once you are out of control somebody has to evaluate … and I am not going to do that. . |
| Patient:: | You can’t do that on an outpatient basis? |
| Therapist: | I will not do that. Once you are in psychotherapy with me my responsibility will be to help you understand what this is all about, and the only way I can do that is by staying totally away from all the management issues regarding your suicide attempts (excerpted from Kernberg, et al., 1989, pp. 43–49). |
Every time I read it, it has the same impact on me. The astonishing reversal of positions—the patient turned analyst with her, “hmmms,” and finally, the kill, her “if you like,” sending back the analyst’s demand through his questioning “OK?” The analyst turned patient—who does all the talking and in the end must hear his own contradiction, I must not manage you, I can only manage you.
Their words circle and never meet, until, as is said, they have both reached the end in the beginning. There is no opening. There is no truth beyond the contradiction, the irrefutable gap between speaker and listener. The futility in this little transcript of a meeting is heart breaking. How does one take responsibility for their life and desire? This question is certainly the right one, but it is said in such a way that there could be no way to make contact with it as a question for oneself— its impossibility somehow rendered affirmatively. One cannot be forced to take responsibility. Responsibility cannot be structured in advance. It is dependant on an encounter with desire that is foreclosed in this account of work.
If the borderline constitutes the outside edge of identity, what is this borderline state at the periphery of the human? As the psychoanalyst, Pierre Fedida, claimed, it is precisely that—the incarnation of the inhuman, a sacrificial figure, “a female mutant Christ, whose skin is flayed in order to feel,” “whose wounds are rubbed as the only condition of life in her” (Fedida, 1999, p. 64). “The Borderline state of humanity is the fulcrum at which the grimaces, simulating affects, of anonymous normality, tip over into the slow destruction of their appearances. It is also the exhaustion of the dream by the insomnia of cruelty” (Fedida, 1999). The Borderline is the line where the inhuman surfaces.
These Borderlines show not that they are Borderline but that humanity’s other face is a Borderline state—tormented flesh, the disintegration of time, catastrophe that cannot be given a name or a place. If her insomnia of cruelty forces him to reproduce this dream of eradicating the borderline, his dreaming gives her the impetus to roam only in the desert of his own making. In this they sustain one another, but there is nothing admirable or new in it.
The Borderline cannot be the unsung hero I want her to be and the analyst is not the monomaniac ego, or in any case, they can be both at once not in order to break out, but to support one another in their place—to give back to one another the recognition they seek. Fragmentation or coherence—both seem to travel under the sign of the whole, the all, the one, and totality, which is as much as to say the hole, the nothing and the negative. The feminists will be angry with me, but then again I am angry with myself for having been caught in this dilemma and still having no way out. To be on one side is to find your way back onto the other, Borderline or analyst, patient or doctor, French or American.
It seems that the Borderline risks as little as her doctor in this game. She makes herself the object of dull amazement and enjoys bringing this scorn and condemnation upon herself. His failure is always not to be more amazed without, however, falling prey to this amazement. In this circle of condemnation and praise the dialogue is certainly stuck. There has to be another way out of this dilemma than what can only be seen manifestly as something disavowed, patched up, and short circuited.
If on a bad day I place myself in utmost contradistinction to my American bedfellows, disavowing everything that Kernberg stands for, his commandment is a strength in me. As Safouan puts it, “The existence of the commandment is not asserted to a lesser degree in revolt than it is in obedience. Indeed it could even be said to be more strongly asserted in revolt. For one can obey out of mere force of habit, whereas he who commits himself to an ordeal, necessarily does so under the gaze of the All-powerful” (Safouan, 1993/2003, p. 59). This is why I, at my worst and perhaps also at my best, like the analyst of borderlines and the borderline herself, amount to little more than a failed rebellion.
The analyst of Borderlines can find himself little place else than in the position of a case manager—acknowledge and practice the injunctions that I specify—which he does not wish to be. The Borderline is a purified revolt from this law in the form of a counter-identification. Borderline and analyst, whole and not-whole, phallic completeness with incompleteness as its referent, or incompleteness under the sign of the phallus—nothing more than this can be found in this field. There is no more of an elsewhere from one position to the next. The absence of what we are, or what we are in the absence of the image, is most crucial, as Safouan put it.
So the problem with the borderline as I see it is an old one. It is the same one that haunted the hysteric at the beginning of psychoanalysis—she does not create anything new. She makes present what is lost in the perspective of a fixed gaze and I wrongly assumed that that was all that could be made present. She is the appearance of disappearance itself. She is to be congratulated for such a feat! But this is not radical enough—it does not break with this virtual logic.
It is Badiou’s reading of Lacan throughout his work that finally brought me to this problem of defining the cutting edge between a fundamental conservatism inherent in hysteria and what the analytic discourse aims to offer beyond this. This is the opening that is at the heart of Badiou’s logic concerned with the production of something new—something that for him can only take place through a radical break. This break is equivalent to a transformation of one’s subjective position in the form of love and work.
The work of Badiou’s that touches this most strongly for me is a little book called Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (1997/2003b). Badiou returns to the apostle St. Paul because for him he rigorously holds to an impossible point of truth, which he subtracts from the entirety of Christian discourse—that Christ is resurrected. For Badiou, the power of this fable, this point of the real—through which he fashions his entire discourse—clears away an imaginary consistency that surrounds Christianity, no less other religious or scientific discourses. Without this, he aims to show that one cannot found universal truth in quite the same way. Our question can be clearly formulated: What are the conditions for a universal singularity?
The Christian discourse acts like an allegory to the analytic one. In fact, Badiou is taking as his reference Lacan’s theory of the four discourses (the University, the Master, the Hysteric, and the Analyst) and reconfiguring it in light of Paul (the Greek, the Jewish, the Mystic, the Christian). Christian discourse, like analytic discourse, speaks to a radical change between the subject and truth:
Let us say that, for Paul it is a matter of investigating which law is capable of structuring a subject devoid of all identity and suspended to an event whose only “proof” lies precisely in its having been declared by a subject. What is essential for us is that this paradoxical connection between a subject without identity and a law without support provides the foundation for a universal teaching within history itself (Badiou, 1997/2003b, p. 5).
For Badiou, what Paul always reiterates is that he believes in the resurrection of Christ and that this belief, its effects, are open to all. He does not believe because, like all the other Apostles, he was there and witnessed it, nor because of fear or signs of the power of God, nor does Paul assert his belief on the basis of his own exemplary life or prophetic visions. Paul teaches only what a sense of conviction is capable of when it is founded precisely on an absence of these supports.
Greek discourse is the discourse of totality (phusis) and knowledge of that totality (sophia). Jewish discourse is a discourse of the miraculous exception to that totality—the sign, the miracle, election, and transcendence beyond the totality of this world. The mystical discourse, he says, counters both of these in their reliance on totality, being a discourse of one’s ravishment by truth, here and now. It is, however, a truth that remains too private, too obscure, and tied to the hubris of personal revelation for Paul. The mystical discourse, unlike the other two, does hold an important border with Christian discourse precisely in this relation to a possible here and now encounter with truth. In fact this mystical discourse founds the possibility of Paul’s encounter—his revelation on the road to Antioch.
The break that Paul makes with respect to Greek, Jewish, and mystical discourse centers on a change, as we might suspect, in relation to knowledge and mastery. A theory of salvation can be neither of these:
Paul’s project is to show that a universal logic of salvation cannot be reconciled with any law … it is impossible that the starting point be the Whole, but just as impossible that it be an exception to the Whole … One must proceed from the event as such, which is a-cosmic and illegal, refusing integration into any totality and signaling nothing. But preceeding from the event delivers no laws, no form of mastery, be it that of the wise man or the prophet. One may also say: Greek and Jewish discourse are both discourses of the Father (Badiou, 1997/2003b, p. 43).
As well, the philosopher and the prophet know—what is or what will come, respectively. Paul, on the other hand, dependent on the grace of the event, declaring an unheard, unknown, and unseen possibility, “properly speaking knows nothing … . According to the truth of a declaration and its consequences, which being without proof or visibility, emerges at that point where knowledge, be it empirical or conceptual, breaks down” (Badiou, 1997/2003b, p. 45).
What the Christian discourse names is both the division of the subject and the possibility of its overcoming in an act of faith, love, and declaration. The subject that has “exited from unity,” that is fallen, is cleft by a separation between law and sin, life and death, doing and thinking. Only this pure act, this leap, can create a point of radical subjectivity:
Let us generalize a little. For Paul, the man of the law is one in whom doing is separated from thinking. Such is the consequence of seduction by commandment. The figure of this subject, wherein the division lies between a dead Self and the involuntary automation of living desire, is, for thought, a figure of powerlessness. Basically, sin is not so much a fault as living thought’s inability to prescribe action. Under the effect of the law, thought disintegrates into pow-erlessness and endless cogitation because the subject (the dead Self) is disconnected from a limitless power: that of desire’s living automation (Badiou, 1997/2003b, p. 83).
This is, quite simply, the problem of the unconscious. This is the problem of being alienated from our desire. The resurrection in Paul, for Badiou, radically redistributes life and death back to their proper place. That is its grace. It is the grace, from my perspective, that comes of reclaiming one’s desire.
In Paul, Badiou says, truth is literally subtracted and extracted out from the power of death—not in its negation or glorification, but in and through affirmation. This affirmation, coming from what is essentially negative, eradicates the problematic effects of negativity for the subject. Death is retroactively identified as a path, not a state of things. Death is not simply what is, but is rather something closer to a choice, and an ethical choice surrounding what it is that “filliates us,” what “suspends difference”—namely, what is universal (Badiou, 1997/2003b, p. 73).
Universal truth subverts an old law that divided the subject and divides subjects—my unknown sin in me, your unknown sin in you. For Badiou, the power of this event has nothing whatsoever to do with opinion. It traverses opinion—avoids it ultimately through its foundation in universality. It is born in weakness and is tied to an act of continual labor—what Paul calls hope, fidelity, and love:
The declaration will have no other force than the one it declares and will not presume to convince through the apparel of prophetic reckoning, of the miraculous exception, or the ineffable personal revelation. It is not the singularity of the subject that validates what the subject says; it is what he says that founds the singularity of the subject … it must be borne humbly, with a precariousness appropriate to it … [it] must be accomplished in weakness for therein lies its strength. It shall be neither logos, nor sign, nor ravishment by the unutterable (Badiou, 1997/2003b, p. 54).
We renounce the push toward transcendence and instead encounter what the resurrection represents and offers in the form of the immanen-tization of spirit. The subject is transformed through his faith and this renewal lies in being traversed by this infinite power of truth.
There is something important for psychoanalysis in Badiou’s St. Paul, especially when it comes to a question of life and death, of courage and fidelity, and also about the handling of truth: “thus, one may justifiably say that he bears it only in an earthen vessel, day after day enduring the imperative—the delicacy and subtle thought—to ensure that nothing shatters it. For with the vessel, and with the dissipation into smoke of the treasure it contains, it is he, the subject, anonymous bearer, the herald, who is equally shattered” (Badiou, 1997/2003b, p. 54). Whether we always, eventually, succumb to this shattering, is perhaps more of an analytic truth than a Badiouian one. Nonetheless, this precarious action and the emphasis on the delicacy of thought, is close to the work of psychoanalysts day after day.
St. Paul is a parable of the affirmative power of desire. When it is repressed, caught in the network of the death drive, its effects are essentially negative. For Badiou, when a subject is put in relation to this unknown, this is not only revolutionary, but a fundamentally ethical stance. By Badiou’s logic then, it matters not that he is French, nor that I am American, neither that he is a philosopher, nor that I am a psychoanalyst. This argument is rendered inconsequential since, if I am to speak, it is not from any given substantial position, from any objective aggregate.
Badiou redescribes the logic of the event through this reading of St. Paul, which he calls the grace of the new. In psychoanalysis, the declaration of the existence of the unconscious is close to the event of truth, for Paul, the truth of the resurrection.
What is left for psychoanalysis in its work with this ineffable thing— the unbewust? To declare that the unconscious exists, without righteousness or justification, is an inherently weak position that we must bear out, by Badiou’s logic, if our discipline is to have any effect of truth:
[It confounds] those who “when they measure themselves by one another and compare themselves with one another, are without understanding”, ascribes no redemptive signification to the apostle’s tribulations. Here again, as always, it is a question of the earthen vessel, of the post-evental bearing of weakness, of the destitution of worldly criteria of glory: “if I must glory, I will glory in the things that show my weakness”(Badiou, 1997/2003b, p. 104).
The French are right then, to answer the question with which we began, to the extent that they do not redeem the Borderline, but redeem neither the borderline nor the analyst of borderlines, nor do they condemn them either.
The Borderline is she who holds up the mirror as the reverse side of the face—death. The analyst of Borderlines submits to the reflection and embodies a dead law whose extolled virtue is supposed to give life. The unconscious, as an event that the two share, is eradicated from their relationship as that universal which exceeds them. In fact, again and again we are told to have no faith in her unconscious and a total mastery of our own. Theory states that we should have no faith in what she comes to say to us as a psychoanalyst—it is blind primary process, her as if personality, evacuation, concreteness, a whole host of nonspecific manifestations of ego-weakness. In short, detestable weakness. Countering it with strength means analysis has to go down the path of arm-wrestling the Borderline out of helplessness.
Hearing Badiou, I say: “Do not work from within her gaze and her weakness will be transformed, which is as much to say that our weakness is transformative.” Such will have been the analyst’s fidelity to the unconscious, our uninterrupted labor to remain in fidelity to a truth that can only be born in weakness. This fidelity to the unconscious seems to me to define what it is to be an analyst. I am in Badiou’s debt. Through him, I know more of what kind of analyst I would like to be. I am the one in the process of vanishing, not to lapse into the borderline, the attractive immanence of her truth, but in order locate the borderline position of the analyst.
So it is as a clinical psychoanalyst that I must return to Badiou. It is from a very different place than that in which his philosophy is articulated. There is trouble. Psychoanalysis has maintained a kind of self-imposed exile from academia—at its most extreme here in America—with fewer and fewer clinical analysts that aim to speak outside of their institutes and enclaves as clinical analysts. But in the end I must try.
The great contradiction in addressing this to Alain Badiou can be seen in what he told me once—that he wished to know nothing about psychoanalysis and that if I liked I could call this his symptom. How do I understand these words from my master? I don’t think he’s alone in not wanting to know anything about psychoanalysis. Oddly, psychoanalysts themselves seem to display this tendency through their own withdrawal.
But what do we make of this decision? Badiou is a philosopher who considers Lacan his event. He is, as he has said, a great “Lacanian.” But then we have to take account of the fact that Lacan was first and foremost a psychoanalyst, with a practice and a discourse that was meant to speak to analysts about analysis. I think we all too easily forget this in this age of cultural criticism. And do we not then fall into the trappings of a symptom when we promote this wholesale repression? A passion for ignorance—as is the case with symptoms.
Like symptoms themselves, psychoanalysis is, in Badiou’s system, everywhere and nowhere. One can read from this a structure— it is centered around a hole, but one which has come to be filled with a little symptom that cannot be known, cannot be spoken. For Badiou, psychoanalysis is a part of the truth procedure of love but not equivalent to it, is taken up in Lacanian structures that inform him, has some bearing on a theory of the subject, and yet, the clinical dimension is dismissed, because truth for Badiou, should always be free. Perhaps it can be subsumed under some idea of an antiphilosophy, but, in the end, the final word is that it cannot, and should not, be confused with philosophy. Mums the word, while that was, I’m sure, a mouthful.
But let us try to seriously consider the question of the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis (lest we lapse into mere cultural criticism once again). I often think of philosophers like Derrida or Deleuze, or even Žižek, for whom a concern with psychoanalysis is central. Their discourse was a perpetual game of Fort-Da, and, for my part, I recognize little in them that resonates with what I do as a practicing analyst. Ironically, Badiou is something else entirely: he is the one philosopher who has chosen to disavow this confrontation with psychoanalysis. It is a fascinating sacrifice of knowledge with respect to psychoanalysis. Perhaps, we might speculate, that it engenders an effect of truth in relation to it.
Here I speak as a psychoanalyst who takes Badiou at his word. He determined a large part of my formation, as we call it, as an analyst. His discourse had a profound effect on my reading of Lacan, and it led me back to a particular strain of his thought, in particular on the question of modesty. This is perhaps not an obvious point, even if it has become all too obvious to me. I forget the clichés that subsume Lacan. The violence he still provokes. Perhaps the glare coming off of so many Lacanian objects—the jargon, mathemes, formulae, graphs—prevents one from seeing this other side of Lacan. I see in him a modest analyst, in love with madness, feminine madness in particular, but through a real sense of limitation, not in the sense of a discourse on finitude, but that which comes from understanding what it means to be an analyst, to act from that impossible place. Badiou, for me, reads Lacan here.
All that blather of Lacan’s about the analyst playing dead, playing dumb, allowing himself to be a dupe, and love the unconscious, becoming, as he says, as stupid as a cabbage. Certainly, if a symptom is a passion for ignorance, the analyst professing to be a lively and knowledgeable fellow would get nowhere. As Badiou says, impossibility has to delimit the conditions of possibility. Or further, this is the very “power of the impossibles.” For Lacan, to be an analyst means learning to live through the vertigo of the analytic position, being put in the position of supposed knowledge and having to find the way both to accept that position and yet internally to refuse it. One also must find the way to allow oneself to be discarded, in the end, by another.
At that juncture, I am forced to confront a divide at the place of this symptom of Badiou’s, as he calls it, where I can no longer locate my place in his discourse for the reason that there is a difference between a discourse on modesty and a modest discourse. It is to the latter that this work was always aimed no matter how often it failed, no matter how often my voice failed. I could have taken up a position of mastery, even as I eschewed knowledge. It would have made writing much easier. I have tried something else. I have wrapped this work in a conceit of dreams.
So let me tell you, once again, about a dream. This one, unlike the others, is entirely populated, but once again there is something of locating a certain kind of object. I walk into a library to look for my husband, but I do so by looking for another man, a philosophy professor of mine who is, in fact, dying. It is a disorienting and strange tactic, no doubt, but who am I to argue with the logic of dreams. A third man, who I will find out later is a visiting professor, asks me if I am just going to stand there with my mouth agape. I am enraged and humiliated, and a sense of shame, like finding yourself naked in public, overwhelms and paralyzes me. I almost apologize and give way to inhibition. Instead I find myself saying, “I find my way by looking for the man who I know will never be there.” The word left in my mouth when I awoke, was not in fact “agape” but Agape—Christian Love of thy neighbor.
Certainly, one can glean a certain hysteria in this, an old and not so trustworthy friend. She usually leads me astray, except, of course, when it comes to a certain question of truth. Lacan, famously said that if there is anything the hysteric loves, it is truth, and she brings one into question precisely there. She raises the value of the symptom to the level of truth, which, as he says, is always the truth that the master is castrated.
The difficulty with hysterics is that they never lay a hand on truth, and, as it goes, she usually winds up with precisely what she claimed not to be looking for (as it is said a master). So, perhaps, knowing a certain inclination I have that is particularly hard to escape, I reverse strategies, and find exactly what I want, precisely by looking for something else.
This something else—in the case of the dream a someone else—that will never be in his place, means one can find the right place, at the right time. It is about a stance that one occupies as a matter of tact. There are four figures in this dream: myself, and three men—the interlocutor, my husband (whom I presumably find), and the absent one.
Lacan states that for the hysteric, it is only if things are well with the God who is dead, who is not there, that she can do anything with a real man. Otherwise, we run into the perennial problem of the love of a hysteric that flows in the beauty of a virile identification, the “implacable erotic transference” as Badiou calls it (Badiou, 1998/2005b, p. 53).
And in the case of my interlocutor, he is that figure Lacan called the non-dupe-err, the one who refuses to make a mistake and so goes astray. For this figure, the God who is dead is clearly not dead enough and the indictment of what should be done properly in libraries, rather than standing around with our jaws dropped, mouths wide open, shows that he is up to his ears in a shame before this God, with which he can do little else than dump it onto his neighbor. I could have crawled off in the face of him. We are sometimes at our best in dreams.
And, of course, there is this question of the living husband and the absent man. One of the thoughts I had upon awakening was that it is impossible to look for someone. The more you look for the signi-fiers you expect to see, the more you are led astray. At least for me, the moment that I drop the intensity of my gaze, I suddenly allow some new sign into consciousness that allows me to find what I am seeking. In a crowd, for example, I look for some obvious sign—my husband’s bald head, his interminably black shirts—and not until I stop looking do I find what will actually let me locate him—the slouch in his shoulders, his particular gait, a thickness of neck.
This is a description of the tact of the analyst. The stupidity and possibility of surprise allows one to find her way to speech; it opens up a space, a gap. Without this gap? Without the man who will never be in his place? There are a thousand ways one goes astray between the beginning and the end of analysis, in the space between “agape” and Agape (with the embarrassing allusion I cannot help but hear—from the oral dimension to sublimation proper).
For Lacan, one of the signs that one is approaching this hole, this gap, is not in fact Love, but shame. It is only through shame that we pass toward a doing well with a “God who is Dead.” The dilemma here is close to what we already mentioned as the impossible choice of modernity for Badiou—the inability to chose between mastery and truth. Badiou would prefer that “truth be articulated onto the void,” to “discover a thinking of choice and of the decision that would go from void to truth without passing through the figure of the master” who is either, invoked again and again, by said visiting professors, or sacrificed, in the “immanence and immobility” of a hysterical terror (Badiou, 1998/2005b, p. 53–54).
Lacan took from Hegel the link between the death of God and love of one’s neighbor. The destruction of the law into the pure formality of Agape—the maxim to “love thy neighbor as thyself”—contains the risk of going to the heart of a necessary emptiness. For Hegel, what dies on the cross is not a finite representative of God, but the God beyond himself. Man stands alone in the face of the Other who becomes an abyss. It is only this structure that allows us to truly love in that uniquely Christian sense, from that edge.
This is how Lacan understands the problem of sublimation. The good is sacrificed in the name of desire, because what one comes to know is that desire is always sacrificed in the name of a good. The good, even when it is the love of a spouse, makes that other a counterpart to the detriment of a sublimation that must attempt to recoup it otherwise.
In his book on St. Paul, Badiou (1997/2003b) shows how the Christian discourse is itself an articulation based on a man who is not there or never will be in his place (dare I say the empty tomb) and Agape. The impossible (as a belief in the resurrection) is what gives strength to the place of the Pauline discourse. Love in Paul, says Badiou, is the affirmation of the labor of truth, the power of thought in a universal declaration that cuts unilaterally. But we cannot forget that this declaration, this mighty affirmation, comes from a point of near impossibility and radical emptiness.
What I would like to say about Badiou touches upon this scene in the library. It is about the stance that one occupies in relation to shame, modest discourse, and this symptomatic ignoring of psychoanalysis. Where in Badiou does this symptom of psychoanalysis rear its head? I would like to say in the absence of shame, a certain fatigue with the attempt to master everything, and the only place where a law is articulated in the name of a good—the idea he has of the good of philosophy, its separation in function from the truth procedures. Badiou, I think, loves philosophy very much. But it is possible to love too much. Psychoanalysts have learned that hysterical ideals with respect to love are always at the heart of symptoms. One runs into trouble again. Love as labor means love comes later, like an aftertaste left in one’s mouth.
Lacan reminds us of this phenomenon, referring to a peculiar fact we see endlessly in our offices: what if, for the sake of your wife’s happiness, you sacrifice your own—only to find that hers will vanish before your eyes? “Enjoy with the wife you love” is indeed the height of this paradox, because it is precisely loving her that creates the obstacle (Lacan, 1991/2007, p. 190). Rather than take this direct path of love, Lacan suggested we approach it from another angle, that we go in the direction of shame.
Do a bit of analysis, Lacan says, and you will see that you already have enough shame “to open a shop” (Lacan, 1991/2007, p. 182). This was brought up in the context of the events of May 1968, when Lacan said that what the revolutionaries did not understand was precisely this shame, the system that produced the immense shame of living. In the name of the shame of others, they took to the streets as if they were out from under it themselves. “You cannot get out without entering,” he cautioned them, and further, “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one” (Lacan, 1991/2007, p. 207).
As analysts, the use we can make of shame is the only bit of tact left to us with the symptoms of our time. For Lacan, as we said, there is only one virtue: modesty, pudeur. He writes that “it is impossible for the honest to die of shame. … You know … that this means the real. … If it happens now, well then, it was the only way to deserve it … . You were lucky.” Otherwise you do not die and you are left with a life of it “by the bucketful by virtue of the fact that it’s not worth dying for.” This, he says, is what “psychoanalysis discovers” (Lacan, 1991/2007, pp. 181–182).
The closer one gets to shame, the closer one is to the hole in the real from which a new truth might arise. We must get as close as we can to this hole if we want anything to do with the subversion, or even just the rotation, of the master’s discourse where everyone is sold short on love. What is the problem with the master? It is a real master that Lacan says everyone forgets, especially in a hysteria that casts him as a sort-of tyrant.
Like Freud, Lacan was at times seemingly no friend of the philosophers. In the 1968 seminar, he says, “Philosophy in its historical function is this extraction, I would almost say this betrayal, of the slave’s knowledge, in order to obtain its transmutation into the master’s knowledge” (Lacan, 1991/2007, p. 22) Moreover, he asks, “Does the master who brings about this operation of displacing, the conveyancing, of the slave’s knowledge want to know?” His answer, “A real master … doesn’t desire to know anything at all—he desires only that things work” (Lacan, 1991/2007, p. 24). One might add: that work militantly at that.
This master, Lacan says, is, like the benevolence and love of most Fathers, thoroughly castrated. It is this position which makes his discourse so unassailable. It is for this reason, this structure, that the tools of the analyst are the power of the impossibles. We learned this from Dora, who gave the key to Freud in the very discovery of her transference (our greatest resistance and our greatest ally).
So what is it about these fathers that their daughters find so hard to know? It is that they want to make too many women happy, all the women (and then the whole world to boot), to be precise. Think of all the jewelry Dora’s father had to buy for his wife, his lover, his daughter, and the cases to enclose them as well. And, as captains of industry, they feel it their duty to get the whole world up and running, which is, to their great shame, impossible. Impossibility wears them down and tires them out. This father does nothing more nor less than occupy the contradictory place of not knowing what he wants and always ending up at some distance from it—the women and his work. On the other hand and on the other side, “being deprived of woman—this, expressed in terms of the failure of discourse, is what castration means” (Lacan, 1991/2007, p. 154).
Shame, when working on that side of the truth of desire in analytic work, holds up the power of the impossibles rather than grinding away in the face of them. This edge of impossibility, and the shame at the sham of what one does, are the only ways I can work clinically. Orienting oneself, knowing how to find one’s way, is different from what one may call the register of having—possessions, accumulation—and this holds just as much for truth itself. Something must be done with the philosopher’s truth, because in and of itself, it is a trap. As Lacan writes, “One doesn’t marry truth; there can be no contract with her, and even less can there be any open liaison. She won’t stand for any of that” (Lacan, 1991/2007, pp. 184–185).
Lacan said that the analyst is the one who “leaves the thread of … truth to the one who already has his worries with it” (Lacan, 1991/2007, p. 186). He will have to worry about it like a curse and go to work. In the end, the function of this curse of truth is a “collapse of knowledge” which holds up certain self-fashioned laws. I hear such a curse in the “why” of my interlocutor in the dream, the visiting professor in the library.
Lacan continues, if many believe that I am in possession of truth, or have begun to worry about it, they say, as a result of me, “it’s through not giving the appearance of having laid a finger on it” (Lacan, 1991/2007, p. 185). This act of refusal in the position one holds, which one might imagine as a form of exclusion, is actually the only path toward collaboration. This is why it is at the foundation of the analytic act. If you want subversion, you have to love the impossibility, the shame, of never being able to die from impossibility or shame. It provides you with that mysterious thing called “tact” that gets things moving—not too much, not too little.
One might ask: Isn’t it modest to take away from the philosopher, in the very field in which he works, his being able to produce a truth himself? Does Badiou not say that philosophy limps behind its four truth procedures? The false modesty of a symptom is cunning. Here philosophy oscillates symptomatically between being an exalted and depraved figure much like the hysteric herself and the father whom she simultaneously tears off the pedestal only to seat him there once again.
Let me say then that this separation between philosophy and psychoanalysis, this separation between the gathering of the conditions of truth and those four little discourses that go to work for the great father, is also (for better or worse) impossible. For me, it is a matter of understanding what to do, tactfully, with this impossibility. I do not propose to have an answer as to the similarity or difference between psychoanalysis and philosophy except to begin to address it through the division Badiou makes and the strange place to which he has relegated clinical psychoanalysis. The minimal difference manifests itself in relation to shame. It is only this that holds the limit. The master has none, the university has too much, the hysteric speaks its truth only in her symptom, and an analyst finally makes do with its impossibility.
The system, Lacan says, despite producing the immensity of the shame of living, “has no shame … . This translates as—it’s impudence” (Lacan, 1991/2007, p. 190). So it would do one well not to go in that direction. It is here that one finds the only law that could be taken as moral in Lacan. Thievery, tyranny of knowledge, forcing truth, are only of the order of the structures of discourse—they are impossible by virtue of the fact of being structures of discourse but, as such, are unavoidable and so cannot be taken morally. They are always at work. If one allows this shame its place, she will allow herself to slip between these structures of discourse—to find her way toward tact; she will be able, in Badiouian fashion, to “labor under truth, labor as love” (Badiou, 1993/2003b, p. 96) But here, then, there cannot be a neat division. We have to slip in the vertigo of this impossibility. Our discourse must bear the trace of this shame.
No one comes to know shame better than the analysand in the encounter with an analyst. Perhaps one experiences shame only in the face of an analyst these days for one particular reason—he represents the consolidation of the law in the supposed subject of knowledge. One goes for no other reason. Even miraculously, if one is aware of that fact. And one might say about Badiou that he wants to know nothing of psychoanalysis to the extent that his desire is that philosophy gets back to work on the level of truth. And yet we find in this desire an underlying love of truth, and, like the hysteric, a centering of discourse around a kernel of symptomatic refusal.
Symptoms attest to that divide between thinking and doing, between mastery and truth, which leaves psychoanalysis in a domain where insight is valued over speech, which, in effect, changes nothing for a subject in relation to mastery. Philosophy, in this same vein, can speak about modesty but never from within a position of modesty—which, ultimately, I think, is the lesson of Badiou’s work, even the heart of his revolutionary politics. As a philosopher, Badiou does not create, he merely gathers, and if this is not the thievery of the master, then perhaps it is too much like the discourse of the university and the gathering of knowledge, the systematizing of truth—another trap of desire in any case. None of this discussion would stand as a condemnation to the extent that we no longer take any of this to be anything other than the permutations of discourse (impossibility).
But not to condemn brings into question one’s relation to shame. If there is glory to be had it is more certainly to be had as a philosopher than as a psychoanalyst. We have long since left the best-sellers list. That doesn’t mean that I do not procure as an analyst a certain force of intrigue. It may be my only cache. But it is precisely here that I can think of little else than shame. That is my experience.
The proletariat can be redeemed, as can the professor. Also woman, at times, in her particular elevation. Even our elusive master, who tires when he tries to make the whole world happy. But what does the analyst do? Whatever it is, it is clearly absurd, making himself the cause of desire, of what Lacan will call the insane operation of a psychoanalysis. The shame I experience after sessions pivots between “what have I done” and “why, in God’s name, did that work?” Perhaps analysis takes this shame to its limit. Badiou was one of those who taught me—strength in “weakness,” not a weakness made strong.
If any academic with a penchant for radical leftist ideology feels shame at the abstraction of his work, psychoanalyzing takes this abstraction beyond any point of recognition, into pure semblance. It may be this that holds as the subversive power of the analytic discourse. If the hysteric ends in a deprivation worn on one’s sleeve and takes off running around the streets, the analyst does nothing but sit. Knowledge does not progress through critique or filter or force but through an audacious leap through artifice in which we give truth back to God. The analyst’s atheism is a strange one—shameful, really.
As Joyce said to Nora, in love letters that show the power of wrestling with one’s relation to shame, “I gave others my pride and joy. To you I give my sin, my folly, my weakness and my sadness” (Joyce, 1966, p. 107).
But there’s the rub. Badiou encountered an analyst about whose work he says he wants to know nothing. I think, in the end, that is right. I would say that his encounter allowed him to function in the place of a master signifier. His is a new discourse, in that it is an audacious leap through artifice. If psychoanalysts do not any longer know of this master’s discourse, then it is clear that we need Badiou, that I needed Badiou, and that philosophy needs Badiou. To the extent that his philosophy, separated out from psychoanalysis through the force of a particular kind of ignoring, makes one ill at ease and yet gets one to work, there is no harm, merely shame. It cannot be transgressed, not on one side or the other. All that one has left is to wait for the fall. If it is not Badiou who disappears at this point, then it is I.
The leap through artifice requires that we give truth back to God. I give truth back to the philosophers. I give truth back to Alain Badiou.
To end by quoting Badiou himself on Beckett: “It will always be a question of making sense of the magnificent formula from The Unnama-ble (1953/2006): ‘I alone am man and all the rest divine …’ To relegate the divine and its curse to the periphery of saying, and to declare man naked, without either hope or hopelessness, relentless, surviving, and consigned to the excessive language of his desire” (Badiou, 2003a, p. 117).
Lacan, like me, speaks alone as a psychoanalyst. To do so is the only fragile and risky guarantee that we have to give, which is essentially nothing. As Lacan said, Love is to give what one does not have. What bearing does this have for the philosopher? Like a good analyst, I will end provocatively by saying nothing at all.