Russell Sbriglia
At the outset of her new materialist manifesto Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett explains that in order to achieve the “flattening” or “horizontalizing” of the ontological plane paradigmatic not only of the new materialisms but of various object-oriented ontologies more generally, she had to “elide the rich and diverse literature on subjectivity and its genesis, its conditions of possibility and its boundaries.” The reason for so doing, she claims, concerned the perils of “the philosophical project of naming where subjectivity begins and ends,” a project that, as she sees it, is “too often bound up with fantasies of a human uniqueness in the eyes of God, of escape from materiality, or of mastery of nature.”1 Against “the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter”—an image she finds all too typical of “dominant notions of human subjectivity and agency,” which “feed . . . human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption”—Bennett advocates for a “vital materialism” that attends to “the capacity of things . . . to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” that often “impede or block the will and designs of humans” (ix, 120, ix, x, viii). As she concludes, such a “‘thing-power’ materialism” causes us to revise “operative notions of matter, life, self-interest, will, and agency” (ix).2
A number of the examples of “thing-power” that Bennett provides throughout Vibrant Matter are literary, perhaps the most compelling being the figure of Odradek from Franz Kafka’s brief sketch “The Cares of a Family Man.” An oddly shaped, spool-like “creature,” Odradek has both human and nonhuman characteristics. On the one hand, “he” (as the narrator pronominalizes him) is “wooden” and “senseless”; on the other hand, “the whole thing” is able to “stand upright, as if on two legs” and is so “extraordinarily nimble” that it “can never be laid hold of” to be subjected to “closer scrutiny.” Though capable of speaking (“‘Well, what’s your name?’ you may ask him. ‘Odradek,’ he says”), his laughter is “the kind . . . that has no lungs behind it” and “sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves.”3 “Wooden yet lively, verbal yet vegetal, alive yet inert,” the “ontologically multiple” Odradek is for Bennett a prime example of a “vibrant thing . . . with a certain effectivity of [its] own,” a testament to the “liveliness intrinsic to the materiality of [a] thing formerly known as an object” (Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 8, xvi). In “straddl[ing] the line between inert matter and vital life,” Odradek not only challenges our “parsing the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings),” but also “brings to the fore the becoming of things,” foregrounds the fact that, as fellow new materialists Diana Coole and Samantha Frost assert, the mantra of materialism should be “‘matter becomes’ rather than . . . ‘matter is’” (Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 7, vii, 8; Coole and Frost, 10).
While reading Bennett’s discussion of Odradek, close readers of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick may find themselves thinking of analogous instances of thing-power, of “the strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our experience” (Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 8, xvi). One such instance is the iconic ivory leg of Melville’s monomaniacal Captain Ahab, a seemingly dead, inert object that, at times, becomes a thing with a “vibratory vitality” of its own (Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 55). Consider, for instance, the following incident, one recounted more than four-fifths of the way into the novel, when Ishmael, our usually transparent narrator and guide, makes the rather startling confession that he has “unwittingly” withheld a “secret” from us that “might more properly, in a set way, have been disclosed before.”4 The secret, it turns out, concerns the “mystery” of Ahab’s “Grand-Lama-like exclusiveness” for “a certain period, both before and after the sailing of the Pequod,” a “recluseness” due to the following “direful mishap” (464):
Not . . . very long prior to the Pequod’s sailing from Nantucket, . . . he had been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and insensible; by some unknown, seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured. (463)
As Ishmael concludes, though Ahab and his “ever-contracting . . . circle” of confidants “had all conspired, so far as in them lay, to muffle up the knowledge of this thing from others,” “in the end, . . . this one matter” ultimately “came out”—a matter that had previously been “small matter for wonder” among the crew: namely, the “careful heed” paid by Ahab, despite “all his pervading, mad recklessness,” “to the condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood” (464–65).
Like Odradek, Ahab’s peg leg is a “literary dramatization” of “impersonal or nonorganic life,” an instance of what Ahab would call “the personified impersonal” (Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 7; Moby-Dick, 507). Its “condition” is not so much “dead,” as Ishmael characterizes it, as it is undead (a point to which we will return below). And yet, in contrast to Bennett’s new materialist approach to Odradek, when it comes to the “small matter” of Ahab’s ivory leg, one cannot simply “elide” the question of subjectivity, for, as we will see, its undead vitality can only be understood by way of subjectivity, albeit a model of subjectivity different from (yet nonetheless indebted to) the traditional Cartesian model that new materialists seek to counter: namely, a Lacanian materialist model.
That the model of subjectivity against which new materialists primarily pit themselves is the classic Cartesian one is no better exemplified than by the aforementioned Coole and Frost’s introduction to their influential collection New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Challenging as “contingent assumptions” a number of “commonsense and philosophical beliefs” about materiality, especially assumptions regarding matter’s seemingly “self-evident and unassailable” “brute ‘thereness,’” Coole and Frost point out that “many of our ideas about materiality in fact remain indebted to Descartes, who defined matter in the seventeenth century as corporeal substance constituted of length, breadth, and thickness; as extended, uniform, and inert.” And yet, they continue, “the corollary of this calculable natural world was not, as one might have expected, a determinism that renders human agency an illusion, but a sense of mastery bequeathed to the thinking subject: the cogito (I think) that Descartes identified as ontologically other than matter.” Following Descartes, “in distinction from the passivity of matter, modern philosophy has variously portrayed humans as rational, self-aware, free, and self-moving agents.” Such an “ontological dualism,” Coole and Frost conclude, not only “yields a conceptual and practical domination of nature as well as a specifically modern attitude or ethos of subjectivist potency,” but also obfuscates “the productivity and resilience of matter” itself, “the myriad ways in which matter is both self-constituting and invested with—and reconfigured by—intersubjective interventions that have their own quotient of materiality” (7–8).
At first blush, the ethos of subjectivist potency that Coole and Frost decry would appear all too applicable to Ahab, a figure who engages in all the negative fantasies that Bennett associates with dominant notions of human subjectivity and agency: the fantasy of human uniqueness in the eyes of God (“ungodly, god-like” Ahab is “above the common,” not only in the eyes of others, like Captain Peleg, but in his own eyes as well, self-confessedly “proud as a Greek god” [79, 472]); the fantasy of escape from materiality (“earthly Ahab” dreams of escaping his earthliness—his “mortal inter-indebtedness,” as he puts it, not only to his crew, but even to his own body—by getting into a “crucible” and “dissolv[ing him]self down to one small, compendious vertebra” [465, 472]); the fantasy of conquest and consumption (“King Ahab,” as Ishmael at one point dubs him, dreams of being the winning bidder at “the auction of the Roman empire,” which, in turn, “was the world’s” [150, 472]); and the fantasy of mastery of nature (“queenly” Ahab, “disput[ing]” to “the last gasp of [his] earthquake life” the “unconditional, unintegral mastery” that the forces of nature attempt to exert over him, boasts that he would “strike the sun if it insulted [him]” and stands toe-to-toe with and ultimately bests St. Elmo’s fire [507, 164]). Though merely a handful of the many instances throughout the novel in which Ahab engages in such fantasies, new materialists would need look no further than these to nod in agreement with what, in many respects, remains the paradigmatic portrait of Ahab, that painted by F. O. Matthiessen, who saw Ahab, in all his “staggering hubris,” as not only “a fearful symbol of the self-enclosed individualism that, carried to its furthest extreme, brings disaster both upon itself and upon the group of which it is part,” but also a harbinger of “what was to result when the Emersonian will to virtue became in less innocent natures the will to power and conquest.”5 From this vantage point, though (surprisingly enough) he doesn’t figure into Quentin Anderson’s iconic study on the “imperial self” in nineteenth-century American literature, Ahab would appear to be the poster child for such a figure.6
Yet whereas Anderson’s imperial selves (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry James) are united by their “assertion of an undivided consciousness”—an assertion that, perforce, “avoids or omits any acknowledgment that our experience has stubborn and irreducible elements which we cannot . . . either alter or understand”—Ahab’s self-professedly “queenly” self is one whose consciousness is self-confessedly “all aleak” (Anderson, x, vii; Moby-Dick, 474). Indeed, however much Ahab would seem to conform to Matthiessen’s portrait of him as a figure of Emersonian self-reliance run amok, “an embodiment of his author’s most profound response to the problem of the free individual will in extremis,” what is ultimately most extreme about Ahab’s will is that it is notoriously free even from Ahab’s own consciousness (Matthiessen, 447). Here we would do well to take Matthiessen’s “in extremis” in the literal sense of the term, meaning “at the point of death,” for Ahab’s will—or, more precisely, what wills Ahab—is far closer to what Freud termed “death drive” and what Jacques Lacan, abolishing the difference between Eros and Thanatos, life drive and death drive, would simply term “drive.” As one of Lacan’s greatest ambassadors, Slavoj Žižek, characterizes it, the drive is “a traumatic imbalance, a rooting out” that renders “Man as such . . . ‘nature sickness unto death,’ derailed, run off the rails through a fascination with a lethal Thing.”7 Insofar as what ends up leading Ahab, wearer of the “Iron Crown of Lombardy” (Moby-Dick, 167), down the “iron rails” to his “fixed purpose” (168)—his quest for vengeance against Moby Dick, of course—is less his own iron will (or “iron soul” [536]) than the will of that fixed purpose itself, Žižek’s characterization of the drive makes for a more accurate portrait of Ahab than Matthiessen’s.
Consider, for instance, the following extended passage from Chapter 44, “The Chart,” in which Ishmael recounts the nightly “trances of torments” to which Ahab is subjected as a result of being “consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire”:
Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening to him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates. (201–2)
Though Ishmael here flirts with a proto-Freudian reading of Ahab’s “spiritual throes,” suggesting that perhaps we should interpret the throbbing of his life-spot, his wild cries, and his bursts from his state room as “unsuppressable symptoms” of his monomania—returns of the repressed, as it were—he ultimately rejects such a reading, for, as it turns out, nothing is actually repressed here. On the contrary, Ahab’s dreams merely carry on with greater intensity his “intense thoughts through the day”—such intensity, in fact, that, like his ivory leg, these thoughts assume both an agency and a materiality of their own. When Ishmael claims that, Ahab having “yield[ed] up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own,” the figure to whom he attributes agency is not Ahab himself but rather the self-assumed, inveterate will of his one supreme purpose. Ishmael doesn’t say that Ahab has “created a creature in” himself; what he says is that Ahab’s “thoughts have created a creature in” him. Not only does thought here assume a vital materiality and become a “thing” in its own right—a “frantic thing” that can “grimly live and burn” apart from the “common vitality” to which it was originally “conjoined”—but, more important, it does so of its own volition, “unbidden and unfathered.” Thing-power, indeed.
And yet, in the same way that saying Ahab’s peg leg is “undead” is not the same as saying that it is “not dead,” the latter of which would be just as applicable to Ahab’s original organic leg before being bitten off by Moby Dick, saying that the frantic thing born of Ahab’s thoughts is “unbidden and unfathered” is not the same as saying that it is “not bidden and not fathered,” unrelated to any subject.8 For this frantic thing is indeed of a subject (un)born; however, from a Lacanian perspective, we must understand this subject as associated not with Ahab’s consciousness but his unconscious.
Instructive here is Bruce Fink’s definition of the Lacanian subject, which, as he explains, “is neither the individual nor what we might call the conscious subject (or the consciously thinking subject), in other words, the subject referred to by most of . . . philosophy.” The consciously thinking subject of post-Cartesian philosophy—which, as we have seen, is the figure of the subject at which new materialists primarily take aim—is “by and large indistinguishable from the ego as understood in ego psychology,” ego psychology being one of Lacan’s most frequent and bitterest targets. As Fink concludes, “Though Freud grants it the status of an agency (Instanz), in Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis, the ego is clearly not an active agent, the agent of interest being the unconscious.”9 Hence the maxim of the Lacanian subject: not “I think, therefore I am,” but rather, as Lacan famously formulates it in his essay “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” “I am thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not thinking,” or as he reformulates it in the very next sentence, “I am not, where I am the plaything of my thoughts; I think about what I am where I do not think I am thinking.”10
Let us consider for a moment the second version of this maxim: “I am not, where I am the plaything of my thoughts; I think about what I am where I do not think I am thinking.” Lacan’s point here is that the “I,” the ego, is the plaything of one’s thoughts, for not only is it the case that “the unconscious thinks” (Freud’s fundamental discovery), but, as Mladen Dolar points out, in a further Lacanian turn of the screw, “it is only the unconscious that thinks,” a point that echoes Fink’s claim that when it comes to subjectivity, the unconscious is the primary agent.11 As Dolar elaborates in what remains the best essay on Lacan’s revision of the cogito, “Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious,” though unconscious thought is “thought without being or substance” as well as “without an ‘I,’” it is nonetheless “not without a subject” (29). And this nonsubstantial subject—a subject whose ontology is that of a “being-in-the-breach,” as Fink wonderfully puts it, a subject that “exists . . . yet remains beingless” (72, 51–52)—is precisely the subject that Lacan termed a “subject in the real.”12
This subject in the real, a subject that is the plaything of its thoughts, that exists yet remains beingless, uncannily resembles the Ahab who flees his state room “a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself.” In this moment of “being in the breach,” a moment in which his “being” is “heaved . . . up from its base,” thereby opening a “hell in himself,” Ahab becomes a “vacated thing,” while his thought becomes a vital—indeed, a “frantic”—thing, a “self-assumed,” “liv[ing] and burn[ing],” “independent being of its own.” Such a “chasm” testifies to Ahab’s splitting, to a division between conscious Ahab, the “scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale,” and unconscious Ahab, an Ahab haunted by what Lacan would term the drive but which Melville characterizes as “the eternal, living principle or soul in him.”13 It is the latter of these two Ahabs, the Ahab ruled by an undead, unconscious agency that renders thing subject and subject thing, that a Lacanian approach to Moby-Dick can help us better grasp.
The dynamic wherein Ahab’s unconscious thought becomes a “subjectivized” thing that overawes his conscious thought recurs at various points throughout the novel, most notably in another crucial passage, from Chapter 132, “The Symphony,” in which Ahab himself reflects on his status as plaything of his thingly thoughts:
What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? (545)
The typical way of reading this passage is to view it as yet another instance of the dialectic between fate and free will throughout the novel, one in which fate is granted the upper hand. Such a reading is supported by Ahab’s assertion to Starbuck not long thereafter, on the evening of the second day of chasing Moby Dick, that “Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ’Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders” (561). For the purposes of a Lacanian materialist reading of the novel, however, the more interesting dialectic suggested by this passage is that between Ahab’s iron will and the inveterate will of the frantic thing, the “nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing” (un)born of Ahab’s unconscious thought, a thing that Žižek, riffing on a common theme from science fiction, would term a “thing from inner space.”14 From the Lacanian perspective, it is this frantic, unearthly thing from inner space—what Lacan would term an “extimate” thing, a thing whose relationship to the subject is that of an “intimate exteriority,” simultaneously inside and outside the subject, like the topology of a Möbius strip—that turns Ahab “round and round” and drives him, “against all natural lovings and longings,” beyond the pleasure principle.15
Whereas Ahab had earlier in the novel boasted, “What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do!” (168), he here finds himself in the role not of willful “sultan” (149) but of helpless slave to a “cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor” who forces him “to do what in [his] own proper, natural heart, [he] durst not so much as dare.” And yet, in contrast to the classic Cartesian model of subjectivity targeted by new materialists, the subjection that Ahab here experiences is, as Žižek stresses, paradigmatic of subjectivity: “Subject is not somehow more actant than objects, a mega-actant actively positing all the world of fundamentally passive objects, so that against this hubris one should assert the active role of all objects. Subject is at its most fundamental a certain gesture of passivization, of not-doing, of withdrawal, of passive experience.”16 Hence “Lacan’s paradoxical conclusion . . . that the Freudian ‘subject of the unconscious’ (or what Lacan calls ‘subject of the signifier’) . . . is the witness of an ‘impersonal’ Truth,” an “apostle” of “the impersonal force that drives [him].”17 In Ahab’s case, this impersonal Truth/force is the “personified impersonal” thing from inner space, the frantic, inscrutable, unearthly thing that, as Lacan would put it, “hystericizes” him, that causes him to question both his identity (“Is Ahab, Ahab?”) and his agency (“Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?”).
It is crucial to stress here that, for Lacan, “hystericism” refers not to a “woman’s disease” (as in the old, misogynistic notion of “feminine hysteria”) but rather to a question that one poses to the Other when one finds oneself occupying a certain symbolic position or tasked with a certain symbolic mandate: “Che vuoi?”18 Though the straightforward translation of this question is “What do you want?,” the true import behind it, to again draw on Žižek’s precise analysis, is “Why am I what I’m supposed to be, why have I this mandate? Why am I . . . [a teacher, a master, a king . . .]?” To ask “Che vuoi?” is to ask, “‘Why am I what you’re telling me that I am?’—that is, what is that surplus-object in me that caused the Other to interpellate me, to ‘hail’ me as . . . [king, master, wife . . .]? Th[is] hysterical question opens the gap of what is ‘in the subject more than the subject,’ of the object in subject which resists subordination.”19 Such a question signals not the undermining or undoing of subjectivity but rather its very emergence, its “subjectivation,” for “hystericization is . . . constituti[ve] of the subject: the status of the subject as such is hysterical. The subject is constituted through [its] own division, splitting, as to the object in [it].” As Žižek concludes, “This is the meaning of Lacan’s thesis that the subject is originally split, divided: [it] is divided as to . . . the Thing . . . which at the same time attracts and repels [it].”20
Here we arrive at two points at which Lacanian materialism and new materialism are fundamentally incommensurable, both of which have consequences for a Lacanian materialist reading of Moby-Dick. First, as Žižek points out, the thing from inner space, the object-in-subject that Lacan came to term the “objet petit a,” the “object-cause of desire,” is not a result of “the excess of some transcendent force over ‘normal’ external reality,” but rather “the direct inscription of . . . subjectivity into this reality,” “the objectivization, the objectal correlate” of the subject.21 Though Lacan’s use of the phrase “object-cause of desire” to characterize the objet petit a makes it sound as though it is the object that causes the subject’s desire, his point is exactly the opposite: it is the subject’s desire that causes the object. The objet petit a is “caused” by the subject insofar as it is a manifestation—indeed, a materialization—of the subject’s desire, an object which the subject, by way of its desire, “elevate[s] to the dignity of the Thing,” reifies into a sublime object.22 Such an object/thing is thus not an entity independent of the subject but rather “the paradoxical stand-in of the Void of subjectivity,” its nonsubstantiality.23 The subject has no material existence outside this objectivization, which is why Lacan maintained that his materialism was a dialectical materialism, one according to which “the reciprocity between the subject and object a is total.”24 This reciprocity is what Lacan was attempting to articulate in coining the aforementioned neologism “extimate,” a term intended to connote the paradox whereby subjectivity, though it constitutes the innermost core of one’s being, is located outside oneself in the figure of the objet petit a—the paradox, in short, of the subject’s “radical ex-centricity to itself,” its “ex-sistence.”25
The second point is that, precisely insofar as this thing is an objectal correlative of the subject, a material stand-in for the subject in the symbolic realm, it testifies to the subject’s castration, reveals that, insofar as it is dependent upon an other for its material support (and here we should note that the a in objet petit a stands for autre, “other”), the subject is a figure not of potency (to recall Coole and Frost’s characterization of the Cartesian subject) but of impotency.
With regard to the first point, that Ahab’s extimate things are objectal correlatives of his subjectivity is made clear by the very forms they take, the materiality they assume. Following Sharon Cameron’s lead, I have elsewhere argued that we can read the frantic thing (un)born of Ahab’s thoughts in Chapter 44, “The Chart,” as Fedallah, the Mephistophelian leader of Ahab’s mysterious crew of Parsee stowaways.26 As Cameron wonderfully puts it, Fedallah is a being born “out of Ahab’s mind,” “birthed in Ahab’s dreams and seen by the eyes of the Pequod’s crew.” She even approximates the Lacanian concept of “extimacy” when she claims that “Melville means us to see [Fedallah] as problematically at once inside and outside of [Ahab],” “that part of himself which exists outside himself.”27 Following the logic of this reading, Fedallah is quite literally Ahab’s “pilot” (Moby-Dick, 499), the extimate agent who, utterly heedless of his captain’s “natural lovings and longings,” steers him—or, more precisely, drives him—down the “iron way” (168) to Moby Dick.
With regard to the second point, that the extimate thing castrates the subject—a castration that, like hystericization, is at the same time responsible for the subject’s constitution, its subjectivation—is no better exemplified than by the instance of thing-power with which we began: Ahab’s peg leg. Recall that, by “some unknown, seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable casualty,” Ahab’s “barbaric white leg” (124) “all but pierce[s] his groin,” leaving him “prone upon the ground, and insensible.” It is tempting to substitute “causality” for “casualty” here, for in this instance of being in the breach, Ahab’s leg plays the role of that extimate object that Lacan dubbed the “lamella,” whose various manifestations (gaze, voice, breast, phallus, and feces) are all objets petit a.28 An instance of the lamella as phallus, Ahab’s leg, as Molly Rothenberg would put it, functions as an “extimate cause of subjectivity.”29
There has, of course, been a good deal of discussion about both “phallicism” and castration in Moby-Dick. The majority of these discussions tend to focus on Chapter 95, “The Cassock,” wherein Ishmael describes how the ship’s “mincer” removes the whale’s foreskin, turns it inside out, cuts two armholes in it, and dons it as protection for “the peculiar functions of his office” (420), namely, mincing pieces of blubber to burn in the try-pots.30 From a Lacanian perspective, however, Ahab’s prosthetic leg is a far better instance of “the signification of the phallus,” of the phallus’s paradoxical function as the signifier of castration, insofar as it is an object which, in the very act of investing its bearer with authority, simultaneously castrates that bearer.31 In fact, Ishmael notes that the barbaric leg not only instills in the crew “a strange awe of” Ahab (80), but also, paradoxically, makes him more “erect” (124, 218, 494, 507), endows him with “an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness,” and a “nameless regal overbearing dignity” (124).
As Žižek explains, phallic objects, such as a king’s scepter or crown, “not only ‘symbolize’ power but put the subject who acquires them into the position of effectively exercising power.” At the same time, however, these objects “introduce a gap between what I immediately am and the function that I exercise (i.e., I am never fully at the level of my function).” This, Žižek continues, is what Lacan means by “symbolic castration”:
Castration is the very gap between what I immediately am and the symbolic mandate that confers on me this “authority.” In this precise sense, far from being the opposite of power, it is synonymous with power; it is that which confers power on me. And one has to think of the phallus not as the organ that immediately expresses the vital force of my being, my virility, and so forth but, precisely, as such an insignia, as a mask that I put on in the same way a king or judge puts on his insignia—phallus is an “organ without a body” that I put on, which gets attached to my body, without ever becoming its “organic part,” namely, forever sticking out as its incoherent, excessive supplement.32
Žižek’s comments help us identify the true agent of symbolic castration, and thus the true phallic object, in Moby-Dick: not Moby Dick, whose “dismast[ing]” of Ahab’s original “spar,” the “flesh and blood one” (471), is all too easy to associate with literal castration, but rather the “stick of whale’s jaw-bone” that Ahab takes as his “bedfellow” and “wife” (472). Precisely the type of “excessive supplement” described by Žižek, Ahab’s prosthetic leg plays the role of the phallus insofar as it is an “organ without a body” (another name for the lamella) that expresses the “vital force,” the “virility,” not of its wearer but of the undead, autonomous drive that unconsciously directs that wearer. A “libidinally invested . . . part of the body incommensurable with the Whole of the body, sticking out of it, resisting its integration into the bodily Whole” and thus “derail[ing] the ordinary run of things,” Ahab’s leg “is not a remainder of castration in the sense of a little part which somehow escaped the swipe of castration unscathed, but, literally, the product of the cut of castration, the surplus generated by it.”33 And yet, as Lacan stresses, only through the “materialization” of this “unreal organ”—an organ that, to again quote Žižek, “autonomizes itself with regard to the person whose ‘soul’ is the form of its body”—can there be said to be any subject whatsoever.34
In his first soliloquy, Chapter 37, “Sunset,” Ahab, having acknowledged the accuracy of the “prophecy” that he “should be dismembered” (“Aye! I lost this leg”), engages in a bit of prophesying of his own: “I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That’s more than ye, ye great gods, ever were” (168). However, as with the frantic thing whose genesis is depicted in Chapter 44, “The Chart,” Ahab’s prosthetic leg, the very member intended to aid the dismasted captain in his quest to dismember his dismemberer—a member, moreover, “fashioned” from the same matter as that which dismembered him in the first place, “the polished bone of the sperm whale’s jaw” (124)—assumes a thing-power that threatens to further dismast and dismember him, to redouble his castration. In this regard, Ahab’s leg is not just a prime instance of thing-power, of a vibratory vitality that, “though it inhabits us and our inventions, also acts as an outside or alien power” (Bennett, “Vitalist Stopover,” 47). It is also—and at the very same time—a prime instance of the fact that, however imperious, Ahab’s ego, to recall the famous line of Freud’s, “is not master in its own house,” the “master” being that “cozening, hidden lord” and “cruel, remorseless emperor,” the unconscious drive.35
In her book One Foot in the Finite: Melville’s Realism Reclaimed, K. L. Evans claims that “Melville’s writing in Moby-Dick connects him to new materialism, . . . with its attendant promise to redefine human life by breaking down the boundaries that separate us from all other things.” In “contriv[ing] a fully material account of the thinking subject,” Melville, Evans maintains, “introduces a capacious and dynamic view of subjectivity—one that doesn’t adhere to traditional notions, following Descartes, of the boundaries forming isolated private persons.”36 As both Ahab’s leg and the frantic thing from “The Chart” demonstrate, Evans is correct that Melville breaks down the boundaries that separate subjects and things. Indeed, the former would appear to be a particularly privileged instance of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the two thinkers whose work most underwrites the new materialism of Bennett, Coole, and Frost, frequently refer to as Ahab’s “becoming-whale.”37 And yet, the extimate nature of these vital things would suggest that Melville was ultimately less interested in the “deterritorialization” of Ahab’s subjectivity into a “body without organs”—an asubjective “process” that “replaces subjectivity” with “a map of intensities,” “a compound of sensations that no longer needs anyone: ocean”—than in the persistence of Ahab’s subjectivity in the undead, “unbidden and unfathered” organs without bodies that nonetheless embody—that give body to—unconscious thought.38 The benefit of a Lacanian materialist approach to Moby-Dick is that it identifies—and interrogates—many of the same problems with ontological dualism that the more typical Deleuzean, new materialist approach to the novel does without reducing Melville’s thought to a monism wherein distinctions between subject and object, self and other, human and nonhuman, are simply erased.39 As we might put it, a Lacanian lens enables us to see how Melville uses a figure like Ahab to practice his own sort of “ontological heroics”—to posit his own ontology, as it were—and think the interspace between monism and dualism.40
Neither monist nor dualist, Melville’s materialist account of the thinking subject is not so much anti-Cartesian—or even, as Coole and Frost claim of the new materialisms, “post-Cartesian” (8)—as it is para-Cartesian. Anticipating Lacanian psychoanalysis, Moby-Dick does indeed challenge the traditional model of the thinking subject; yet it does so not by abandoning the cogito, throwing Descartes’s head overboard along with those of Locke and Kant (as Ishmael at one point suggests we do [327]), but by shifting its agency from consciousness to the unconscious, the latter of which, as Alenka Zupančič reminds us, is “not the opposite of consciousness” but rather an “active and ongoing” “thought process” that “in-forms” consciousness, that forms it from within.41 The model of the subject for which Ahab stands remains that of “a thinking thing” (Descartes’s res cogitans); however, the thing that does the thinking is not the “I” of the cogito but the active and ongoing thought process that is the unconscious—a process that, as Ahab demonstrates, generates its own things, its own vibrant matters. From this perspective, the beauty of so-called King Ahab is that though he indeed engages in all the negative fantasies that Bennett associates with the typical “imperial self” model of subjectivity, the model of “subjectivist potency” that Coole and Frost decry, he nonetheless ends up exemplifying what one of his many Shakespearean forebears, Prince Hamlet, already knew: “The King is a thing.”42
1. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), ix. Further citations in the text.
2. Though Bennett uses the term “thing-power” throughout Vibrant Matter, the phrase “‘thing-power’ materialism” comes from her essay “A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 47. Further citations in the text.
3. Franz Kafka, “The Cares of a Family Man,” trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1971), 428.
4. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, vol. 6 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1988), 464. Further citations in the text.
5. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 448, 459. Further citations in the text.
6. See Quentin Anderson, The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History (New York: Knopf, 1971). Further citations in the text.
7. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 181.
8. Žižek uses Stephen King’s novels to illustrate the distinction between “undead” and “not dead.” As he explains, “every reader of Stephen King” understands the difference between “‘he is not dead’ and ‘he is un-dead’”: “the ‘undead’ are neither alive nor dead[;] they are precisely the monstrous ‘living dead.’” Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 21–22. It is this sense of the term “undead” that I have in mind when using it to characterize Ahab’s peg leg.
9. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 36–37. Further citations in the text.
10. Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious; or, Reason since Freud,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 430.
11. Mladen Dolar, “Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious,” in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Žižek (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 29. Further citations in the text.
12. Lacan, “Position of the Unconscious,” in Écrits, 708.
13. From a Lacanian perspective, “eternal, living principle or soul” could very well double as a definition of the drive, for as Žižek explains, contrary to the classic Freudian understanding, Lacan associates the death drive not with a desire for self-annihilation, with a yearning for “homeostasis” or an “absence of tension,” but rather with “immortality,” with an “uncanny excess of life, . . . an ‘undead’ urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death.” Žižek, The Parallax View, 62.
14. See Slavoj Žižek, “The Thing from Inner Space,” in Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 216–59.
15. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, book 7 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 139. For a thorough examination of Lacan’s concept of “extimacy,” see Jacques-Alain Miller, “Extimité,” in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society, ed. Mark Bracher, Marshall W. Alcorn Jr., Ronald J. Corthell, and Françoise Massardier-Kenney (New York: NYU Press, 1994), 74–87.
16. Slavoj Žižek, Disparities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 83.
17. Žižek, The Parallax View, 148–49.
18. See Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” in Écrits, 690, 693.
19. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 113.
20. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 180–81.
21. Žižek, The Parallax View, 151–52.
22. The process of “raising” or “elevating” an object “to the dignity of the Thing” is Lacan’s definition of sublimation—hence Žižek’s frequent designation of the objet petit a as the “sublime object.” Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 112.
23. Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute; or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (New York: Verso, 2000), 47. As Žižek explains, the objet petit a is the “objectal counterpoint” of the subject insofar as it is the object that “sustains the Subject qua empty/void/non-substantial.” That is to say, it is precisely because the subject (as discussed earlier) is empty/nonsubstantial that “it has to be sustained by a minimum of a ‘pathological’ contingent objectal stain, objet petit a.” Hence Žižek’s conclusion that the objet petit a “‘is’ the subject itself in its otherness” (Fragile Absolute, 47).
24. Jacques Lacan, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, book 20 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 127. For Lacan’s claim that his “discourse,” as he puts it, is dialectical materialist, see Jacques Lacan, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, 1971, book 18 of Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 28.
25. Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious; or, Reason since Freud,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 171; Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” in Écrits, trans. Fink, 6. My reason for quoting from Sheridan’s translation in the first instance here is that whereas Fink simply translates Lacan’s original “excentricité” as “eccentricity,” Sheridan’s rendering of it as “ex-centricity” does a better job of conveying Lacan’s point regarding the extimate nature of subjectivity. All other references to the Écrits throughout this chapter (including the reference in this note to the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’”) are to Fink’s translation.
26. See my essay “Object-Disoriented Ontology; or, The Subject of What IS Sex?,” Continental Thought and Theory 2, no. 2 (August 2018): 35–57.
27. Sharon Cameron, The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 65, 41, 54.
28. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964, book 11 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 196. As Lacan explains, “all the forms of the objet [petit] a that can be enumerated are the [lamella’s] representatives, its equivalents” (198).
29. Molly Anne Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2010), 10.
30. See, for instance, Leland S. Person, “Melville’s Cassock: Putting on Masculinity in Moby-Dick,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 40, no. 1 (1994): 1–26.
31. See Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” in Écrits, 575–84.
32. Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), 87.
33. Žižek, Organs without Bodies, 175n33; Žižek, The Parallax View, 62, 123.
34. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 205; Žižek, The Parallax View, 120.
35. Sigmund Freud, “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis,” vol. 17 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), 143.
36. K. L. Evans, One Foot in the Finite: Melville’s Realism Reclaimed (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 6.
37. Both together and separately, Deleuze and Guattari often speak of Ahab’s “becoming-whale.” See, for instance, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 243–46; Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 169, 173, 177; Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 35–36; Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 78–79; and Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 42–44, 73–74.
38. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 44; Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 36; Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 169.
39. As Merton Sealts long ago noted, Melville was indeed “attracted by philosophical monism and even by pantheism.” Merton M. Sealts Jr., Pursuing Melville, 1940–1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 295. One need look no further than a chapter like “The Mast-Head” for confirmation of this attraction. And yet, we should remember that Descartes has the last laugh in this chapter, as his “vortices” threaten to send the “sunken-eyed young Platonist”/“Pantheist” into the sea, thus bringing his “identity” back to him “in horror” (158–59). Of the many Deleuzean approaches to Melville of late, Moby-Dick in particular, two especially strong examples are Michael Jonik, Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), and Pilar Martínez Benedí, “Navigating Dualisms on the Mast-Head: On Melville, Incorporeality, and New Materialism,” Leviathan 21, no. 2 (June 2019): 68–82.
40. “Ontological heroics” is a phrase coined by Melville in a famous letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne of June 29, 1851, just as he was finishing up the “tail” of Moby-Dick. Herman Melville, Correspondence, vol. 15 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1993), 196.
41. “Interview with Alenka Zupančič: Philosophy or Psychoanalysis? Yes, Please!,” by Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda, Crisis and Critique 6, no. 1 (April 2019): 440; Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), 116.
42. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 4.2.26.