One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention; and the world therefore swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.

— Samuel Johnson

 

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.

— Jean Genet

 

Samuel Johnson, the English writer, comments on the fatigue which is involved in the study of the text. The close attention which is required in study is tiresome and weary. In contrast, the idleness of reading opens toward the amusements which escape the close study of the text. The focus of this chapter is the exegesis of a sample from Lacan’s work in Seminar on the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (1964). Lacan’s ideas are originally presented orally in lecture to both specialists in psychiatry and psychoanalysis and to select intellectuals of various political stripes. But Lacan’s work cannot be understood as systematized — either by the author or the reader – because his lectures in oral and written form simply do not consititute a coherent and cogent system of thought. There is no proper “Lacanianism” nor, I would argue, a consistent division between earlier and later periods of his thought. Transferentially, he summons and directs his reader toward insights that can only be exposed in the practice of reading or listening rather than studying or formulating. His work is profoundly idle, as Johnson puts it, and Lacan evidently prefers to be read rather than studied. My intent in this chapter is to read Lacan closely — but only to avoid a systematization of his ideas in a simply “Lacanianism.” Lacan develops and illuminates many derived concepts from Freud’s work, but these ideas — or insights — do not constitute a system of study but rather an amusement which entices the reader toward his own discoveries and systems. Lacan’s words — spoken and written — are an invitation. The words are a departure rather than a destination. An adequate response to Lacan’s text cannot be the “study,” as Johnson says of fatigue, but must be the “reading” of the words with an idleness or wander around a vertiginous syntax and semantics. This chapter reads rather the studies, and its horizon is to adorn Lacan’s words with the “idleness” or reading raher than the “fatigue” of studying. The intellectual effluvium which emerges from such an interpretation is not a system but a set of ideas — “conceptual personae,” in Deleuze and Guattari’s words. These ideas transcend the discourse from within which they unfold.

 

Jean Genet, the queer French writer, speaks of the liberation of man. This revolution is precisely not interpretation, and the emancipation of the human is not a question of interpretation. Genet’s point is that interpretation — reading or studying, in Johnson’s words — are distinct from the project of liberation. The relationship between interpretation and revolution is undefined, and it is possible that there is precisely no bind between liberation and interpretation. Genet’s words limit interpretation and application to an engagement with a “transcendental ideology” — a mark of the regime of philosophical truth that Lacan’s work does not approach. The gap between literary interpretation and practical action is absent in Lacan’s ouevre because his work resists a “transcendental ideology” which outstrips the factical ground of revolutionary practice. Genet’s words neither define the liberation of man nor the engagement with “transcendental ideology,” but the horizon of his critique of the regime of philosophical truth is a return to man and his liberation rather than to text and its interpretation. My wager in this chapter is not — contra Genet — that theory is a form of practice. Nor is my bet that interpretation informs revolution. Rather, my work in this chapter demonstrates that interpretation and exegesis transform man. The amusement and idleness of reading rather than studying, as Johnson puts it, invite but also force man qua reader to liberate himself from the contraints of the fatigue of studying. The purpose of this chapter is not to get Lacan right in correspondence to a mythical “Lacanianism” but to precisely get Lacan wrong. This “reading” liberates man in the process of interpretation. Genet suggests that the emancipation of man is distinct from the practices of interpretation of the text. But the queerness of Lacan’s discourse — spoken and written — is that interpretation is a transformational practice. How is the reader himself transfigured in the amused and idle process of reading rather than studying the text? How does interpretation as an act undo man? My intent in this chapter is to transform the self not as a separate endeavor of revolution nor as an evolved effect of a newly discovered “transcendental ideology” or system of the regime of philosophical truth. Rather, my purpose is to transform the writer and the reader in the process of interpretation and engagement with text. The practice of reading is its own transformative process. Lacan’s text is in a privileged relationship to this process because it is neither a system nor a philosophy. The work is a challenge to the reader to isolate and extract strands of discourse. This work of isolation and extraction — reading rather than studying — informs my own work to discover the madman’s secret truth and to write the Manifesto of the Pervert. The lonely neurotic is transformed into the gregarious Pervert — from the enslavement of man to the liberation of man — in the process of reading. Interpretation is the substance of the revolution.

 

A Pervert’s Manifesto is strongly influenced by psychoanalysis and Lacan’s radical decenterment of the subject. A basic understanding of Lacan’s words is necessary in order to appreciate the broad framework within which my text does its critical and imaginative work. Unfortunately, an even elementary intuition of Lacan is prohibitive. Lacan’s discourse is sly and wily, and the essence of his philosophy — such as it is — is located in the form and style of his text rather than in the content and rigor of his analysis. Reading Lacan is experiential — private even — and it is a labrynthine wander toward and away from Freud’s work. In this brief L’etr’acte (1), I want to present a close reading of a short excerpt from Lacan’s work. Lacan’s Seminar on the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (1964) is considered a turning point in the philosophical direction of his work. But I would advise the reader that Lacan’s work is not easily summarized. At its best, Lacan’s discourse encounters many disparate objects, each a veil for other concepts and their own specific obscurities. In this L’etr-Acte (1), I want to introduce several themes in Lacan’s body of work as they are sparsey introduced in the opening chapter, “Excommunication,” in Lacan’s Seminar on the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (1964). The purpose of this scattered introduction to Lacan’s work is to (dis)orient the reader in the field of concepts in The Pervert’s Manifesto. The reader is best to imaginatively engage with Lacan’s words rather than master them. This decentered foundation in Lacan’s theory will frame the interventions in this book.

 

At its best, Lacan’s discourse provokes the hysteric’s desire and the avalanche of questions which follow in its wake. Lacan summarizes this barrage of queries with the algorithm of $<>a. The $<>a symbolizes the fundamental void toward which these questions are directed. The concepts such as the unconscious, the object (objet petit a), the transference, and the drive as outlined in Lacan’s Seminar on the four fundamental concepts in psychoanalysis (1964) answer the question of the hysteric’s desire with further questions. The answer is a question — a platitude that Lacan manages to make refreshingly exotic in his work. My project in this critical evaluation of Lacan’s text is to be inspired by questions whose answers inevitably exceed the borders of Lacan’s work. Where are the answers to these questions? — precisely, inside and outside of the realm of the unconscious, the object, the transference, and the drive. Lacan’s work unabashedly gestures beyond his work — to the realms indicated in the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. This means that Lacan’s work — to riff off of Saussure — is not Lacan’s work. Lacan’s work is certainly work — a labor beyond the borders and partitions of an economy of le propre (the proper, property, ownership, possession, mineness) that otherwise circumscribes the divisions between mine/yours and ours/theirs. Indeed, the (ex)communication in Lacan’s text is primarily outside of the text in the patient desire and jouissance of the reader. Lacan’s desire is the Other’s desire. Lacan’s jouissance is the Other’s jouissance. Lacan’s text is the Other’s text. The artistry of reading Lacan’s text and the labor of writing about his text involve a slippage between the boundaries of le propre that invites a desire and a pleasure which are fundamentally Other. The Other, it would seem, reads and writes Lacan.

 

Lacan begins his Seminar on the four fundamental concepts in psychoanalysis (1964) with a chapter entitled “Excommunication,” for the extraneous, the excluded, and the extra are simultaneously the integral, the included, and the innate — the extimate, as Lacan puts it elsewhere — to Lacan’s text. As Derrida would put it, the inside (is) the outside. The inside is the outside because meaning is the provision of the Other. Lacan’s title, “Excommunication,” playfully foreshadows Derrida’s famous il n’y a pas de hors texte. If, as Derrida reveals, nothing is outside of the text because nothing is inside of the text — that textuality profoundly disrupts the inside/outside opposition which is based in the economy of le propre — then communication is always an exchange between the interiority and integrity of the text and the excess and exception of its communication. In the later stages of Lacan’s career, he demonstrated his concepts with visual and conceptual knots in order to illuminate his ideas, including the parallactic overlap between the inside and the outside. The profundity of this thought structures all of Lacan’s work. This commitment is precisely the insight which enables Lacan to deconstruct the economy of le propre throughout his career. The economy of le propre (the proper, property, ownership, possession, mineness) normally patrols the borders around the text and the transference — a delimitation of the separations between mine/yours and ours/theirs which otherwise enforces that the text and the transference be the property of either the inside or the outside, the reader or the writer, the interpreter or the speaker, or the analyst or the patient. Lacan reveals that neither text nor transference, neither drive nor desire, neither unconscious nor object, is the private property of the mine.

 

This deconstruction of le propre is performed to the letter in Lacan’s work — or perhaps: Lacan-work — in the openness and vulnerability of the text to the conferral of meaning by the Other. Lacan’s text is not Lacan’s text. Lacan’s text is the Other. The provocation of the hysteric’s desire qua reader and writer extends the communication of the Seminar beyond the pages of the book. The book is neither mine nor yours — it is simply outside of the economy of le propre that would otherwise circumscribe boundaries around its ownership and possession. As a Marxist would put it: Lacan’s text abolishes all private property, both materially and psychically. The hysteric is both inside and outside of the communication. Lacan’s communication includes the excommunication that it simultaneously excludes. Lacan’s text exchanges inside for outside only to return elsewhere — toward resistance to the enforcement of the economy of le propre that otherwise seeks to administer the borders inside/outside, mine/yours, author/reader, interpreter/text, and analyst/patient. The torus-like journey between the inside and the outside of Lacan’s text explains that the excommunication is a communication — that the opposition between the two are fundamentally the same difference.

 

This Sameness+, as I name it, enables the passage — transformation — from a desire which is founded on the fantasy of a stable symbolic order that is divided by oppositional pairs organized by difference to a drive which is organized around the laughable encirclement of an elusive object that is organized by the same difference. If the text is otherwise than itself, then what is the text?  The text is the desire and the jouissance of the subject in question and of the subject who questions. This subject is the Other. The subject is the text. The communication between the two — self and other, subject and text — is inexorably inexact because its drive is beyond a desire which is organized by the vicissitudes of difference. As a pervert may intuit: the text (is) the Other (is) the subject (is) the object. What is the difference?  The gleeful pause at the end of this question gestures toward a desire which is transformed into drive.

 

Qualifications

 

Lacan begins the Seminar with an approach toward the question of qualification — a question, it should be noted, that has already been decided in advance by the presence of the full auditorium of spectators of his lecture. Lacan writes:

And yet, I must first introduce myself to you — despite the fact that most, though not all of you, know me already — because the circumstances are such that before dealing with this subject it might be appropriate to ask a preliminary question, namely: am I qualified to do so?

Lacan poses the question of desire to his audience: am I qualified to solicit (a) your desire?  Another iteration of the question is simply: am I desirable?  The answers to these questions is decided in advance because the full auditorium suggests that the transference between subject of desire and sujet supposé savoir — what Lacan describes as qualification — is already activated. The appropriateness of the “preliminary question,” then, is moot because the transference has already begun. The transference is always already present. The transference neither arrives nor departs but constitutes the continuity of an endlessly differed and deferred exchange: $<><><><>a, and so on. Lacan’s qualification precedes his qualification. The transference between a packed house of hysterics and Lacan as sujet supposé savoir is already active. Lacan’s point is that the question of the transference — which is a question — cannot be posed. This question — “am I qualified to do so?” — has already been answered in the affirmative. There is no origin of the transference because the situation of man is such that he is born into the transference. Oddly, the transference precedes and exceeds the subject in question. The transference has neither arche nor origin and, for this reason, it precisely works as such.

 

The “preliminary question” which intends to interrogate the qualification, appropriateness, and adequacy of the objet petit a is necessarily elided and veiled in all relations of desire. Lacan demonstrates that in our ordinary factical existence we tend to avoid the question: is the object up to the task?  Fantasy denotes the mise-en-scene of desire which frames, structures, and articulates the desire itself. Fantasy supports desire and obfuscates the constitutive feature of the objet petit a — that it is not itself the object which it simultaneously is in itself. This fantasy enables desire and the movement of the subject toward the object and the fantasmatic phalllic satisfaction that the object promises to satisfy and fails to deliver. This fantasy veils the specificity of drive and the comical circumnavigation (<>) around an elusive object which is enjoyed because it is (not) itself. Drive enjoys without the insistence of the fantasmatic ruse that the object is present to itself. The difference between désir and Trieb is articulated as a parallactic gap between the failure of an absent presence (desire) and the enjoyment of a present absence (drive). The question that Lacan poses — “am I qualified to do so?” — is only relevant to desire. The drive which traverses the fantasy and returns to the elusive object in fits of giggles could care less about the qualifications of the object. Drive simply enjoys the drive. The object of drive is the drive itself. There is no proper object of drive. The Pervert gets off before — without — qualification. There is no qualification of his desire. The object of Trieb resists qualification and specification because of the present throb of the radical absence of the object.

 

Politics and Substitution

 

Lacan reminds his readers of the slippage between the subject and the object ($<>a) in a remark that he makes about exchange. Lacan writes: “Each of us at any moment and at any level may be traded off — without the notion of exchange we can have no serious insight into the social structure.” Lacan’s immediate reference is to Levi’s Strauss’s work on the elementary structures of kinship and to the position of the woman as object of exchange by men of different clans in order to facilitate relations between these men. (Work by Gayle Rubin and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have further illuminated this patriarchal dynamic with concepts such as the “traffic in women” and the “homosocial.”)  Lacan’s other point of reference is the critical concept of value and general equivalence in Marx which holds that capitalism facilitates the exchange of two incommensurable objects or commodities through the subordination of each object to an abstract value. This speculative value is expressed in the general equivalent in the form of currency. This system of capital veils the reduction of two distinct commodities in the expression of market value (price) in the form of the general equivalent (currency). Capital veils that the calculation of value of each commodity prohibits their relative exchange with each other. The reduction of the value of each commodity to the general equivalent renders each commodity incommensurable — unequal and inequivalent — with other commodities. Outside of capital, the object is strictly singular and cannot be reduced to the abstract property of the quantification in the dollar and the coin.

 

This consequence of the subordination of each commodity to the form of the general equivalent is that each commodity is absolutely incommensurable — unequal and inequivalent — with every other commodity. The object is singular and has neither absolute nor relative relationship to any other object in the system. The reason for the incommensurability of objects under capitalism is that their value is set by the market in the form of the general equivalent. Currency is the only valid expression of value in the marketplace. The economy reduces the value of each commodity to the form of the general equivalent (currency). This reduction in value — from qualification to quantification, from use-value to exchange-value — is dictated by the market. The exchange of commodity A (say, an iPhone) and commodity B (say, a cashmere sweater) in themselves, as objects of barter, is strictly prohibited. Every commodity is reduced to a value which is dictated by the market and expressed in the form of the general equivalent is proeprly and strictly incommensurable — unequal and inequivalent — to the other commodities in the market. The iPhone has exactly no relationship to the cashmere sweater. Neither of these objects can be compared or contrasted as use-values to the other. This is precisely the opposite of the intended function of the abstraction and generalization of exchange. Capital reduces singularity to identity and difference.

 

Lacan’s point is that this incommensurability — inequality and inequivalence of singularity — does not apply to men themselves because they are not subordinate to a value which is dictated by the market and expressed in the form of the general equivalent. The subject’s ex-centricity to the general equivalent means that he escapes the incommensurability — inequality and inequivalence of singularity — which otherwise afflicts commodities as the objects in the marketplace. Each subject is strictly exchangeable and substitutable with every other subject in the society — what Lacan designates as “may be traded off.” The reason that each subject is exchangeable and substitutable is that man is not subordinate to the form of currency. Man cannot simply be summarized in the measurements of the calculation and speculation of value. This demonstrates that man is both unmatched and unique — singular — in his ex-centricity to the reductive calculation of the general equivalent, and he is also equal and equivalent — commensurable — in his exchangeability and substitutability. Two subjects are easily exchangeable with each other (say, the former boyfriend and the current boyfriend) because their value cannot be calculated in terms of a general equivalent which is dictated by the market. Man is freely exchangeable — substitutable and displaceable — with his fellow man because his value cannot be calculated. Man is valueless, and he is strictly beyond the calculations of the nihilism of value. Man does not have a value. He is singular in relationship to the other. The value of man is beyond calculation. The value of man is beyond abstraction. But precisely for this reason man is commensurable — equal and equivalent — with other men in the symbolic order. Man is the same difference as every other man because his singularity positions him outside of identity and difference.

 

The crucial point is that politics — and what Derrida names as justice apart from droit — is the dimension of noncalculation. This Outside is the obversive space of the machinations of value of the market as they are expressed in the form (currency) of the general equivalent. Paradoxically, the singularity and uniqueness of man facilitates his exchangeability and substitutability. Man and man may be absolutely incommensurable, but their incalculable value beyond the intrigues of the market and the general equivalent facilitates a radical exchangeability — same difference — between men. The political concept of (in)equality as it is glorified under Western capitalist democracy is not possible between commodities which are reducible to the standard of the general equivalent. Paradoxically, the absence of measurement enables a politics of trading between subjects whose free exchange — substitution and displacement — is possible because the measurement of the value of the deal is incalculable. Neither the dealer nor the object of the deal can be ripped off in the absence of calculation and abstrction. Man is the same difference because he is incalcuably singular. The general equivalents in the society — phallus for sexual relations, father for social relations, currency for financial relations, and the word for discursive relations — cannot be properly applied to the singularity of man. Outside of general equivalence, man escapes the structural principles of phallus, father, currency, and word. The Pervert of the future cannot be dominated by the calculations of the phallus, father, currency, or word. The Pervert is the Outside of sexuality, sociality, economy, and language. After the general equivalent, man is post-sexual, post-social, post-capital, and post-signification. The subject of the object of the deal, as Lacan puts it, is the futural object of existence after phallus, father, currency, and word. But what is the mise-en-scène of existence after sex, society, capital, and language? What are the general inequivalents of the Pervert?

 

The transformation of the equal into the singular — sans abstraction — is the invitational horizon of politics. Politics animates the commodity form. But it does so only in a society in which man is reduced to a commodity. This Sameness+ — Being — facilitates a radical incalculable exchangeability between subject of politics. Man’s singular inequivalence to his fellow man is transformed into uncalculable but exchangeable Sameness. Singular inequivalence is the substance of political theory and practice. The Pervert is free to trade himself with any other man in the system because each man is the same singularity — sans calculation — as every other man. In this future, man is elevated to the object of a barter — what Lacan refers to as the object of a deal. Politics is the arrival of a system of barter — trade, exchange, and substitution between same and other rather than identical and different terms. Man has yet to approach the political as such because he continues to quantify and measure under the dominance of the rule of le propre — the proper, property, ownership, possession, mineness — in all relations.

 

Comedy

 

The object of desire and the object of the drive are a parallactic object which splits itself between the fantasy of phallic fulfillment (desire) and the comedy of endless near misses (drive). The comic dimension of the drive traverses the fantasy of desire. This is a fantasy that fundamentally misunderstands the resistance of the object to the clutches of desire. Qua drive, the desirous chase for the object — and even the phallic fantasy that it is Da! — is simply another humorous missed encounter with an object. The objet inevitably veils itself from capture. Lacan writes:

But if the truth of the subject, even when he is in the position of master, does not reside in himself, but, as analysis shows, in an object that is, of its nature, concealed, to bring this object out into the light of day is really and truly the essence of comedy.

At stake in the revelation of the object qua concealed is the “truth of the subject” — Lacan’s nod to the fundamentally narcissistic structure of man. Lacan implies that the object of desire is hidden and concealed, and that the purpose of analysis is to reveal and unveil (“bring this object out into the light of day”) this object qua truth. Lacan’s promise that “analysis shows” the truth qua concealed — the object qua obscured — positions analytic technique as a part of the project of fundamental ontology, as practiced by Heidegger for whom truth (as Aletheia) refers to a simultaneous revelation and disguise. Being, as Heidegger discovered, is precisely not present, and it is improperly not itself.

 

Comedy is the experience of the revelation of this disguise — of the simultaneous illumination of the putting the rabbit in the hat in order to pull the rabbit out of the hat. The object is fundamentally not itself. Being, for Heidegger, is not present as itself. The comic arises in the presence of the object as otherwise than itself. The support that fantasy provides for desire prepares the hysteric for an object which is precisely itself. The hysteric sustains the desire that the object will return to her — Da! Desire is dreadfully earnest and serious because its fantasmatic object is accessible within the support which is offered by the coordinates of the fantasy. In contrast, Trieb is refreshingly playful and absurd because its traversal of the fantasy enables the subject to escape anchor in the object qua presence. The subject of drive — the Pervert — laughs at an object which giggles in magnanimous response. The Pervert’s object is the Outside of the field of desire. The Pervert exhausts desire in the encirlement of drive. The Pervert’s desire is not.

 

Comic Praxis

 

The concept of Praxis as it is defined by Lacan enables a precise understanding of the difference between desire and drive within the registers of the symbolic, the Real, and the imaginary. Lacan writes:

What is a Praxis?  I doubt whether this term may be regarded as inappropriate to psychoanalysis. It is the broadest term to designate a concerted human action, whatever it may be, which places man in a position to treat the Real by the symbolic. The fact that in doing so he encounters the imaginary to a greater or lesser degree is only of secondary importance here.

At a first approach to Praxis, it is a question and an answer — what Lacan exactly performs in the citation. Praxis is the formulation of a desirous question and the pursuit of an answer (objet petit a) as “concerted human action.” The work of Praxis puts man in a “position” to approach the Real of that which resists symbolization absolutely with the symbolic order. The process of the approach is a failed symbolizaton. The symbolic stumbles upon the dimension of the imaginary with its lures, and its promise of totality, speculation, identity, and the so on is thwarted. Praxis is the treatment of the Real as the resistance to symbolization absolutely by the symbolic. Praxis can only fail because its horizon is the successful symbolization of the Real.

 

A Praxis which fixes to symbolize the Real intends to capture the object in the imaginary order. Praxis tarries with the comic dimension insofar as it encircles the concealed Real object which remains obscured despite the best efforts of the work of symbolization by the Praxis. A perversely comic Praxis is a “concerted human action” which enjoys (jouissance) the failure of the symbolization of the Real. This failure is the Pervert’s playland. The Pervert of Praxis “encounters the imaginary” insofar as he succumbs to the fantasy that the Real object is symbolizable within the concerted human action of Praxis. Earnest Praxis fails because the Real resists symbolization. Comic Praxis succeeds because it intuits that the resistance of the Real object is constitutive of the Praxis itself. Comic Praxis enjoys the resistance of the object, and it avoids the dangerous temptations of the imaginary. Psychoanalysis is itself appropriately described as a comic Praxis.

 

Science, Psychoanalysis, Religion

 

The question of the status of psychoanalysis as a science haunts Lacan’s teaching. Lacan writes:

Without even introducing by any kind of transition the two terms between which I wish to hold the question — and not at all in an ironic way — I posit first that, if I am here, in such an audience, it is to ask myself whether psychoanalysis is a science, and to examine the question with you.

Lacan identifies two distinction questions. The first question is posed by the hysterical subject of desire (“ask myself”): “is psychoanalysis a science?”  The second question is posed by the Other in the “large auditorium.” This “qualification” situates Lacan’s intervention: “how do we examine the question, ‘is psychoanalysis a science?’”  The difference between psychoanalysis and science is that whereas the former approaches the object (as Real) with drive the the latter chases the object (as imaginary) with desire. Psychoanalysis celebrates the object as veiled, and it embraces the comical movement of the drive as it encircles the object of the Real beyond the lures of the imaginary order. In contrast, science fantasizes that the object can be revealed in presence, and it flirts with the object as imaginary. Is psychoanalysis a science?

 

This question poses a potential imaginary equivalence between the two terms which the drive of psychoanalysis avoids in its encirclement of the object qua Real. The question is of a fundamentally scientific ilk — of being and essence: what is? — that psychoanalysis as drive finds laughable. Psychoanalysis has already traversed the fantasy that otherwise posits imaginary objects. Beyond the fantasy, the question of the essence of either psychoanalysis or science is moot because they reveal themselves only in obscurity. Unexpectedly, psychoanalysis must be a science because it is not itself — a conclusion that science regards as incoherence. The question, “is psychoanalysis a science?,” is a query for a scientist caught in the imaginary lures of an essence as itself and a Being as presence. The other question, “how do we examine the question, ‘is psychoanalysis a science?,’” is the properly psychoanalytic question because it interrogates the hysteric’s desire as a question. The psychoanalytic question poses essence and Being as questions themselves.

 

What specifies science is the theory and practice of specification. Scientific theory and practice determine the object as presence. Lacan writes:

What specifies a science is having an object. It is possible to maintain that a science is specified by a definite object, at least by a certain reproducible level of operation known as experiment. But we must be very prudent, because this object changes, and in a very strange way, as a science develops.

Science “specifies” itself and its objects. The emergence of science arises as a creationist sublimation ex nihilo which objectifies itself as an object which is a subject. Science is split — as simultaneously a subject and an object. The fantasy of science is that the object is present (“having an object”). This implies a subject — which knows this object. This fantasy is precisely the object — frame — that the hysteric discovers as concealed in the comical revelation of the obscurity of the Real object. Lacan’s claim that science possesses an object implies a scientific economy of le propre. This science of the proper separates and distinguises objects — ready-at-hand, as Heidegger would say of objective presence — in the world. The fantasy of science is that the object can be specified. The scientific object can be separated and divided — a as opposed to $<>a — from the other objects in the world. Science is a phallic endeavor because it participates in the divisions and partitions (originally, that between mother and child) which animate and condition the world of the “definite object.” In contrast, the Pervert is a scientist of absence rather that presence, and his object cannot be “specified” because it exceeds any Being or presence as such.

 

Lacan mentions the “very strange” alterations in the object becauase he wants to underscore that the object of scientific research is an object of desire which resists capture as self-same and self-identical. This explains the relationship of science to psychoanalysis. Science investigates a worldly object whose obscurity (“having an object”) is repressed. In contrast, psychoanalysis pursues a desire of a science as it “develops” in relation to the evasive object that it seeks to capture in phallic knowledge. The psychoanalytic pursuit of its object — contextualized here as: “how do we examine the question, ‘is psychoanalysis a science?’” — participates in the economy of desire which animates the scientific endeavor. The difference between psychoanalysis and science is subtle because psychoanalysis posits science as an object — but not of desire (“definite object” of the imaginary) but of drive (as the Real which resists symbolization absolutely). Lacan notes the difference in the psychoanalytic approach to science qua object in his admission that the object “changes” as the science “develops.” Psychoanalysis approaches science as the object of the missed encounter — the encirclement of the drive around the resistant object qua Real which abjures capture by the symbolic. Psychoanalysis is a perverse comic Praxis because it celebrates the missed encounter with the object as Real. Science is a blind Praxis because it is caught in the imaginary lures of the fantasy which otherwise stablize the object as presence. Like any Praxis (“concerted human action”), science treats the Real by the symbolic. But science succumbs to the temptations of the imaginary which install fantasmatic “definite objects” without strange mutations in its field of experimentation. The psychoanalytic object endures wily metamorphoses. This chimerical object demonstrates that the objet petit a is always elsewhere. In contrast, the scientific object is specified.  The determinate object indicates that the experiment works. The object of science is the definite object of the imaginary. The object of psychoanalysis is the desire of the object itself. This $<>a relationship is the gap that the scientist represses. Psychoanalysis pursues the desire and repression — and desire qua repression — of scientific Praxis. Not only is repression internal to desire — the objet petit a must be stabilized as a “definite object” in the imaginary register in order to enable the scientist to symbolize the Real — but science is central to psychoanalysis — the Real must be confused with the imaginary in the “definite object” of the desire of science in order to enable the psychoanalytic pursuit of the relation of $<>a. We, subjects of desire, are all scientists insofar as we surrender to the lures of imaginary capture. If we are all scientists, then who is the psychoanalyst? As Lacan asks, “Am I qualified to do so?” But the Pervert foreswears the imaginary object of desire in favor of the Real object of drive. The Pervert is Outside of the question of qualification and the transference, and he is the cured patient of psychoanalysis whose faux interpretations he never bothered to consider.

 

Psychoanalysis provides illuminates the distinction between science and religion — both of which are different from psychoanalysis itself. Lacan writes: “Psychoanalysis, whether or not it is worthy of being included in one of these two registers, may even enlighten us as to what we should understand by science, and even by religion.” Psychoanalysis involves value (“whether or not it is worthy of” and “what we should understand”). Saussure discovers a value which is a relationship between terms in the system — whether understood as signifiers, signs, words, concepts, categories, or identities. This value cannot be determined in Being as presence because it is the Becoming mediation of the units of signification in langue. Value resists capture as a “definite object” because, like a signifier in Saussure’s general linguistics and a being (Seinde) in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, it resists capture as presence and positivity. Value is not value. If specifiable, value is the function of this not. Value (is) the relationship between the terms (“these two registers”) which articulate value in their negative opposition and relative difference. Crucially, Lacan exempts psychoanalysis from the in-between relationship of value (“whether or not it is worthy of being included in one of these two registers”) — why?  The reason is that psychoanalysis articulates itself from the position of the phallus. The phallus is the transcendental signifier which indicates (as a strictly indexical sign) the object petit a in the social field of the Praxis in question. It is because the Praxis is itself in question (malfunctions, posits an origin-cause) that psychoanalysis can pursue its object: the relationship of value (<>) between the subject and the object.

 

According to Lacan, the phallus functions only as veiled and obscured. Psychoanalysis presents itself as the nonphallic nonknowledge opposed to the phallic knowledge of science. Psychoanalysis cares less about its own identity — its inclusion and exclusion in the categories of science and religion — than the identity of the other categories — science and religion — which are put into question by psychoanalysis. The focus of psychoanalysis as the artful science of desire is the division and partition — imaginary stabilization of the “definite object” which is specified in the field of Praxis — between terms, such as science and religion. These two paradigms pursue their distinct but mutable objects with modalities of désir and Trieb. Lacan’s dismissal of the question of the inclusion/exclusion — excommunication — of psychoanalysis within the identites of science and religion forestalls the imaginary lure which involves identification and its vicissititudes.

 

Psychoanalysis pursues the perverse Trieb of feminine nonknowledge qua phallic knowledge. The system of savoir organizes the symbolic into pairs of oppositions. Phallically, we “should”understand the distinction between science and religion as distinct by the logic of the structure of opposition. This Reason is privileged by the symbolic order. Any symbolization which desires the structure of opposition — science/religion — will approach the Real as a missed encounter. However, even the drive toward the Sameness+ of an unimaginable structureless structure will miss the Real — why? The Real always returns to the same place which is forbidden by the symbolic order. Desire can seek access to the same place which is forbidden in the Real. This pursuit animates the repetition compulsion of desire whose structure is the transgression of the law and the return of the prohibition with the effect of the guilty conscience. Alternatively, drive can repeat the missed encounter with guffaws. The Pervert’s Manifesto repeats the missed encounter with its resistant object, and so on — again. This explains the length of this manuscript, and the orality of its textual presentation.

 

The difference between désir and Trieb — between science and psychoanalysis — is the orientation toward the resistant and elusive object-cause of desire. Lacan’s description of the objet petit a as the object-cause of desire indicates that desire does not work. Lacan notes that there is only an origin and a cause in something that does not work. The question of arche is not posed to an object which works. The object is the cause of desire because desire fundamentally malfunctions and fails. This explains the temptation of drive. Trieb abjures departure and arrival — a — and instead encircles the object without the expectation of its presence. The drive enjoys the absence — failure and malfunction — of the object. The object of Trieb essentially works. Both science and religion posit origin-cause for objects in the world which do not work. Science posits the origin of the species (Evolution) for a homo sapiens which does not work. Religion posits the cause of man (Creationism) for a humanity which does not work. The evidence that the human is broken is the crazed search for its origin in the Evolutionism of science and the Creationism of Christianity. Both science and religion offer contrastive explanations for the same malfunction of man. Science and religion are flip-sides of the same failure: humanity. In the future, the Pervert will work. Man will have no arche. The Pervert arrives ex nihilo.

        

Lacan’s concern about science — besides the innovation of the atomic bomb — is the reduction of the subject to the object — man as the object of the scientist’s evaluative gaze in the human sciences (anthropology, sociology, economics, history, statistics). Lacan writes:

It is possible that these remarks will force us into an at least tactical retreat, and to start again from the Praxis, to ask ourselves, knowing that Praxis delimits a field, whether it is at the level of this field that the modern scientist, who is not a man who knows a lot about everything, is to be specified.

Desire initiates the delimitation of the field which is organized by Praxis. But this desire is only legible to analysis within the field — what we may understand as fantasy — which is delimited by the Praxis. Desire is already situated within the coordinates of a fantasy. This fantasy organizes the Praxis of concerted human action within the field. The point is that desire cannot be detached from either fantasy or the field delimited by Praxis. The Outside of fantasy, is the Spirit of the Pervert in the Real.

        

Lacan’s suggestion that we “start again from the Praxis” implores the analyst to observe the desire which animates the delimitation of the field by the Praxis. The field of Praxis is already delimited in the presence of the desire for the object. The fantasmatically bound field posits objects. Lacan’s concern is that the human sciences specify man himself as the object in the field which is delimited by a liberal and humanist — social scientific — Praxis. Man becomes an object — an object-cause of the desire of the human sciences themselves. The scientist is a subject of desire whose object is man. Psychoanalysis is a comic Praxis which reveals that man qua object exceeds himself. Psychoanalysis illuminates the missed encounter with the object of the drive. This Real objet is veiled by the desirous pursuit in imaginary fantasy for the object of desire. Man exceeds the clutches of the evaluative lens of science because the scientist misses (“who is not a man who knows a lot about everything”) the missed encounter. Fort!  Da!

 

The Analyst’s Desire

 

Lacan returns to the question of the analyst’s desire over the course of his teaching. The mature Lacan positions the analyst as the object-cause of the analysand’s desire: “Am I qualified to do so?”  The circumscription of the analyst’s desire is a tricky matter because the analyst as object-cause of the hysteric’s desire — and, in Lacan’s later work, the provocateur of the new master signifier which emerges from the cacophony of her wild raves and fierce rants — orients him as the object of desire. The object of desire is typically identified as the position of the pervert whose essential motive is to pleasure the other. It is the hysteric who is properly the (becoming of) the subject of desire. The analytic relationship is between an hysteric, whose position in the transference is the split subject in the $<>a relationship, and a pervert, whose position in the transference is the objet petit a in the reversed a<>$. The hysteric’s desire is constituted in the movement of her speech in the articulation of a question — “Am I a man or a woman?” for the hysteric or “Am I dead or alive” for the obsessional. The analyst’s desire is slippery — an object of drive in the Real rather than an object of desire in the imaginary — because he is an object of desire rather than a subject of desire. About the analytic desire, Lacan conjures a trick:

I may even seem to have been saying the same thing myself in my teaching recently, when I point straight out, all veils torn aside, and in a quite overt way, towards that central point that I put in question, namely — what is the analyst’s desire?

The link between first, the semblance (“seem to have been saying”) of Lacan’s speech (“in my teaching”) and, second, that speech itself (“when I point straight out”) simultaenously hides and reveals qua the internal structure of the desire — of the object for Lacan, and of truth as Alethia, for Heidegger. Lacan’s own desirous question — “what is the analyst’s desire?” — is layered with metaphorical substitution and metonymic slippage between the semblance of full speech disperses into lost signifiers and inchoate desires. The postulation of the analyst’s desire is captured in the signifying chain that endlessly defers an answer — what Derrida refers to as the transcendental signified — to the desire.

 

Lacan’s disclosure of the semblance (“seem to have been saying”) of speech (“when I point straight out”) as metaphors for each other — appearance qua essence — illuminates the work of the phallic function and the lost origin of object-cause of desire as objet petit a. Both the phallus and the objet are deferred in the past (infinite regress) and deferred in the future (infinite progress) but never present. The phallus designates (as an indexical sign) the effects of the signified in the field of the signifier. But the phallus does its integral work only in hidden obscurity. The phallus cannot appear as such. In the citation, Lacan “points straight out,” and this reference to his own phallic position reveals itself in obscurity with “all veils torn away.” However, the reader has yet to approach the lost origin and the answer to the question not yet posed. This question in and of the insistence of the signifying chain (what Freud names as free association) enables Lacan qua phallus qua object to “point” toward the “central point.” What is the “central point”?

 

The “central point” is precisely the object that, as Lacan says, “I put in question.” What is “put in question” in the question— in desire as the question — is desire. Not only does Lacan demonstrate that desire is a question but he formulates this desire as the series of metaphors and metonymies — metaphor qua metonymy — that desperately differ and defer both the formulation of the question — “what is the analyst’s desire?” — and an answer which remains suspended beyond the “central point” around which the desire encircles. This passage demonstrates that desire is a metonymy which necessarily involves metaphor — what Lacan demonstrates as the “central point.” This figuration is both a metaphor for the desire of the analyst and a metonymy in the approach toward the object. The “central point” enunciates a metaphor for the approach to the analytic desire. But the “central point” is also merely a metonymic difference and deferral toward the approach of the answer to Lacan’s query — which is a question: “what is the analyst’s desire?”  Lacan shows that desire is a question which follows the object. But this object fails to satisfy the desire in question. The object-cause of desire precedes the formulation of the desire qua question. The question responds to the answer. The analyst’s desire precedes itself.

 

In Training

 

The desire of the analyst informs the training of the psychoanalyst. The analytic desire must be addressed because it pertains to the Becoming of the analyst himself. Lacan writes,

In any case, the analyst’s desire can in no way be left outside our question, for the simple reason that the problem of the training of the analyst poses it. And the training analysis has no other purpose than to bring the analyst to the point I designate in my algebra as the analyst’s desire.

The analytic desire precedes the question of desire, but Lacan also insists that it “can in no way be left outside our question.” The counter-transference is posed from within the question of the analysand’s desire. The patient’s desirous question — “Che vuoi?” — refers to the desire of the analyst. The analyst’s desire is properly beyond the proper (proper, property, appropriation, ownership, mineness). The analyst’s desire “can in no way be left outside of our question” because the analyst’s desire fundamentally does not belong to him. The analyst’s desire, like the patient’s desire, is always the desire of the Other. The analyst’s desire is “our question” — a desire of the Other apart from the analyst. The analyst’s desire and the patient’s desire are not merely intertwined. Rather, these desires are fundamentally the same desire. Each desire is split from itself and conjoined with the Other’s desire. The “central point” of the question of the analyst’s desire is that analytic desire resists presence as the center of the analyst. The question of the (counter-)transference emerges not “outside” but inside the question of the analyst’s desire: whose desire is whose? Whose transference is whose? A scientist easily “specifies” the proper distribution of the objects of desire, but the psychoanalyst arduously pursues desire itself rather than simply its objects. How is desire qua Other separated in terms of an economy of le propre and isolated as either the analysand’s desire or the analyst’s desire?

 

The analytic desire must be addressed because it involves the training of analysts. This is a practice which requires that both trainer and trainee pose the question to themselves as objects: “am I qualified to do so?”  What qualifies the analyst qua object-cause of desire?  The horizon of Lacan’s “training” of analysts enables these subjects to position themselves as objects — precisely, as objects which do not work. Is the analyst qualified to be an object-cause resistant to fantasmatic imaginary capture in the mirror reflection of the patient’s desire?  The “qualification” to be an analyst qua object is to be seen in the register of the Real — as the resistant kernel around which desire (and drive) encircle in the Praxis which treats the Real with the function of the symbolic. The analyst’s desire is for Real objecthood. The question of qualification is the approach that the analyst is trained to take toward fantasmatic imaginary capture in the claws of the analysand’s desire. The analyst’s desire must be mortal in order to resist capture in the patient’s imaginary fantasy. This mise-en-scène obstructs the symbolic approach to the missed encounter with the object of the analyst as Real.

 

Lacan’s algebra for the analyst’s desire is the inverse of the hysteric’s desire. The analyst’s desire is structured as homologous to the pervert’s desire: a<>$. This obversive recontruction of the neurotic fantasy is always in operation insfor as all split subjects ($) function simultaneously as objects of desire (a). The peculiarity of the analyst (and the pervert) is a theoretical and practical assumption of subjectivity qua objectivity. Neurotic subjects comport themselves as split subjects. This is so even as this castration is either repressed, as in neurosis, foreclosed, as in psychosis, or disavowed, as in perversion. The analyst must present himself as an object (a<>$) in order to solicit the desire of the patient and to analyze the patient’s strategic encirclement of the analyst qua object-cause. This object resists capture in the fantasmatic imaginary of the patient’s desire. Lacan’s point is that the analyst must resist. If the horizon of psychoanalysis is the dissolution of the analysand’s resistances, then this is so only because it seeks to solicit a desire which will be met by the analyst’s own resistances. The analytic suspension of the patient’s resistances requires and enables the analyst’s resistances. The couplet of patient and analyst swap roles. This analytic switcheroo facilitates the emergence of Trieb beyond désir.

 

The analysis positions the analyst and the patient on opposed ends of an axis. Lacan notes that it is “in the very movement of speaking that the hysteric constitutes her desire.” The analyst qua object indicates that the hysteric’s free associations in session comprise the analyst’s objecthood. This explains the necessity of the hermeneutics of suspicion, as Ricouer (1977) described the Freudian interpretative orientation, that the analyst deploys in the encounter with the patient. The analyst’s interpretations must diverge from the patient’s desire because the analyst’s function as object-cause is to solicit a desire which must be transformed into drive. The analytic deployment of the division between conscious and unconscious — manifest and latent — is a simple sham. The conceit is designed to ensure the analyst’s “qualification” as object of the Real which resists capture in the patient’s desire. This desire is organized by the fantasy of the analyst qua transferential sujet supposé savoir. Lacan notes that this “relation of desire to language as such did not remain concealed” from Freud. The Freudian analyst recognizes the fraudulence of the distinction between conscious/unconscious and manifest/latent.

 

Lacan suggests that this relation between analysand/analyst is not “fully elucidated” because of the “massive notion of the transference.” The transference is the bind which is produced in analysis between the desire of the patient for a knowledge which is fantasized in the place of the analyst. The transference obscures that this relationship is a fantasy or the scene in which desire is enacted. Desire is structured by knowledge and the vicissitudes of its distribution in the analytic arrangement. The transference positions the patient and analyst as opposed to each other. But the transference also binds them to an amorphous and undifferentiated desire of the Other. This alienated desire obscures the contrivance of the unconscious. This chicanery sham must be concealed in order for the analyst as object of the Real to function in the practice of analysis. The analytic subterfuge produces effects in the symbolic. The resistance of the analyst must be sustained as object-cause in the Real of what will become the analysand’s drive beyond a pleasure principle that otherwise satisfies itself on the momentary and fantasmatic reduction of tension in human Praxis. The unconscious is a fiction of the Real.  It is exactly for this reason that it is effective in analysis.

 

The Name-of-the-Father and the Desire of the Mother

 

Lacan’s original concept of the name-of-the-father presents a fantasmatic insight into the origin of the unconscious qua sham. Lacan writes:

What I had to say on the Names-of-the-father had no other purpose, in fact, than to put in question the origin, to discover by what privilege Freud’s desire was able to find the entrance into the field of experience he designates as the unconscious.

The concept of the name-of-the-father illuminates a theme in Derrida’s work: the arche. Derrida says that the origin is always already trace. The arche is a tissue of differences and deferrals which mark any origin — departure and destination — as a deviation from its of self-same and self-identical presence. Lacan says that the origin is “put in question” by the name-of-the-father. The paternal function (identification, ego-ideal) is presented to the child as a substitute for his abandonment of the desire of the mother. The paternal metaphor substitutes the name-of-the-father (identification, ego-ideal) for the desire of the mother (pleasure) in the child’s nascent existence. This displacement of enjoyment by identity is the condition of proper entry into the symbolic order. Lacan’s “question” demonstrates the “origin” of this metaphorical substitution. The arche of entry into culture is neither the desire of the mother (which comes to overwhelm the child) nor the name-of-the-father (which installs a constitutive lack between the ego and the ego-ideal). Rather, the rite of passage is the process of substitution — what Lacan refers to in his discussion of politics as trade and exchange. The child enters society through the politics of trade and exchage. Metaphor is the political mechanism of individuation and differentiation. Selfhood is the effect of considerations of the political.

 

The Original Desire of Freud is Drive

 

The question of Freud’s desire — “what does Freud want?” — animates Lacan’s discourse. Lacan’s work is a response to the unresolved desire of Freud. Freud’s work is a rejoinder to his failure to properly answer the question — “what does a woman want?” Freud’s theorization of the woman as dominated by a phallocentric version of femaleness — penis/not-penis — obviates any possible answer to his own question about femininity. Freud’s desire may be the ex nilhilo of Being from Nothingness, but the phallocentricity of the Western unconscious abjures any presentation of femaleness or its desire. However, Lacan position in the question of Freud’s desire in a different dimension. Lacan writes:

Freud’s desire, however, I have placed at a higher level. I have said that the Freudian field of analytic practice remained dependent on a certain original desire, which always plays an ambiguous, but dominant role in the transmission of psychoanalysis.

The “Freudian field” is the mise-en-scene of fantasy.  This domain is delimited by Praxis. The fantasy posits objects of desire which are specified by a science. Lacan’s suggestion is that psychoanalysis tout court is the frame of fantasy of Freud’s desire. Lacan places this desire “at a higher level.” Psychoanalysis as the science of desire is situated in the fantasy of Freud’s desire. This implies that the science of psychoanalysis is an analysis of Freud’s own desire, but this desire is no ordinary desire of science. At an “higher level,” this desire is beyond the clutches of the desire of ordinary psychoanalysts. Psychoanalytic désir is always already Trieb. This desire is an encirclement around the object qua Freud’s desire. Freud’s desire is the foundation of the fantasy in which these desires interact. The “higher level” of Freud’s desire is simultaneously the “lower level” of privileged entry into the frame of fantasy that Lacan identifies as the “Freudian field.”

 

Lacan’s delineation of the fantasy as the “Freudian field” situates the objects of desire in psychoanalytic Praxis as fundamentally beyond the borders of le propre that otherwise would separate desires from each other — my desire versus your desire, our desire versus their desire, and so on. The Freudian field is a fantasy which is situated only in the aftermath of the analytic traversal of the fantasy. The traversal breaks the imaginary bind of egos and transforms desire into drive. Lacan reminds his reader that the traversal beyond the fantasy in drive is properly understood as always already within fantasy. Fantasy is at once beyond fantasy. The Real is fantasmatic. The approach toward the “higher level” of Freud’s desire is the experience of the torus-like confusion which implicates the imaginary within the Real as a function of the symbolic. This torsion illuminates the primary likeness between the ostensibly distinct registers. This experience of the fantasy qua Real approaches the “higher level” of Freud’s desire.

 

Lacan states that the “Freudian field” is the field of fantasy qua Real. The field is beyond and before the traversal of the fantasy. The field is “dependent on a certain original desire, which always plays an ambiguous, but dominant role in the transmission of psychoanalysis.” If the fantasy is the frame and support of desire, then what is the prop which supports the fantasy?  What is the origin of the fantasy itself? What is the fantasy of fantasy? Lacan names the support of the fantasy or the Freudian field an “original desire” whose ambiguous function in the transmission of psychoanalysis engages Lacan’s own work in his Seminars. The “original desire” is drive. It is a desire which reflects itself as fantasy. Ordinarily, desire is blind to its position in the fantasy of the imaginary. Freud’s “original desire” recognizes its fantasmatic function as the condition of its traversal of the fantasy as a drive beyond the pleasure principle and the regulation of lack in the increase and decrease of tension in the organism. This original desire “plays an ambiguous, but dominant role” in the transmission of psychoanalysis because the training of analysts seeks to prouduce the analyst as an object rather than a subject of desire. The training designs the analyst as the object of the patient’s desire. This object is resistant to capture in the fantasy of the patient’s imaginary identification. The original desire qua drive which enjoys the resistance of the object qua Real is the entry into the traversal of the fantasy. The traversal invites the training analyst into the Freudian field of drive rather than desire.

 

Transference and Drive

 

The drive and the transference are fundamental concepts which imply each other. The transference enables drive. The drive facilitates the end of the transference. The two concepts are not easily separated from each other, especially in the Praxis of psychoanalysis. Lacan writes,

The few words on the blackboard under the heading Freudian concepts are the first two — the unconscious and repetition. The transference — I hope to approach it next time — will introduce us directly to the algorithms that I thought necessary to set out in practice, especially with a view to the implementation of the analytic technique as such. Lastly, the drive is still so difficult to approach — that I do not think I can do more this year than touch upon it after we have dealt with the transference.

The unconsicous and repetition are “the few words” and “the first two” because their function is to establish the scene for the demonstration of the function of the transference and the drive. The repetition of the unconscious repeats in this passage, but this repetition is concealed by the failure (and success) of the transference and the emergence (and repression) of the drive in the performance of this passage. Both the transference and the drive are processes which cannot be reduced to objects of desire. These ordinary object are otherwise be trapped by the mechanisms of identification in the fantasy. However, Lacan pursues the transference as an objet petit a in this passage. He says of the transference, “I hope to approach it next time.” Lacan’s point is that the determination of the transference as object-cause of the Seminar itself (“I hope to approach it next time”) demonstrates that the transference is precisely the subjective experience of this slippage in the object as itself.

 

The cause of the transference is the repetition of the transformation in the object. The transference qua object in Lacan’s discourse demonstrates the experience of the transference. The presence (“approach”) of the transference is endlessly differed and deferred (“next time”) beyond the clutches of imaginary fantasmatic capture. The essence of transference is the simultaneous desire — what Lacan identifies as “hope” — of the object to arrive in presence and the experience of the transience of an object whose presence is absent. The “hopeful” approach toward the object will be compulsively repeated “next time.” The field of this repetition is the unconscious. This “hopeful” desire is the condition of the unconscious. The repetition of the desirous “approach” and its endless deferral and loss “next time” sustains the unconscious as arche of the failure which erupts in the field of the conscious as a symptom. The desire in the transference is exactly founded on faith — “I hope to approach it next time.” The unconscious is a system of belief rather than a paradigm of knowledge. This is the reason that Freud found no negation and no knowledge in the unconscious.

 

The distinction between transference and drive illuminates a difference of “approach,” as Lacan says, toward the object, and a different “approach,” he implies, by the subject. The object of the transference (desire) and the object of the drive (Trieb) are distinct because they differently organize the unique experiences of desire and drive. Lacan claims that, “Lastly, the drive is still so difficult to approach — that I do not think I can do more this year than touch upon it after we have dealt with the transference.” Whereas Lacan has “hope” or faith that he will approach the object of transference as an object of desire, he admits that the object of drive “is still so difficult to approach” because it arrives “lastly.” The transference is approached with belief because it is caught in the fantasy of the imaginary capture of the object qua present and total. The drive is approached with difficulty because its aim is beyond the imaginary object and toward the Real object. This object is the hard unsymbolizable kernel around which the drive pulsates. Lacan can do no more than “touch upon it” qua the Real in the aftermath of the dissolution of the transference and the relationship of man to his imaginary object in the field of fantasy. The object of the drive can only be approached as the missed encounter. The drive as an object can only be approached as the missed encounter.

 

The drive is its encounter as the missed encounter. This is the difficulty of its approach. The prospect of the approach to the object of the drive qua Real promises a transformation in the algorithm which summarizes the whole of the Praxis of man ($<>a). An approach to the Real implies the dissolution of the transference and the suspension of desire which appear at the end (“lastly”) only to inagurate a beginning (“touch upon it”). This demonstrates the experience of the man of drive — that the oppositions of the last and the first, the end and the beginning, and the one and the other, appear as fundamentally the same. This experience of Sameness+ is summarized in Freud’s outline of the compulsion to repeat and Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return of the same. Sameness+ fractures man’s relationship to the world of objects of desire. These objects of desire are individualized and differentiated as the proviso of their desirability. Beyond the transference — “lastly” — is the deconstructive reorganization of the phallic divisions of the symbolic order. This reconfiguration is a function that Saussure identifies with langue and which Lacan names as the symbolic function. Oddly, beyond desire is the deconstructive symbolization of the Real. The language of play awaits beyond the impasse of desire.

 

The Unconscious and the Symbolic Function

 

Lacan’s use of structural linguistics for the purposes of psychoanalysis not only enables him to conceptualize the unconscious as structured like a language but it also facilitates the deployment of some of the other insights from Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1917), such as linguistic value and its logic of pure difference and opposition. Lacan writes: “Most of you will have some idea of what I mean when I say — the unconscious is structured like a language. This statement refers to a field that is much more accessible to us today than at the time of Freud.” This citation is noteworthy because it distributes oppositional positions to an undifferentiated audience of the listeners to his live Seminar. Lacan says that “most of you” will understand the latent unconscious truth of the manfiest conscious articulation — “the unconscious is structured like a language.” An unconscious which is structured like a language involves the phallic divisions which the society mobilizes in order to facilitate both identification and disidentificaton in a “field.” This field is an inchoate and chaotic realm of unanchored sounds and thoughts. This nebula of jumbled materialities and scrambled abstractions precedes their organization into differences and negativities without positive terms as a langauge system.

 

The Lacanian sound-bite about the unconscious delimits a “field” which organizes the Praxis of psychoanalysis. The isolation of the field of psychoanalysis rends the objects in the system subject to exchange and substitution — what Freud identifed as condensation and dispacement and what Lacan situates as metaphor and metonymy. The symbolic function organizes the words in the system into oppositional pairs. This coordinated system simultaneously enables and disables exchange and substitution. The unconscious is the privileged field of free exchange and infinite substitution. This field is the Outside of knowledge. This field is beyond negation. This Outside is strictly prohibited in the conscious language system of the ego. Lacan’s suggestion that the unconsicous is structured “like” a language implies similarity but also dissimiliarity. The system of the conscious is that whereas the conscious language system forbids certain exchanges and substitutions. In contrast, the unconscious structure is free to substitute and exchange at the whims of its wishes.

 

Unconscious, Lost Origin

 

The question which emerges from the thought of the unconscious itself is: what is the origin of the unconscious?  Lacan pursues this question through a strategy of avoidance. Lacan writes,

Before any experience, before any individual deduction, even before those collective experiences that may be related only to social needs are inscribed in it, something organizes this field, inscribes its initial lines of force.

The unconscious is the “field” which a Praxis outlines in order to enable the specification of objects within that field for the function of science. Praxis delimits the field of the unconscious “before” any engaged involvement by man. What is this “something,” as Lacan says, whose Praxis “organizes the field” and “inscribes its initial lines of force”?  The usual response is that the unconscious is the inscription of these lines of force, but Lacan’s question circumlocutes around the prosaic answer by suggesting that there is a force “before” the unconscious which facilitates its symbolic function. The question can be reposed: who arrives before man?

 

The theological response to this question is: God. Lacan’s work on the symbolic function focuses on the ex-centricity of signification to man. There is “something” before man which “organizes” the field of the unconscious and which “inscribes” its initial forces. A force ex-centric to the unconscious is referenced in the title of the first chapter, “Excommunication,” of Lacan’s Seminar (1964). This force precedes the unconscious. There is an unconscious of the unconscious. Analysis aims for an unweaving of the the work of the “something” which organizes and inscribes the field of the unconscious. It is necessary to theorize beyond the pleasure principle. The lost arche precedes — or postdates — the field in which psychoanalysis finds its own desire. Indeed, “something” must be the Outside of the field of the unconscious in order for the unconscious to organize a desire which encounters a resistance. Freud identifies the “navel” of the dream and Lacan recognizes the Real as the forces which resist symbolization absolutely.

 

Lacan’s sheepish avoidance of an identification of the lost origin — trace of arche — of the unconscious not only solicits the desire of the analysts in training who seek truth in a place which is outside of knowledge. The circumlocuation around the arche — the unconscious of the unconscious — also facilitates the jouissance of those caught in the nets of an unconscious which exceeds all boundaries of le propre — the proper, property, ownership, possession, mineness. Lacan writes: “Nature provides — I must use the word — signifiers, and these signifiers organize human relations in a creative way, providing them with structures and shaping them.” Lacan’s improbable claim that Nature provides signifiers which are structured oppositionally in the field of the unconscious is intended to amuse his reader. At first glance, it appears as if the symbolic function is opposed to Nature. Lacan’s precise point is that Nature is a symbolic function which is subordinate to the signfiiers that She provides. Whereas a theologian, as I noted above, would identify the origin of the symbolic function with God, a biologist may understand the pairs of oppositions in the field of the unconscious as a provision from Nature.

 

God and Nature — religion and science — approach the same symbolic function in their articulation of the origin of man. The lost origin — as différance and trace in deconstruction — solicits variously structured desires and enjoyments which posit different terms for this lost origin: God, as in theology, and Nature, as in science, and text, as in literature. Culture is Nature’s words. These words install the division between Culture/Nature. Lacan’s central point is that God and Nature (and the unconscius) are names for a function which exceeds these concepts themselves: the phallus. The phallus designates the effects of the signified in the field of the signifier qua veiled and concealed. The arche of the symbolic only functions as obscured. The words of Culture present themselves as the provision of Nature. The force which organizes and inscribes the field of the unconscious and the Praxis of psychoanalysis as a science is necesssarily concealed from view. This explains Freud’s recourse to an unconscious whose primary process veils the latent truth of its articulations.

 

It Does(n’t) Work

 

Lacan situates the unconscious in a network of failure — of a malfunction which retroactively posits an origin-cause for the failure. Lacan writes:

In short, there is cause only in something that doesn’t work. Well!  It is at this point that I am trying to make you see by approximation that the Freudian unconscious is situated at the point, where, between cause and that which it affects, there is always something wrong.

The quick tipoff in this passage is at the start — “in short” — which describes the short-circuit in the algorithm $<>a without the differences and deferrals of the movement of the transference — <><><><><> and so on — toward an object which resists capture. The relationship of $<>a twists and turns beyond the lures of the imaginary. The algorithm describes the short-circuit between a failure — the split subject’s transference — and the arche of this failure — desire. The algorithm is a short-cut (“in short”) for a relationship (desire, transference) which does not work. Desire does not work. This explains Lacan’s designation of the objet petit a as the object-cause of desire. The object is the arche of an imaginary relationship which does not work. The cause is “in” the object which fails, but the failed inside of the object posits an origin-cause which insists beyond it. Lacan isolates this excess as the split subject ($). The object malfunctions, and it seeks an origin-cause for this failure outside of itself. The objet petit a is experienced as the split subject. The subject is the object. Lacan’s effusive “Well!” after his short-circuit — “in short” — of the object’s failure and the retroactive proposal of an origin-cause of this malfunction indicates that a field — the unconscious — opens in the aftermath of the fault in the object and the retroactive calculation of a fault in the subject. This calculation — interpretation and analysis — is the active exploration of this malfunction. The unconscious is the privileged field in which to investigate the “point” of this failure between split subject ($) and object of desire (a).

 

The space between the “cause” and “that which it affects” is the Lacanian lozenge (<>). The objet petit a is situated as the arche of a split in the subject which fails to capture its object — an object whose tricky slip and slide evades the capture of the desire of the split subject it puts into question. The success of the objet petit a as inspiration for the subject’s desire inevitably reduces itself to a glitch which posits fault in man. Man is the failure of the object’s success. The in-between this win and loss is the unconscious. The primary process is the field in which the short-circuit of the algorithm $<>a unfolds. Lacan situates the unconscious between cause and its failure. This designates the field of the unconscious between desire (a) and man ($) in which “there is always something wrong.” The short-circuit that Lacan presents between an object and its origin-cause (“Well!”) veils the entire work of analysis. This effort seeks to return man to a traversal of the fantasy which transforms desire from a success qua failure in which the object exceeds itself at the moment of its capture into drive as a failure qua success in which the missed encounter meets its mistake. The question of the analysand which indicates “something wrong” is the question of the presence of the object: what is the “cause”?  If the arche is “in” an object which exceeds the object, then where is this excess?  Where is “it”?  The infinite encirclement around these questions qua objects of desire demonstrates that the object is not “it” itself. The cause of the glitch in the subject is always otherwise and elsewhere from any presence. This infinite difference and deferral — what Derrida describes as différance — indicates that the subject’s object-cause exceeds Being in a metaphysics of presence. The analyst intuits that “there is always something wrong” in the relationship (the lozenge: <>) between the split subject which is caused by an object whose presence is an escaped absence.

 

Well! When does it work? Man works when he drives in Trieb. Man does not work when he does not work in desire. There is presence and absence — presence of absence — in a system in which man works rather than does not work. There is absence and presence — absence of presence — in a system in which man works rather than does not work. What is the difference? Lacan’s system indicates that the situation of man amidst a world of objects that he lacks produces a glitch in the system — what psychoanalysis will repeatedly name as lack and castration. This compulsive repetition is the field of the aperture of the unconcious. There is no unconscious in a system in which man works — in which the object-cause is not absent. This is precisely Lacan’s gesture toward drive. The subject is its object. The space between the arche of the split in the subject and the the subject itself is the same difference. The division between the conscious and the unconscious is overcome in a Trieb which encounters the Real as the resistance of the system.

 

An approach to the object qua Real experientially works because the object-cause of the split in the subect is precisely this same subject. Man and world unite sans the lack and castation of the system. Why? Man is neither the split subject ($) nor the resistant objet petit a. Man is the lozenge (<>)  of Becoming between and among the various subjects, object, ego, alter-ego, semblable, double, or other veil for the system. The union between subject and object generates the sublime underside of the symbolic order: Nothing is Missing. Contra science and religion, there is no glitch in the system at the moment in which drive displaces the division. Man is a “creationist sublimation,” as Lacan calls the work which the present out of the nothing of the absent, ex nihilo. The absence of the glitch — a — delivers the subject to the symbolic function as merely a signifier which represents the subject signifier to another signifier. This elevation of man to word works. But man’s desire evidently does not work, at least not yet qua desire.

 

The Failure for the Unconscious

 

The unconscious emerges from failure and a a system which does not work. The success of the unconscious as a discovery depends on the glitch of and as man. But the precise locus of this man is in question. Lacan writes: “Impediment, failure, split. In a spoken or written sentence something stumbles. Freud is attracted to these phenomena, and it is there that he seeks the unconscious.” Lacan’s reference to “impediment, failure, split” gestures toward the repetition of the snafu which identifies the emergence of the unconscious as an object of Freud’s desire. The failure — what does not work — inaugurates Freud’s desire. The symptom is simply the glitch in the system. The object-cause of Freud’s desire is the glitch of and in man — what we understand as the desire (<>) which mistakenly endevours to meet its object in the missed encounter. Lacan’s ambiguous phraseology, “it is there that he seeks the unconscious,” reminds the reader that man is elsewhere from himself. He is dislocated in the stumbles — “impediment, failure, split” — of the subject of the unconscious. Man is elsewhere than in his proper place in the world. Lacan’s avoidance in naming the subject of the split — “something stumbles” — indicates that the unconscious exceeds the function of the proper name. Lacan writes, “There, something other demands to be realized — which appears as intentional, of course, but of a strange temporality.” Freud’s discovery is to name this “something other” as the wishes of the unconscious, but Lacan’s stress is on the “impediment, failure, split” in the process of the nomination of this word. Lacan continues: “What occurs, what is produced, in this gap, is presented as the discovery. It is in this way that the Freudian exploration first encounters what occurs in the unconscious.” The discovery of the unconscious is failure and dysfunction. The unconscious is the gap between the subject which is supposed to work (the system of the ego) and the cause-origin of the glitch in the event of “impediemnt, failure, split” in man. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious emerges from a symptom which does not work in man. This glitch retroactively indicates the origin-cause in and as the unconscious. The unconscious posits itself. The unconscious is a “creationist sublimation,” as Lacan calls it, of the Freudian invention ex nihilo. Out of nothing, the unconscious emerges from the “impediment, failure, split.” Freud’s intervention is that man is not coincident with himself. Man exceeds himself outside of himself. The dysfunction which “stumbles” enables Freud to recognize that man is not entirely in man. Freud’s intervention splits man from himself — or facilitates this division — such that the discovery is not man but the unconscious. This unconscious is transindividual rather than subjectivized. But can we discover an unconscious without man? Is the discovery of the unconscious the ruin of man? Is this destruktion of man his redemption?  The latter would certainly be culling success from failure.

 

Desire Splits the Split

 

The desire that Freud discovered in the emergence of the unconscious splits the subject retroactively as the subject of the split. The split subject precedes the split which retroactively divides the subject of the unconscious. Lacan writes,

Thus the unconscious is always manifested as that which vacillates in a split in the subject, from which emerges a discovery that Freud compares with desire — a desire that will temporarily situate in the denuded metonymy of the discourse in question, where the subject surprises himself in some unexpected way.

The discovery of the unconscious appears as the split in the subject. The unconscious presents itself as otherwise than itself. The unconscious is the split in the subject. The subjective relationship of this alienation to its object is the field of fantasy in the unconscious. The relationship of $<>a is the unconscious. It is an emergence which is identifed with impediment because the relationship of desire properly dysfunctions. The proper of desire is defeat. The discovery of the unconscious illuminates the split of the subject. It is a desire which precedes the split. This antecedent desire is the unconscious. This discovery of the split qua desire — unconsicous — predates the desire which explains the unconscious. The discovery of desire heralds a gap which precedes the desire. Paradoxically, desire is anterior to its own presence.

 

The unconscious is caught in the peculiar temporal vortex of the futur antériur. The desire of the unconscious only will have been the desire in the future arrival of its interpretation in what Lacan refers to as the “denuded metonymy of the discourse in question.” The desire of the unconscious is a retroactive effect of the revelations (“denuded metonymy”) of the signifiers of the hyseric’s discourse. Lacan explicitly makes this point in his discussion of the hysteric: “Now, the differential feature of the hysteric is precisely this — it is in the very movement of speaking that the hysteric constitutes her desire.” The desire of the analysand exceeds the “now” — what Derrida deconstructs in Speech and Phenomena (1967) as the “punctual now” in Husserlian phenomenology. This presence is conditioned by the “protentions” and “retentions” which are repressed in Husserl’s work. Psychoanalytically, the split in the subject gestures toward a future which unfurls in the “denuded metonymy” of the discourse. This metonymy is imaginarily laid bare in metaphorical “surprises.” These “surprises” punctuate (point de capiton) the discourse. Lacan’s point is that this future precedes its unfolding in the present — “now” — which is only retroactively constructed in the metonymy of discourse after the metaphor or the symptom is interpreted. Analysis separates the metaphor into a manfiest content with a latent (“surprise”) throught. The symptom is “like” and “unlike” itself in the format of the structure of metaphor. The denuded desire unveils its jewels. But it does so only in the “surprise” which is “now” apparent as the arche of the discourse.

 

The split resists symbolization absolutely. The Real always returns to the same place of the subject which is decentered in space and time. One approach to this split interprets it as the metaphoricity of metaphor. This is the process of substitution and exchange which the neurotic child first performs in the substitution of the name of the father for the desire of the mother. The split is the substitution of identification for desire in the Oedipus complex. Beyond the familial drama, the split is the substitution and exchange of objects in the system. The split cannot be named because it is the condition of the substitution and exchange of the two words which are split but sutured in the process of metaphor. The split divides the subject in occlusion. The split is elsewhere and otherwise to the two objects — subjects as commodities — who are subject to this split. The division is the process of metaphor.

 

The split is only visible to the subject and the analyst in its effect. This explains Lacan’s statement that the unconscious “vacillates in a split in the subject, from which emerges a discovery that Freud compares with desire.” The essence and arche of this split is only manifest in metaphor, by way of a “comparison with desire.” It is comparison — substitution and exchange — which performs the function of the split. The split is not itself. It is only visible in the effects in metaphor and in the bi-level configuration of the symptom and the split between manifest content and latent thought. The reason that the split becomes both the subject and the object of desire is because it is foundationally disguised and fundamentally veiled. Psychoanalysis approaches this constitutve gap both in the subject and in the object in its thematization of the field of the unconscious in the dimension of castration. The work of desire is to split the split from itself. This effort inevitably generates more splits — and metaphors and symptoms. The split qua part-object may be in the future of the subject, but the approach toward the objet petit a will inevitably gesture toward a return to a split which precedes the resistant split of this split.

 

I present this close reading — but not earnest study — in order to prepare the reader for the philosophical nuances and theoretical details in The Pervert’s Manifeso. This chapter foreruns the work in the subsequent chapters. Lacan’s discourse and words rather than ideas and concepts are the foundation for the critique of the extant system and the invention of the Pervert and her future. The purpose fo this L’etre Acte (1) is to outline the style and substance of this book. Rather than the “fatigue,” as Johnson says, of “transcendental ideology,” as Genet puts it, The Pervert’s Manifesto performs a style whose violence and aesthetic exceed reading and inspire amusement. Lacan’s work selectively frames this demonstration. The object of our psychoanalytic and deconstructive intervention is the singularity of the futural selfhood and sociality of the Pervert. What are the condition for her appearance? What is the process by which this future unfolds. Perversely, it must be hazarded — toward what?