The Dislocations of the Real
3.1 The promise of jouissance
The other side of this story, which has been largely neglected so far, concerns jouissance . The cyclical process of identification/construction and its failure is driven by a desire to achieve a state of fullness . It is the entrance into the field of language and social reality, that is, our constitution as subjects marked by lack (through an act of submission to the Law of the Symbolic), which retroactively gives rise to the myth of a presymbolic, purportedly ‘full’ jouissance able to remediate this lack.
The primary agent of castration is thus language itself, and not some sort of contingent, personalized other: ‘The organism’s passage through and into language is castration, introducing the idea of loss and absence into the world’ (Leader, 1996, p. 148, emphasis added). It is our advent as speaking beings which creates a loss that is ‘at the center of civiliza- tion and culture’ (Fink, 1995, p. 100): the lack of jouissance allows for the emergence of desire sustained by fantasy, the motor force behind cultural development.
A small word of caution is warranted here. Accounts like these are always at risk of unintentionally reinforcing some kind of utopian liberation fantasy, as if they form an argument to cast off the repressive mores that stand in the way of true, unlimited enjoyment. They seem to signal that lack can be circumvented, as it is tied up with the limitations imposed by the ‘paternal function’ (that is, the imposition of symbolic law). This is, however, far from what Lacan had in mind (1959–60, p. 184). He claims that total jouissance , as such, is impossible for the speaking being: if it were ever reached, the subject would be annihilated.
The trick is that through the intervention of the paternal function, something inherently impossible is prohibited in a seemingly redun- dant fashion (Lacan, 1959–60, p. 176). Nevertheless, this prohibition
creates the illusion that the impossible could be attained, were it not for the obstacles and barriers imposed from outside (Verhaeghe, 2009). The Law makes us believe that what is impossible really exists and is merely forbidden. As such, it supports fantasy and desire. Desire is tantamount to the law: as the latter prohibits ‘the maternal object’, the emblem for a forbidden jouissance imagined to be ‘total’ in the classical Oedipal account, it simultaneously installs her as something desirable. This entails somewhat of a ruse: although the desirability of the maternal object is an effect of the imposition of the law, her constitution as the
‘taboo object’ is organized in such a way that she appears as always-already desirable , prior to and independent of the law, as some sort of ‘natural’
love object. Nevertheless, her exceptional status only derives from the symbolic structure as such. 1 The so-called ‘lost’ object of fantasy, which would enable a total enjoyment, never actually existed: it is only ever posited retroactively. Lack comes first and gives rise to the idea of full- ness, and not vice versa (Stavrakakis, 1999, p. 43). Or, the so-called ‘lost’
object concerns a past that was never actually present (LaCapra, 1999), it signals a structural absence defensively interpreted as lost.
The necessary act of exclusion to enter the field of social reality installs the fiction of total enjoyment. It is the promise of this jouissance that stimulates desire. However, when we pursue this desire in reality, we are always confronted sooner or later with the sad realization that ‘this is not it’, leading to the continuous displacement from object to object (Lacan, 1958, p. 580). It is the structural failure to retrieve the always- already lost (and thus structurally absent) object that keeps desire going.
The promise of a ‘return to a state of fullness’ doesn’t just play a crucial role at the level of the individual. Jouissance , desire and fantasy are determining factors at the level of the collective as well. For instance, the political significance of the promise of jouissance lies in the observa- tion that the success of political movements is often tied up with their ability to manipulate a kind of collective ‘symptomatic enjoyment’. One way to accomplish this is by painting a convincing picture of the lost paradise, combined with the assertion that it is within reach. Populist parties promise the final termination of the antagonisms and problems that haunt society and the return to a state of harmony and tradition.
Often, the proposed program for achieving this involves the eradication of something identified as standing in the way of the coveted harmony, some sort of scapegoat equivalent to the symptom in psychoanalysis: the Jew, capital, immigrants, and so on (for example, Žižek, 2014). Ideology taps into the enjoyment tied up with the fantasy of total harmony. It does so by disavowing the structural nature of the real (that is, castration) and
proposing a ‘final solution’ for social antagonisms. In contrast with such an imaginary stance, which involves the confluence of the categories of
‘loss’ and ‘absence’, as Dominick LaCapra (1999) pointed out, a symbolic subject position recognizes the inevitability of lack and the impossibility to construct any definitive answers. The latter position is marked by an acceptance of symbolical castration, of the impossibility of total jouis- sance , of ever retrieving the putative lost object. This means that every critique of a political or ideological system must go beyond a purely deconstructive level: ‘it requires a mapping of the fantasies supporting this system and an encircling of its symptomatic function’ (Stavrakakis, 2007, p. 81). In other words, understanding the movements of politics and ideology requires that we take into account the jouissance involved, that we work out how jouissance and certain privileged representations are related.
The idea that social reality is itself structurally lacking finds its pendant in the pivotal role ascribed to fantasy in psychoanalytic theory. Only through fantasy can a more or less stable and coherent reality system be established. Indeed, for Lacan, as we have seen, fantasy is not in opposition to reality (in contrast with the common usage of the term).
Fantasy, by contrast, is the necessary supplement that makes reality cohere: ‘It is because reality is articulated at the symbolic level and the symbolic is lacking, that reality can only acquire a certain coherence and become desirable as an object of identification, by resorting to fantasy’
(Stavrakakis, 1999, p. 46). Fantasy remediates for the mark of castration or real lack in the symbolic by positivizing it. As such, it gives the social world consistency and appeal. However, this fantasmatic form of dealing with the Other’s lack is not infallible: it can be overthrown by events that are incommensurable with fantasy’s meaning-generating, defen- sive framework. The pertinence of such moments of rupture is double.
First, it has been argued that events of this type are traumatic. Second, it is precisely this moment of rupture that allows us to circumscribe the foundational moment of the political. In what follows, I will situate the role of fantasy in the construction of social reality. Subsequently, I turn to a discussion of rupture in its traumatic and political dimension.
4 Fantasy and social reality
The previous sections dealt with the crucial Lacanian idea that the lack at the level of the subject is doubled by the lack in the Other.
Consequently, the human condition is characterized by a quest for a lost and impossible enjoyment not affected by lack. Lacan elaborated
the notion of fantasy to describe a scenario in which an encounter with this longed-for jouissance is staged. Fantasy thus fulfills an essentially defensive role: it attempts to make bearable the doubled lack effected by castration (Lacan, 1964–65). Stavrakakis (1999) emphasizes that this is not to say that fantasy actually succeeds in ‘filling up’ the Other’s lack, for this is structurally impossible. It is rather that fantasy disavows this impossibility by presenting us with its object ‘as a metaphor of our lacking fullness’; it offers us the mirage of a mythical object that could administer a ‘full enjoyment’. Objet petit a , as Lacan called it, the object- cause of desire (1964, pp. 243, 268), is understood as a materialization or positivization of symbolic lack, which (falsely) promises an enjoyment beyond castration and thereby creates the illusory consistency of the world.
Nevertheless, even in fantasy the encounter with the object is always staged as a future possibility. We never actually succeed in retrieving it.
The fantasy’s promise always remains just that: a whisper of a never- actualized possibility that sustains desire. As Stavrakakis (2007) puts it eloquently: fantasy offers the ‘presence of an absence’ (the mirage of a mythical object that is ‘out there’ somewhere) to mask the ‘absence of a presence’ (the non-existence of total jouissance ) (p. 78). What constantly emerges from this exposition is that when harmony is not present, it has to be introduced through a fantasmatic social construction in order for reality to cohere. As argued in Chapter 3, this need for harmony and continuity purportedly derives from the fact that the ego is itself consti- tuted through identification with a unified image, whereby the under- lying experience of fragmentation and discontinuity is misrecognized (Lacan, 1949). This foundational move installs an overall ‘tendency toward misrecognition’ and a ‘generalized search for unity in the world, which actually distorts the experience of reality’ (Vanheule, 2011b, p. 2). Other explanations point to ‘something in human nature that puts a bonus on order, routine, repetitiveness, continuity, standardization, predictability’ (Sztompka, 2000, p. 457, emphasis added), because these conditions purportedly satisfy a ‘craving for existential security’ (ibid.).
Lacanian theory offers an explanation as to why this existential security is always at peril.
Although fantasy is commonly understood as something highly indi- vidualistic, in the sense of an eminently private and intimate affair kept hidden from others, a few scholars have drawn attention to the collec- tive aspects of fantasy as well (for example, Ernest Bormann (1985), Jacqueline Rose (1996), Todd McGowan (2007) and Slavoj Žižek (2008)).
They claim that our social world is underpinned by shared fantasies
crucial for understanding ‘the functioning of sociopolitical life[,] as the phantasy structure shapes the narratives of communities’ (Andreescu, 2013, p. 211). In turn, these narratives reinforce the associated fantasy as they make up ‘the context of the socialization of the members of the community’ (ibid.). Fantasy is said to create a shared sense of identity, community and common consciousness. As such, it plays an important part in our self-definition. Rather than being confined to the intimacy of one’s psychology, then, fantasies are claimed to be present on a high- er-order, communal level as well. On both levels (the individual and the societal), however, their role remains the same: they make bearable the lack in the Other while sustaining and orienting desire. Andreescu (2013) argues that a political system only functions to the degree that it channels and captures human desire, usually by making reference to a utopian and lost state of harmony and unity.