The Dislocations of the Real
4.2 The anticipated certainty of the subjective act
So far, we have elaborated on three essential features of the act, which are interrelated. First, the act brings something new into the world. Second, it is characterized by a logical temporality that is distinct from normal, chronological time. And third, the act appears to arise ex nihilo , without the possibility for it to ground itself in the knowledge that preceded it.
To further our comprehension of this concept, we will now return to the
Žižekian reading of Lacan’s subjective or ethical act. The act comes very close to the Badiouian concept of forcing, as ‘anticipatory certitude’ is the hallmark of both (Pluth & Hoens, 2004, p. 185). However, for my purposes, the return to Lacan’s conceptualization is preferable at this point, as it readily emphasizes the importance of this type of act in the context of the clinical encounter (Lacan, 1967–68).
In the previous section, I argued that the trace driving the subjec- tive act is a creation rather than an objective reflection of the traumatic event. However, despite this apparently arbitrary and ex nihilo character, the subject does succeed in arriving at what can only be called a truth.
With reference to Žižek (1991b), we could argue that truth arises from misrecognition . Žižek alludes to the fact that truth, because of its epis- temological and ontological status, can never be approached directly but always requires some sort of detour through which it is created.
For example, in order to produce the knowledge that we desire about the meaning of our symptoms, the process of psychoanalysis requires the (illusory) supposition by the analysand that this knowledge already exists – more precisely, it is thought to exist in the transferential person of the analyst (which is why Lacan (1964, pp. 225, 232) introduces the concept of sujet- supposé-savoir , the subject-supposed-to-know, to rede- fine the notion of transference). This misrecognition forms the impetus for the analysand to speak, and by doing so, he or she discovers that in the end the analyst was a figure of his or her imagination and obvi- ously does not possess the truth concerning his or her very being. But also, through this process of dissolving the transference, he or she stumbles upon the meaning and unacknowledged gratification of his or her symptoms – almost by accident or as a side-effect, as it were. The latter is thus only obtained through the founding misconception that this knowledge already existed in the analyst. As such, this knowledge is projected into a point in the future, from where it appears to return as the analysis produces the signifying frame that gives the symptoms a proper symbolic place and meaning: ‘Transference is then an illu- sion, but the point is that we cannot bypass it and reach directly for the truth. The truth itself is constituted through the illusion proper to the transference’ (Žižek, 1991b, p. 189). The analyst is thus someone who sustains the analysand’s misrecognition and who even goes so far as to deceive him or her on this point. But ultimately, through this ‘swindle’
( escroquerie ), the analyst keeps his or her word as the analytic process produces a morsel of the desired truth about the meaning of the symp- toms. It is the symbolic elaboration in the analysis which decides retro- actively what the symptoms will have been. Hence, there is a strange
temporality at work in this instantiation of the truth: the subjective mistake, error or misrecognition ‘arrives paradoxically before the truth in relation to which we are designating it as “error”, because this “truth”
itself becomes true only through – or, to use a Hegelian term, by media- tion of – the error’ (Žižek, 1991b, pp. 190–91).
The same thing can be said of the subjective acts that we are discussing.
The temporal paradox that is at work in the recovery from trauma consists of this one thing: that one has to decide on what it is that has happened, at a time when the knowledge to do so is absolutely lacking. It is this feature that makes recovery from trauma an ethical matter, in the sense discussed in Chapter 4. Moreover, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and Badiou’s philosophy alike hold that the subject only appears in the midst of this very lack (Neill, 2011, p. 193). Recovery from trauma, then, essentially involves a decision as to what has happened. And, in line with Žižek, this decision cannot but be erroneous (more precisely, from the standpoint of the pre-evental world its proclamation is nonsensical). However, only through this (mis)recognition of what has happened, and by remaining faithful to it, can the subject finally arrive at the truth and implications of the trauma. Thus, the first attempts to deal with the trauma are neces- sarily premature in that they always seem to come too early. Nevertheless, the appropriate moment cannot arise but through a series of premature or failed attempts. In this way, the aforementioned quietism, of which the theory of the act/event is sometimes accused, is countered: one is obliged to perform a series of actions of which only time will tell if one of them amounts to an act proper. There can be no act without activity.
These claims add an important dimension to the hackneyed notions of verbalization and mentalization in trauma recovery. Verbalizing the trauma, in my reading, is a subjective act of creation that is essentially without grounds, rather than the development of an understanding that correctly matches the ‘objective reality’ of what has happened. It is precisely this dimension of the act – and, along with it, its political implications, as we will see – that is obscured when the ‘new trauma- related information’ is taken as a given rather than as necessarily consti- tuted. At the moment of the subjective act itself, there is no guarantee of its truthfulness. The act involves a wager and can never be the result of mere calculation, as the latter relies solely on the pre-given that was rendered futile by the confrontation with the real.
At this juncture, Badiou’s reliance on mathematics proves particularly useful. The concept of forcing (akin to the process of the Lacanian act), which Badiou deploys to describe the activity of the faithful subject, actually refers to a technique in set theory invented by mathematician
Paul Cohen. Basically, it addresses how the undecidable can be decided upon after all, and Cohen’s accomplishment was to show that such a decision can be legitimate. We have seen that the names used in a truth procedure are ‘additions’ to the pre-existent situation, whose correct- ness can only be settled in a future anterior sense. A statement that is undecidable in one situation may be veridical (or demonstrably false) in a new one. Forcing authorizes and legitimates claims about indiscern- ible multiples – not proving or verifying them, but giving them a status that is better described as suspended than as undecidable (Pluth, 2010).
The faithful subject engaged in the labor of forcing thus operates as if the present situation were already completely reworked from the stand- point of the evental truth. Whereas both the event and its signifiers are indiscernible in the here and now, they become verifiable (and, perhaps, veridical) in the light of the knowledge-regime of the new world. In Badiou’s (2003c, p. 65) own words:
I call the anticipatory hypothesis of the generic being of a truth, a forcing. A forcing is the powerful fiction of a completed truth. Starting with such a fiction, I can force new bits of knowledge, without even verifying this knowledge.
Thus, although the ex nihilo character of the act might raise suspicions about the nature of what it produces (for example, its arbitrary and/or constructionist character), forcing actually makes it possible to arrive at a ‘truth’ that is separated from the specificities of the people involved in its production.
The forcing of new bits of knowledge invests the whole ‘pre-trauma world’ with new meaning, as it becomes enmeshed in the textures of the new present. On a more psychological level, the faithful subject’s acts are associated with the development of new subjective projects and goals, a new orientation of the person’s biographical narrative. This is why Lacanian theory speaks of the post-traumatic subject as a subject which survives its own death (see Žižek, 2008): the desire that oriented the biographical narrative up to the moment of the trauma, as that which forms the core of the person’s identity, is abolished – only to be reborn through the act. However, the desire that emerges out of the detritus of the trauma and through the act is not the same as the one before;
it is a new desire, constituting a new subject and drawing out radically different aims and trajectories.
Again, this new orientation of desire is not something of which the effects are restricted to the psyche of the traumatized person; it is
primarily directed outwards, where it addresses the other. Establishing a new present that allows for a subjective appropriation of the trauma is not limited to, for example, intrapsychically developing new schemata.
Although an act is primarily an act for the subject, it is always some- thing that, due to its transgressive nature, puts the other on the spot, so to speak. Zupančič (2000, p. 83) remarks:
The act differs from an ‘action’ in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent). After an act, I am ‘not the same as before’. In the act, the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn (or not); the act involves a kind of temporary eclipse of the subject. The act is there- fore always a ‘crime’, a ‘transgression’ – of the limits of the symbolic community to which I belong.
We have to approach this designation of the act as a ‘transgression’ or a ‘crime’ with great care. What is meant by this is that the act has a formal structure to it that is foreign to the register constituted by the good/bad dichotomy, but nevertheless it may be perceived as ‘evil’ or
‘bad’ because it always represents a certain ‘overstepping’ of the limits of the given symbolic order (or community) in which it takes place. As the act introduces a new present, it brings a change in ‘what is’, and this always implies that the other cannot but react to the novelty that is introduced. This feature opens the door for a re-introduction of the political in trauma recovery.
As Laclau, Stavrakakis, Žižek and others have remarked, the ‘new’ in politics is always related to the emergence of a new signifier, ‘a new ideal which comes to occupy the place of the organizing principle of a discur- sive field and of associated subjective identities’ (Stavrakakis, 2007, p. 59). This idea links up with the above description of the act as similar to Badiou’s ‘intervention’. With the emergence of a new master signifier,
‘the socio-symbolic field is not only displaced, [but] its very structuring principle changes’ (Žižek 1999, p. 262). Note that such a re-articulation of symbolic-imaginary reality is argued to rely upon ‘the contingent dislo- cation of a pre-existing discursive order, through a certain resurfacing of the traumatic real which shows the limits of the social’ (Stavrakakis, 2007, p. 59). The dislocation is the ‘source’ of the intervention. The new signifier responds to a gap that suddenly opens up and produces anxiety.
As described in Chapter 5, a traumatic rupture invalidates the nodal points that ordinarily structure the elements of a given sociopolitical reality into a meaningful system. When a new master signifier surfaces, this changes the meaning of those prior anchoring points. The political dimension of an act can thus manifest itself in language itself – with
the caveat that language, in Lacanian theory, is a material substance.
Interventions in the signifier thus directly affect the actual, material units of ideology. Every radical reconfiguration of these elements can therefore be viewed as a direct attack upon the substance of ideology itself (Johnston, 2009, p. 125).
5 Disentanglement: trauma, event and the act
Throughout this work, figures of rupture and discontinuity have taken center stage. Trauma is thought to derive from the violent and unexpected confrontation with ‘something’ that cannot be represented. In other words, what transpired in the traumatic event resists recuperation in the former structuration of the subject’s psychical economy. In a variety of psycholog- ical theories on trauma, the incommensurability of the traumatic episode with prior meaning-making frameworks is identified as generative of the typical traumatic symptomatology (Ehlers & Clark, 2000). Lacan theorized the traumatic confrontation with the formless, unfathomable ‘beyond’ of representation with the concept of the real. Theories of cultural trauma and other forms of large-scale rupture locate the incommensurability on a trans-individual level rather than a psychological one.
As discussed, the formal characteristics of Badiou’s notion of the event, vis-à-vis the pre-existing world, are highly reminiscent of the described dichotomy between a traumatic episode and the preceding symbolic- imaginary system. Trauma, the event, the act: all of these concepts are ultimately defined by their capacity to exceed the pre-given. They all share a moment of negativity, of disruption of the pre-established struc- ture, of suspension of the Other. However, whereas the event and the act are explicitly linked to the production of a new symbolic structure, in part through this fleeting moment of dislocation, this is not the case with trauma in any clear way. The main distinction between trauma on the one hand, and the event/act on the other, lies in their respective valence: whereas Badiou’s event is heralded as the harbinger of posi- tive change (via the local manifestation of an eternal truth), trauma is defined by destructiveness and negativity. Whereas Badiou’s event (and equally, Lacan’s act) produces a subject, trauma denotes the subject’s dissolution or destruction. Or even, Badiou’s event opens possibilities, while trauma closes them off (Di Nicola, 2012a). In this light, the deli- cate discussion concerning the ‘productive dimension’ of trauma can be rephrased as follows: can we legitimately conceive of trauma as an event in the Badiouian sense? Badiou himself is clear on this matter: he firmly rejects any such linkage on the basis of the discussed difference in valence (negativity/death versus positivity/life). From a clinical perspective, we
could add that trauma is not ‘productive’ in any straightforward way.
One of its defining characteristics is precisely its uncanny resistance to the passing of chronological time: there is nothing inherent to trauma that leads to a ‘conclusion’ in any sense. The exact opposite is the case:
trauma is the impossibility to close off or conclude the past, which is why it returns to haunt the present.
The fertility of juxtaposing trauma with the theory of the event/act lies in the latter’s specification of how the unrepresentable/impossible finds its way into a symbolic order that is altered by this transition. The disruption of the Other, whether it is in the guise of a traumatic episode, a situation of radical social change, a Badiouian event or a psychoanalyt- ical act – all of which are instances of the real, in the sense that they are manifested at the precise points of inconsistency of the reality/world at stake – requires the ‘flash of an intervention’ as well as the subsequent, arduous subject-process, if this disruption is to have a lasting impact on the (sociopolitical) reality at stake. Theories of the act and the event highlight this moment of creative invention that is necessitated yet often overlooked in trauma recovery. Moreover, these theories make tangible the counterintuitive temporality inherent to this process, related to the
‘anticipatory certitude’ and the concept of ‘forcing’ discussed above.
Lastly, they clarify both the ethical and the political dimension of the subjectivization of rupture.
The act affirms the break with the pre-existent and introduces some- thing new that can only be judged if the prior situation is reworked from the standpoint of this evental supplement. The necessity of creating a new present for coming to grips with the ephemeral event provides a powerful outlook when applied to traumatic pathology and recovery.
The ethical act of naming (the intervention) and the subsequent subjec- tivization process targets the Other: just as the analyst’s act requires a response from the analysand, so the act in the face of the traumatic real is an injunction for the other/Other to take up a position. This is the act’s political force: it is directed outward, towards the creation of a new
‘transcendental regime’ and thus a new present or world, rewriting the rules of what is possible and what is not. The invention of a new signi- fier around which a new field of meaning coalesces is a prime example of the moment of the political, in the sense discussed in Chapter 5.
To conclude this chapter, I will discuss a few examples to render these many points more vivid. First, I will turn to Ron Eyerman’s discussion of the cultural trauma of slavery, and show how his exposé relates to the central notion of the act. The idea is that Eyerman describes the lengthy political process situated at the level of different and incommensurable
symbolic formations, rather than traumatic rupture per se . In this way, a brief discussion of Eyerman’s cultural trauma theory allows me to further disambiguate the notions discussed throughout this book. Next, I will present a reading of the changes procured in the social fabric by the 1970s feminist movement, as recounted by Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1997). The Lacanian framework allows us to think through the process and dynamics of societal change in its relation to individual healing. This example makes clear that even those traumatic experi- ences that take place in the intimacy of one’s private family life should be read against the background of an overarching sociopolitical system.
In my reading, it is by grace of the subjective acts and the permutations this causes in the field of the Other that the traumas of these women can be worked through.
6 The cultural trauma of slavery
In Cultural Trauma. Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity , Ron Eyerman (2003) meticulously works out how what he calls the
‘cultural trauma of slavery’ was at the base of an emergent collective identity, through an equally emergent collective memory (p. 1). Slavery, first and foremost, evidently affected those who directly experienced it in horrible ways. But secondly, Eyerman argues, it became ‘traumatic in retrospect’ (p. 1) for a large collective of people who did not experience it firsthand. His intriguing and controversial thesis is that the individual experiences of the slaves became a cultural trauma only when they were taken up in a collective memory that pervaded the entirety of American society and formed a rupture with the ways in which members of this society viewed themselves and their history. According to Eyerman, cultural trauma thus always necessitates the establishment and accept- ance of the ‘traumatic meaning’ of what happened. He thereby empha- sizes the lengthy process by which a series of traumatic experiences is mediated and represented over time. If a traumatic episode in history, which affected a particular sub-group of a given society, is to have an impact on the entirety of this society, in the sense described in Chapter 5, this means first of all that it must be transmitted or dispersed ‘within the discourse of people talking about the past’ (p. 6):
while this reconstructed common and collective past may have its origins in direct experience, its recollection is mediated through narra- tives that are modified with the passage of time, filtered through