Čítam takú dlhšiu esej, ktorá rozoberá rozdiely medzi lacanovskou psychoanalýzou a "autentickým šialenstvom" (o ktorom hovorí artaud a od ktorého sa neskôr ako BwO konceptu odrazia Deleuze s Guattarim). Tá esej má viacero vrstiev ale tu je pekne vysvetlená psychoanalytická teória "oslobodenia" subjektu (aj keď nie úplne komplexne). Možno ťa to bude zaujímať:

“UNE FORCE ANTIGONE”:



“The others who have died are not separated. They still turn around their dead bodies./ I am not dead, but I am separated”
(ARTAUD, The New Revelations of Being)

It is well known that, according to Lacan, the fictional, mythically impossible, character who fully embodies separation is the virgin Antigone. While interned at the asylum of Rodez, Artaud writes a short text entitled “Antigone chez le Français” in which he describes her act of separation. What does Artaud say about Antigone?

1. Antigone is the woman; she is the woman who is, “the formal embodiment of a woman”. Artaud implicitly inscribes her name in the list of his seraphic harem of filles-à-venir, also named, not accidentally, “daughters of the heart”. Who are they? Filles-à-venir are post-sexuated women that Artaud could love. According to an organic vision of life they are friends, potential lovers, grannies, an Afghan translator of Art and Death who has never existed in any birth-register, all bound together by an imaginary “inmixing of subjects”, as Lacan would call it.

An anti-family must be built and chosen: “You must decide between your parents and me”. Here one recovers an unexpected development of Artaudian asceticism: filles-à-venir are daughters of continence. They are perhaps daughters of a corps-à-venir, a body without organs, which the androgyne could only erroneously anticipate. A different notion of unity is at stake here, a unity of pure difference. Artaud’s daughters are not organically de-generated from him but neither are they descendent emanations of a capital One which by now appears insufficient. His are all “first-born” daughters. “We won’t get out, in the world as it is now made, from this idea of primogeniture, not the first son of his father, but the father of his first son”; “first” is a characteristic of the son/daughter as such. The father can only be father of a son/daughter who was not generated by him: like Artaud in relation to his “immortal little girls”. Filles-à-venir were never (organically) born and can never (organically) die: they are real and as such “undead”. Therefore one has to emphasise how the decline of the androgyne coincides for Artaud with a revaluation of woman who had previously been accused of interrupting the androgyne’s binary perfection, once and for all, by detaching herself from man (thus establishing a void, a difference).

2. Artaud and Antigone “deserve one another” for having both suffered, undergoing a “supreme inner combat” and being “tortured” by an “abominable notion of infinity”. Antigone managed to defeat it: this is proved by her name, “the name of a terrible victory”. Insofar as “names are not [always] given at random”, Artaud can say that Antigone has become her own name, “Antigone” now embodies an antagonistic force par excellence, “the force-Antigone of being”. He tells us that in order for her to achieve this status – i.e. symbolic separation, alienation from the Symbolic – Antigone had to defeat “all of that within us which is not being or ego [moi], but persists in wanting to be considered as the being of our ego”. Antigone has therefore succeeded in defeating alienation, both sexual/linguistic alienation in the Symbolic, for which “I is an Other” – the social unconscious which desires, speaks us and gives us a name – and imaginary alienation, for which the “ego is an other”, a false unity, an object that emerges through an alienated identification with the image of the other. It is also clear that for Artaud there are two kinds of being, a negative and a positive kind: the “dull [obtuses] forces” – once again a reference to stupidity – of the alienating being, the being which “is” in my place and through which I “witness myself”, are in fact opposed to the antagonism of a “contrary force”.

3. Artaud himself is attempting finally to defeat “all other egos which are other than myself”. He needs Antigone to help him in a “last combat” through which he should be able to become his real name; but he also knows that this same victory would entail the “burial of his brother the ego [moi]”, the death of his actual but never actualised “self”; the “true” self is itself a brother, a sibling or double, and it can emerge only as an (objectified) unachievable mirage of unity from an alienated standpoint. In other words, Artaud is well aware of the fact that Antigone’s victory is cruelly “terrible”, as he says. On this point, Lacan teaches us that the separation of the object from symbolic identity leads us to a “loss of reality”, i.e. “subjective destitution”.

4. Artaud also tells us how Antigone achieved her terrible victory over the “other egos”: “Separating from her soul the force which pushed her to exist”, dissociating herself from the alienating force which nevertheless made her exist. Social existence qua false being is alienated by definition; it is what Artaud elsewhere defines as “êtreté”, “beingbeen”, an objectified being, a state [état] which is not: “I know that this world is not”. Artaud specifies that Antigone separates herself from alienated existence by “finding a contrary force”, a force contrary to existence which allows her “to recognise herself as being different from the being she was living and which lived her”. Antigone’s terrible victory implies that she dies symbolically and in reality: what survives is the name of an antagonistic force of pure negativity which we might well name “death drive”.

One should also note how elsewhere in his works Artaud describes separation from the Symbolic in completely opposite terms: “It is me [moi], told me my ego [moi] which listens to me. And I [je] have replied: all egos are at this point since for what concerns me I [je] don’t listen to you”; “victory” here is equivalent to the uprising of a wild plurality of egos against the domination of a single ego. However, I do not believe that we are facing here a mere contradiction; beyond the apparent irreconcilability of these two alternatives one should in fact detect what Lacan himself describes as the two opposite but inextricable deadlocks of separation: tragedy and Buddhism.

The subject can be separated from the object in two different ways. More specifically, separation qua first stage of the traversal of the fundamental fantasy ($◊a), should literally be considered as the detachment of the symbolic (barred) subject from the imaginary object of desire. The consequence of this is the emergence of the object (cause of desire) – the object a – in its real void which can then lead to two complementarily opposite impasses; either the subject tragically identifies himself with his fundamental lack-of-being, his irreducible scission, precisely by overcoming all contingent alienations, thus losing the object, or else the subject identifies himself with the object a, thus “turn[ing himself] into a mummy”; this nirvanisation is by no means ascetic since it perversely takes the void of the object for the Real of the Thing: the radical alternative to tragedy is therefore psychotic perversion…

In Artaud’s terms, all this means that one can either obtain a cruel I – i.e. one’s real name – without the other (all other egos are in fact defeated and what was thought to be the “true” ego is “buried”), or a multiplicity of others, a proliferation of (other) egos without the I. Lacan suggests that psychoanalysis is able to overcome this impasse by re-subjectivising the object after its emergence as void, which means in Lacanese to individualise (the lack of) jouissance through the imposition of a new Master-Signifier.

In Seminar VII, Lacan’s famous reading of Antigone fails to distinguish between tragedy and Buddhism as two distinct negative outcomes of separation. If, on the one hand, Antigone acts tragically by saying “No!” to Creon, on the other, she also lives an extra-symbolic mummified life “in between two deaths”; Lacan reminds us that when she is “placed alive in a tomb” she is in fact a “still living corpse”. Here one should note that, according to Artaud, who continually invokes the image of the mummy, the latter is “eternally between death and life, it is corpse and foetus”: Antigone – and those who behave like her – is therefore someone who prefers to “die alive instead of living dead” (i.e. to exist in a symbolically alienated state).

More importantly, I would argue that Seminar VII does not tell us that separation might lead to an impasse; it does not explain how psychoanalysis should overcome the double deadlock of tragedy and mummification, the pure negativity of a destructive, albeit necessary, moment. Antigone “does not compromise her desire” to bury Polynices and in so doing achieves separation: in 1959-1960 this is for Lacan the fundamental ethical law of psychoanalysis; what is not sufficiently emphasised by him is the fact that Antigone does not return, that her act is self-destructive… On the contrary this fact should be stressed, given that, at least at this stage, Lacan seems to suggest tragedy as a (contradictory) model for the aim of psychoanalytical treatment.

It is for this same reason that Antigone must not entirely be taken as a model: she cannot epitomise the analysand; the analysand must provisionally be hystericised, as Lacan will say in Seminar XVII, but he does not have to become a tragic figure. Ten years after his reading of Antigone, Lacan will refute the identification of psychoanalysis with tragedy; as Miller correctly notes: “In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis Lacan had exalted transgression, whereas in Seminar XVII he makes fun of the transgressive hero” since, as he himself claims, “one transgresses nothing”, transgression is a “lubricious babble”… For Lacan it is certainly necessary to assume the real (of the) lack and the inconsistency of the Other’s “dull forces”. However, separation must be only fleeting. We cannot dwell in the lack. In other words, Lacan is also asking us to compromise our desire precisely in order to keep on desiring, that is to say, to dwell in a properly functioning though re-symbolised Symbolic; Lacan is asking us to compromise after not having compromised, to limit our non-compromised desire for the Void in order to impose a new way of desiring…

More precisely, I am proposing to read the injunction “do not compromise your desire!” in two mutually implied ways. Its first moment corresponds to Antigone’s assumption of the lack, her distancing from the Symbolic; its second moment corresponds to carrying on desiring without falling into the void.

If desire is the desire of the Other, desire of desire – and desire is for Lacan the essence of man qua parlêtre –, “do not compromise your desire” can and must also mean “keep on desiring!”… “Do not compromise your desire” also means “do not give up the Other!”, do not give up the dimension of the socio-linguistic, symbolic Other which is made possible only by desiring… “Change it but do not give it up!”… The desire of the Other, which we are qua parlêtre, also corresponds to the desire to remain within the Other.

Active subjectivisation is possible only in the intersubjective Symbolic after we have temporarily suspended it and “reshaped” it through the imposition of a new Master-Signifier and the emergence of a new (partly subjectivised) jouissance connected to it. In other words, the political truly starts at the very point where the evil purity of an anarchic and destructive ethics – which nevertheless constitutes the precondition of the former – is compromised.

According to Seminar XI this subjectivisation can be achieved through psychoanalytical treatment, in what Lacan defines as the “traversal of the fundamental fantasy”. Briefly, the latter means:
1. Detaching the object a from the barred subject $;
2. Achieving the void of separation (subjective destitution);
3. Re-subjectivising that same void through sublimation.

It will then take another six years for Lacan to elaborate this notion into a sketch of a psychoanalytical politics of anti-ideological jouissance. Ideology turns out to be nothing but the jouissance which fails to recognise the lack – its lack, the jouis-sans… – and as a consequence individually to subjectivise it; the control of jouissance is left to the Other.

Such a politics is outlined in Seminar XVII with the elaboration of the four discourses, a significant political contribution which still awaits in-depth analysis. In this renewed theoretical context the tragic figure of Antigone would stand for the embodiment of a radicalised, self-destructive hysteric (an impossibly mythical figure) who, after having discovered that the Master/Other is barred, would decide to sacrifice herself in a gesture that reacts against its inconsistencies: as a consequence, she would not undermine the existing Other, but would ultimately sacrifice herself for its maintenance or, at best, for the père-verse mirage of another consistent Other; precisely by deciding to collapse into the void of the lack Antigone refuses to accept it.

The results achieved by Lacan in Seminar XVII are then further complicated by his re-working of the symptom in 1975-76: the latter seems to suggest that any possible subjectivisation of jouissance has to undergo the radical destabilisation of “non-triggered” psychosis and the successive creation of a (partly) “personalised” Symbolic – one’s “non-tragic” name – by means of one’s writing, the marking of one’s jouissance through the written letter. In other words, what I am also suggesting here is that Lacan’s reading of Joyce, far from being a literary-clinical case-study, represents his most mature formulation of a psychoanalytical ethics and politics.