I was struck when reading Bruce Fink’s superb Lacan on Love how orthogonal this tradition of thought is to the approach to human agency I’ve tended to work within. Whereas Margaret Archer argued that we are what we care about, the Lacanian approach would suggest we are what we lack. We are defined by our sense of what is missing, the loss of what we never really possessed, the precise way in which we have struggled to cope with the violence of entering into language. From loc 1439
Now this lack is precious to us. What we gave up defines us, we feel. It goes to the heart of our perceived individuality, to the core of our “subjective difference” – that is, to the core of what makes us different from everyone else. Thus, it is not with just anyone we meet that we are willing to say that he or she has something that corresponds to the lack in us! We may be protective, not wishing to show we feel lacking in any way, that we need anybody, that we are castrated. We may prefer to shroud ourselves in an aura of sublime indifference, and in certain cases that may get us loved by others, but it has nothing to do with we ourselves loving someone else. To love someone else is to convey in words to that person that we lack – preferably big time – and that he or she is intimately related to that lack.
One of the core ideas I took from Charles Taylor is that lack can be something creative. I’ve always been fascinated by what Rorty once described as our half-articulate need to become a new person. I’ve tended to see these struggles for articulation as how we come to clarity about who we are and what matters to us, orientating ourselves in what Taylor calls moral space through our fumbling attempts to elaborate upon our present experience of that space.
In this sense I saw what I termed the discursive gap as a creative force, with the inadequacy of the symbolic in the present tense driving processes of personal change as we move towards the future: the fact the words available to us don’t capture what we are trying to say leads us to try again or search for new symbols with which to say it. But Lacanian theory would offer a more pessimistic reading of this gap, as an unavoidable void which we might seek to elude in fantasy but which we will always carry with us.
I nonetheless wonder if there’s a parallel between the empirical biographical observations in asexuality studies where I formed this idea (i.e. the struggle for articulacy does lead people towards categories which satisfy this need, however incompletely) and processes of recovery in analysis. Even if the inarticulacy is something we will inevitably carry with us forever, could we nonetheless speak of more or less harmonious ways of inhabiting that inarticulacy?
The obvious problem with the realist approach to what we care about is that it can’t account for how frequently we care about things which are destructive to us. There is often, as Gabor Mate put it, a profound tension between authenticity and attachment: in a real sense these broken attachments prevent us from becoming who we are. As he puts it, “That some attachments may not survive the choice for authenticity is one of the most agonizing realizations one can come to”. What we care about is often, though not quite as often as Lacan would insist, an expression of what we lack. In these cases our attachment is to the objet petit a: the elusive treasure burrowed away within the phenomenological content of our attachments which promises to fill that primordial lack if only we finally, conclusively, get our hands on it.
The humanistic philosophical anthropology of commitment needs psychoanalytical theory in order to do empirical justice to the frequently frustrated and self-defeating character of our commitments. The point is a methodological one as much as it is a conceptual one. This can also be framed in terms of Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism:
A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project. It might rest on something simpler, too, like a new habit that promises to induce in you an improved way of being. These kinds of optimistic relation are not inherently cruel. They become cruel only when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.
But the problem with this is it suggests the issue is the object itself rather than the relationship we have with it. There are cases where we can establish a new relationship to an old object in a way which means it no longer impedes our flourishing. My own transition from being someone who imagined working in universities as a calling to instead approaching it as a job is an illustrative example of this. The danger is that recognising our relationship to the object could in principle be otherwise doesn’t mean that we can make it otherwise; as indeed I found myself when this line of thought led me to intellectually justify retaining a hope about something in my life which I knew in my heart simply needed to end.
To query Berlant’s privileging of the object does not mean we should replace this with a privileging of the relation to that object. It’s a case of both/and rather than either/or (riffing off something Chris Smith once said about networks and nodes) and this is where Archer’s analytical dualism could be combined with a Lacanian account of desire in a productive way. I wonder also if Donati’s ideas about relational goods could be used here to distinguish between attachment to an object (with the Lacanian suspicion that inevitably opens up) and attachment to the emergent properties of the relation with an object.
These are sketchy thoughts with a partly autobiographical motivation but there’s something intellectually important here which I don’t want to lose sight of. In the peculiar transitional phase of life I’m currently in it feels like it’s much easier to hold these two dimensions (what we care about, what we lack) in a common frame of reference than it might otherwise be. There’s a deep historical schism between structuralism and phenomenology which I increasingly feel has mutilated the psychic life of the subject as a conceptual object, in much the same way as the disciplinary divide between psychology and sociology did a profound violence to how we conceive of the individual as a category. I feel like Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy forcefully locates itself in this macro-cultural aporia but I’m struggling to think of other intellectual sources which excavate this murky terrain, though obviously Berlant and the related literature touch on this in significant ways.
Much as I’ve been trying to match images and music recently, I’m keen to match ideas and music (something which Lambros Fatsis first opened my ears to). The ideas in this blog post feel like this song to me:
Mark Carrigan 