I was struck reading Mark Bracher’s Lacan, Discourse and Social Change how Lacan’s conception of the outcomes of analysis speak to existentialist concerns, even if the route through which one gets there is psychoanalytically specific:
This process involves the recognition of the Other’s deficiency, the realization that the unconscious fantasies that have been directing one’s desire and contributing to one’s suffering are both relative and doomed to remain unfulfilled and, hence, that there is no transcendent meaning to be found for one’s existence, no ultimate object that will satisfy one’s desire, and no single, fundamental jouissance that will of itself make life worth living.
Lacan, Discourse and Social Change pg 72 [my emphasis]
‘Traversing the fantasy’ does not mean repudiating the fantasy but rather realising its “arbitrary, ungrounded nature, with regard to the Other, of this fantasy” so as to accept the fantasy as one’s “own particular means of jouissance”. In doing so “the repressed desire for alien jouissance embodied in the fantasy achieves a more overt and direct expression as a result of a new master signifier that accommodates the previously repressed desire”.
There’s actually a concrete account of personal change expressed here, even if the language seems explore. If I understand correctly, it means recovering the fantasies which drive us, particularly the desire expressed within them, in order to find ways of approaching life which work with this fantasy in our own terms rather than through inherited categories overflowing with unacknowledged expectation. The problem is not the fantasy, the problem is the expectations we invest in it.
It’s something we accommodate rather than transcend, domesticate rather than expel. It means coming to terms with the lack expressed in the fantasy, recognising ourselves as a being for whom that lack has taken the form that it has. As Bracher describes it in a footnote on pg 72-73:
As a result of producing a new master signifier, the analysand moves, in effect, into a new discourse of the Master. This discourse does not constitute a radical break with tyranny and an accession to freedom, for the subject remains in thrall to a master signifier, thus rendering the process circular rather than progressive. There is a crucial difference, however, in the discourse of the Analyst: its master signifiers are produced by the subject herself rather than imposed on the subject from outside. In this way, one ‘shifts gears’ as Lacan puts it … The new master signifier should be less oppressive because it is of a different style – a style that is less absolute, exclusive, and rigid in its establishment of the subject’s identity, and more open, fluid, and processual […] The discourse of the Analyst is able to promote such a response and production because it is opposed to all will of mastery, engaging in a continuous flight from meaning and closure, in a displacement that never ceases.
Lacan, Discourse and Social Change pg 72-73
The point here is to start from the assumption of “alienation and desire and, on the basis of that assumption, separate from the given master signifiers and produce [our] own new master signifiers, that is, ideals and values less inimical to its fundamental fantasy and the desire embodied by that fantasy” (pg 68). In other words, we’re always going to experience feelings of insubstantiality, meaninglessness and lack; there’s always going to be the inclination to imagine that a certain achievement, relationship or outcome will finally purge those aspects from our existence. Rather than seeking to escape the wheel of desire we instead find creative and compelling ways of living within it, built upon the experienced reality of what motivate us as defined in our terms. This is by its nature a continual process, finding what fulfilment life offers in the ‘displacement that never ceases’, remaining alert to impulse towards closure and fantasies of completion.
In the week I’ve been reading Bracher’s book, I’ve also been obsessed with the Ex:Re solo project by Daughter’s Elena Tonra. It’s a haunting record which she describes as a series of letters to a former partner, including this account of “trying to find comfort in a stranger”. I was struck by Tonra’s description of “wanting to find something in someone that wasn’t there” before a violent confrontation with this fantasy expressed in the most devastating verse I’ve encountered for years:
I thought of another the whole time
He would have never stared at me like that
See he saw me as a human
This one thinks I’m a slaughterhouse
The album expresses the themes which preoccupied Lacan in vivid and captivating ways: being haunted by a lost object, seeking that object in places where it cannot be found, the world being twisted out of shape by the weight of the loss. But the reason I’m writing about it in this blog post is this reflection by Tonra at the time the album was released:
Tonra is proud of the finished record, but throughout the process of making it, she’s had one lingering fear. What if she deliberately destroys her world in order to write about it? “I’ve been trying to analyse my own behaviour,” she says quietly. “When you see things cycle round, and that slightly destructive element… Why is it that when things go well, suddenly they start dissolving really quickly and then they end? Is that just life, and that’s what happens? Is that my doing?
“It’s just unfortunate that I attach those experiences to writing. If I’m attaching my work to that, to feeling unhappy, then I wonder how much is me going, ‘Set that on fire so you can talk about it.’”
She starts to laugh again. “I really f***ing hope not. I just wanna be happy.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/daughter-elena-tonra-interview-new-album-solo-exre-music-a8648726.html
This is a powerful expression of the space which I understand Lacan to be trying to open up, in which creative responses to lack in turn create new ways of looking at that lack and our responses to them. I’d be really interested to know how Tonra reflects on this album and the experiences conveyed in it a few years later. I’m going to listen to the Daughter album released last year with these questions in mind:
I have you in the pictures
I’ve held you in the plan
I’d just need to erase distance
Find a hole in the ocean swim backwardsThe wait is brutal, just disintegrates
We talk in riddles
Then give up and go, we are so vague
Don’t ask me why we’re sеparate
I’ll never tеll you anything real
Mark Carrigan 