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The fantasy of knowledge as attempt to foreclose otherness

From Darian Leader’s Why do women write more letters than they post?

The paradox here is well known: the more you try to undo the separation, by understanding the other person, the more the separation is reinforced. It is not simply a question of confronting the basic difference of one’s partner. Understanding wants more: it is suffocating in its very structure since it involves asking something. It is a demand to know something. Knowing the contents of someone else’s thought turns their alterity, their otherness, into one’s own property.

Pg 2

A man is sitting in a café and sees a couple walk past. He finds the female attractive and watches her. Now, a woman in the same situation might well do something different. She may be attracted to the man, but will nonetheless spend more time looking at the woman who is with him. In other words, what interests her is less the man or the woman, than the relation between them. What does the woman have that has made this man her partner?

Pg 3

Trying to explain everything to the patient will necessarily eclipse the presence of desire: if you supply a lot of knowledge, the dimension of lack is obliterated. What matters is preserving a place for what is between the lines, for what you don’t know. If this place is maintained, it can function as a motor for the treatment and for the production of free associations. Get rid of it and the patient may well pack his bags.

Pg 109

The problem is that for the man, the meaning of a love letter is so important. On receiving a love letter from a woman, he may strive to understand it, to read into it, to find metaphors and hidden references. But there is no reason to suppose that the letter means anything. A man will try to put meaning into this empty space: to try to make the woman’s body speak. But a woman’s body will not, ultimately, speak to him, even in love. If a man’s love letter speaks, but not necessarily to the woman he loves, a woman’s love letter does not have to speak, in this sense, at all.

Pg 139

This highlights what I found so philosophically and sociologically interesting about the role of transference in Lacanian practice. To function as the one who knows for the analysand (“why won’t they tell me what they know!?”) incites a process in them with the potential to become self-propelling. The sense that the analyst knows causes the analysand to begin a trajectory of questioning (hystericisation) with the potential to bring them to a place where they realise not only does the analyst not know, but there is no knowledge to begin with, at least in the sense of a key which unlocks the imagined door to a place of fullness. The attempt to foreclose the otherness of the analysand, getting what they know, sets into motion a process which, if successful, leads to the fragmentation of the original ambition. It’s not just abandoned, it rather comes to seem like a category error. It no longer makes sense as an ambition.

Is there an interpersonal correlate to this? To imagine a relationship freed of these dynamics would itself be a fantasy, constructing a pure presence purged of lack. There is always a missed understanding between people. This leaves I guess being moved by the otherness and what it provokes, but treading lightly enough that this movement isn’t obsessively orientated towards an overcoming of that otherness. From Bruce Fink’s Against Understanding vol 1:

There is something unknown there, something mysterious, something opaque. This Other knows something about the world that I do not know, this Other has a knowledge of things that I do not have (indeed, this Other might be understood to be the model for what is referred to as the all-knowing or omniscient God in a certain number of religions).

What are the pleasures and satisfactions to be found, individually and together, in tarrying with the opaque? The point is the enjoyment opened up by the movement, rather than the destination it is orientated towards. I find this psychologically plausible as an account of satisfaction but I find it ethically unsatisfactory because I’m not sure it leaves a place for love and care, beyond being a foundation for satisfaction.

(I suddenly realised that my secondary school had the motto ‘sanctas clavis fores aperit’: the key that opens sacred doors, which now feels incredibly resonant)

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