One of the aspects of Lacan I find most valuable is its intimate sensitivity to what is repressed or denied in our experience of negative emotions. Consider spleen, described here by Charles Taylor, at the level of philosophical anthropology:
Spleen, ennui, is an extreme state of melancholy. It is not just a condition in which we feel our exile acutely, in which the things which surround us have no meaning, do not speak to us, in which we are far from sensing the higher love which we long to follow. Much worse befalls us. We begin to lose even the sense of what meaning and love might be. The very shape of what we’re lacking disappears from the world; we lose sight of the very possibility. We suffer extreme deprivation but have lost a grasp on what it is we are missing. This brings no peace, but on the contrary the most profound form of despair, of numbness, and paralysis.
Cosmic Connections, loc 5980
It’s a powerful account of a superficially debilitating emotion. Lacan however would insist we look for the unnamed and unacknowledged forms of enjoyment latent in this experience. If this was really so bad would we have such a glut of fiction, film, music and poetry exploring the experience of spleen? Even in Taylor’s terms we can see the outlines of the jouissance of spleen:
- A radical sense of our individuality, even if it’s painful. I lack what all others are imagined to have. The I/they distinction is powerfully inscribed.
- A dramatic transformation ahead of us which is only beginning, a sense that we are starting a journey into the descents of hell. Things might get much worse, even if they haven’t yet.
- A changed relationship to our experience of lack. It’s newly problematised and made available to us as an object of our reflection. Particularly once addressing it comes to seem foreclosed, we can see it with a newfound clarity.
- The absence of peace conversely means the ubiquity of intensity. A continual state of dramatic striving from which there is no end.
The point is not that this is actually a pleasant emotion. Clearly it’s not. Lacan’s insistence is instead that people are getting off on how unpleasant it is. There’s a peculiar delight to be taken in the suffering: the intensity which underwrites the negative character lends itself to a peculiar form of positivity. It makes us feel alive even as feeling alive nonetheless feels, well, shit.
This isn’t secret pleasure hiding beneath displeasure but rather a perverse pleasure which can be taken from the structure of displeasure itself. There’s a psychic payload to suffering which carries forms of attachment which can seem inexplicable until you excavate the jouissance underpinning them, particularly the forms of intensity which underpin them e.g. spleen is fundamentally a more exciting way to live than the mundane rhythms of feeling vaguely ok about yourself and your life.
I’m interested in how we use this style of thought to excavate the areas of the lifeworld which are often rendered opaque. The moods and modes of being-with made available through these libidinal investments, the collective joys and overlapping despair which cements our bonds with others or sometimes tears them apart. If you take this way of perceiving beyond the individualising focus of the clinic, but don’t immediately scale it up macro-economically or get fixated on cultural forms as with the Ljubljana school, there’s a really interesting microsocial terrain opened up by this way of thinking about psychic economy.
The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
– The Motive for Metaphor, by Wallace Stevens
Of things that would never be quite expressed
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,
What does it feel like when we’re wandering through this obscure world with others? How does it change if one of us suddenly wants to be quite themself, whereas the others have a bond predicated on neither wanting nor having to be? I increasingly think there’s a whole different way of incorporating psychoanalytical thought into social analysis, inflected through the hermeneutical generosity of interpretive sociology and prised away from the hermeneutics of suspicion. They are an artefact of the clinic rather than a necessary epistemological feature of this mode of analysis.
I’m overstating the difference with Ljubljana slightly but there’s something about how they setup their approach which makes it nearly impossible to linger in this terrain. They treat it as a way point through which to reach the bigger and more consequential questions. Whereas I wonder what happens if you insist on remaining in this intimately ambiguous gray zones of sociality in which so much of social life is lived. What happens when you take the texture of these ‘obscure worlds’ seriously as a casual force in why people do what they do, rather than as (at best) a phenomenological background to the real business of the social? There are other people who circle this terrain (e.g. Craib, Bollas, Phillips, Berlant) in different ways but I feel that none of them really reside there, at least in the sense in which I’m conceiving of this project.
(This is what fascinates me about group analysis. I’m struggling to work out how to write about my training because I can’t separate the intellectual content from the experiential work. It’s fine to write about the former but it’s almost impossible to write about the latter without betraying the confidence of the group. But I’m starting to conceive of analytical work with groups in terms of the ‘obscure world’ and how we linger within it)
Mark Carrigan 