I seem oddly intent on spending my early 40s conceptually picking apart all the philosophical certainties through which I finally secured a robust sense of personal identity in my 30s. This feels like a more life affirming exercise than it sounds, in the sense that I can see quite clearly now how I was clinging to some of these ideas because they made the world feel comprehensible to me. For example I’ve been bloviating for years about the ‘feel of an idea’ as the fundamental experience in how I conceive of creativity, only for it to suddenly occur to me earlier this year that there was a prior space of feeling which I was entirely passing over: what is the feeling relation invoked here beyond the idea which is its object? Eliot’s ‘raids on the inarticulate’ were the most inspiring four words I’d ever ever encountered in the English language but suddenly I wondered what about the infinite range of other things you could do with the inarticulate rather than raid it:
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion
– T.S. Eliot’s East Coker
I found myself wondering something similar on a long run yesterday, a grinding and unpleasant run where my legs hurt and I wanted to go home for pretty much the entire time, about Charles Taylor’s notion of existential fullness. In The Secular Age he talks about the experience of “a fullness, a richness” in which “life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worth while, more admirable, more what it should be”. This can be something “we just catch glimpses of from afar off” such that “we have the powerful intuition of what fulness would be, were we to be in that condition”. But we sometimes experience it more directly, such that “the sense of fullness came in an experience which unsettles and breaks through our ordinary sense of being int he world, with its familiar objects, activities and points of reference”. On these occasions “the deep divisions, distractions, worries, sadnesses that seem to drag us down are something dissolved, or brought into alignment, so that we feel united, moving forward, suddenly capable and full of energy” in which “[o]ur highest aspirations and our life energies are somehow lined up rather than producing psychic gridlock” (pg 5-6).
I always thought I knew exactly what he meant when he wrote this but now, after three years of reading psychoanalysis, I wonder if this is a fantasy. Indeed is this not the quintessential experience of objet petit a? The world is charged with a sense of possibility, the feeling of ripening infuses the self, something deep and profound is unfolding… there’s a movement towards a wholeness, a sense of something being within grasp that would finally bring fulfilment. It’s not an object as such but rather a way of looking at mundane objects that imbues them with an almost unfathomably alluring character. It just feels that if this thing, this person, this occasion could become proximate and remain there that everything would be just right. Everything would be in place. At last. The problem is that it’s never reached, the energy exists in the displacement of the desire, the glimmer of what could be be which overwrites the cold and fragmented world which is. It could never be reached, it could never provide wholeness, it was never on offer. It’s an echo, a haunting of past objects, which elicits a deep hunger to return to a barely remembered unity. It exists in the gap, the nearly but not quite, and it will remain there.
What I read so many years ago as promising in Taylor, “we just catch glimpses of from afar off” such that “we have the powerful intuition of what fulness would be, were we to be in that condition”, now reads as fantasy to me. In that displacement lives fantasy which, in Taylor’s case, misrecognises itself as existential contact with something fuller and deeper. It’s not just a different conceptual vocabulary because if Lacan is right, which honestly I think he is, Taylor is advocating we orientate ourselves to something which can never be reached. For Lacan the objet petit a is a structural relation which evokes this response in the subject. It cannot survive proximity which means that if we actually get our hands on it, there’s an almost metaphysical horror to the confusion and anxiety which ensues. What is… this? This is not what I wanted. This doesn’t mean we turn away in disciplined asceticism which would be another form of fantasy. It does however mean we loosen our grip on the objects of desire, we go with the flow of the experience while relaxing our expectations of what might ensure. That at least is the practical existential message which I think is buried within Lacanian theory.
This doesn’t mean there aren’t peak experiences. It does mean however we should resist diagnosing them in terms of fullness. The fullness is something we impute retrospectively or project forward prospectively. The character of peak experiences is in reality far more ambivalent. Take the aforementioned run. I’d had a deeply frustrating week on about six different levels and I came back from that feeling like I had in some profound way reset myself, that I’d put the experience behind me and was ready to move on. It wasn’t a fun run though. Indeed it was fucking horrible. I had to fight myself not to give up after a few miles. On a moment to moment level it was a more unpleasant than pleasant experience. Yet I’m deeply glad I did it. I wonder if a lot of peak experiences are really like this. Not that they’re privately horrible, though some are. But rather that their ‘peakness’ only makes sense in terms of a psychodynamic arc which resists codification into present-tense statements of fullness. What I also take from Lacan is a sense of aliveness, which is always rooted in the circular movements of the drives. The manner in which we don’t quite integrate ourselves, but we become ourself more emphatically in these movements without resolution where we surrender something, at least temporarily.
Mark Carrigan 