And I'm never real,
it's just a sketch of me
And everything I've made
is trite and cheap
And a waste
Of paint, of tape, of time
I encountered Mari Ruti’s name frequently over the last few years. If I’d understood quite how much her intellectual sensibility matches my own, I would have finally started reading her books far earlier in this intellectual journey. There are three senses in which I feel a great affinity with her approach which means I’m now committed to reading her entire body of work in a manner which feels largely involuntary
Ruti foregrounds the existential dimension when engaging with psychoanalysis. As she puts it on pg 5 of The Call of Character: “we are dealing with the fundamentals of human experience: where we seek meaning and value; what we find important and worthy of our effort; how we meet life’s inevitable challenges, adversities, and bursts of agony; how we respond to the obstacles and opportunities we encounter; how we determine which goals, activities, ambitions, or people warrant our attention and which do not; how we love, hate, or simply ignore those close to us; how and where we find pleasure, enjoyment, fulfillment, or a sense of self-actualization; what satisfies us and what does not; and where (or to whom) we turn when all else fails”. In other words “how we go about making pivotal decisions about the contour of our existence”.
Ruti reads psychoanalytical theory through clinical practice in a manner which I’d only otherwise found in Bruce Fink. This is important to me because clinical work starts from the assumption that the analysand in some way wants to reduce their suffering and has proactively taken action to initiate a process which they hope will bring this about. There is after all a lot of work involved in making and sustaining analysis, not least of all accumulating the resources to pay for it and ensuring you turn up multiple times a week over the course of years. There’s a lot of agency here which a surprising number of theorists are bewilderingly oblivious to or disinterested in.
Ruti is deeply influenced by post-structuralist theory while remaining intensely frustrated with it. The problem for her is not the theoretical insights themselves but rather the cultural politics surrounding them, particularly once these theoretical approaches became hegemonic in the academy. The tendency to valorise novelty, movement and fragmentation leave her palpably annoyed at points in her books. Likewise the tendency to negate agency and to treat this as a progressive stance. The point is not that these theorists are wrong but rather that specific insights are wrapped up in a performance which is self-indulgent and politically short-sighted. That at least is how I read her frustration, even if she seems too nice to quite say this about her friends.
This can feel like a strange combination if readers are operating with a rigid distinction between psychoanalytical and philosophical questions. The choice of Lacan in particular as the primary interlocutor cuts through the entire corpus of Ruti’s work. There are many other significant influences who Ruti has a mainly affirmative relationship to (Kristeva, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas) and others (such as Butler and Žižek) whose work mainly serves as an object of critical elaboration. There’s also the vast supporting cast accumulated by someone who reads with exceptional breadth. But it ultimately comes back to Lacan for Ruti as the main lens through which to ask these existential questions. The manner in which she insists on reading Lacan through a clinical lens is crucial for how she connects these two registers. This involves what she calls a paradigm shift in her first book Reinventing the Soul. From loc 2572:
“I believe that if contemporary criticism has tended to neglect the more imaginative dimensions of Lacanian theory, it is in part because Lacanian analysis in the United States has for the most part been filtered through academic discourses that entirely neglect its clinical aspirations. Academic Lacanians—of whom I am one—often talk about Lacanian theory as if it had nothing to do with clinical concerns, with the result that everything ‘therapeutic’ becomes associated with relational or other Anglo-American schools of analytic practice. This in turn leads to an unnecessarily reductive notion not only of what it means to read Lacan, but also what it means to be a clinician. I would like to suggest that it may in fact be quite useful to read Lacan as a clinician, as someone who takes seriously the fact that psychoanalysis at its Freudian inception was centered around the impetus to alleviate the analysand’s psychic pain. Indeed, although Lacanian theory is often presented in ways that might lead one to believe that it is wholly divorced from ideals of psychic well-being, I like to remind myself that whatever else Lacan was, he was always a faithful interpreter of Freud and, as such, could not possibly be wholly unconcerned with the recuperative goals of analysis. The fact that Lacanian approaches are not compatible with the ideal of a coherent self does not mean that they cannot help the subject live its life in rewarding ways.”
This captures the terrain in which Ruti is operating. There is no coherent self but we still seek to live in rewarding ways. The recognition of the split subject is not a denial of flourishing per se but rather a statement about the challenge which we face in our aspiration towards flourishing. It’s in recognition of those psychic conditions, the reality of our fragmented and fractured existence, that we can begin to loosen our grip on preconceived notions of what it means to live well. As she puts it in A World of Fragile Things (loc 607) “it is when we give up the promise of a cure—when we agree to work with our lack rather than seek to heal it—that we become capable of fully entering into the turbulent current of our lives”. The problem is a notion of flourishing, which I’m using here to refer to how ‘living well’ has tended to be conceived within the philosophical literature, which treats this splitness as a contingent condition to which we need to find a cure. Instead, suggests Ruti, once we acknowledge “what we so commonly dread—namely that our selves will become broken, shattered, or decentered—has already happened, we no longer waste our time in trying to fend off the disaster”.
What might otherwise sound like a bleak denial of the possibility of happiness instead becomes a liberation. Rather than lurching from object to object, desperately trying to find the things within us that will repair the gaping wound we dimly sense within us, Ruti suggests we ought to ask “is it really that bad?”. Instead of a fantasy of completion where we imagine we can find a sense of wholeness, a permanent resting place from which we can approach life confident that everything will be fine, we instead begin to see the countless partial enjoyments which life can offer us. There’s not a single thing which, if we get it, will ensure that we are fine. We will never be fine, at least not in the abiding sense the fantasy proposes. To be fine is instead a precarious achievement which can only be realised by looking the void in its face. We will die. Everyone we care about will die. The people and things we love most in the world will inevitably disappoint us. The things we imagine will complete us will inevitably feel hollow. But rather than be defeated by that recognition we can instead see it as a challenge. The problem with the idea of happiness is that it pulls us away from the real business of living, as she writes on loc 520 in A World of Fragile Things:
“To put the matter in slightly different terms, one could say that the more relentlessly we chase happiness as a transcendent ideal, the more difficult it becomes for us to fully invest or immerse ourselves in the affairs of the world—the more difficult it becomes for us to enter what Eric Santner eloquently describes as ‘the midst of life.’ This is to say that the pursuit of happiness can induce us to step outside the flow of ordinary life, to sacrifice the vibrancy and resonance of the present for a futile fantasy of future deliverance. In this manner, the ideal of happiness becomes an exercise in trying to escape life.”
Or as the inimitable Lester Freamon once said to Jimmy McNulty: “A life, Jimmy. You know what that is? It’s the shit that happens while you wait for moments that never come.”
Ruti is warning us that until we can dispense with the “moments that never come” we can never fully enter into the reality of our existence. It’s important to be clear about what she means here. Ruti isn’t postulating a fullness of experience which is accessible once we forego the fantasy of fullness. It isn’t simply that we have misidentified fullness, located it in the wrong place, such that we reclaim it just by living each day as it comes. What she means about ‘escaping life’ carries a different sense of living well which is less to do with integration and more to do with the enjoyments which are available to us if only we make ourselves available to them.
Instead of an existential fullness which can be achieved as an outcome she presents us with an image of more or less skillfully swimming through the tides of life. There is no stable equilibrium we can achieve. There is no resting place. The fantasy we might find one is a denial of life. It is a desire for life to be over. This means there will always be events which knock us off course. There will be crushing defeats. There will be mundane frustrations. The problem with fantasies of fullness is that it leaves us tyrannized by these inevitable experiences as fleshy, fragile, broken beings cast into a world which we can’t control. The events themselves might cause us suffering but the expectation we ought to have avoided them greatly compounds this suffering. Either the guilt at failing as an agent (“how did I let this happen to me?”) or the fury that we were not spared by the Other (“how could they do this to me?” or “how did they let this happen to me?”). Her point is not that we should cultivate passivity and equanimity because “shit happens”. It’s rather that the particular shit that has happened to me cannot now be changed. Her work is interested in how we reconcile ourselves with these past events (more on this later) in a manner which enables us to live more expansively and creatively in the present. In this sense recognising the limits of what we cannot control works paradoxically to expand the scope of our agency by facilitating a more direct encounter with the reality of our existential predicament.
I really like how Ruti reads Nietzsche. She shares my love for the Nietzsche of The Gay Science and Ecce Homo. The Nietzsche who preaches amor fati as an existential imperative. By this he meant not only that we tolerate our fate but that we learn to love it. As she puts it in Reinventing the Soul loc 4672, “amor fati implies the subject’s readiness to love not only the variable ingredients of its fate but, more importantly, the process of encountering this fate”. I think encounter is a crucial word here which names something running throughout Ruti’s approach. What matters is our encounter with the reality of our existence. There are all manner of defences which we form in reaction to the reality of that encounter, allowing us to step back and evade it, to blunt the difficult feelings which arise from our existential predicament. Ruti is not positing a reality to that encounter beyond these defences, an unmediated fullness which lurks on the other side of psychic renewal, but rather suggesting that we can learn to meet this encounter in more or less skillful ways. Amor fati implies “creatively wrestling with whatever opportunities or obstacles that this fate may bring” which “shares with Freudian psychoanalysis the willingness to sort through whatever wreckage life (wave after wave) washes ashore” (loc 4672). The fantasy that there won’t be wreckage is exactly what we need to do away with. The imperative is about how we respond to what washes up and how we orientate ourselves to the future on the basis of this reckoning with the past. She suggests on loc 4633 that this involves a loosening of control:
“amor fati mellows out the sharp edges of want and desire, enabling us to recognize the times when the best we can do is to allow the events and episodes of our life to develop without any urgency, struggle, or resistance. Amor fati thus asks us to slow down, to trust the rhythm of life, and to create space for experiences to emerge without attempting to rush or force their course.”
It’s not a rejection of agency as much as learning to exercise that agency with greater balance and poise. It’s a shift away from the imaginary register of being occupied by visions of what could and should happen in order to attune ourselves to what is happening and clarify what that means for us. This is where the art of living, in the sense of the classical conception of self-cultivation and flourishing, finds its place within Ruti’s psychoanalytical framework. It is the skill of meeting this encounter in ways which are more or less enriching of our experience of life, more or less conducive not just to enjoyment but to (borrowing a phrase from Bruce Fink) enjoying our enjoyments. Understanding this skill can be easier if we start from what its absence looks like in Ruti’s conception. I’ve already touched upon the problem of control and how this makes it harder for the subject to respond skillfully to the difficulties they inevitably encounter in life. This is how Ruti describes it in A World of Fragile Things loc 685:
“The pursuit of control, insofar as it is directed at keeping at bay the imaginary monsters of our lives, introduces a certain ‘dead-ness’—call it an excessive stiffness or tentativeness, if you will—to our psyches, thereby draining our capacity for happiness.”
In its extreme manifestations this is the mortification of desire itself: someone so wrapped up in their obsessive neurosis that there is little lived contact with life itself. Ruti highlights how this can take more adaptive forms which might seem less obviously pathological. She observes in The Call of Character loc 2548 that “those who have ordered their lives too tightly—who have constructed a bastion of regularizing routines against the specter of anxiety—often have trouble deciphering the truth of their desire, with the consequence that although their lives may be well managed, they are also a little anemic”. These people can be high functioning but there’s something missing, a distance from their own energy which drains their existence of colour and vibrancy. These negative conditions help us see the countervailing sense in which living skillfully means infusing life with exactly the energy that is missing or depleted in these subjects. She uses the memorable phrase “keeping our desire limber” earlier in The Call of Character to describe a lighter and looser relationship to what we want which makes space for the objects of our desire to breathe. From loc 1624:
“This is one reason that it is important, as I have emphasized, to work on keeping our desire limber. Those whose desire has congealed into unyielding configurations will find it virtually impossible to let their alliances breathe. They hold on too tightly, with the result that they squeeze the life out of their relationships.”
What does it mean to keep our desire limber? In the case of relationships, particularly romantic ones, it means moving with our desire rather than being tyrannized by it. This means, as she puts it in Reinventing the Soul loc 3271, “learning how to place restrictions on oneself without becoming masochistic” because “psychic well-being is in many ways a function of the subject’s capacity to place limits on its pleasure principle (and the repetition compulsion that feeds this pleasure principle)”. It’s not a matter of renouncing desire but rather “following the thread of one’s desire in a more discerning and discriminate manner”. This is “channeling it in directions that are less likely to cause us pain than the gluttonous pursuit of narcissistic and/or primordial pleasure”.
Mark Carrigan 