Thursday, January 29, 2004
(12:12 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Nothing to fear, nothing to doubt
I.
From Lacan's seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis:
As I believe I have shown here in the sphere I have outlined for you this year, the function of desire must remain in a fundamental relationship to death. The question I ask is this: shouldn't the true termination of an analysis -- and by that I mean the kind that prepares you to be an analyst -- in the end confront the one who undergoes it with the reality of the human condition? It is precisely this, that in connection with anguish, Freud designated as the level at which its signal is produced, namely, Hilflosigkeit or distress, the state in which man is in that relationship to himself which is his own death -- in the sense I have taught you to isolate it this year -- and can expect help from no one.
At the end of a training analysis the subject should reach and should know the domain and the level of the experience of absolute disarray. [...] Anguish develops by letting a danger appear, whereas there is no danger at the level of the final experience of Hilflosigkeit.
I have already told you how the limit of this region is expressed for man; it touches the end of what he is and what he is not. That is why the myth of Oedipus acquires its full significance here.
If the definition of scripture is a text that has something to do with you whether you want it to or not, then Oedipus is Scripture -- Freud, who made Moses into an Egyptian, climbed down from Mt. Olympus and imposed on the West a myth and a law we never asked for. He imposed upon every subject the burden of a transgression beyond intentionality; as Lacan says: "One shouldn't forget that in a sense Oedipus did not suffer from the Oedipus complex, and he punished himself for a sin he did not commit." One shouldn't forget, as well, that the Israelites broke no law in the incident of the Golden Calf -- indeed, they intended to worship YHWH. Moses shattered the law of God on the ground, then made another version in his own hand.
Freedom from the Law of Sinai comes only through the sacrifice of the Son, already enacted, as Paul says, 430 years before Moses received the law. How, then, to free oneself of the law of mommy-daddy-me?
II.
Alexander Kojève is a sexist. Never, he claims, has a woman fought in a duel. Never has a woman sought her own honor. Never has a woman done anything for sheer recognition. True humanity, he says, comes from the fight, in which one man is enslaved and made to work and another man is self-created as the master and made to enjoy. He takes this from Hegel, from the overworked and overcited dialectic of master and slave, and into this dialectic Lacan throws his Freudian twist -- Oedipus, too, was locked in a battle for recognition. In becoming the master and creating the necessary conditions for the development of true humanity, he commits the two gravest sins imaginable, one of which (incest) it is impossible to commit as such.
Revealed for what he truly is -- that is, revealed for what he is not -- Oedipus the Master blinds himself. Without a master, the world is deadlocked, and a new fight for supremacy erupts, except in this case neither will back down. Creon the slave takes sides, creates a new arbitrary law, attempting to rebuild the city by fiat. Then the woman, neither slave nor master, ruins everything, out of love for a dead man.
Is it any wonder that by the time of Socrates, women are confined?
III
Theory is dead, and the blog is its last gasp. I write this to redeem my time, to repent for the time I should (according to my self-imposed law) have been working on Hegel and Lacan but instead spent worrying about the academic job market and vouchers for public school.
At Barnes and Noble last night, I thought: If I had world enough and time, I would read In Search of Lost Time in its entirety. I almost bought volume 2, but then thought better of it: due to graduate study, it would only be added to the pile of books deferred.
Every time I think about what I'd like to read and how I need to become thoroughly educated, I also think that I would need to take time off school in order to do so. Perhaps the solution is to become the next Mr. Erwin, my high school's polymathic instructor of world history -- after all these years, it is still possible that everything I need to know, I learned from Mr. Erwin. Now, of course, lest a child be left behind, I could only teach courses called "English," but as we know, there is a lot that gets taught under the heading "English" of which George W. Bush would likely not approve -- for instance, the Antigone of Jean Anouilh, in which Creon admits that at the end of the battle, he could not even tell the two bodies apart.
