A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living (Psychoanalysis and Culture)

Mari Ruti

AW or ld Ps ycho a

of naly F sis a rag nd t ile he A

rt o Thin f Li ving gs

This page intentionally left blank.

A World of Fragile Things

SUNY SERIES IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CULTURE

Henry Sussman, editor

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

Mari Ruti

State University of New York Press

Cover art by Richard Nalli-Petta, A Fragile World, April 2008. Sections of chapters 2 and 4 were previously published in “The Fall of Fantasies: A Lacanian Reading of Lack,” The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 56 (2008): pp. 483–508.

Published by STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, ALBANY

© 2009 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Fran Keneston

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ruti, Mari. A world of fragile things : psychoanalysis and the art of living / Mari Ruti. p. cm. — (SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-2715-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4384-2716-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Happiness. 2. Psychoanalysis. 3. Well-being. I. Title. BF575.H27R87 2009 150.19'5—dc22 2008047325 10

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

Contents

Introduction

1

Chapter One

15

The Art of Living Chapter Two

41

The Pursuit of Happiness Chapter Three

67

The Remaking of Fate Chapter Four

89

The Fall of Fantasies Chapter Five

113

The Residue of Love Epilogue

141

Notes

149

Index

171

This page intentionally left blank.

Introduction

Psychoanalysis—as a form of conversation—is worth having only if it makes our lives more interesting, or funnier, or sadder, or more tormented, or whatever it is about ourselves that we value and want to promote; and especially if it helps us find new things about ourselves that we didn’t know we could value. New virtues are surprisingly rare. —Adam Phillips

WE LIVE IN a world of fragile things: fragile selves, fragile psyches,

fragile loves. One of the most distinctive features of human existence— what makes it recognizable as human and what gives it its characteristically bittersweet quality—is that we tend to be acutely aware of its precariousness even when we are more or less courageously focused on taking advantage of the various opportunities that it affords. Human life is therefore inherently paradoxical in the sense that we strive to make the most of circumstances that we know will end disastrously, with our own death. As Schopenhauer once put it, we insist on living our lives “with great interest and much solicitude as long as possible, just as we blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although with the perfect certainty that it will burst.”1 In this book, I take a broadly philosophical approach to the question of what it means to be a human being. More particularly, I am interested in basic questions about what makes our lives meaningful, worthwhile, or interesting, what gives us a sense of aliveness, and how 1

2

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

we might be able to meet the world in creative ways. However, rather than developing this line of inquiry along traditionally philosophical lines, I am eager to establish what psychoanalysis as a theoretical discourse—as a rather peculiar theory of what it means to be human—can tell us about the existential strategies that allow us to survive the precariousness of our lives. How do we cope with the uncertainties of existence—with our relative powerlessness with regard to our own destiny—without falling into states of anxiety, inaction, or hopelessness? How do we make the most of our everyday realities without becoming paralyzed by their ephemeral nature? How do we manage to appreciate the beauty and intricacy of our lives while haunted by the certainty that the bubble will eventually burst? The fragility of our life-worlds asks that we approach them with a combination of tenacity, grace, and wisdom. Western philosophers since Socrates have called the attempt to arrive at an effective combination of these ingredients the “art of living.”2 This art of living is premised on the idea that there is a complex craft or poetics to human existence that elicits our thoughtful participation—that even though death escapes our control, life is not something that simply happens to us in a passive manner, but rather a process that invites our active and lively engagement. The Western strategy for coping with human frailty has therefore frequently been to transform a potentially vulnerable condition into an empowered one, to insist that while fate cannot be dictated to, it can be manipulated and shaped according to our hopes, wishes, and aspirations. Though this line of reasoning is far from universal, it can be found in various key currents of Western thought since Socrates’s famous assertion that only the examined life is worth living all the way to Sartre’s insistence that the human subject is in the final analysis responsible for the choices that it makes in its life. The philosophical response to the idea of human helplessness has thus often been to recast this helplessness as a site of possibility and self-overcoming. This book develops a specifically psychoanalytic account of the art of living. We will discover that this account not only deviates from, but in many ways contradicts, some of the most cherished principles of the traditional art of living. Nonetheless, psychoanalysis shares with the

INTRODUCTION

3

latter the fundamental insight that the human subject is not born into the world with a fully formed self, but must, to the best of its ability, fashion itself along the way. This process of becoming a singular person—of molding a distinctive character, identity, and mode of inhabiting the world—is a challenge that resides at the very heart of human existence, and it would be difficult to imagine what our lives would be like without this ongoing endeavor. By this I do mean that we are all consciously or deliberately involved in the task of assembling our selves. I also do not mean that we are free to compose our lives as we please, independently of our historical and sociocultural setting. I simply wish to suggest that the question of how we should proceed with our lives—what characteristics we would ideally like to acquire and what we deem significant in the world—is woven into the very texture of our existence in ways that lend it much of its meaning and substance. In a sense, we form our identities through what Jonathan Lear describes as our “living engagement” with this question.3 It is, as it were, the very act of asking this question, and others like it, that induces us to grow in psychic depth and complexity. Moreover, because there is no fixed or definitive answer to this question—because we are likely to respond to it differently at various points in our lives—it is the continual process of grappling with it that most intensely shapes us as individuals. To arrive at a final answer, to decide once and for all what it means to be a person, would imply that we would no longer be participating in the art of living in any profound sense. To the extent that psychoanalysis facilitates the process of asking important questions about the shape and direction of our lives, it by definition endorses a certain art of living. What is more, the fact that psychoanalysis promotes the idea that psychic transformation is possible—that we can over time modify not only our conscious, but also our unconscious inner processes—implies that it assumes that we possess the potential for various types of self-fashioning. The very idea that symptoms can be alleviated, that we can loosen psychic fixations and exchange rigid patterns of thought, feeling, and action for a more flexible manner of experiencing the world, suggests the possibility of

4

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

psychic renewal and regeneration. The possibility of such subjective revitalization, I would like to propose, constitutes a crucial component of the psychoanalytic art of living. Traditional accounts of the art of living tend to describe it as a matter of cultivating a unitary and internally consistent self.4 Theoretical advances in how we think about subjectivity—from Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as an inherently disruptive element of psychic life to postmodern depictions of decentered, fragmentary, and polyvalent subjective realities—have made it impossible to conceive of the art of living in these terms. As a result, a contemporary art of living—an art (and practice) that would be relevant to the peculiar psychic realities of postmodern subjectivity—cannot be directed at making our lives more coherent, but must instead convey something constructive about coping with their intrinsic incoherence. Its aim cannot be to conjure away life’s tensions, ambiguities, and points of bewilderment, but rather to teach us how to live through these without breaking our spirit. Psychoanalysis, I believe, can help us to develop such a contemporary alternative to traditional versions of the art of living because it takes the incoherence of human existence for granted. It is in fact deeply suspicious of excessive displays of coherence, for it recognizes that such displays frequently function as psychic defenses that thwart the fluid circulations of our creative energies. Self-consistency taken to an extreme, psychoanalysis intimates, can be an impediment to psychic vitality and multidimensionality. Psychoanalysis—at least the kind of psychoanalysis that concerns me in this book—makes a virtue out of life’s contingency.5 By this I do not mean that psychoanalysis does not respect our desire to feel grounded in the world, but merely that it emphasizes that the best we can do for our well-being is to learn to cope with the fact that life’s unpredictability invariably exceeds our capacity to control it. As a matter of fact, the more we cling to the notion of predictability, the less dexterously we are able to deal with life as the erratic and capricious stream of unanticipated events, encounters, and developments that it often is. No matter how carefully we strive to organize our lives around certain centers of security—ideals, ambitions, or rela-

INTRODUCTION

5

tionships, for instance—it is our lot as human beings to learn to survive less than secure circumstances. I am here talking about insecurity as an existential predicament rather than as a state of affairs that arises from unequal or oppressive social arrangements. While the latter can be ameliorated by rearranging the conditions that make some lives more insecure than others— that in fact render some lives unbearable while artificially cushioning others—the former is something that none of us, insofar as we are creatures of consciousness (and unconsciousness), can elude. We all know this. However, it is one thing to agree with the truism that few aspects of life are as constant as its inconstancy, yet altogether another to be able to move from the pursuit of stability to an acceptance of, and tolerance for, instability. Psychoanalysis at its best—when it curtails its dogmatic and prescriptive tendencies—can empower us to embrace the unforeseen with a measure of resourcefulness. To put the matter differently, psychoanalysis can help us to envision what it might mean to be the agents of our lives in a world that questions the very possibility of agency. The issue of agency—how much creative freedom we have with respect to our lives, to what extent we can be the authors of our own meanings, and how (if at all) we might be able to escape the dominant sociocultural structures that surround us—remains one of the most contested topics of contemporary philosophy because its stakes are quite high. Whether we think of the human subject as a self-directing entity or as a mere plaything of external forces that reside beyond its control has tremendous implications for some of our most deeply held beliefs—beliefs about what it means to be a human being, whether originality and creativity are possible, what the status of inspiration is, what self-actualization entails, what it means to take responsibility for our actions, how we might go about changing the world for the better, and what social justice would look like. One of the merits of psychoanalysis is that it recognizes that we are neither fully agentic nor entirely disempowered. Like many other contemporary theories of subjectivity, psychoanalysis operates under the assumption that human beings are constituted through social processes of language acquisition and acculturation—that our identities are

6

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

reflective of our placement in a specific historical setting rather than of a divinely endowed or metaphysical kernel of humanness. In short, psychoanalysis believes in the socially constructed nature of subjectivity and psychic life. This means, among other things, that it recognizes that we are always obliged to work within the cultural materials at our disposal, that our attempts at self-constitution inevitably take place within a social context that places limits on what we can envision and attain. At the same time, psychoanalysis contends that the fact that we exist in a world of predetermined meanings does not imply that we cannot inventively contribute to the production of meaning—that we cannot generate the kind of meaning that means something to us personally. Though there is no such thing as a stable or coherent self, and though we can never be the authors of our existence in any pure or unconditional sense, each of us does have a self, and most of us would probably like to be able to actively intervene in the unfolding of our destinies. In this context, one of the most empowering insights of psychoanalysis is its acknowledgment that the self ’s constructed status enhances, rather than diminishes, its creative potential. Instead of advancing the somewhat facile idea that the sketch of our personhood is ingrained within our being from birth—and that it is our task to fill in and actualize, as accurately as possible, the outlines of this sketch— psychoanalysis emphasizes that we form ourselves in response (or resistance) to the innumerable external influences that surround us; precisely because we are not tied to a predestined blueprint of what we are supposed to become, we have a much greater degree of leeway in carving out the contours of our existence. Psychoanalysis is not a practice of discovering who or what we are in any essential sense, but rather of finding evocative modes of signifying facets of existence that in one way or another feel valuable to us or that manage to spark our desire to know more. From this point of view, one could say that psychoanalysis invites us to reconsider the very meaning of agency. Rather than conceptualizing agency as a function of heroic feats of self-actualization that are designed to enable us to overcome the constraints of our positionality in the world—as is often the case with more traditional notions of transcendence—psycho-

INTRODUCTION

7

analysis encourages us to view it as a matter of our ability to inhabit our actual circumstances in ways that allow us to make the most of these circumstances. Instead of the goal of rising above the demands of everyday life, psychoanalysis promotes our capacity to feel effectively connected to the here and now, to the tangible (yet also fleeting) density of living our lives. Agency is therefore not a question of a sovereign human will pitted against the world, but rather of our uniquely human capacity to imaginatively play with (and within) the possibilities presented by the world. This suggests that though redemption or existential consolation in any absolute sense is an impossible aspiration, we possess enough creative ingenuity to enter into the current of our lives in rewarding ways. As a matter of fact, to the extent that the act of renouncing transcendent ideals of redemption and consolation redirects our energies from the otherworldly to the worldly, it may enable us to better discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude. This is one sense in which psychoanalysis provides us with a new understanding of the art of living. Psychoanalysis also takes the art of living in a novel direction because it, by definition, encourages us to take a curious and inquisitive attitude toward our unconscious psychic states. By now it is common to admit that we tend to unconsciously produce the conditions of our psychic torment in the sense that we unwittingly, and often repeatedly, place ourselves in hurtful, disappointing, or self-undermining situations. Freud developed his influential notion of the repetition compulsion in part to explain this perplexing phenomenon. But it is important to underscore that the unconscious impacts our lives in even more fundamental ways, by shaping what we, generally speaking, consider possible in our lives. Since the unconscious pays tribute to and seeks to preserve archaic forms of psychic meaning—forms of meaning that derive from our family history and early infantile experiences—it can cause us to think and act according to formulas derived from the distant past. These formulas—the emotional rules of engagement that we bring to our interactions with the world, so to speak—may have little to do with our conscious aspirations. Yet they can be potent enough to guide our behavior in life-defining ways. They can, for instance,

8

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

channel us into specific existential tracks by virtue of the fact that they, in ways that we are not entirely aware of, persuade us to pursue certain directions and life choices while simultaneously barring others. This suggests that theories of subjectivity that fail to consider the unconscious—that strive to understand the self on a purely rational level—by necessity have a limited and ultimately limiting vision not only of what it means to be a human being, but also of what it means to try to transform our lives. Like its more traditional counterparts, the psychoanalytic art of living accentuates the importance of the examined life. However, from a psychoanalytic perspective, no matter how resolute our efforts to modify our lives on the conscious level, we will fail to bring about genuine transformation as long as we are incapable of effectively arbitrating between our conscious and unconscious processes of making sense of the world. This is why one of the aims of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice is to enable us to develop an actively interpretative relationship to our unconscious motivations. It is when we lack an adequate understanding of these motivations that we get caught up in the meshes of the repetition compulsion—that we end up reenacting destructive patterns in a passive and uncontrollable manner. This is why it is essential to learn to read our unconscious impulses to obtain a more accurate sense of what might be neglected or underdeveloped in our psychic lives. Once we come to see that we are not merely the helpless victims of these impulses but can take a dynamic role in deciphering them, we can begin to alter our lives. This is what it means, in Freudian terms, to move from a passive repetition of the past to an active working through of this past. Working through as a form of conscious remembering and reconstruction of the past breaks the cycle of repetition because it allows us to catch our unconscious in the act, as it were, before it has had the chance to dictate our next move. At this juncture, it may be useful to underscore that developing an interpretative relationship to the unconscious is not the same thing as colonizing it. The point is not to drain the psyche of all of its mysteries, but merely to cultivate an ongoing rapport between conscious and unconscious psychic processes. As a matter of fact, while “solving” a

INTRODUCTION

9

specific unconscious mystery may shed light on a particular aspect of our existence, it can at the same time pave the way for a dozen previously undetected mysteries to find their way into our consciousness; our every effort to access the unconscious generates new forms of unconscious meaning. In this sense, the more we probe, the more there is to probe. The more we know, the more aware we become of what we can never know. Our attempts to know ourselves more fully therefore tend to expand the realm of the unknowable. In this sense, although psychoanalysis aims to improve our capacity to read the unconscious, it can also deepen our appreciation for the fact that some parts of ourselves will always remain enigmatic and indecipherable; it can make us more receptive to what we do not or cannot comprehend about ourselves and our lives. Indeed, it is the persistence of these inscrutable elements that makes the psychoanalytic method viable in the first place, for they ensure that there is no limit to the layers of interpretation that can be brought to bear upon the psyche. As Adam Phillips notes, it is to the extent that life resists examination that it remains “endlessly examinable”—“that it can always be described in different ways, from different points of view.”6 During earlier times, what was enigmatic about the self tended to be explained in religious, mystical, or superstitious terms. In the postFreudian universe, it is the unconscious that—for some of us at least— has come to house the mysterious (and therefore awe-inspiring) elements of existence. Another way of stating the matter is to say that the unconscious has in many ways come to replace what was traditionally conceptualized as fate. As we have seen, one of the most noteworthy things about the unconscious is that it can land us in the same place over and again, without our conscious understanding or consent. This implies that the logic of our existence is much less random than we might assume and that at least some of the events and episodes that appear to simply come to pass in our lives are brought about by the pressure exerted by our unconscious on our conscious lives.7 The repetition compulsions that drive our behavior obey their own internal rationale, which is precisely why they can create the illusion of an

10

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

impersonal force (or curse) that determines our destiny. Even when—or perhaps exactly when—we believe that we have finally managed to overcome a destructive pattern, we can find ourselves enacting it anew and with renewed vigor. Indeed, it is difficult to know what is more exasperating: not knowing how things will turn out or knowing exactly how they are likely to turn out despite our best efforts at a different outcome. This raises the question—and this is one of the central questions of psychoanalysis as well as of this book—of whether it is possible to alter our fate. Can we change our unconscious patterns and responses? I have been implying all along that we can. Indeed, if we could not, there would be little point to psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice. Psychoanalysis asks us to take a careful look at our past precisely so as to empower us to construct a new fate out of the elements of the old. While the disillusionments of the past inevitably assert themselves in the present through the unconscious, one of the goals of psychoanalysis is to enable us to work through these disillusionments until they yield some sort of wisdom or insight. From this point of view, the fact that our lives rarely unfold according to linear progress narratives, but contain delays, detours, mishaps, breakdowns, and moments of disenchantment, is not merely an unavoidable part of life, but can initiate us into a more multilayered manner of responding to the world. In fact, knowing not only how to survive such setbacks, but also how to work through and beyond them to more affirmative psychic states, indicates that we have grasped something fundamental about the psychoanalytic art of living. Psychoanalysis, perhaps more than most philosophical representations of subjectivity, foregrounds the fundamental fragility of human life in the sense that it recognizes that things can go terribly wrong— that the self can be wounded, damaged, shattered, or stretched beyond its ability to cope. Because psychoanalysis begins with the symptom— with the indication that something in the subject’s psychic life has gone amiss—it possesses a keen appreciation for the fact that some fates are simply too agonizing to endure. It is for this reason that psychoanalysis cannot be merely a practice of self-enrichment, but must engage the unconscious in a process of transformation. While it is fashionable

INTRODUCTION

11

these days to talk about the inherently subversive nature of the unconscious—and there is no doubt that the erratic energies of the unconscious can be harnessed for countercultural purposes—for those whose unconscious lives bear the traces of past trauma the more valuable lesson may be the idea that pain can be creatively transformed, that pain is not necessarily useless. Developing an active relationship to our unconscious in the sense that I have described may be the most important step in being able to productively work through a devastating past. Such transformative reworking of the past changes the way that we understand our history, which in turn changes the way we live in the present and reach toward the future. This means that the past loses its power to indiscriminately impact the present. This is exactly what it means to rewrite fate. And I would say that it is also what it means to participate in the psychoanalytic art of living. The first chapter of this book outlines the main characteristics of the philosophical art of living as it was historically portrayed. After contemplating the strengths and weaknesses of the traditional philosophical conception, I move on to the question of how we might best think about subjective authenticity and singularity in the contemporary context. I maintain that the challenge of developing a distinctive character is less a matter of unearthing innate and deeply buried dimensions of being than it is of our capacity to embrace an ongoing and open-ended process of becoming. I believe that this model of the art of living enables us to acknowledge the radical contingency of existence while simultaneously taking seriously our need to fashion a personality and a mode of life that possess enough consistency to feel psychically manageable. I also reflect on the complex—and at times profoundly antagonistic—relationship between the demands of social conformity and our desire to attain a measure of individual uniqueness. Chapter 2 proposes that the fact that we often feel internally lacking and alienated constitutes the very foundation of our ability to interact with the world in creative ways—that it is our perpetual dissatisfaction with ourselves that causes us to approach the world as a space of possibility that has the power to awaken our attention and make us marvel at its vibrant details. I consequently suggest that we undermine

12

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

our chances for happiness when we envision it in terms of healing the void within our being, achieving a state of unalienated wholeness, or ascending to a transcendent realm beyond our daily lives. And I surmise that we increase the likelihood of happiness when we concentrate our efforts on learning how to take advantage of the largely fortuitous twists and turns of our existence. Within this framework, I consider how we might be able to work our way from painful psychic histories toward a more hopeful future—how we might be able to transform the hardships of our past into an existential opportunity. Chapter 3 investigates what it means, from a specifically psychoanalytic perspective, to rewrite one’s fate. Beginning from Freud’s insight that the way in which we unconsciously relate to the world— particularly our repetitive tendency to reenact self-debilitating subjective scenarios—in large degree determines our destiny, I delve into the question of what it might entail to move from a passive repetition of petrified psychic patterns to a more enabling reworking of these patterns. In this context, I review Hans Loewald’s suggestion that the unconscious contains our psychic potentialities in an embryonic form and that molding a distinctive identity is therefore a matter of gradually appropriating these potentialities on a higher level of inner organization. I moreover examine Loewald’s conviction that becoming a self-realized character involves the eagerness to singularize—as well as to take responsibility for—our unconscious. Finally, I delineate the manner in which the dispersal of our habitual unconscious responses expands the field of existential possibilities, thereby enabling us to reconfigure our destiny. Chapter 4 returns to the relationship between inner lack and creativity by drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan who regards lack to be constitutive of the human condition. Lacan furthermore contends that fantasy formations—particularly those that are designed to buttress the narcissistic grandiosity of the ego by offering us an inflated image of ourselves—mislead us by covering over this lack so as to make our identities appear more integrated than they actually are. As a result, they make it difficult for us to appreciate the possibility that lack may render us inventive by inducing us to undertake ever-renewed exploits

INTRODUCTION

13

of meaning-production as a means of compensating for our gnawing awareness of insufficiency. That is, fantasies obscure the fact that our inner void serves as a fertile kind of emptiness that animates our subjectivities. Against this backdrop, I suggest that it is only the fall of our most treasured fantasies that allows us to transition to a more imaginative and creatively engaged psychic economy. More specifically, the disbanding of fantasies enables us to better listen to the idiosyncratic particularity of our desire, and in so doing to begin to forge a singular identity apart from the social conventions that seek to determine the parameters of our being. Chapter 5 discusses creativity as a productive means to mourn the various losses that punctuate our lives. Whenever we experience a loss, our psyches struggle to find a substitute for what we have lost. A symptom is one such substitute, standing in for the lost object, ideal, or way of life. Creative activity, I posit, is another—infinitely more rewarding—manner of responding to loss. I illustrate that creativity is essentially a process of playing with absence whereby our losses are knitted into the delicate composition of our imaginative undertakings. Creativity, in this sense, offers us an indirect means of holding onto and honoring what we have lost. At the same time, it allows us to take a degree of distance from our losses, to transform our sadness into signification, and, in so doing, to gradually diffuse the pain caused by loss. While loss—the absence of a beloved other, for instance—can momentarily debilitate us, it can also (precisely insofar as it compels us to look for substitutes) give rise to inspiration. This is why the ability to move from loss to creative expression is one of the most central components of the psychoanalytic art of living.

This page intentionally left blank.

ONE

The Art of Living

To create a self is to succeed in becoming someone, in becoming a character, that is, someone unusual and distinctive. . . . To become an individual is to acquire an uncommon and idiosyncratic character, a set of features and a mode of life that set one apart from the rest of the world and make one memorable not only for what one did or said but also for who one was. —Alexander Nehamas

BECOMING A CHARACTER

IN The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault, Alexan-

der Nehamas claims that philosophical accounts of the art of living have historically given expression to one extraordinarily ambitious aspiration: that of becoming a unique and unusual character, an individual who is set apart from the rest of humanity not only by his actions, attitudes, and motivations, but also—and more important—by who he is. On this view, the art of living entails attaining a high degree of subjective singularity. In the pages that follow, I would like to ask whether singularity as an existential objective still makes sense in the contemporary world, and, if so, how we might best conceive it. While much of this introductory chapter is devoted to outlining the contours of what philosophers have traditionally understood by the art of living, its ultimate aim is to work toward a proposition that will inform the rest of this book, namely that subjective singularity might be less a 15

16

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

matter of positive attributes that we can name or define than of an always precarious process of shaping ourselves into individuals with distinctive passions. As is the case with many of the most persistent ideas in Western philosophy, the art of living can be traced back to Socrates. This does not mean that Socrates articulated an existential philosophy in terms of the modern ideals of singularity and personal distinctiveness, but merely that he was interested in what it meant to live well. More specifically, the Socratic art of living was a matter of learning to live philosophically.1 The purpose of the so-called examined life was to shed all false beliefs and opinions in favor of enduring truths that were only attainable through the correct application of reason. A wise and virtuous person—a person capable of living courageously and according to moral principles—was one who made a consistent effort to rid his soul of all unexamined assumptions. In contrast to those who were content to live according to socially received norms of thought and behavior, the person who had chosen the philosophical approach to life sought to test the accuracy of his knowledge through continual inquiry and self-questioning. In this manner, philosophy became a concrete way of life—a tangible mode of existence that was designed to transform the parameters of the individual’s entire being—rather than merely an abstract or impersonal set of hypotheses about the world and about the possibilities of human knowledge. It was thought to provide valuable insight not only about the best way to live, but also about the kind of person or character that one could ideally endeavor to become. The evolution of the art of living from its Socratic roots to its more recent manifestations has been explored in intricate detail in books such as Michel Foucault’s The Care of the Self, Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, and Nehamas’s aforementioned text. I cannot here do more than highlight some of the most salient features of this art. The first is the recognition—a recognition without which it would make little sense to talk about an art of living to begin with—that human beings can take a keen and probing interest in the particulars of their existence. In effect, insofar as humans are not born with completely established characters,

THE ART OF LIVING

17

the emergence of personal singularity appears to presuppose a measure of self-interest and self-awareness. As philosophers from Aristotle to Kant to Schiller have underscored, humans are the only living creatures who have the capacity to fashion a “second nature” out of the materials given to them by “actual” nature. In other words, being human is not fully biologically determined, but susceptible to cultural as well as psychological intervention. This implies that the self gains depth and complexity from its own unceasing attempts to dynamically participate in the molding of its character; rather than being a site of fixed or essential meaning, the self functions as a malleable canvas for transformative acts of self-cultivation. Many of the various schools of ancient philosophy that followed Socrates cherished the idea that the self could be cared for, modified, and refined over time.2 Indeed, even when their philosophical outlooks and emphases differed significantly, they tended to develop the art of living in increasingly concrete directions by devising a wide array of practical exercises that were designed to allow the individual to gain a more sophisticated understanding of his past history as well as of his present inclinations and potentialities. Such exercises—ranging from reading, writing, contemplation, self-examination, and the cultivation of the imagination to lively participation in philosophical debates— held existential as well as moral value in that they aimed at a metamorphosis of the individual’s conduct of life in the broadest possible sense; they endeavored to improve both his character and the quality of his life. As Foucault states, they enabled “one to commune with oneself, to recollect one’s bygone days, to place the whole of one’s past life before one’s eyes, to get to know oneself, through reading, through the precepts and examples that will provide inspiration, and, by contemplating a life reduced to its essentials, to rediscover the basic principles of a rational conduct.”3 Ultimately, they sought—as Socrates had already done—to empower the individual to achieve a state of wisdom. Though ancient philosophers understood that wisdom was not something that could ever be seized in a definitive or permanent manner, they believed that it could be reached during rare and elusive moments of self-transcendence.4 The practical exercises that they advocated

18

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

were, among other things, meant to ensure that such moments became more accessible to the individual.5 The practices of self-care that were so central to the ancient art of living were directed at constructing a harmonious character capable of intense self-reflexivity. Most important—and this is the second feature of the philosophical art of living that I would like to highlight—these practices were meant to ensure that the individual possessed a high degree of mastery over his passions. Many of the proponents of the art of living believed that much of the individual’s pain and suffering was caused by overwhelming passions of various kinds: unrealizable desires, unreasonable appetites, unfounded and exaggerated worries, regrets about the past, fears regarding the future, and so on. Such passions, they emphasized, drained the individual’s inner resources and prevented him from living to the fullest of his capacities. As a consequence, the goal of self-care—of what Hadot describes as “a therapeutic of the passions”6—was to enable the individual to conquer his passions so as to neutralize their power to direct his destiny. Foucault explains that the version of self-care that developed during the Roman empire, for instance, bordered on asceticism in the sense that it entailed a great deal of self-limitation and restraint. In addition to daily exercises of self-refinement, it included various tests and trials that were intended, momentarily at least, to deprive the individual of all but the most indispensable necessities of life. Foucault specifies that the purpose of such deprivations was to demonstrate to the individual, on a very concrete level, his absolute independence from those aspects of existence that were not essential to his survival.7 In this sense, the austerity of the ancient art of living was less a matter of renouncing pleasure for the sake of renunciation than a strategy for ensuring the self ’s freedom and autonomy in relation to its surroundings. By learning to keep a distance from the unreliable seductions and enticements of the outside world, and by focusing on the delicate movements of its own soul instead, the self gained a measure of protection against the inevitable disappointments of the world. Perhaps even more fundamentally—and this is the third attribute worth noting—the ancients regarded the art of living as a means of

THE ART OF LIVING

19

gaining access to a superior sort of pleasure. They stressed that even though the pleasure that the self derives from external objects might be incomparably poignant at the moment of fulfillment, it is almost inevitably tainted by the fear of loss and disillusionment, and can consequently not in the final analysis compete with the more steadfast and dependable kind of pleasure that the self attains through being “answerable” only to itself. As Foucault observes, the ancient art of living endeavored to illustrate how in the “satisfaction of the most elementary needs, one could find a fuller, purer, more stable pleasure than in the delight one might take in all that is superfluous.”8 That is, the self ’s ability to take pleasure in itself—what Hadot characterizes as “the simple joy of existing”9—yielded the kind of inner peace and serenity that was more esteemed than anything that the external world could provide. Both Hadot and Nehamas emphasize that important elements of the ancient art of living have infiltrated various layers of the Western philosophical tradition. Many of the practical exercises that I referred to earlier were incorporated into Christian spirituality, in particular the ascetic rhythm of monastic life. Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhardt reformulated some of the main tenets of the ancient care of the self in terms compatible with Christian ethics. Furthermore, as Hadot points out, traces of the ancient art of living can be found in some of the most foundational texts of Western philosophy, such as Montaigne’s Essays, Descartes’s Meditations, Spinoza’s Ethics, and Shaftersbury’s Exercises. The ethos of this art is also clearly discernible in the attempts of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard to foreground the existential aspects of human life, in Husserl’s efforts to alter the way humans perceive the world, as well as in Heidegger’s analysis of authenticity and care. Finally, thinkers as different from each other as Wittgenstein and Thoreau display dimensions of the ancient art of living.10 THE CASE OF NIETZSCHE

No outline of the history of the art of living—even as schematic and partial as the one I am offering here—would be complete without a

20

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

special nod to Nietzsche, whose version of the art of living has had a strong influence on contemporary thought.11 Nietzsche notoriously maintains that the world in which we live, as well as the beliefs and opinions that we hold about this world, are always socially and historically constituted in the sense that we have no access to any ultimate “truth” or “reality” that would transcend the particulars of our cultural circumstances. More specifically, how we understand the world is inevitably mediated by the language we use to represent it. This suggests that many of the things that we take to be “real” and “commonsensical” are merely social constructs that have become so deeply ingrained in our psyches that we have lost track of their constructed status and come to regard them as unquestionably true. As Nietzsche observes, “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.”12 That is, truths are habits of thought that have over time become so convincing to us that we no longer recognize them as habits, but rather take them to represent “reality” in its pure and unadulterated form. What we regard as true and universally valid are those meanings that have most successfully covered over their fictitious origins—that have most seamlessly concealed the fact that they are social constructs. This indicates that we tend to believe that we are being most truthful when we act and think according to fixed conventions, when we follow the rules and regulations that are so entrenched in our social system that we take them to be binding. As Nietzsche remarks, “to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors.”13 This implies that trying to understand the world—and our place in it—is never merely a passive attempt to describe a preexisting reality, but a process of actively constituting this reality: our very efforts to represent the world bring this world into existence for us. In other words, there is no reality, knowledge, or way of relating to the world that is not from the very beginning infused by human wishes, passions, and judgments. Nietzsche moreover suggests that there is a hegemonic aspect to meaning-production in the sense that it is those meanings,

THE ART OF LIVING

21

beliefs, and values that are most insistently and commonly utilized in a given social order that take on the status of truths; what becomes constituted as truth is never independent of power relations. Rather, those with sociosymbolic power—with representational power—have over the years been able to pass off their particular beliefs and values as universal truths. This means that to the extent that we lose track of the process by which fictions solidify into facts—that we are incapable to envisioning viable alternatives to the dominant fictions that govern our lives—we can become entangled in beliefs and values that are actually hurtful to us. We frequently hesitate to step outside social conventions because what is familiar to us makes us feel secure. However, Nietzsche reminds us that the recognition that the social order is conventional— constructed—grants us a great deal of creative agency in relation to the world in that we can strive to reconstitute it along new and innovative lines; the constructed character of our existence, rather than being a source of anxiety or concern, should empower us to engender fresh meanings, values, and modes of life. After all, the most effective way to transcend outdated or oppressive conventions is to counter them with better ones. From this viewpoint, we make a tragic mistake when we run after absolute “truth,” for our energies would be far better utilized in fashioning enchanting fictions that would make our lives more ardent or interesting. Insofar as the intensity of human life derives in part from our ability to cultivate an artistic relationship to the world—from our capacity to compose wonderful myths and fables both about the world and about ourselves—the key to an admirable existence is to become a creator, rather than merely a passive consumer, of meanings. Because Nietzsche believes that on a fundamental level we are artists and inventors—individuals capable of dazzling feats of imaginative initiative—he asks us to take an avid role in the shaping of our lifeworlds. Rather than simply submitting to the safe and frequently quite stale conventions of conduct passed on through the generations, we should, Nietzsche insists, initiate a process of revitalizing the codes by which we live. Existential “nobility,” he proposes, is reserved for those

22

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

who manage to forge their own idiosyncratic trail through life rather than take the path of least resistance. This outlook prefigures some more recent attempts—such as Sartrean existentialism—to conceptualize personal authenticity as a matter of the subject’s ability to dissociate itself from the hackneyed norms of the social collectivity. Sartre proposes that the subject is always torn between two warring modalities of being in the world. On the one hand, there is a creative and future-oriented aspect to the self that is capable of transcendent acts of self-overcoming. On the other, there is the self of bad faith, a noncreative and stagnant self that remains mired in immanent forms of life with no possibility of change or growth. The latter is plagued by a hopeless sense of emptiness and meaninglessness that undermines its ability to reflect on the meaning and future direction of its life. Sartre posits that many of us fall into bad faith—remain content to mindlessly repeat the received values of our social world—for the simple reason that it is less challenging than the anxiety-inducing undertaking of interrogating and taking responsibility for our existence. Nietzsche’s version of the art of living—of becoming the poet of one’s life and of “giving style” to one’s character, as he deftly describes it14—is in many ways designed to function as an antidote to such existential complacency; it is meant to empower the subject to actively intercede in the unfolding of its future. Furthermore, Nietzsche—like many of his ancient predecessors—aligns self-fashioning with selfmastery, positing that the self ’s agency and capacity for pleasure are enhanced by its commitment to a strict regimen of rules that gives structure to its project of self-refinement. Nietzsche accordingly proposes that the task of crafting a self can be effectively undertaken only by those who are willing to “survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye.”15 That is, self-cultivation demands the subject’s ability to conceal, accentuate, reinterpret, and transform aspects of its being in ways that empower it to read them as parts of an internally consistent whole. For Nietzsche, the quality of the particular attributes—

THE ART OF LIVING

23

whether they are appealing or not, gracious or not—is less significant than the overall pattern that they compose. What is significant in the end, he underscores, is that “the constraint of a single taste” has formed everything. This emphasis on self-constraint, in turn, implies that self-fashioning can only be practiced by those who are strong enough to “enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own.”16 Nietzsche is thus keen to integrate the diverse aspects of the individual’s being—including what is unattractive, diseased, or wounded— into a coherent entity. This does not mean that Nietzsche aims at a permanent or predictable character—for he recognizes that the self is always an unfinished enterprise—but merely that he believes that selfstylization entails incorporating even the troublesome facets of one’s personality into one’s ever-developing art of living. As Nehamas posits in Nietzsche: Life as Literature, the unity of the Nietzschean self is never a stable achievement, but rather something that must be continuously and avidly worked at. To attain subjective integrity, Nehamas asserts, “is not to reach a specific new state and to stop becoming—it is not to reach a state at all. It is to identify oneself with all of one’s actions, to see that everything one does (what one becomes) is what one is.”17 At any given moment, there may be a host of dominant components that lend consistency to the self and that allow it to say “I” with a degree of conviction. However, since the self is comprised of multiple and frequently even incompatible habits, attributes, and peculiarities, the configuration of the characteristics that constitute its “coherence” by necessity changes over time. As Nehamas explains, though “the ‘I’ always seems to refer to the same thing, the content to which it refers and the interests for which it speaks do not remain the same.”18 Nehamas goes on to specify that the process of fashioning a self in the Nietzschean sense “is a matter of incorporating more and more character traits under a constantly expanding and evolving rubric.”19 The self ’s unity and organization, in other words, result from its ability to sift through and appropriate an ever-increasing number of complex desires, inclinations, and experiences. What is more, the self not only manages to hold together the numerous threads of the present

24

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

moment—to navigate between the diverse potentialities of what is immediately and tangibly at hand—but also to reach backward through its personal history in order to resuscitate and reinterpret elements of the past that can help it to better live in the present. Such a process of retroactive reinterpretation empowers the individual to read even devastating episodes of his history as valuable ingredients of the present—as elements that have played a vital role in the enhancement and fortification of his character. This type of self-relationship implies the subject’s willingness to accept responsibility for its character by acknowledging that its actions in the world in large measure determine the form of its (emerging) identity.20 That is, even though many of the materials that figure into the subject’s project of self-fashioning are more or less accidental—dependent on, and reflective of, particulars of birth, personality traits, adversities encountered and overcome, defeats and triumphs experienced along the way, advantages or disadvantages of social standing, and so on—it ultimately remains accountable for its own poetics of becoming. One could in fact say that the Nietzschean subject aspires to “consume” accidents by transforming them into necessities—by reinterpreting them as something without which it would not have been able to evolve into the person it currently is. As Nehamas postulates, each element of the subject’s disposition, however apparently fortuitous, is “essential to the whole of which it has become a part, and it is no longer accidental.”21 Or as Nietzsche himself advances, the self who attains nobility of being is by definition one who knows how to redeem the accidents, calamities, and riddles of the past so as to create a livable present.22 KEY SHORTCOMINGS

There is much that is intuitively appealing about the philosophical art of living in its various incarnations. On the most basic level, the notion that there is an art or technique to our existence implies that there are better or worse, more or less constructive, modes of inhabiting the world; to the extent that we would like to live well rather than badly,

THE ART OF LIVING

25

we are likely to be intrigued by a philosophy that promises to tell us how to best approach our lives. In addition, the art of living lends expression to a certain—perhaps specifically Western—obsession with the idea that life is only worth living if we can find a way to turn it into something original or extraordinary. As we have seen, singularity as an existential goal calls for the ability to break out of established social conventions so as to accede to an inimitable way of taking up the task of shaping a self; it implies the capacity to realize previously unrealized possibilities and to live in an inspiring or otherwise venerable manner. As Nehamas remarks, even though in a general sense everyone is an individual, from the more narrow perspective of the art of living, “only some people create themselves or become individuals, over time.”23 The art of living is seductive because it invites us to take a closer look at our lives so as to determine whether we are living up to our creative potential, whether we are happy and fulfilled, and whether there are aspects of our lives that need to be rethought and reconceived. To the extent that we hope to live lives that allow us to actualize the nuances of our being, that feel dynamic and multidimensional, that contain flashes of inspiration and imaginative insight, and that are characterized by a high level of psychic resourcefulness, the notion of living our lives as poetry can add tone and density to our existence. Furthermore, the idea that we can play with our identities can be a source of considerable pleasure. Nehamas writes on this aspect of the art of living as follows: As in the acknowledged arts, there are no rules for producing new and exciting works. As in the acknowledged arts, there is no best work—no best life—by which all others can be judged. As in the acknowledged arts, that does not imply that judgment is impossible, that every work is as good as every other. As in the acknowledged arts, the aim is to produce as many new and different types of works—as many different modes of life—as possible, since the proliferation of aesthetic difference and multiplicity, even though it is not often in the service of morality, enriches and improves human life.24

26

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

The art of living opens up the field of subjective possibilities. As I have stressed all along, one of its most alluring aspects is the idea that our identities are not fixed once and for all, but remain open to constant refashioning. It is, moreover, reassuring to think that even though many dimensions of our existence are initially given to us randomly, without our input, we can aspire to build a life that is centered on what we most care about. As Nietzsche reveals, each and every component of our lives—no matter how defective, excruciating, or ludicrous—has the potential to become a part of an organic whole. In this sense, there are no accidents, but merely sites of opportunity. The art of living is hopeful because it holds the future open. However, it also contains some very obvious problems. First, the art of living could be argued to represent an overly individualistic approach to existence, elevating the creative agent to the throne of meaning-production without sufficient regard to the ways in which creativity by necessity operates within a collective sociohistorical setting. We have seen that although the traditional art of living includes enclaves of sociality—such as the emphasis placed on informed intellectual exchange and debate—it for the most part regards social commitments as an obstacle to the actualization of the individual’s potentialities. Whether we consider Socrates’s distrust of conventional opinions, Nietzsche’s deep disdain for the complacency of collective life, or Sartre’s commentary on the existential malaise caused by the individual’s fall into bad faith, it appears that social life for these thinkers is an impediment to the subject’s ability to stay faithful to its inner directives. There are of course good reasons to agree with their point of view. It is clear that social conventions often sedate us into conformist and conservative ways of life, rob us of initiative, and make it more difficult for us to think for ourselves and take responsibility for our actions. Moreover, they can be outrightly insidious in severely restricting the life options of particular groups or individuals. At the same time, the dogged accent on autonomous self-constitution exhibited by many philosophers of the art of living overlooks the possibility of collective arrangements that might actually contribute to the individual’s strength and well-being.

THE ART OF LIVING

27

The second problem with the art of living in its traditional rendering is that it tends to provide an overly unitary notion of what it means to be an individual. As we have learned, for many philosophers of the art of living, the integration of the individual’s diverse attributes into a coherent and balanced whole is essential for the success of the project: if the subject engages in the arduous process of fashioning an admirable life out of the disparate resources that it has been awarded, it is in order to attain the dignity and security of a cohesive character. Socrates, for example, aspires to achieve a life that is in every way in agreement with a logical understanding of the all-important virtues of justice, courage, and wisdom; to fail to realize a correspondence between one’s beliefs and one’s character is, for Socrates, to fail at the art of living. Likewise, as we have seen, Nietzsche asserts that living one’s life as art demands a high degree of stylistic consistency and, above all, the ability to contain a multiplicity of miscellaneous elements within a disciplined whole. I stressed that this does not mean that Nietzsche thinks that there is only one correct way to go about constituting a self. Quite the contrary, he emphasizes that the art of living is something that cannot be taught or emulated, and that it is consequently up to each subject to determine the idiosyncratic shape of this art. At the same time, Nietzsche, like many of his predecessors, upholds the ideal of a self-consistent entity that displays a clear mark of its maker. Along related lines—and this is the third (and final) problem I would like to call attention to—the traditional conception of the art of living grants the subject an inordinate degree of agency over the particulars of its existence.25 What is notable about the thinkers I have discussed this far is that they believe not only that it is possible to construct a coherent whole out of diverse and potentially volatile ingredients, but that the subject possesses enough inner resoluteness to successfully undertake this project. They seem to assume not only that the subject has immediate access to its wishes, desires, and aspirations— that it understands itself and its motivations in a relatively transparent manner—but that it is able to act on these wishes, desires, and aspirations in ways that enhance the singularity of its being. This aspect of

28

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

the art of living is particularly pronounced in the ancient view of the passions as something that need to be curtailed and disciplined. The idea that one could free oneself of one’s passions—or of one’s fears and worries, for that matter—by the sheer exertion of one’s rational will implies the kind of self-mastery that is difficult to fathom from the contemporary perspective. I have already remarked that advancements in twentieth-century thought have made it awkward to take at face value either the idea that the self is (even potentially) a coherent entity or the idea that it is selfdetermining in the sense of being able to control its passions or psychic states. The psychoanalytic accent on the unconscious alone has made it inconceivable to envision the human subject as a being that is capable of immediate comprehension of its desires or motivations. In addition, the notion of an autonomous and unitary subjectivity has yielded to a more postmodern conception of a fluid and radically porous self that is filled with warring and contradictory strands of meaning and intensity that cannot be disciplined under any overarching principle of organization. By this I do not mean to cast a rigid opposition between the traditional art of living and postmodern theories of subjectivity for, as we have discovered, many of the proponents of the art of living—most notably Nietzsche—characterize the self as a mutable entity capable of innumerable self-enactments. This view accords well enough with the postmodern celebration of subjectivity as a site of performative fluidity. At the same time, the philosophers of the art of living tend to aspire to the kind of self-sovereignty and harmonious totality that much of postmodern theory has sought to undermine. THE Q UEST FOR AU THENT ICI T Y

Contemporary culture has in some ways internalized the postmodern insight that notions of subjective totality and unconditional agency are frequently far from innocent—that they all too easily reflect a troubling tendency to try to conquer or marginalize whatever eludes the unitary scheme that they uphold. Many of us are acutely aware of the fact that the Western drive to place persons, things, meanings, and

THE ART OF LIVING

29

values into tidy categories can be a violent project that represses whatever does not correspond to its classificatory paradigms. In practical terms, this drive can translate into the attempt to dominate everything from the self to nature to other cultures and modes of life. Hence, we have had to acknowledge that the quest for mastery has been the Achilles’ heel of Western civilization in the sense that it has given rise to a great deal of brutality, both on the level of the individual—suppressing those elements of psychic life that threaten to undermine the self ’s fantasy of coherence and autonomy—and on the collective and cross-cultural level.26 Yet few of us are entirely immune to the idea that our lives possess the kind of integrity and purpose that was of such central importance to traditional conceptions of the art of living. Indeed, contemporary culture could be said to advance its own version of this art. I will characterize it, for lack of a better expression, as the quest for authenticity. As Charles Taylor, among others, has pointed out, the contemporary pursuit of authenticity is motivated by the idea of getting in touch with, and becoming attuned to, the most profound layers of our being.27 It presupposes that all of us have a distinctive way of enacting our humanness, of being “true” to ourselves, and that somewhere deep inside we possess an accurate map of that way. In Taylor’s words: “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s. But this gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me.”28 Being authentic, in other words, entails safeguarding and cultivating one’s originality. As a matter of fact, it is by expressing what is original about one’s character that one defines oneself as a human being—that one names the “point” of one’s existence; one names what makes one worthy of respect. Taylor emphasizes that this ethos of authenticity valorizes the kind of intimate contact with oneself—the kind of immediacy of experience and self-awareness—that is perceived as being in danger of getting lost, in part as a result of external pressures, and in part because it is relatively common to take an instrumental attitude toward oneself that interferes with one’s capacity to listen to one’s inner

30

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

voice.29 From this perspective, the search for authenticity is a desperate attempt to retrieve a subjective voice that is deemed lost or muted; it is an effort to find a way of articulating those things that matter the most but that remain buried under false self-representations. It is worth noting right away that where traditional accounts of the art of living talked about cultivating a self—about improving and refining the self ’s character to meet an elevated ideal—the contemporary pursuit of authenticity is often couched in terms of recovering a core or kernel of being that has gotten lost in the turmoil of living. That is, where the philosophical art of living aimed to activate the subject’s capacity to become a more fully realized version of itself, to reach potentialities that exceeded its current configuration of traits, the contemporary notion of authenticity asks the subject to become what it already, deep down, is. Where the art of living in its older forms often deemed certain character traits and aptitudes more esteemed than others, the contemporary culture of authenticity pursues the “truth” of the individual’s being without much attention to the quality of the characteristics that constitute this “truth.” In effect, where the traditional art of living was designed to rid the subject of certain disagreeable or undesirable attributes—or, as in Nietzsche, at the very least to transform such attributes into valuable ingredients of a refined whole—for the current culture of authenticity the important thing is less what the self is like than that the self gets to be what it, in some inherent sense, already is. The contemporary cult of authenticity, in other words, has largely lost sight of the notion of the self as an ongoing process, upholding instead a static vision of essential traits. It is perhaps not altogether surprising that present-day subjectivity is haunted by the fear that the self ’s essence can be buried, that genuineness and sincerely are somehow in short supply. Though the masks and personas of social life may not be any more artificial now than they were in earlier times, there is arguably something about the contemporary cultural moment—a moment characterized by an unrelenting exposure to external stimulation, multiple demands on our time and attention, an accelerated pace of life, a surface-oriented tone of personal interactions, and a fragmentation of communal space—that

THE ART OF LIVING

31

makes it demanding to fend off the sensation of personal inauthenticity. While our culture (sometimes deservedly, sometimes not) prides itself on its unprecedented fluidity and versatility—the fact that it allows for a diversity of existential styles to coexist in a heterogeneous space—it is also one of the hallmarks of this culture to deplete our vitality and put us on the defensive. As Jean Baudrillard conjectures, “Speech is free perhaps, but I am less free than before: I no longer succeed in knowing what I want, the space is so saturated, the pressure so great from all who want to make themselves heard.”30 Contemporary culture is vibrant, but at its worst it can scatter us in so many directions that we come to feel overwhelmingly disjointed. Paradoxically, we come to feel so frantically alive—agitated and overstimulated—that we die inside. This suggests that aliveness comes in various forms and that not all of these forms are equally conducive to psychic well-being. Taylor maintains that although the contemporary ideal of authenticity is frequently expressed in the flattened, debased, and trivialized terms of self-centered individualism, at its heart it is possible to discern a legitimate struggle to sustain forms of inner aliveness and self-connection that are increasingly under erasure in our achievement-driven society. Somewhat provocatively, Taylor maintains that most everyone in our culture, including those who are prone to judge the quest for authenticity as a banal form of self-indulgence, feels the weight of this ideal.31 That is, even stern critics of the culture of authenticity are likely to consider matters of fulfillment and self-actualization when they are faced with important life choices. And one might add, those who do not have the luxury of such deliberations might still feel the force of this ideal (as an impossible goal, as a melancholy site of unattainability, for instance). Against this backdrop, Taylor proposes that we need to try to distinguish between what is laudable about the ideal and the narcissistic practices that have come to stand for it; instead of dismissing the ethic of authenticity altogether, “we ought to attempt to raise its practice by making more palpable to its participants what the ethic they subscribe to really involves.”32 One of the problems with the ethic of authenticity in its current configuration is that, like the traditional art of living, it tends to conceive

32

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

of subjective singularity in opposition to society, culture, and the demands of collective life, in short, in stark opposition to everything that resides “beyond” the self. Precisely because it is frequently motivated by the fear of being assaulted or overrun by the external world, it tends to associate communal life primarily with inauthentic customs and rituals that occlude the well of wisdom that resides in the depths of the self. It accordingly suggests that we only become genuinely free when we manage to disengage ourselves from our cultural underpinnings; on this account, to embrace an authentic existence is to look away from the world so as to better pay tribute to the self. However, this vision conflates the idea of sociality—the inherently collective nature of our existence—with the most shallow and souldepleting characteristics of the cultural world in the sense that it fails to recognize that sociality comes in various forms, some harshly debilitating, others profoundly enabling; it fails to properly distinguish between forms of sociality that are hegemonic, harmful, and disrespectful of individual differences on the one hand, and others that are loving, vitalizing, and conducive to creativity on the other. Most social settings are likely to contain a combination of these elements, which suggests that it is essential for us to learn to interpret our life-worlds in order to determine which parts of them are empowering and which are not; it is important for us to become astute readers and observers of culture rather than serve as mere ciphers of social hegemonies. This insight is something that the contemporary culture of authenticity for the most part neglects to elaborate. Even if we acknowledge—as I hope to do throughout this book— the dangers of social conventionality, not to mention of the kind of frenetic existence that I described earlier, pitting authenticity against sociality is misguided on at least two different levels. First, none of us can have an identity independently of others for the simple reason that the self is by definition an intersubjective entity. We become human beings—we acquire an identity—only by integrating ourselves into social contexts. In this sense, our “singularity” is something that we only attain through sociality. Second—and Taylor highlights this point—it is often exactly what resides beyond ourselves that matters

THE ART OF LIVING

33

to us the most, that we value above all else. We in fact tend to care about external things to such an extent that we are vulnerable in relation to them in the sense that we find it difficult to sustain their loss or to tolerate being betrayed by them. One could even say that our very subjectivity is a function of the various external things that matter to us as well as of the persistent and idiosyncratic ways that we care about them—that our “originality” only emerges in relation to things that we deem precious enough to be worth paying attention to. This is to say that our most heartfelt commitments to the outside world inform our identity and distinctive existential approach. Consequently, to conceive authenticity in a manner that downplays demands arising from the world—or confuses enabling forms of sociality and intersubjectivity with hegemonic conventionality—is to trivialize it by discarding many of the most important things that bring meaning and value to our existence.33 Taylor distinguishes between the “manner” and “content” of authenticity, positing that though authenticity presupposes a personally distinctive manner of doing things, the content of our thoughts and actions does not need to be narcissistic or self-referential. That is, the fact that authenticity demands that we develop a singular way of going about our lives and of pursuing the future does not mean that we cannot find “authentic” fulfillment in our interpersonal relationships, political causes, ethical commitments, cultural and artistic preoccupations, the beauty and sublimity of nature, and a whole host of other things beyond ourselves. As Taylor asserts, the fact that a poet has a characteristic style does not suggest that she can only write about things directly relevant to herself—that poetry is first and foremost self-expressive.34 By the same token, we may find that it is precisely when we surrender ourselves to involvements and preoccupations that touch the world outside ourselves—when we choose to enter the folds of collective life in a real and palpable sense—that we come the closest to authenticity. After all, it is not only the passion or intensity of our sentiments, but also the dignity, acumen, and judiciousness of our outlook, that carries weight in the larger scheme of things. On this view, to confound the manner and content of authenticity is to deprive ourselves of much of what we find

34

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

most rewarding. Taylor in fact concludes that to the degree that explorations beyond the self are what we most care about in life, we ought to “be trying to persuade people that self-fulfillment, so far from excluding unconditional relationships and moral demands beyond the self, actually requires these in some form.”35 The distinction between authentic kinds of authenticity—if I am allowed to express the matter in this way—and individualistic or elitist forms of self-absorption is not easy to settle. Suffice it here to call attention to the fact that the tension between the ideal of authenticity on the one hand and the often quite degraded forms in which it manifests itself in our culture on the other—the realization that the ideal is not being met in reality—can in itself increase our desolation. It is as if we were living with an inchoate realization that our very efforts to attain authenticity only distance us further from our goal—that the authenticity that we manage to achieve is somehow false or tarnished. In this sense, we live less in a culture of authenticity than in a culture that is based on an unspoken yet widespread recognition of the inauthenticity of our quest for authenticity. THE PRO CESS OF SELF-FASH IONING

The inauthenticity of our quest for authenticity might tempt us to abandon the very notion of authenticity as a social myth that causes us to chase a wholly illusory vision of what the good life is supposed to entail. However, I believe that there are useful ways to think about authenticity—as well as of subjective singularity—in the contemporary context, provided that we cease to associate these characteristics with deeply buried and innate personality traits, and instead identify them as qualities of a self that vigilantly enters into the practice of inquiring into the parameters and possibilities of its existence. In effect, insofar as the art of living in its traditional form linked authenticity and singularity to the ideal of an ever-renewed process of selffashioning, we have a great deal to learn from it. At the same time— as I have endeavored to communicate in this chapter—it would serve us well to be able to sidestep the ideals of self-mastery and antisocial-

THE ART OF LIVING

35

ity that tended to exemplify older conceptions of becoming a (distinctive and courageous) person. The rest of this book is designed to demonstrate that psychoanalytic conceptions of subjectivity and psychic life are particularly conducive to developing a contemporary art of living precisely because they tend to accentuate the ongoing character of the process of selfconstitution while quite vehemently bypassing notions of both selfmastery and antisociality. Even in its most culturally complacent forms, psychoanalysis tends to take seriously Jonathan Lear’s incisive observation that “whether we like it or not, we are always in the business of becoming human. We are making meanings about who we are, what things mean for us, which in fact shapes who we are.”36 This is to suggest that psychoanalysis recognizes that questions about how we should live our lives, what we deem important in the world, and how we might best approach our interpersonal and social milieus, persist even through our efforts to ignore or resist them, and that how we respond to these questions sculpts the contours of our subjectivity. As a result, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, the “business of becoming human” by necessity involves taking an interest in what it would mean, in the finest possible sense, to embrace the challenge of forming oneself into the kind of person who is thoughtful and self-perceptive enough to be capable of continuing self-fashioning. In the chapters that follow, I will illustrate that subjective singularity is less a matter of discovering the essence of one’s being—of accurately naming the elements of one’s character—than it is of feeding the inner spark that sustains one’s aptitude for self-transformation. It is a matter of coming to terms with the idea that the task of becoming a person—particularly the sort of person who remains both existentially alert and passionately receptive to the world—must by definition be recommenced over and again, for it is when we get complacent within a specific incarnation of the self, or when we get stuck in a specific conflict or trauma, that we lose the capacity for psychic renewal. As Lear remarks, “The process of becoming a certain kind of a person is life itself, and should that becoming come to an end, so does that kind of life.”37 On this model, if we wish to protect that

36

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

self ’s status as a sinuous entity that is capable of reaching new modes of being in the world—that is capable of adroitly pursuing its particular kind of particularity without the security of a final destination— we need to forego any firm conclusions about what our lives can or should entail. This of course does not mean that we cannot have hopes, ideals, or anticipatory fantasies, but merely that we need to remain agile enough to handle the unexpected. This manner of thinking about self-fashioning posits a certain “coherence”—even a certain existential integrity or dignity—to the self without at the same time delineating the attributes of this coherence in any positive manner. Instead, the self ’s coherence consists of its ability to effectively cope with the ever-threatening specter of incoherence— the fact that there is no stable center to hold together the shifting components of its being. By this I do not mean to argue against the idea that we possess a degree of self-consistency on the practical level of everyday life, for to the extent that we manage to sustain ourselves as distinct entities through time, we necessarily attain some psychic cohesion. Obviously, there are ways of going about our lives that we recognize as “ours”—that feel valid and compelling to us—and others that feel unfamiliar in ways that are even more disconcerting than the uncanniness of our dreams. Even if our habits and customary outlooks do not constitute a reliable or uniform whole, they do—to borrow from Christopher Bollas—yield a subjective “idiom” or “spirit” that is highly particular to each of us.38 Indeed, it is in many ways exactly this idiom or spirit that the art of living is meant to cultivate. This, however, should not be confused with the idea that our identities rest on secure ontological foundations. One reason that we manage to feel self-consistent even in the absence of secure ontological foundations is that the stories that we tell about ourselves—about the kinds of individuals that we think we are or would like to become—inevitably intersect with the larger cultural narratives that structure our lives. As I have already implied, the latter provide us with the conceptual framework within which to search for personal distinctiveness: we attain both imaginary and practical consistency in part by incorporating the social into our continuing efforts to

THE ART OF LIVING

37

assemble a life-story that is engaging to us. Self-fashioning, in this sense, is less a matter of excavating the self for its hidden qualities than of composing an identity from the myriad resources that we encounter in the world. Alasdair MacIntyre points out that “we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives.”39 This suggests that our personal narratives are only intelligible to the degree that they take place within the broader narrative fabric of our life-worlds: our stories can only engender a viable identity if they contain some sort of a link to the stories that hold together our communal context. Although there are numerous different stories that we can tell about ourselves—various ways of carving a place within the social horizon— we are always to some extent compelled to fashion ourselves in relation to social and ethical ideals and commitments. This explains in part why our projects of self-constitution tend to be goal-oriented despite the fact that the future is always intrinsically unpredictable. Though we do not know at any given point how the future is going to unfurl, we live our lives “in the light of certain conceptions of a possible shared future, a future in which certain possibilities beckon us forward and others repel us, some seem already foreclosed and others perhaps inevitable.”40 Our social embeddedness, in other words, narrows down the possibilities that the future holds by connecting us to collective conceptions of what is and is not possible. Here it is important to underscore that even though the socially situated nature of our subjective realities forecloses certain futures, we are never merely inert pawns of our cultural worlds. We are both initiated into culture—caught up in its representations, expectations, and norms of behavior—and capable of initiating actions in it. There is no doubt that to the extent that our actions take place within specific social contexts, there are always limits to the cultural materials that we are, either circumstantially or psychically, prepared to take advantage of. Yet the fact that only certain kinds of self-enactments are conceivable to us at any given moment does not compromise our capacity to constitute an idiosyncratic character. By the same token, the fact that the range of our actions is dependent on, and restricted by, the collective settings within

38

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

which we undertake them does not imply that we have no impact on the world. As Bollas astutely observes, “without giving it much thought at all we consecrate the world with our own subjectivity, investing people, places, things, and events with a kind of idiomatic significance.”41 Though the world calls us into specific self-configurations, we also configure (and reconfigure) the world to meet the requirements of our subjective universe; the world imposes itself on us, but we also impose ourselves upon the world. Like all storytellers, we are both circumscribed by, and able to contribute to, the larger cultural narratives that surround us. Against this backdrop, one might propose that to enter into the art of living means to develop a strong and piercing understanding of what most matters to us in our lives so that we have a resonant basis for choosing which narratives we wish to endorse and which to disregard. This is important because our choice of narratives is always linked to a particular array of existential possibilities: even if our options are always limited to socially conditioned narratives of what it means to be (or to become) a human being, what we decide—which narratives we sanction and perpetuate—can still make an enormous difference. The kind of mindful self-reflexivity that I have been promoting can, ideally at least, assist us in making the types of choices that we can be fond of—choices that we experience as psychically and existentially enlivening regardless of whether or not they meet the dominant expectations of our social environment. What might it connote, for instance, to choose personal satisfaction over the narratives of success and achievement that we have been fed all our lives? What might it signify not to want to follow the path that our talents appear to dictate for us? What it means to become a person—let alone a unique character—is far from self-evident. Just about the only thing that one can say with any degree of conviction is that the notion of an ongoing process of becoming a singular individual implies that we need to get used to the idea of being less than perfect. As a matter of fact, as I will endeavor to reveal in the next chapter, it is exactly the fact that we are not perfect—that we tend to feel internally lacking and incomplete— that renders our identities pliable and forward-looking by keeping our

THE ART OF LIVING

39

desire alive. In other words, the fact that we can rarely meet our existential aspirations in any decisive sense contributes to the art of living by ensuring that there is always something to strive for. On this view, being less than perfect sustains our attempts at self-constitution because it reminds us of what it feels to have aspirations; it gives us a lack or a limitation we can work with.

This page intentionally left blank.

TWO

The Pursuit of Happiness

The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one. . . . We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men themselves show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. —Sigmund Freud

THE CONUNDRUM OF HAPP INESS

HAPPINESS IS a notoriously elusive goal. We tend to talk about hap-

piness as what we would have if things were different in our lives—if we were able to attain a specific goal, acquire a clear sense of purpose, regain our composure, change our circumstances for the better, engage the love of a particular person, or recover something precious that we have lost. Happiness, in other words, tends to be tied to a fantasy of future deliverance—the idea that at some not too distant point the logic of our lives will click into place and give us the much-coveted sense of belonging, of being “in step” with ourselves and the world, that presently escapes us. This implies that no matter how many wonderful opportunities or pinnacles of existential intensity we experience in our lives, we are prone to feel that something is missing. In addition, when 41

42

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

we are not longing for what we do not possess (or possess enough of ), we are likely to be consumed by the terror of losing the few treasured things that we do in fact have. Moments of happiness are hence infused with a profound irony in that it is precisely when we manage to feel happy that we are most keenly aware of the fact that the feeling is unlikely to last. Insofar as each passing moment of happiness brings us closer to its imminent collapse, happiness is merely a way of anticipating unhappiness; it is a deviously roundabout means of producing apprehension and discontent. Yet Freud is undoubtedly correct in positing that happiness—wanting to become happy and to remain so—is what many of us regard as the purpose of our lives. This is the case even though we know that the more voraciously we pursue happiness, the more we open ourselves to the likelihood of suffering. In this, as in so many other things, we are deeply irrational creatures. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud remarks that suffering threatens us from at least three directions: from our own bodies (which are predisposed to pain, decay, anxiety, and dissolution), from the external world (which can assault us with a whole array of overwhelming pressures), and from our relationships with others (which can wound us in acutely debilitating ways). No wonder, then, that many of us learn to modify our pursuit of happiness by becoming reconciled to the idea that we are fortunate when we manage to survive our unhappiness.1 Yet implicit in Freudian psychoanalysis is the idea that we can do better, that we stand a chance of attaining a degree of happiness if we change our definition of what it is—if we stop thinking about it as a stable state of being that we might one day be able to attain, and regard it instead as a by-product of an always precarious process of grappling with the peculiar predicament of being human (what I in the previous chapter described as the process of becoming a person). As a matter of fact, to the extent that Freudian psychoanalysis regards self-division— most readily apparent in the key distinction that Freud draws between conscious and unconscious psychic processes—as foundational of human subjectivity, it cannot portray happiness as a matter of existential certainty. Rather, it asks us to think about it as a function of our ability to make the most of our status as beings of uncertainty.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

43

My aim in this chapter is not to solve the conundrum of happiness—which would in any case be an impossible undertaking—but rather to reflect on the ways in which it might be possible to reconceptualize happiness as a matter of dynamically coping with the contingent nature of our lives. I would like to propose that we make a giant leap toward happiness when we give up the attempt to make our inner discomfort vanish—when we relinquish the struggle to drown or deaden our sentiments of lack or alienation, for instance—and instead focus on the psychic lessons that this discomfort might be trying to communicate. Over time, such lessons might even empower us to transform what is painful or challenging in our lives into a source of existential wisdom. I would moreover like to suggest that being able to accept the intrinsic fragility of existence—the idea that there is no final redemption that will rescue us from life’s uncertainty—frees us to redirect our psychic energies into endeavors that have a chance of bringing us a measure of contentment. The mistake we often make is to think that happiness resides somewhere beyond the borders of our everyday life. This tendency to place happiness within a realm just out of reach may be related to the more general Western metaphysical and religious inclination to imagine that the foundations of life—what gives existence its ultimate justification— reside in an unearthly domain that can only be momentarily glimpsed through superhuman (transcendent) efforts. From the Platonic notion that all material phenomena are but imperfect reflections of a divine ideal to the Christian belief in a God in whose image we have been created and to whom we will in the end return, the Western imagination has taken comfort in the conviction that the various objects, entities, and beings of the world possess an origin that, even when it remains masked or mysterious, enjoys an absolute integrity. That is, although Western thought has been able to tolerate the idea that it may never be able to pierce the veil of appearances that conceals the originary “truth” of being, it has been more reluctant—until Nietzsche at least—to entertain the idea that such originary truth may not exist at all. When it comes to happiness, this propensity to postulate an invisible cause for every visible effect all too easily tempts us to regard it as

44

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

something that we can only approximate to the extent that we manage to overcome the mundane limits of our daily lives. However, placing happiness in an elusive sphere beyond our tangible existence traps us in an endless cycle of deferral: what we want is always a step ahead of us and no matter how diligent our efforts to close the gap between our ideal of happiness and the concrete realities of our lives, we come away frustrated. While it is the case—as I already intimated in the end of the previous chapter and as I will show in greater detail—that feeling imperfect, and having aspirations, can enliven our existence by giving us something to strive for, fantasies of otherworldly happiness are insidious in that, at their most powerful, they can actually prevent us from appreciating the beauty and radiance of our regular lives. They can make us feel that our happiness is diluted or compromised by daily life—by the concrete demands that distract us from our ideal—which suggests that the more robust our everyday existence, the weaker our chances for happiness. 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.”2 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. The ideal of transcendent happiness—the fact that we are inclined to conceive of happiness as a release from the discomfort, dullness, or heaviness of our everyday lives—can hence, ironically enough, keep us from happiness. It transforms our amorphous existential longing—our vague unease about the human predicament, for example—into a specific goal (that of fleeing our ordinary lives) while at the same time guaranteeing that we will never actually achieve this goal. In this context, it is only when we come to acknowledge that our lives can never be perfectly happy in an ideal sense that we create space for moments of happiness—that happiness as an existential possibility becomes, in

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

45

fact, possible for us; it is only when we stop mourning the ephemeral quality of our existence—the fact that there is no ultimate salvation that will magically conjure away the brutality of death—that we can fully enter life. From this point of view, it is the very impossibility of transcendence—the realization that our earthly existence is all we have got—that induces us to take an ardent interest in the world in which we exist; when we are no longer preoccupied by the promise of life after death, we become capable of living the life—the time before death— that we actually possess. GIVING UP THE CURE

One of the main reasons that fantasies of transcendent happiness are so appealing is that they occlude the possibility that human subjectivity—in its “universal” or “impersonal” structure—might well be constituted around the kind of lack or alienation that can never be fully healed or redeemed. I am here referring to lack and alienation as an elementary or ontological condition of human existence rather than as a function of, say, personal ordeals, abusive relationships, or unequal and oppressive social conditions. I obviously do not mean to imply that all of us are equally traumatized, for I am well aware that many of us are faced with forms of lack and alienation that signify far beyond what is existentially inescapable. And I also do not wish to propose that individuals who have been wounded in context-specific ways should not attempt to alleviate the effects of painful or distressing life histories. I am merely positing that human subjectivity, as Roland Barthes once conveyed the matter, is organized around a chasm “which cannot be closed, and out of which the subject drains, constituting himself as a subject in this very draining.”3 Life histories may be rewritten so as to mend or minimize the devastating effects of specific experiences of psychic injury. But there is nothing that can be done to erase the subject’s ontological alienation, for this alienation is something that none of us, regardless of our life circumstances, can evade. Yet we are easily seduced by the idea that happiness is a matter of overcoming our sentiments of inner lack and alienation—the persistent

46

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

sense that something is missing from our lives—and of attaining a state of existential wholeness. In effect, as I already emphasized in the previous chapter, we are inclined to take comfort in the idea that we possess an essential kernel of humanness (often characterized as a spiritual core or soul) that is fundamentally inviolable—that no matter how devastatingly we have been injured, we possess the capacity to heal the rifts within our being and regain our sense of completeness. This perspective is compelling not only because it validates the intuitively persuasive idea that happiness equals feeling complete, but also because it gives us something concrete to work toward in the sense that inner “wholeness” is a goal to which we can aspire. Even when we comprehend—as I am sure most of us do—that we will never be able to attain this goal, it might be tempting to believe that we can make progress, that we can over time approach a state of refined equilibrium that will anchor us securely in the world. It can be reassuring, perhaps even pleasantly tantalizing, to envision a secret oasis of serenity at the center of our being that we can aspire to divulge in all of its splendor. We may even imagine that the closer we get to uncovering this oasis, the more we will be protected from life’s disillusionments. Wholeness, in this scenario, comes to be synonymous with feeling safe and sheltered. It can even turn into an ethical imperative—something that we deem worth pursuing because we hypothesize that by so doing we can “purify” or “improve” our character. The same way as Platonic ideals supposedly express uncorrupted Truth, there might appear to be something untainted about the potential for happiness that resides concealed within the depths of our being. This notion is problematic on several levels, but what is perhaps most damaging about it is that it can lead us to overlook, or at the very least to underestimate, the manner in which our experience of lack and alienation contributes to the intensity of our psychic lives; it keeps us from recognizing that our persistent sense of being less than fully realized—our perception of the various fissures and shortcomings of our being—is not necessarily an impediment to self-actualization, but rather the very foundation of our capacity to take an active interest in the intricacies of the world. After all, without our awareness of lack, we

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

47

would have little curiosity regarding the things, objects, and beings that inhabit and make up the world; we would be unable to feel desire for anything outside of ourselves. On this view, it is our lack—and the desire that ensues from this lack—that allows us to approach the world as a space of possibility. As Emmanuel Levinas asserts, “The human being thrives on his needs; he is happy for his needs.”4 That is, it is only insofar as we experience ourselves as needing something from the world that we have a conception of the world as a place that can potentially meet our yearnings and that might accordingly have something valuable to offer us. Without our lack, we would have nothing to motivate us and keep us moving forward. In this manner, lack gives rise to a self that is open to—and ravenous for—the world. It seems to me that it is in the interval between our sense of lack and the possibilities that the world presents that we are able to engage in the all-important task of interrogating the outlines of our being— that we are able to participate in the process of becoming a person. This means that if it is in effect the case that, as I have begun to propose, happiness is a matter of knowing how to make the most of our status as beings of lack and uncertainty, then it is also in this same interval between the self ’s lack and the world’s possibilities that happiness becomes an issue worth contemplating. One might even say that it is only insofar as we gain a better understanding of what it entails to live in this space between the self and the world, between lack and possibility, that we can begin to reorient the fundamentals of our existence—that we can begin to work toward a new kind of philosophy of happiness. This philosophy may not be terribly palatable to those who equate happiness with notions of ease, comfortableness, and not having to make an effort, but it has the advantage of sidestepping false solutions. As Nietzsche might have said, it asks us to peer into the abyss and to proceed with our lives despite the frightfulness that peers back from its depths. To the extent that lack causes us to desire, it induces us to turn outward in pursuit of things that might add density and meaning to our lives (such as, for instance, new goals and preoccupations, interpersonal relations, love affairs, and modes of living). Because the world is filled

48

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

with marvelous objects that entice our desire—because the world, though certainly full of limitations and deprivations, is also brimming with possibilities—we are compelled to reach beyond our solipsistic universe; we are given the gift of attentiveness. This turning outward is, moreover, not limited to an encounter with already existing objects, but entails the strong aspiration to bring new objects into being. Indeed, it is possible to understand the intricate productions and fabrications of the human psyche as vehicles through which the foundational lack of existence assumes a positive, tangible form. Because we can never attain a state of wholeness, we are driven to look for substitutes that might compensate for our sense of lack; we are motivated to invent objects and figures of meaning that can, momentarily at least, ease and contain the discomfort of alienation. In this rather paradoxical sense, rather than robbing us of inner richness and vitality, lack is the underpinning of everything that is potentially creative and innovative about human life. Lack, in this sense, is the somber underlining of our world-shaping capacities. Julia Kristeva expresses this perfectly when she asserts that the imagination is more or less inherently melancholy in being founded on loss and that creativity represents a “triumph over sadness”—a way of coping with a desolation that might otherwise overwhelm us.5 She explains that our entrance into the imaginative universe of meaningproduction empowers us to weave a network of significations around our lack, thereby alleviating our paralyzing sense of sorrow by giving rise to a world of beauty and potentiality. “Like feminine finery concealing stubborn depressions,” Kristeva maintains, “beauty emerges as the admirable face of loss, transforming it in order to make it live.” It is, in short, precisely because we feel lacking that we are inspired to signify beauty. In addition, our attempts to generate beauty animate loss, translating it into a site of life (and gradually allowing us to move away from a sense of death and deprivation). In filling the melancholy void of our being with a web of captivating representations, we manage to “remake nothingness” by conceiving it as a space of possibility.6 Our lack and our creative capacities hence operate in tandem: it is because we lack that we are prompted to create and it is through our

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

49

creative activity that we manage, in however provisional a manner, to fill—and therefore to give concrete form to—our lack. There is, as it were, a direct link between lack and creativity, between our alienation on the one hand and our capacity to engender imaginative ways of coping with this alienation on the other. This suggests that our ability to dwell within our lack without seeking to close it—our ability to tarry with the negative, to express the matter in Hegelian terms7—is indispensable for our psychic aliveness. As a matter of fact, such tarrying with the negative could be argued to be the greatest of human achievements, for it transforms the terrors and midnights of the spirit into symbolic formations, imaginative undertakings, and sites of delicate beauty that make the world the absorbing and spellbinding place that it—in its most auspicious moments at least—can be. In this context, it is important to specify that the translation of lack into creativity is not a matter of dialectical redemption in the sense of granting us the ability to turn negativity into a definitive form of positivity. Our attempts to name our lack are transient at best, giving us access to no permanent meaning, no solid identity, no unitary narrative of self-actualization. Any fleeting state of fullness or positivity that we may be able to attain must always in the end dissolve back into negativity; any endeavor to erase lack only gives rise to new instances of lack. This means that the process of filling our lack must by necessity be continually renewed. It cannot be brought to an end for the simple reason that we can never forge an object or a representation that would once and for all seal this lack. However, far from being a hindrance to existential vitality, this intrinsic impossibility—the fact that every attempt to redeem lack unavoidably falls short of its mark—is what sustains us as creatures of becoming and what allows us, over and again, to take up the inexhaustible process of signifying beauty. As Kaja Silverman states: “Our capacity to signify beauty has no limits. It is born of a loss which can never be adequately named, and whose consequence is, quite simply, the human imperative to engage in a ceaseless signification. It is finally this never-ending symbolization that the world wants from us.”8 This is one sense in which we shape the world as much as it shapes us.

50

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

When it comes to ontological lack, our most constructive approach might therefore be to try to move beyond the idea that we possess an authentic self that lies buried beneath the trauma of self-division; that is somehow more primary, intact, or innocent than our current self; and that we might, with a little bit of effort, be able to restore to its former untraumatized glory. Yet we often work quite hard to devise strategies that allow us to suppress the uncomfortable idea that our selves are by definition torn and tattered. We make ourselves relentlessly busy in order to silence the uneasy voice within ourselves that keeps reminding us of our lack and that insists on asking what it is that we are meant to accomplish in this world. We adhere to conventional ways of doing things in the hope that someone before us has figured out the correct course of action. And we become absorbed in the hyperactive ethos of consumer capitalism in an effort to amass more and more of the “good stuff ” of life so as to “fill” the gaping void within our being. Because our tolerance for existential emptiness remains low, we are always on the lookout for distractions that we think might alleviate our impending sense of terror or boredom. Our devotion to the ideal of wholeness can thus induce us to invest our efforts in preoccupations that may offer a momentary relief from our feelings of hollowness and self-alienation, but that in the long run only increase our misery by taking us further and further away from solutions that could actually make a real difference in our lives. Earlier I stressed that our fantasies of happiness can keep us from happiness. Along related lines, our desperate attempts to repair our lack can prevent us from effectively confronting this lack. Instead of concentrating on how we might translate our lack into creative energy, we chase existential mirages that promise to surmount it, but that in the long run only add to the confusion of our lives by driving us to enact patterns of behavior that hold us tied to a vision of an impossible plenitude. Such frozen patterns may seem compelling without serving any productive purpose; our behavior becomes ritualized while remaining empty of meaning. This is one way to convey what it means to be caught in the claws of the Freudian repetition compulsion. Strangely enough, 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

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

51

we become capable of fully entering into the turbulent current of our lives. In other words, when we acknowledge that 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, but are free to direct our attention to weaving the tenuous threads of our lives into a manageable reality; it is only when we recognize that our lives are already more or less derailed that we can begin to live without the fear of getting derailed. Rather than striving to fix what must forever remain beyond our capacity to fix, we can begin to live with our existential predicament with a degree of poise and openmindedness. Ideally, we learn to turn our psychic resources toward the potentialities of the future rather than forever dwelling in the debris of the past, hankering after the kind of restitution that will never come. In this sense, coming to terms with our lack might be just about the best thing that any of us can do for our psychic well-being. THE UNCANNY WI TH IN

Conceptualizing human existence in terms of lack rather than of wholeness inevitably changes the way we think about and approach many of the most fundamental aspects of our lives. There is, for instance, an enormous difference between thinking about creativity as the culmination of inborn genius or divine inspiration and thinking about it—as I did above—as an always necessarily precarious effort to cope with the nothingness of being. What is more, the realization that lack has no definite or decipherable content—that it cannot be depicted in any unequivocal manner—underscores the idea that we are only partially intelligible to ourselves; it highlights the fundamental strangeness of our efforts to understand ourselves in a transparent way. Why, indeed, is subjective “truth” or intelligibility a goal for us? As Adam Phillips observes, there is something quite suspicious about the belief that life is “an epistemological project” through which we strive for more and more accurate knowledge of ourselves and others rather than, say, an experiment in finding pleasure, discovering beauty, or making a connection with the people we encounter.9

52

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

In this context, I am reminded of Michel Foucault’s argument that while many non-Western societies have developed forms of erotic art that aim at the intensification of sexual pleasure, the West has developed a science of sex that endeavors to ascertain the “truth” of our sexuality—that is in fact premised on the notion that this “truth” can grant us direct access to the mysteries of our being. Foucault maintains that psychoanalysis, insofar as it relies on a confessional structure that aspires to reveal the obscure secrets of our unconscious lives, contributes to this fascination with truth.10 I would maintain, however, that the spirit of psychoanalysis at its most insightful moments is to challenge not only the possibility of subjective truth, but also our very desire for it. It is of course a psychoanalytic commonplace to state that we are all strangers to ourselves. Insofar as psychoanalysis recognizes that much of what we do and wish for in our lives is unconsciously driven, it emphasizes that we do not always know why we act or think the way we do; because we do not have a clear window into our unconscious, we are frequently drastically mistaken with regard to what goes on in our lives. This is why Freud insists that it is often the most inadvertent, fortuitous, or superfluous elements of our being—those undigested (and indigestible) morsels of psychic life that emerge from the furtive folds of the unconscious—that contain the highest significance. As Jean Laplanche explains, “What Freud is aiming at is a kind of history of the unconscious . . . a history with discontinuities, in which the moments of burial and resurgence are the most important of all.”11 Freud reveals that it is frequently what we least pay attention to— what we ignore either because our awareness is engaged elsewhere or because we find the issue difficult to confront—that we should most interrogate. He asks us attend to those seemingly immaterial details that sneak their way into our discourse in oblique ways, or that persist despite our best efforts to exorcize them. In this fashion, he invites us to become responsive to those facets of ourselves that we do not recognize as a part of ourselves, thereby alerting us to configurations of psychic depth that we might otherwise overlook. Considered from this angle, an art of living might have less to do with composing a harmo-

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

53

nious or aesthetically pleasing masterpiece than with paying attention to those accidental details that somehow mar or thwart our attempts to become such a masterpiece—that stick out from or blur the clarity of the picture that we hold of ourselves. Phillips posits that accidents are worth paying attention to precisely because they are a way for the unconscious to speak its meaning, for suppressed or alien voices within our being to assert themselves through the mistakes we make. According to Phillips, Freud reveals not only that accidents are meaningful, but that we “use” accidents to communicate those meanings that we experience as most forbidden. That is, accidents disclose dimensions of our psychic lives that we ordinarily repress or disown because we are ashamed, confused, or threatened by them. As Phillips states, “the idea of accident—of the apparently unintended, the contingent—gives us access to otherwise unavailable desires or parts of the self.” In effect, to the extent that accidents get around our conscious defenses, they “become the best way, indeed the only way, of doing some things.”12 One could consequently argue that being interested in accidents is as, or perhaps even more, important to the psychoanalytic art of living as gaining knowledge about ourselves. Self-knowledge allows us to claim and improve some aspects of our lives, but other, more deeply buried facets of our being only divulge themselves—and only become open to modification— through accidents. Even though psychoanalysis believes in the importance of selfreflexivity, it does not advocate the possibility of full self-disclosure. As we have discovered, although on one level psychoanalysis allows us to attain higher levels of perception and self-awareness, on another level it is an exercise in becoming reconciled to the idea that we can never entirely know ourselves. This might in turn prompt us to reconsider how we relate to others, for if the quest for knowledge about ourselves is not necessarily the most useful way of going about our lives, it might be even less so when we encounter the unfathomable depths of another person. As Phillips asserts, it is not merely that we might violate other people by “our assumed knowledge about them—as in racist and sexist fantasy—but that it is misleading to assume that it is knowledge that

54

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

we want or that we have of people, any more than it is knowledge we get from listening to music. (Perhaps bodies simply affect each other, or evoke each other.)”13 Phillips hence suggests that the pursuit of knowledge not only imprisons us in deceptive and potentially hurtful circuits of projection—circuits in which conjecture and postulation take on the status and power of truth—but also bars us from forms of experience that might grant us immediate and unmediated access to the delicate fabric of our life-worlds. We seek knowledge while at the same time ignoring the possibilities for existential wonder that surround us. Along similar lines, Stephen Mitchell points out that we need to pay close attention to what we mean when we assert that we “know” another person.14 There are obviously many different ways of knowing someone, some utilitarian, others desire-driven, some superficial, others intensely intuitive, and there is little reason to assume that any one version of our image of the other—what we believe we know about the other—is the accurate one. In effect, the fact that the other can be viewed from various perspectives at once forces us to regard the other as a multifaceted and ever-shifting entity who is no less complicated, no less dependent on context and setting, than we are ourselves. Most important, it asks us to recognize that the other does not possess transparent knowledge of itself either—that what we deem uncanny or unknowable about the other is often experienced as such by the other as well. From this viewpoint, the idea that we could ever know the other in any certain fashion is a curiously arrogant assumption. And it is also peculiar in the sense that it is often precisely the other’s mysterious opacity that elicits our desire—that makes the other of interest to us—in the first place. Why, then, are we so devoted to solving the other’s secret? One reason is that we tend to think that understanding the other will allow us to forge a deeper connection with it; we tend to equate intimacy with knowing the other. But—and this is a less commendable reason—we also strive to reduce the other to a predictable set of characteristics that (we imagine) will persist over time because we tend to experience whatever is unknown as threatening and destabilizing.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

55

Santner in fact maintains that we insist that the other is knowable to us because, on a fundamental level, we are terrified to assume responsibility for what is potentially disconcerting and impenetrable about the other; our imagined knowledge regarding the other shields us from the fact that the other is a “bearer of an internal alterity, an enigmatic density of desire” that makes it radically inscrutable to us.15 Likewise, Bruce Fink asserts that when we are confronted by the other’s desire, we tend to jump to conclusions about what the other wants from us. The unknown nature of the other’s desire is unbearable to us, with the result that we “prefer to assign it an attribute, any attribute, rather than let it remain an enigma.”16 As soon as we name the other’s desire, as soon as we fix it into a definition that makes (imagined) sense to us, our unease abates. This is the case even if we are absolutely mistaken, even if our delineation of the other’s desire has very little to do with the actuality of that desire. In this manner, we prematurely—and somewhat violently—step into the space of the other’s desire, stifling the other’s ability to designate what it wants. We in fact transform the other’s desire—which can be an indefinite form of wanting—into a categorical demand; we translate a nameless or inchoate yearning into “a concrete desire, a specific want—in short, a demand for something quite precise.”17 From this perspective, the insistence that we “know” the other—that we have been able to accurately interpret the other’s desire—serves as a convenient and self-serving screen against knowing dimensions of the other that we might find bewildering. We seek knowledge about the self as well as about other people because we are trained to associate knowing things with having control over them. However, I would say that honoring what is unknowable about ourselves and others might be one of the best ways to promote what I in the previous chapter described as the singularity of being, for it seems conceivable that what is most impenetrable about human beings—what spills over or disturbs the borders of socially consistent subjectivity—is also what is most distinctive, most radically irreducible, about them. Santner in fact speculates that the singular self—the self that can “most truly say ‘I’”—enjoys an actuality, a nonnegotiable kind of “necessity,” beyond all social generality or classification.18 Such a self

56

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

defies cultural pressure in the sense that its energies cannot be translated into socially serviceable endeavors. In Santner’s terms, it represents “a rising to consciousness of a non-symbolizable surplus within an otherwise intelligible reality, a sort of stain on the horizon of cultural intelligibility.”19 On this account, it is when our knowledge about ourselves fails or falters—when we brush against those uncanny reaches of identity that we can neither name nor represent—that we touch the edge of subjective singularity (what in more traditional philosophies was called a personality or character). Moreover, it may well be that revering what is unknowable about ourselves serves to protect our status as beings of potentiality and becoming. After all, our willingness to stay receptive to what we do not or cannot know about ourselves brings us in contact with inner intensities that still remain unrealized; it is at the limits of our comprehension that we most consistently stumble upon what is genuinely startling or surprising about ourselves. If fantasies of transparent self-knowledge foreclose our capacity to effectively cope with those aspects of our existence that remain unresolved (and irresolvable), embracing the idea that parts of our being will always remain alien frees us to delve into the ambiguities of existence without any expectation that we will ever fully dissolve or neutralize these ambiguities. MAKING USE OF ACCIDENTS

Psychoanalysis therefore reveals that the solution to our decentered lives cannot be to “recenter” them by endorsing an idyllic notion of unambiguous or nonconflicted existence. Yet precisely because our lives lack secure foundations, because there is no essential core of personality that would be powerful enough to hold together our scattered identities, we are often quite desperate for existential strategies. What I have begun to suggest is that such strategies are not merely a matter of tolerating the contingency of our existence but, more profoundly, of recognizing that our insistence on security can, tragically enough, keep us from fully stepping into the rhythm of our lives. They are a matter of acknowledging that to the extent that we fear the volatility and transience of

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

57

existence, we can keep ourselves from living—that our attempts to mitigate the unpredictability of our lives can over time annihilate what is most fiery about them. As Mitchell asserts, our wish to control our existence, while offering an appearance of composure, “chokes the richness out of life.”20 The pursuit of control, insofar as it is directed at keeping at bay the imaginary monsters of our lives, introduces a certain “deadness”—call it an excessive stiffness or tentativeness, if you will—to our psyches, thereby draining our capacity for happiness. There are of course situations in which the monsters are all too real: situations in which the world assaults us with a devastating and heartbreaking insistence, thereby putting us into a constant state of alertness. As D. W. Winnicott already remarked, a subject who feels attacked by the external world—either by poisonous interpersonal relationships or by an overwhelming social context—tends to set up psychic barriers, to develop a “false” self, so as to protect itself from being violated.21 Winnicott asserts that this false self conceals the subject’s “true” self—a self that possesses enough psychic spontaneity to be capable of “creative living,” of the kind of existential limberness that is conducive to ongoing self-transformation. The “false” self, in other words, bears the responsibility for defending the viability of the “true” self. Winnicott’s notion of the “true” self is a bit thorny in the sense that it almost inevitably raises an image of the type of untraumatized inner intactness that I criticized earlier. Yet a careful reading reveals that the Winnicottian “true” self refers less to fixed attributes that would lend consistency to the individual’s character than to the continued elasticity of this character; it is less a matter of innate core attributes than of the subject’s aptitude for inner aliveness.22 It is precisely this aptitude that is ravaged by interpersonal or social trauma. The purpose of the false self, then, is to set up an impenetrable barrier between the true self and the world so as to defend the integrity of the true self. “In the severe case,” Winnicott explains, “all that matters and all that is personal and original and creative is hidden, and gives no sign of its existence.”23 In such instances, Winnicott specifies, “the false self sets up as real and it is this that observers tend to think is the real person.” Such a self may function quite effectively on many

58

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

levels of daily existence. However, it begins to falter when it is confronted by what Winnicott calls “living relationships”—“situations in which what is expected is a whole person.”24 The false self therefore fails to convince in relationships that presuppose a depth and versatility of being. It has lost its ability to meet the world in authentic ways. And it has lost its capacity to be at ease with itself. The undertaking of the Winnicottian false self could be likened to the efforts of any living creature to shield itself against external aggression. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud portrays an undifferentiated vesicle of an animate substance that is susceptible to external stimulation. He argues that such a vesicle, constantly defending itself against the possibility of excessive trauma, over time forms an outer “crust” that is so thoroughly “baked through” as to seem inanimate: This little fragment of living substance is suspended in the middle of an external world charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective shield against stimuli. It acquires the shield in this way: its outermost surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree inorganic and thenceforward functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli. In consequence, the energies of the external world are able to pass into the next underlying layers, which have remained living, with only a fragment of their original intensity. . . . By its death, the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate.25

Like the vesicle struggling to survive in the face of overstimulation from the external world, the false self dies (ceases to have the structure proper to living matter) so as to protect the deeper layers of the self from trauma. Yet the poignant tragedy of the false self is that even if its solid armor of self-sufficiency manages to shelter the true self by keeping the outside world at a safe distance, it in the long run prevents the subject from externalizing its inner world, thereby making it feel psychically numb, shallow, and devoid of meaning; the very exertions of the false self to safeguard the true self can make the subject feel more false.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

59

Extreme forms of trauma are therefore doubly insidious in that the subject’s efforts to defend itself against being injured can themselves injure it in profound ways. Trauma can in fact oblige the subject to focus on survival to such an extent that it feels that it has ceased to exist as a person; because trauma compels the subject to experience the world as inherently hostile and impinging, it makes anxiety—the sense that there is no respite from the world’s intrusiveness—an inexorable dimension of psychic life. Individuals in this predicament may find it next to impossible to relax their wakeful hypervigilance in relation to their surroundings even when no longer confronted by any immediate challenge or danger; a prolonged or repeated exposure to trauma can put individuals on the defensive for the simple reason that it causes them to anticipate, and brace themselves against, more trauma. The more fragile our relationship to social institutions of power— the more precarious our existence on the practical level of everyday life—the more challenging it is for us to meet the world as a generous space of possibility. What is more, even when we are not plagued by blatantly debilitating forms of hardship, the ordinary demands of social compliance can hinder our capacity for creative living. On the one hand, as I have sought to underscore, our psychic lives, including our capacity to take ourselves as objects of contemplation, come into being in response to, and remain alive through, the external world. On the other, social compliance can turn our lives into a deadening routine of recurring thoughts and actions that provide little occasion for genuinely restorative experiences. As a consequence, rather than viewing the textures and fine gradations of the world as an opportunity for self-constitution, we can come to regard ourselves as unwilling hostages of a game whose rules have been determined by others. As Winnicott remarks, social existence, though obviously indispensable for organized human communities, can induce us to regard the world primarily “as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation.”26 For Winnicott, this type of social compliance is a form of psychic illness, which suggests that the vast majority of us are unwell much of the time. As he claims, “social health is mildly depressive— except for holidays.”27

60

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

Our lives can thus become subdued or obdurate for the simple reason that collective norms demand a measure of conformity. One could in fact say that insofar as social compliance causes us to become caught in life-dulling habits, it represents a form of symptomatic behavior, for a symptom is precisely an indication that something in our psychic lives has gotten stuck in a groove. If we fall into selfundermining patterns of involuntary and automatic behavior—the Freudian repetition compulsion—it is because we are unable to break out of circuits of energy that have solidified into stubbornly inflexible patterns; our psychic energies accumulate and get trapped in symptoms, with the result that these energies remain unavailable for more innovative endeavors. Symptoms are a metaphoric and roundabout means of communicating what we find impossible to convey more directly. As such, they protect us from having to confront emotions or experiences that are too distressing to process. At the same time, to the extent that symptoms represent bottled up pain—pain that has not been adequately mourned—they deplete our psychic lives, making creative living a challenging undertaking; they drain psychic energies that could be deployed in more productive ways. Yet Winnicott posits that our capacity for creative living can never be entirely destroyed—that although our inner spontaneity can be compromised, it cannot ever be definitively extinguished. As a matter of fact, it is one of the principle tasks of the false self—its very reason for existing—to ensure that this does not happen. We have seen that the false self protects the vulnerable dimensions of the true self from being found and exploited. In this rather paradoxical fashion, the false self, though itself utterly incapable of creative living, carries the responsibility for sustaining and (in the long run) resuscitating the individual’s capacity for it. As Winnicott explains, the false self conceals the true self until it is safe for the latter to once again assert itself; even in an individual dominated by the false self, the true self is always “acknowledged as a potential and is allowed a secret life.”28 Winnicott hence insists that the distinction between creative and noncreative living is not categorical, but that we

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

61

tend to vacillate between these two existential modalities. That is, Winnicott suggests that even when we fail to live creatively, we retain the intuition that we possess the potential to do so at some future point. As he postulates, “In a tantalizing way many individuals have experienced just enough of creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living uncreatively.”29 Ironically enough, the very fact that we often feel disconnected from our capacity for creative living—that we are aware that something is amiss in our lives—is a sign that we are still psychically alive, that some untamed or unbroken part of us is still aspiring for recognition. Against this backdrop, one might say that one of the objectives of the psychoanalytic art of living is to restore our capacity for creative living, for the kind of inner spontaneity that allows us to make good use of the accidental dimensions of our lives. In the previous chapter, I mentioned that Nietzsche saw it as a sign of existential nobility to be able to translate accidents into necessities—to “consume” them in the course of fashioning a distinctive character. By the same token, one could maintain that the art of living that psychoanalysis advances relies on the idea that we can profitably draw the unintended or accidental details—including the anomalies, breakdowns, and interruptions—of our lives into the process of becoming a person. After all, “failures” of normal psychic functioning may well open unexplored existential territories by inducing formerly absent, hidden, or acquiescent inner potentialities to materialize and rise to the surface of our consciousness. By this I do not mean to minimize the fact that surrendering oneself to life’s radical contingency may only be possible from a position of relative (social, economic, and intersubjective) security. At the same time, I would like to take seriously Kristeva’s contention that analysis endeavors to transform the crisis of existence—the fact that our lives are by definition characterized by a high degree of existential insecurity—into a work-inprogress.30 Within this mercurial reality, our happiness depends less on how well or badly we tackle the myriad ordeals of our lives than on how dexterously we withstand the fact that the ground underneath our feet shifts constantly.

62

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

THE ECHO OF THE PAST

My analysis of Nietzsche already indicated that being able to make use of accidents in a manner that is conducive to well-being is frequently a matter of being able to bring the past—however conflicted, incongruous, or painful that past may be—to bear on the present in supple and life-enhancing ways. As human beings, we cannot avoid the fact that the past continues to speak in the present and that it in many ways dictates the contours of our future, including what we envision our options to be. Although there is a certain freshness to every new instant—although inner experience is sharply new at every moment— we do not ever encounter the world entirely unsullied, without a strong echo of the past. Moreover, insofar as it is the past that makes the present possible—or that, more precisely, makes possible a specific present—it is important for us to learn to live with the idea that the past is always less than ideal, that the losses, wounds, injuries, mistakes, and disappointments of the past are, and will always be, a part of our being. In this context, our existential assignment is to ensure that our past does not stifle, paralyze, or debilitate the present, that when the past is revived in the present, it surfaces in a palatable form; while the past cannot be discarded, it can be reconfigured and reinterpreted in ways that are conducive to happiness. The future feeds on the past, but—as Nietzsche showed us—we also look to the future to reread (and thereby to transform) our personal histories. In a certain sense, it is only to the extent that we embrace the future that the past remains alive for us, for the future offers a lens through which to reinvent the past. Even though the past can function like a weight at the bottom of our lives—even though it can pull us toward the deepest shadows of our being—we can aspire to resurrect it in constructive ways. We can even learn to regard the scars of the past as what makes us interesting (the same way that we might be magnetized by others who have been scarred), for scars—the scratches and abrasions of life—are a significant part of what renders us distinctive, what impresses our characters with a reverberating kind of singularity.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

63

Yet the process of fashioning a singular character is obviously not merely a matter of owning our scars, but frequently entails a concerted attempt to integrate psychic pain into a meaningful life trajectory. As Michael Eigen states, “We learn and keep on learning to work with our wondrous mutant selves.”31 We look for beauty, and, even though it often eludes us, there are times when we discover it in the most unlikely places, amidst the sedimented rubble of our more or less laborious—more or less bold and valiant—histories. We exist within inner horizons where the prospect of falling into despair or purposelessness remains clandestinely present even when we manage to transmute our experiences of defeat, dejection, damage, or annihilation into blazing moments of joy. If we are lucky, we gradually gain an appreciation for how destruction can give rise to unprecedented forms of vitality, how our capacity to survive distress leaves behind a smoldering residue that we can draw on to constitute empowering life narratives. Although the process of living is perhaps inherently damaging, we can learn to make use of this damage—the same way that we can learn to make use of accidents—to generate more vigorous forms of life. Many of us are of course familiar with the idea that suffering contains the seeds of a new beginning, that suffering refines us—distills or purifies our being, as it were—because it compels us to take a careful look at what we need to rethink in our lives. We in effect tend to regard suffering as a particularly efficient tool of character building, as something that washes away what is merely incidental or superfluous in our lives. The psychoanalytic art of living could be said to partake in this vision insofar as it intimates that suffering is, in part at least, what renders us the complex creatures we are. In addition, it underscores that the process of crafting a personality entails setbacks as well as triumphs; it is crammed with constraints, impediments, hindrances, and stumbling blocks of every conceivable (and sometimes even inconceivable) shape and form; and it blends moments of gratification with others of deep humiliation. It is accordingly not always a soothing or comfortable process. But when it comes to the necessity of pursuing our lives, it is all we have got. Psychoanalysis foregrounds the idea that we cannot predict, at any given moment, what we might find valuable in the future. Because the

64

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

meaning of our various experiences unfolds gradually, over a lifetime of destiny’s dappled and often quite capricious designs, we cannot determine ahead of time where we will end up. Our mistakes and mishaps may in the end turn out rather well; a tragedy may open up an inexhaustible well of creativity within our being; and reaching a limit or an impossibility of some sort may usher us into an unanticipated opportunity—one that we would not have been able to discover had we not reached a dead end. From this viewpoint, the moments when we feel fissured or broken are uniquely important in that they can activate realms of the imagination that provide us with a sharp-eyed perspective on the world and on ourselves. Indeed, the suffering that awaits us in the gloomy vales of life can give us a glimpse of psychic domains rarely visited or apprehended, asking us not only to confront our invisible demons, but also to acknowledge that our lives can develop in puzzling ways. Life is a series of small deaths and losses—a trembling string of instants that disappear the moment we experience them; in a way, life is swallowed up by the very process of living. What I have tried to illustrate in this chapter is that our chances for happiness are enhanced by our ability to enter into life’s flickering and ever-vanishing stream without being devastated by its ephemeral nature. One could in fact say that we fail at happiness to the extent that we are terrified of impermanence. Conversely, we approach happiness when we manage to enter into the erratic and vexingly fickle struggle of living with a degree of ferocity. This is the case in part because our capacity to tolerate life’s contingency—its accidents, chance occurrences, and stabbing moments of inner clarity—augments our ability to take pleasure in what is inimitable and irreplaceable precisely insofar as it is transient; it makes us uniquely receptive to the force and preciousness of the passing moment—the only moment where happiness as an existential aspiration can make any sense to us. We can even go a step further and assert, with Freud, that the fact that something is transient dramatically increases, rather than diminishes, its value. Instead of viewing the decay and fading away of what is lovely and perfect as a defect of existence, we can recognize that the

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

65

limitation that time places on our capacity to enjoy the object or experience in question only enhances its preciousness. Freud explains that we tend to be suspicious of the value of what is fleeting because we associate transience with the necessity of mourning; we connect the very notion of transience with the emotional pain of having to give up something that we love. Yet if we take the intrinsic fleetingness of human existence as an existential given, we can begin to appreciate the idea that, as Freud expresses the matter, evanescence only lends a “fresh charm” to what we most value in our lives.32 On this view, our capacity to mourn—or, more properly, our capacity to not be intimidated by the inevitable prospect of mourning—is what makes satisfaction and enjoyment possible; our happiness cannot be divorced from our understanding of mourning as a process that, paradoxically enough, facilitates, rather than impedes, life. Happiness, as I have portrayed it in this chapter, may seem like a daunting undertaking in the sense that it not only requires the capacity to withstand the idea of foundational lack and alienation, the willingness to work through pain and suffering, and the ability to embrace the always tentative process of molding oneself into a singular individual, but also the readiness to accept that all good things will eventually come to an end. Yet, as contradictory as this may sound, welcoming all of these seemingly arduous attitudes makes happiness something that we no longer have to work at—something that we obtain without any particular effort on our part—for the simple reason that they remove many of the most common sources of pain and unhappiness. Happiness is therefore less a privileged state of being that we pursue directly or deliberately than a consequence—a providential side-effect, as it were—of our ability to surrender ourselves to the tumult of living. Another way of stating the matter is to propose that we only approach happiness to the extent that we manage to relinquish our need to control the trajectory of our existence—that we resist the attraction of definitive conclusions regarding how our lives are supposed to evolve. Being excessively focused on regulating the course of our existence makes it difficult for our more passionate predilections— those wholly idiosyncratic layers of psychic urgency that connect us to

66

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

our singularity—to reveal themselves. As a result, it is only when we enter a process of shaping an identity without attempting to force the final outcome of this process—when we accept what, for the time being at least, is rather than insisting on how we would want things to be—that we participate in the adventure and disclosure of our distinctive art of living. By this I do not mean that we become complacent— for the details of our art of living do not divulge themselves to us without our subtle vigilance—but merely that the act of letting go of our drive to dictate the results of this art renders us receptive to its various forms of aliveness; it allows us to stay open to the self as a site of newly rising opportunities. An important way to nurture this receptivity to the self ’s emerging forms of aliveness is to develop a compassionate attitude toward our own suffering, particularly when it is caused by events and circumstances outside our control. As much as I have stressed the transformative potential of suffering, there may well be times when the best we can do is to allow ourselves to dwell within, and acknowledge the weight of, our affliction. By this I do not mean that we should not endeavor to ease our anguish, but merely that a compassionate stance toward our suffering entails knowing that there are incidents in our lives that have no deep purpose, that do not contribute to any future aim or aspiration, and that do not yield any profound insight no matter how vehement our attempts to interpret them—that do not, in short, in any way enhance our art of living. This is to say that as much as we should remain open to the idea that pain can guide us to something of value, we need to concede that sometimes certain experiences come about—or refuse to do so—without this in itself meaning anything at all. In this context, the fact that our lives are composed of fleeting moments can even work in our favor in the sense that we can learn to live through episodes of pain and suffering without letting them scar us irrevocably. We can learn to effectively reach for happiness in a world of fragile things.

THREE

The Remaking of Fate

For Freud . . . unconscious powers are the true psychic reality. This apersonal ground of our existence, he claims, we are called upon to make human, to make, each in his own way, into a person. —Hans Loewald

REP ET I T ION AS FATE

HANS LOEWALD posits that our existential task is to make human—

to make into a person—the unconscious powers that constitute the apersonal ground of our lives. At first glance, this characterization of the unconscious as “apersonal” may appear somewhat enigmatic, for what could be more personal—more idiosyncratically singular—than our unconscious desires and motivations? But the matter gains clarity when we recall that Freud frequently describes the unconscious as a mechanical force that compels individuals to repeat painful psychic and emotional scenarios without their conscious awareness, consent, or collaboration. As he explains: Thus we have come across people all of whose human relationships have the same outcome: such as the benefactor who is abandoned in anger after a time by each of his protégés, however much they may otherwise differ from one another, and who thus seems doomed to taste all the bitterness of ingratitude; or the man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friend; or the man who time after time in 67

68

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

the course of his life raises someone else into a position of great private or public authority and then, after a certain interval, himself upsets that authority and replaces him by a new one; or, again, the lover each of whose love affairs with a woman passes through the same phases and reaches the same conclusion.1

Freud remarks that individuals in this predicament—individuals caught in the tentacles of the repetition compulsion—give the uncanny impression “of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some ‘daemonic’ power.”2 In this fashion, Freud asks us to conceive of fate as something that resides within ourselves rather than as something that commands our behavior from the outside; instead of thinking of our destiny as being externally dictated, we are invited to regard it as a force that arises from within our own psyches. This in turn suggests that to the extent that psychoanalysis aims at psychic transformation, it by definition challenges us to (re)make our fate—or, perhaps more accurately, to become aware of ourselves as creatures who are capable of remaking our fate—while at the same time recognizing that we can never be the authors of our lives in any decisive sense. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate why this undertaking is less paradoxical than it may sound.3 This far in my discussion, I have foregrounded the creative and interpretive self-reflexivity that allows us to undertake the process of becoming a person—that enables us to ask the right kinds of questions about what makes our lives worth living and how we might best go about living them. In the pages that follow, I would like to work toward a better understanding of what it means for such self-reflexivity to encounter—and be compelled to interact with—the unconscious as an always necessarily opaque domain of primordial wishes, fantasies, desires, and conflicts. Freud’s notion of the repetition compulsion is designed to convey the fact that the conscious (which houses our self-reflexive capacities) and the unconscious (which mocks and undermines these capacities) represent two vastly disparate ways of making sense of human existence, and that it is often the tension between the two that gets us in trouble.

THE REMAKING OF FATE

69

Insofar as the repetition compulsion draws its energy from unconscious undercurrents that carry the residue of past traumas, it obliges us to experience these traumas over and again; it serves to bring the past to the present (and into the future) in a persistent and potentially corrosive form. The unconscious, in other words, does not understand the transformative character of time, but freezes affects and archaic experiences in an eternal present that wars with our conscious lives insofar as these presuppose a continuum from the past to the present and onto the future; whereas our conscious lives rush toward the future in a continual stream of becoming, the unconscious demands that the present revive the past in a wholly faithful and accurate manner. What remains unconscious can be incomparably tenacious, inflexible, and narrow-minded, for the characteristic activity of the unconscious is to keep the remnants of our psychic history alive in an unaltered state. One could in fact propose that the repetition compulsion, in causing us to act out past conflicts and ambivalences in an involuntary manner—in inducing us into configurations of thought, action, and behavior that are all the more perfunctory the more accurately they replicate what has come before—elicits our compliance as efficiently as do hegemonic norms and regulations. If social pressures induct us into lifeless and lackluster daily routines, the repetition compulsion can generate equally obstinate psychic rituals. This explains in part why the unconscious can be so disruptive when it manages to impose its demands on us without our conscious knowledge. I am referring, among other things, to moments when we act in ways that may not at all be appropriate to the circumstances at hand, as when we under- or overreact emotionally, direct our love or anger at individuals who merit neither, or misjudge what really matters in a particular situation. In such instances, the unconscious resurrects our past—particularly what is most problematic about this past—in the present in damaging yet entirely compelling ways, all too easily making us feel that our lives are being lived by some entity other than ourselves. Jonathan Lear explains that unconscious fantasies that organize our lives in obstinately repetitive ways are “world-structuring” in that they present a confining set of life possibilities as though they were the

70

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

only possibilities we possess.4 “The automatic nature of unconscious repetition pulls life toward the boring,” Lear asserts, “for no matter what happens it is almost always experienced as more of the same.”5 Lear specifies that a person driven by the repetition compulsion treats her particular version of the world as the only conceivable world in the sense that she cannot even begin to imagine how she could ever change things for the better.6 She is in fact more than a little intimidated by alternative possibilities. According to this account, “any purported field of possibilities is always a somewhat restricting fantasy of what is possible in human life.”7 It is as if our psychic lives were the sum total of our bad habits in the sense that what we unconsciously assume to be the limits of our lives ends up curtailing the range of our existential scenarios for the simple reason that it consistently directs us to certain situations, behaviors, and interpersonal relations while steering us away from others. Or, to express the matter slightly differently, it dictates how we seek and obtain pleasure in the world, thereby determining the very shape of our enjoyment. This is a perfect manifestation of what Roberto Harari, following Jacques Lacan, calls “a destiny compulsion.”8 To the extent that unconscious repetitions insist that the future should replicate the present in a predictable manner, they foreclose the future as future—as something that is by definition different from the present; they provide an illusory sense of security by making life seem knowable and foreseeable. They may even make us reconciled to our “fate” in the sense that we begin to believe that things happen in certain ways because it is our particular lot in life to continue living as we have always lived. We may even come to take pleasure in the fact that potentialities remain mere potentialities—that their fulfillment is always postponed, therefore remaining a tantalizing possibility. But this does not alter the fact that our capacity for creative living has been compromised. Unconscious repetitions signal that the current of our desire has gotten stuck in ways that rigidify our existence. One manner to understand this on the concrete level is to consider Christopher Bollas’s suggestion that pathologies of the mind induce us to select objects “that are congruent with unconscious illness.”9 Bollas explains that the object world is a lexicon for self-experience in the sense that our vari-

THE REMAKING OF FATE

71

ous object choices function as forms of self-utterance: we define ourselves by the kinds of objects we invite into our lives. Objects, moreover, possess the power to “play upon” us, to elicit assorted responses and to lure us into diverse types of relationships. Individuals with multifaceted psychic lives are likely to gravitate toward objects that deepen and expand the self—that augment the self ’s personal idiom—by providing intensely resonant experiences. In contrast, individuals who are trapped in unconscious patterns of repetition may not have an adequate sense of having a choice of objects: they may not be able to distinguish between objects that enrich them and others that deplete them. As Bollas proposes, such individuals “may narrow the choice of objects, eliminating those with a high evocative potential.”10 Moreover, to the extent that such individuals operate within a relatively unyielding psychic universe, they may feel compelled to impose their perspective on objects, thereby violating the integrity of these objects and blunting their life-altering power. In this manner, the repetition compulsion eradicates or renders inoperative potential objects (and subjective lexicons) before they have had a chance to materialize as possibilities. An individual in this predicament not only suffers from a radical contraction and strangulation of her world, but is also frequently plagued by the sensation that her destiny is directed by an invisible hand that keeps progressively tightening the shackles that hold her captive to a life that does not feel worth living. In this context, it is essential to stress that the insight that unconscious repetitions can cause us to consistently—and rather dexterously—set up the conditions of our own failure is not meant to downplay the degree to which our lives are shaped by our sociohistorical context, by our relationships, or by our gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, or economic status, among other factors. In other words, I have no intention of replacing external factors—chance events, accidents, historical conditions, cultural norms, or the wounding effects of social injustice, for instance—by the Freudian unconscious as the cause of our suffering. I merely wish to raise the possibility that the manner in which we unconsciously relate to the world—both as a structure of meaning-production and as a complex interpersonal space—might be

72

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

an important feature in determining how the world responds to us, what we find challenging, where and how we are rewarded, and who (and in what way) gives or withholds what we need, want, or desire. That is, I wish to highlight the fact that the unconscious organizes the opportunities and obstacles that govern our existence, and particularly the fact that it can propel us to seek satisfaction in ways that are from the outset doomed to disappoint us. It is also worth underscoring that the external details of our existence—how we are positioned in society, what we (dare to) expect from the world, how entitled or unprotected we feel, how easy or arduous our lives are on the tangible level of making it through the day—can become incorporated into our unconscious lives in such an intensely compelling way that they become internalized directives for our thoughts and actions. In fact, the more unconscious the directive, the more power it has over our lives. This is one reason that improving our external circumstances may not always be enough to alleviate our longstanding anxieties or to make us feel more empowered; to the extent that the unconscious is committed to preserving the past—even when this past is not what we would have chosen—in an unchanging form, it can prevent our inner lives from catching up with modifications of our external conditions. OWNING UP TO ONE’S UNCONSCIOUS

The past is of course always a part of the present in the sense that there is rarely such a thing as a “pure” present that is entirely independent of the events and inner preoccupations of the past. While it may be possible to experience the present in an uncontaminated mode during brief intervals—moments of absolute concentration, sexual ecstasy, or contemplative stillness, among others—these intervals are never permanent. What is more, such intervals are frequently characterized by a temporary suspension of self-reflexivity (some would call this oblivion) that marks them as distinct from the ordinary progression of life. Indeed, individuals—mystics and artists, for instance—who are capable of prolonging such states of all-encompassing absorption are rec-

THE REMAKING OF FATE

73

ognized to possess a special gift that differentiates them from the rest of humanity. This implies that, for most of us, life without reference to the past, and therefore without repetition, is an unattainable ideal. What matters, then, is how the past is repeated. Loewald remarks that when it comes to unconscious motivations, we need to ask ourselves “whether we are to be ruled by them or whether we can flexibly use them, in the haste and urgency of everyday life.”11 In other words, it is crucial to distinguish between passive repetition of unconscious motivations on the one hand, and the kind of active repeating that takes the form of conscious memory on the other. If unconscious repeating turns us into inert captives of the repetition compulsion, active repeating opens a space for the creative working through of past materials so that we can gain some distance from those components of our history that impede our ability to lead resilient lives. In this scenario, the past is no longer experienced as a frozen entity, but rather as a versatile pool of psychic deposits that animates the present as well as the future. The past, present, and future come to function, to borrow from Loewald, as “mutually interacting modes of time”12 in the sense that not only does the past become a dynamic dimension of the present and the future, but—as I suggested in the previous chapter—it can be reinterpreted from the vantage point of the present (as well as, potentially, the future); the past, like the present and the future, becomes amenable to revision and reconfiguration. In this manner, we move from passively reproducing our past to actively fashioning the possibilities of our present and future. In the first chapter, I proposed that we need to become critical readers of our social world so as to be able to better determine which of its components are desirable and which should be resisted. Along related lines, psychoanalysis urges us to become critical readers of our own unconscious. The same way as a literary critic can hone her interpretive skill in approaching a text, we can improve our skill in reading the multiple layers of our psychic lives. Like the literary critic, we will never be able to produce a correct or wholly truthful interpretation— this is not even the point—but we can improve our perspicacity. We can produce, if not more precise, then at the very least more engaging

74

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

and evocative readings of ourselves. In Loewald’s words, developing an active relationship to the unconscious fosters “the growing recognition of a differential between who I am, what I do at present, and who I may or should be, what I may, should or should not do in the future— as hoped for, desired, demanded, by myself.”13 One could then say that psychoanalysis, ideally at least, allows us to transition from merely having a future to having a say in how that future is to be lived. More specifically, in asking us to develop an active relationship to our unconscious motivations, psychoanalysis advances the seemingly absurd idea that we can in some measure become responsible for the manner in which the unconscious impacts the future. As Loewald proposes, psychoanalysis demands that we “own up” to our unconscious wishes and fantasies.14 We are, in other words, asked to recognize that the unconscious we are dealing with is our own—that no matter how alien or bewildering its messages, we cannot expect anyone else to carry responsibility for it. This does not mean that there are no more unconscious conflicts, but merely that we are able to develop a keener understanding of what these conflicts entail; as Lear emphasizes, we are able to take some action with respect to them, and consequently to “avoid being lived by them.”15 Taking responsibility for our unconscious is a function of being willing to listen to its communications with a degree of curiosity and welcoming attentiveness. Responsibility, in this sense, has little to do with knowing the difference between right and wrong; rather, it manifests itself as a certain fine-tuned receptiveness to those fragments of the unconscious that find their way to our conscious lives. It is less important—and ultimately perhaps rather futile—to reach ethical or intellectual conclusions about the unconscious than it is to create a space of inquiry where we diligently attend to how it continues to reincarnate the past in the present. At times, this is a matter of knowing how to bring what is beautiful or worthwhile about the past into the present without diminishing the luster and radiance of the original experience. Other times, it involves recognizing that, regardless of how passionate our attachment to the past, we cannot expect the present to reawaken it for us. We cannot, for instance, expect people and experi-

THE REMAKING OF FATE

75

ences we encounter in the present to fill in or compensate for people and experiences we have had to relinquish in the past. Or, to state the issue less obliquely, we must learn to give up past attachments so as to forge an opening for new ones. Unconscious fantasies can induce us to have unreasonable expectations for our lives and relationships (which can rarely match the extravagant aspirations of our fantasy life). It is for this reason that owing up to our unconscious entails remaining acutely aware of the kinds of demands we place not only on ourselves as fragile creatures navigating a world of increasingly complex practical preoccupations, but also on others as objects of our love or admiration. By making us more cognizant of the ways in which our interactions with others tend to replicate our past relationships, such owning up empowers us to become more perceptive regarding the particularity of our desire and the automatic manner in which we tend to enact this desire; it enhances our interpersonal alertness by allowing us to be mindful of the ways in which we can—precisely when we are driven by our unconscious wishes and fantasies—make unrealistic claims on others, as when we, for instance, assume that they can give us the meaning of our existence, make us whole, or conjure away some past hurt or disappointment. In all of these situations—and many others—it helps to be attuned to the power of unconscious motivations so as to be able to cope with the enigmatic density of intersubjective situations. P ERSONALIZING THE UNCONSCIOUS

Listening to the unconscious with a discerning ear may also allow us to gain insight into those aspects of our inner lives that have been repressed, overlooked, or underdeveloped, and that might consequently be striving for actualization. Loewald goes so far as to intimate that the unconscious contains our psychic potentialities in raw and incipient form, and that the process of becoming a person is essentially one of progressively taking over and integrating these potentialities on higher levels of psychic organization. In other words, the unconscious is not merely a remote region where archaic memory traces are lodged, or

76

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

where repressed elements of the past are safely tucked away, but also— and more important—an amorphous wellspring of elemental potentialities that continuously, throughout our lives, constitute “the active base and source of more differentiated and more complexly organized modes of mentation.”16 Loewald specifies that the unconscious is ego in the nascent state,17 suggesting that we can over time personalize—individualize, singularize, or make our own—our unconscious by incorporating it into the intricate weave of our conscious lives. As a matter of fact, insofar as becoming a person with a distinctive character, for Loewald, calls for ever-increasing levels of psychic differentiation, it feeds on this movement from the unconscious to the conscious, from the unrealized potentialities of our primordial past to the intricate feats of living that punctuate our more self-reflexive present. In this depiction, unconscious drives, urges, traumas, conflicts, and motivations are not discarded or dissolved—for as Loewald underscores, they are “part of the stuff our lives are made of ”18—but rather continually reworked, reactivated, and hauled into our conscious lives in new and innovative configurations. As he conjectures, “The development of a more conscious life involves a continuous appropriation of the unconscious levels of functioning, an owning up to them as potentially me, ego. This appropriation, this owning up, integrating the id into one’s life context as an individual self, is then a developmental task or, in a different context, an existential task.”19 It is easy to detect Loewald’s debt to phenomenological philosophy, for he in many ways presents a psychoanalytic alternative to the phenomenological understanding of what it means for human beings to actualize their potential and to live authentically. Phenomenological accounts often emphasize (as Nietzsche also did) that it is the subject’s responsibility to make the most of the fact that it is born into specific life circumstances—family situation, historical period, culture, and so on—that it did not select. Heidegger describes this predicament in terms of the anxiety of being “thrown” into a world of preexisting norms and meanings—a world that was not designed for one’s comfort, that one does not necessarily fully comprehend, let alone appreci-

THE REMAKING OF FATE

77

ate, and that one cannot control or manipulate in any significant degree. Within this framework, the subject’s existential challenge— what makes its life both demanding and stimulating—is to arrive at a measure of creative autonomy in relation to the external forces that threaten to determine its existence. In other words, although Heidegger acknowledges that the subject is always by definition a “being-inthe-world”—a creature whose life only makes sense against the backdrop of the particular world within which it endeavors to find its bearings—he at the same time underlines that it is the subject’s responsibility to ensure that it does not become entirely swallowed up by that world; it is the subject’s existential obligation to fend off states of noncreative complacency that would deprive it of the ability to keep asking itself what it, as a conscious being with singular ideals, passions, and practical concerns, finds significant in its life. Loewald demonstrates that in addition to being “thrown” into external circumstances, the subject is also “thrown” into an array of unconscious motivations that resist its every effort to discipline them.20 This is why he insists that the process of becoming a distinctive person includes accepting responsibility for one’s unconscious. The same way that Heidegger urges the subject to ensure that it is not passively constituted by its external conditions, Loewald asks the subject to take an active interest in its unconscious motivations to make sure that it does not end up being passively driven by these motivations. As a matter of fact, much like Heidegger, Loewald conceives the state of being thrown into the world as an opportunity—an opportunity that is simultaneously a grave responsibility—to take over one’s thrownness in a resourceful manner. As he states, “I believe that Heidegger’s concept of Geworfenheit—man is thrown into the world, unplanned and unintended by himself—and Entwerfen—the taking over and actively developing the potentialities of this fact—have grown in the same soil.”21 And to the extent that thrownness is an unconscious as well as a conscious matter, the subject cannot enter into the task of actualizing its potential in any meaningful sense without owning up to its unconscious. Only under these conditions, Loewald maintains, can the future “have a chance to be made my future, not the imitation of someone else’s life.”22

78

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

It is of course in many ways the very essence of the unconscious to escape our efforts to claim responsibility for it; without the intractability of unconscious motivations, there would be no human life as we know it. However, what Loewald suggests is that there is an enormous difference between allowing ourselves to be involuntarily flooded by the archaic meanings of the unconscious on the one hand, and being able to thoughtfully negotiate our relationship to such meanings on the other. Heidegger maintains that when we fail to preserve a critical detachment from hegemonic structures of meaning-production—when we fail to actively think about what it means for us to dwell in the world as socially embedded creatures—we are no longer able to distinguish our wants from what the cultural order tells us to want; we submit to a conventional assessment of what the good life should encompass. Likewise, Loewald reveals that when we neglect to cultivate an avidly attentive stance toward the unconscious, we all too easily become engulfed in habitual patterns of meeting the world that make it impossible for us to accurately identify our desires. This is why Loewald regards one of the principal goals of psychoanalysis to be to empower the subject to personalize its unconscious. This is one way to understand Freud’s assertion that the purpose of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious. And it is also a way to conceptualize what it means, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, to lead an authentic existence. Ultimately, Loewald aspires to conceptualize a life-enhancing encounter between the conscious and the unconscious. His analysis in fact implies that being able to imagine how the two might interact, intertwine, and interpenetrate without either being victorious at the expense of the other resides at the very heart of the psychoanalytic process of becoming a person. More specifically, the goal of making use of the raw potentialities of the unconscious should not be interpreted to be a teleological undertaking whereby these potentialities would be definitively depleted, consumed, or extinguished. Rather, it should be regarded as a means of generating a continual and ever-renewed exchange between the conscious and the unconscious. That is, even though Loewald believes that the development of increasingly complex edifices of psychic life is in part brought about by the conscious appro-

THE REMAKING OF FATE

79

priation of unconscious potentialities, he stresses that in the final analysis we are dealing with “a circularity or interplay between different levels of mentation”;23 if the conscious draws on unconscious energies, the unconscious also feeds on conscious experiences insofar as the latter inevitably leave behind an unconscious residue. Along closely related lines, Loewald underscores that we make a mistake when we equate the goal of personalizing our unconscious energies with the idea that these energies need to somehow be civilized. Instead, what is important is that the portal to these energies remains open. As Loewald explains, “If they are in danger of being unavailable—no matter what state of perfection our ‘intellect’ may have reached—or if there is danger of no longer responding to them, it is our task as historical beings to resume our history making by finding a way back to them so that they may be transformed, and away from a frozen ego.”24 Loewald thus suggests that though we need a relatively high degree of psychic integration—exemplified by the finely discriminating powers of the intellect—to function efficiently, excessive intellectualism leads to what he calls “the madness of unbridled rationalism.”25 Rational and self-reflexive psychic states are obviously an achievement of a very high order, but if we are to remain capable of growth, they need to be continuously replenished by the unruly energies of the unconscious. Indeed, if we are not able to return over and again to the unconscious as a font of creative energy, “rational thought becomes sterile and destructive of life, as it denies or ignores its own living source.”26 Loewald thus emphasizes that our existence tends to lose its meaningfulness—its evocative power to stir us—the moment it gets filtered through the uncompromising lens of rationalism, for an unmitigated rationalism renders our lives hopelessly listless and wearisome. More specifically, Loewald posits that the jaded and disillusioned rationalism of the average adult—what many consider as normal—deanimates our existence precisely to the extent that it bars live communication between the conscious and unconscious components of psychic life.27 From this perspective, creative living—our capacity to resist barren inner states—is a function of our ability to allow the unmasterable

80

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

elements of our psychic lives to momentarily impinge upon the wellordered outlines of our rational existence. In other words, incorporating the erratic impulses of the unconscious into the conscious fabric of our lives is less a matter of stamping the organized form of conscious existence upon unorganized unconscious material than it is of allowing unconscious energies to play themselves out in the realm of conscious life. Or to express the matter slightly differently, it is less a matter of repressing the asocial dimensions of the self than it is of forging a space for these dimensions to express themselves in socially intelligible terms. If this means that the troubling “otherness” of asocial energies is on some level being tamed or disciplined, it also means that the realm of social intelligibility is forced to stretch its borders to make it possible for this otherness to surface within its structured domain; the social is compelled to renegotiate its parameters to accommodate the disruptive emergence of the asocial. In this manner, Loewald’s model places a burden on both the social and the asocial, redirecting asocial energies into culturally valuable endeavors and demanding the social to remain receptive to the kinds of raw energies that may appear to imperil its integrity.28 TELLING STORIES

Psychoanalysis promotes our capacity for creative living by enhancing our facility in moving between conscious and unconscious levels of psychic life. Indeed, to the extent that psychoanalysis recognizes the unconscious as an essential component of psychic life, it shifts our conception of what it means to be a human being: rather than equating personhood with structures of consciousness, rationality, or the ego, it situates subjectivity somewhere between the conscious and the unconscious. From this point of view, our socially mediated identity is merely one aspect of our subjective makeup and what resides beyond sociality takes on a special significance. No wonder, then, that the analytic practice of free association—of reporting whatever comes to mind without questioning its value or soundness—is designed to enable us to better traverse the divide

THE REMAKING OF FATE

81

between the conscious and the unconscious, and to provoke influences and communications to flow in both directions. On the one hand, free association allows us to relax the controls of our conscious mind—to momentarily abandon the structured organization of our rational existence—so as to gain access to the more unstructured energies of the unconscious. On the other, free association could be argued to be a sublimatory activity in that it brings unconscious energies into the ordered network of language; it relies on the power of language to give form to formlessness; and it provides us with a linguistic safety-net within which our affects become nestled. That is, analysis facilitates regression—including the reliving of past traumas—because we know that we will never fall irrevocably, that the encoded schemas and conventions of language stand ready to pull us back to the structured realm of social life. Psychoanalysis takes unconscious communications (slips of tongue, dreams, fantasies, ambiguous expressions, etc.) as—or more— seriously than the stories we tell about ourselves on the conscious level. For many psychoanalysts, unconscious communications are in fact the only “proper” domain of analysis. However, I would say that even stories or self-narratives that do not explicitly bring up unconscious meaning—that do not invite interpretation in a classically Freudian sense—may be valuable because they are one of the main mechanisms through which (potentially overwhelming) unconscious energies are transformed into verbal communication. In the same manner that a writer might capture imprecise and fleeting impressions within the delicate syntax of sentences, or a painter might conjure up a striking image out of a jumbled assortment of colors, the “talking cure” draws the diffuse energies of the unconscious into the signifier’s trajectory. In this manner, language becomes a medium that allows the conscious and unconscious realms to come together in a fluid manner. From this viewpoint, self-stories are effective not so much because they help us make sense of our lives, but because they give us access to the spirited liveliness of language. Indeed, to the extent that our identities are tied to discursive structures, it could be argued that the mobility of language is directly linked to the flexibility of being. In

82

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

this sense, psychoanalytic storytelling is a way to practice creativity. One might even contend that one of the principal purposes of psychoanalysis is to kindle our passion for the production of meaning. To the degree that psychoanalysis relies on the power of language to reanimate a dead or a suffocating psyche—to the degree that it allows us to resume stories that have congealed into unyielding patterns or become so devastating as to be unlivable—it actively exploits the idea that our lives can be signified and resignified from various perspectives. This openness to resignification in turn gives us a compelling means to think about psychic potentiality in the psychoanalytic context. Whereas traditional philosophies of the self frequently struggle in vain to elucidate the workings of potentiality beyond the nebulous claim that as human beings we automatically possess it, psychoanalysis offers a concrete understanding of its operations by highlighting the signifier’s inexhaustible capacity to engender new forms of meaning. In this sense, potentiality resides within, and materializes through, structures of language. Its status is transient—tied to the ebb and flow of the signifier—rather than ontological. But this does not in the least detract from its capacity to awaken the dormant recesses of our psychic lives. Psychic potentiality is therefore in part a function of our ability to tell stories and then to retell (from a different standpoint) the stories that we have already told. As I have been underlining all along, such stories are not designed to constitute an immaculate life history. Rather, they weave intricate webs of discourse that provide an (always provisional) way to go on with our lives. As Adam Phillips observes, analysis, in foregrounding the fundamental unknowability of human beings, teaches us “the impossibility of convincingly plotting lives,”29 of either giving a faithful depiction of the past or of predicting the future. As a matter of fact, life-stories that aspire to organize the diverse threads of our lives into a rational and consistent schema only function as defenses that construct ideal selves while at the same time keeping us from productively confronting the ambivalences and inconsistencies of our psychic lives. They deprive us of the capacity to break through the boundaries of the conscious self, with the result that we remain closed to insights that can only be attained by piercing the membrane

THE REMAKING OF FATE

83

that holds together our familiar and all-too-reasonable life-worlds. Such coherent self-representations may provide a comforting sense of security, but ultimately they shut down, rather than open up, our access to the unconscious. This explains why one of the objectives of psychoanalysis is to show us that our lives cannot be finalized or rationalized by the telling of logical stories.30 It is of course impossible to live without some sort of a story about one’s life, and such stories do tend to exhibit an illusory cohesiveness. Indeed, the self in many ways comes into being through processes of narrativization in the sense we have no identity prior to, and apart from, the stories that we tell about ourselves. Such stories, among other things, sustain our sense of historicity, of who we have been through the passage of time. It is, moreover, quite difficult not to conceive of our lives in terms of progress narratives. As Phillips remarks, it is surprisingly challenging not to think about the good life in terms of a successful negotiation of a developmental project rather than as “something that we make up as we go along, according to our wishes, in endlessly proliferating and competing versions, the unconscious . . . feeding us our best lines.”31 Against this backdrop, what is particularly noteworthy about psychoanalysis as a philosophical model is precisely the fact that it encourages us to experiment with the notion of making it up as we go along. Analysis lifts the rational constraints that normally govern our lives so as to allow us to enter into deliberations that we may not ordinarily dare to entertain. In Phillips’s rendering, analysis is less a matter of helping people get back on track (whatever that would mean) than it is an opening for dynamic conversations that enable them “to understand what stops them from having the kinds of conversations they want, and how they have come to believe that these particular conversations are worth wanting.”32 The fact that psychoanalysis offers us an imaginative space where multiple—and sometimes even conflicting—stories about the self become possible means that it provides a rare opportunity for precisely the kind of open-ended process of self-fashioning that I have been advocating in this book. The realization that life-stories can be told in various ways, that they are full of ruptures, uncertainties, and inconsistencies,

84

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

that they change over time, and that they can be retroactively revised, enables us to dynamically engage in the task of building our own personal mythology of what it means to be a person. What I have attempted to convey in this chapter is the idea that an important part of this task is our growing awareness of the ways in which we are (in a limited and very particular sense) capable of remaking our fate. This awareness may in fact be the single most important part of the psychoanalytic attempt to craft a self. Analysis provides us with a means to play with narratives, to rearrange the fragments of our lives into tentative yet compelling patterns, and in so doing to rewrite our past—as well as our present and future—many times over; it gives us access to a provisional kind of selfknowledge that is creative precisely to the extent that it is inconclusive. On this view, our identities acquire depth and vitality not from any innate kernel of being, but from a gradual layering of stories. This in turn implies that the most current story that we tell about ourselves is merely the most recent draft of our life. OP ENING THE FIELD OF POSSIBILI T IES

To the degree that psychoanalysis aspires to allow us to rewrite our fate—that it endeavors to empower us to create space for alternative life plots and directions—it seeks to dissolve unconscious fantasies that organize our world in a confining manner. As Lear astutely postulates, analysis, on its most basic level, is a process of opening up the “possibility for new possibilities.”33 By this he means that the transformation of psychic life that analysis attempts to accomplish is meant to offer the individual a more imaginatively lithe sense of life’s potentialities. It deliberately creates fissures in the individual’s dearest and most trenchantly reenacted fantasies so as to provide an opening for inner reorganization. The subject who is used to operating in the world according to a predetermined set of possibilities is gradually persuaded to expand the parameters of what it finds conceivable so that fresh kinds of thoughts, actions, and modes of relating become plausible. If, as Lear proposes, we “think of a person’s world as the total structure of her possibilities”34—as the collection of all the life scenarios and ways of

THE REMAKING OF FATE

85

being that she is able to envision—analysis serves as one means of reconfiguring that world. From this point of view, the possibility for new possibilities is not merely “an addition of a specific possibility to the world”; rather, “it is an alteration in the world of possibilities.”35 One way to understand what it means to restructure our relationship to the world is to foreground the fact that how we fantasmatically conceptualize the world—what Lacan describes as our imaginary relationship to the world—may not have a whole lot to do with how the world actually is. This implies that if we are to begin to live in the world in more creative and ethically responsible ways, we need to learn to recognize the world as separate from our fantasies; we need to learn to respect the integrity of the world apart from our projections and unconscious distortions. In concrete terms, this might mean that we need to learn to treat other human beings as entities that have identities, desires, opinions, and patterns of being that are entirely independent of us. This in turn requires that we tolerate a degree of separation from others—that we recognize that others possess the kind of poignant singularity that has nothing whatsoever to do with our needs, wishes, or fantasized fulfillment. As a matter of fact, it may well be that it is only insofar as we internalize this insight that we become capable of genuine relationships—relationships that do not endeavor to consume the other or to reduce it to a narcissistic mirror for the self but that, rather, allow the other to persist as an autonomous entity. When we revise the manner in which we interact with the world as a structure of possibility (or impossibility), we may realize that we have more options—that the field of possibilities is wider—than we are accustomed to thinking. We may, for instance, become aware of inclinations that we never realized we had, develop new interests and priorities, or begin to relate to others in more discerning and enlightened ways. By the same token, we may come to recognize that there are certain desires or blueprints of being without which we do not feel like “ourselves.” In a different context, Harry Frankfurt observes that discovering what we are may be “a matter of discovering what we must be.”36 Frankfurt is referring to the fact that there are things in our lives that we cannot avoid doing—that we do against our will, as it were—

86

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

even when we are ostensibly pursuing wholly different ends. Frankfurt’s objective in making this argument is to stress, correctly enough, that necessity—feeling compelled to do something—does not inevitably undermine human agency, but is in many ways essential to it in the sense that without boundaries to our freedom, there would be no shape to our existence; we would be paralyzed by the lack of limits. But it might be useful to add—and Frankfurt to a large extent acknowledges this37—that “what we must be” is at least as much, and quite possibly more, a matter of unconscious determinations than of conscious acts of willing; as we have seen, what our unconscious desires is much more powerful than what we can consciously—as agents of will—make ourselves desire. What we most care about in the world—and particularly what we cannot help caring about on the unconscious level—influences our fate by shaping us into the sorts of persons we are. Consequently, becoming astute readers of our unconscious can help us to better comprehend why our lives have evolved the way they have. As I have tried to communicate, this is not a matter of gaining transparent self-understanding, but rather of cultivating a keen awareness of how we might best stay attuned to our unconscious motivations. Indeed, if the pursuit of self-knowledge frequently fixes us into a stable fantasy of who we are (or should become), remaining connected to our unconscious allows us to embrace the process of self-becoming while simultaneously foregoing the fantasy of definitive self-knowledge. Furthermore, it obliges us to admit that even though the choices that we feel compelled to make during the course of our lives may not be “ours” in any conscious sense—even though they may arise from unconscious motivations that we cannot fully control—they nevertheless have significant consequences; it alerts us to the fact that how we go about making choices—and how aware we remain of the unconscious underpinnings of those choices—makes a difference not only to us, but also to others close to us. Staying connected to our unconscious allows us to begin to refuse the position that we have been assigned in the game of destiny. That is, even when we cannot change the external world, we can alter the ways in which we relate to this world, and in this manner, indirectly,

THE REMAKING OF FATE

87

the ways in which the world responds to us. In other words, we can mobilize our psychic histories in such a fashion that old materials are recycled into new settings and animated in untried and unfamiliar configurations. From this stance, the experience of working through is by definition one of loss, for if old materials are to become an affirmative part of the present, their ancient incarnations need to be dispersed; to alter our fate, we must be prepared to mourn those parts of ourselves that no longer serve a purpose or that can only harm us. I have implied that to a limited extent we have the power to recreate a new life out of the elements of the old. This is why overcoming unconscious fantasies that impoverish our world is an essential component of the psychoanalytic art of living. Indeed, if we, generally speaking, conceive of art as an imaginative space where potentiality materializes in concrete form—where something tangible emerges from a field of possibilities—we can discern that analysis is an artistic practice in exactly this sense: it is intended to help us bring out into the realm of actuality some of the potentialities contained in our psychic life. In presenting the self as capable of constant renewal, I do not mean to suggest that change is always easy to achieve. As we have seen, the defensive nature of psychic fixations and repetition compulsions makes certain forms of transformation very difficult indeed. In fact, one advantage of psychoanalysis over more traditional forms of the art of living is precisely that it has a compelling theory of why change is sometimes so arduous to bring about—why our beliefs, behaviors, and modes of being can display a stubborn persistency in the face of our conscious efforts to alter or eradicate them. Yet as much as psychoanalysis foregrounds our vulnerability in relation to unconscious patterns, it concurrently accentuates the inventiveness and tenaciousness of the human spirit. On the one hand, psychoanalysis makes it practically impossible to think about agency in the traditional sense of having mastery over our thoughts and actions. On the other, to the extent that psychoanalysis respects ideals of singularity and personal authenticity, that it believes in the possibility of inner rejuvenation, and that it advocates taking responsibility for the unconscious, it presupposes that we can productively intervene in the disclosure of our destines.

88

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

The psychoanalytic remaking of fate diverges from philosophical accounts of self-fashioning primarily in that it draws the unconscious into the process of becoming a person. This implies, among other things, that it has an entirely different understanding of what it means to possess agency. One could perhaps say that if the philosophical art of living is centered around the act of becoming the poets of our lives, its psychoanalytic counterpart allows us to take advantage of flashes of poetic insight—of the imaginative potentialities of the psyche—without getting caught up in the notion of creating a masterpiece. Its genius resides in the fact that it enables us to embark upon the task of constructing a singular identity while time and again reminding us of the utter futility of all fantasies of self-mastery. As a matter of fact, to the extent that the psychoanalytic subject is one who by definition shapes itself without guarantees—who enters into the process of self-constitution without knowing the outcome of that process—we are obliged to reconcile ourselves to the fact that agency in any traditional sense is inherently unattainable. Yet accepting the limits of agency does not suggest that we cannot find meaning, value, and beauty in the world, that satisfaction escapes us, or that we are incapable of creative living. Precisely because our lives can never be willed into a predictable mold, they remain satiated by potentialities that can either be ignored or developed, discarded or pursued. How we choose to take up these potentialities determines our fate. As Phillips puts the matter, the fact that we are not going anywhere in particular “is not so much a cause of grief as an invitation to go on inventing the future.”38

FOUR

The Fall of Fantasies

The question of the sovereign good is one that man has asked himself since time immemorial, but the analyst knows that it is a question that is closed. Not only doesn’t he have that sovereign good that is asked of him, but he also knows that there isn’t any. —Jacques Lacan

THE GIF T OF CREAT IVI T Y

I ARGUED in chapter 2 that existential insecurity is an inevitable

component of psychic life. In chapter 3, I outlined what it might mean, from a psychoanalytic perspective, to remake one’s fate. I would now like to consider how these two ideas come together in the thought of Jacques Lacan—one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. In an attempt to honor the broadly philosophical ethos that I have tried to develop in this book, I will limit my comments to Lacan’s early work,1 and more specifically to a single aspect of his notoriously opaque writings, namely the idea that narcissistic fantasies structure our sense of “reality” in deceptive and limiting ways. On the one hand, such fantasies appease our anxiety about the contingent foundations of existence. On the other—and precisely to the extent that they replace the anxiety of uncertainty by a misleading sense of certainty—they curtail what we find existentially possible. As a result, from a Lacanian viewpoint, it is only the fall of our most 89

90

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

cherished fantasies—particularly of the idea that there is some “sovereign good” that is capable of shielding us from the terror of living— that makes possible the kind of renegotiation of destiny that Loewald links to actively owning up to one’s unconscious. Indeed, one reason I wish to focus on Lacan in this chapter is to draw attention to the conceptual parallels between him and Loewald, if for no other reason than to dispel the common (mis)conception that these two theorists inhabit entirely different galaxies of the psychoanalytic universe. It is well known that Lacan incurred the wrath of generations of so-called ego-psychologists—exactly the approach that Loewald could be claimed to exemplify—when he asserted that the latter were hopelessly misguided in their efforts to enhance their patients’ well-being by healing their inner lack and alienation. Lacan insisted that psychoanalysts who endeavored to assuage the subject’s lack by reinforcing the ego—by helping the subject feel more secure and flawlessly integrated—had drastically misinterpreted the principal tenets of Freud’s teachings. More specifically, Lacan suggested that every attempt to fill or cover over the subject’s lack only distanced the subject further from the possibility of accurately reading its desire. Because Lacan understood the ego to be a defensive edifice that consistently resorts to misleading fantasy formations to shelter the subject from having to accept the realities of its psychic predicament—particularly the idea that lack is a necessary foundation of its identity—he believed that any concession to the ego’s logic would merely make the subject suffer more in the long run. Yielding to the demands of the ego, in other words, would only perpetuate the deep-seated fantasies that make it difficult for the subject to come to terms with the uncanny idea that unfulfilled desire, and the resulting agitation, are immanent to human existence. The objective of psychoanalysis, for Lacan, was therefore not to overcome lack by strengthening the ego, but rather to work through, and gradually break down, the elaborate fantasies that keep the subject from imaginatively facing the challenges of its existential2 situation. The annoyance of Lacan’s adversaries was understandable. Not only did Lacan seem to attack the (intuitively quite reasonable) conviction that psychoanalysis was designed to make individuals feel bet-

THE FALL OF FANTASIES

91

ter about their lives, but his basic message—the idea that ultimately there was no cure for the subject’s lack—sounded unnecessarily callous, particularly to analysts who had been trained to mend injured egos and to prop up the subject’s narcissistic sense of itself as a lovable entity. However, it is important to note that much of the tension between Lacan and his detractors stems from a fundamental misunderstanding regarding what he means by lack. Rather than addressing lack as a consequence of specific childhood traumas, abusive personal histories, or unfair and oppressive social conditions—as many other psychoanalytic schools do—Lacan is concerned with lack as the ontological underpinning of human existence. Like many phenomenological philosophers, Lacan is interested in what it means for human beings to face their radical negativity or nothingness, and to wrestle—in the sense that I described in chapter 2—with the recognition that their lives are built on unstable ground. To put the matter in more rigorously theoretical terms, Lacan endeavors to understand the implications of the fact that human beings, by definition, fail to reconcile the concrete phenomenality of being with the abstract ideality of Being, with the aspiration to attain absolute existential fullness. It is precisely because Lacan is more interested in the psychic effects of ontological lack than he is in the tragic consequences of traumatic life-histories that the suggestions that he offers to the subject’s predicament tend to be incomprehensible—and may at times even seem irresponsible—to those who regard the goal of psychoanalysis to be to work through forms of psychic wounding that ensue from hurtful familial or sociocultural conditions. One might say that instead of regarding psychoanalysis primarily as a therapeutic method, Lacan envisions it as a profoundly philosophical undertaking that—a bit like traditional renderings of the art of living—possesses the potential to revise the subject’s perception of the basic orientation of its existence. By this I do not wish to suggest that Lacanian theory offers us advice on how to live our lives. Indeed, if anything, Lacan reveals that there is no particular philosophy of existence that is capable of providing us with the answers that we are looking for. However, I think that Lacan would not necessarily disagree with what I have been proposing

92

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

all along, namely that psychoanalysis opens a space for the kind of selfreflexivity that enables us to begin to ask the right kinds of questions. For Lacan, such questions are often directed at unveiling the always peculiar workings of our desire. As I will illustrate, the purpose of obliterating the subject’s illusory convictions about its ontological security is to create an opening for the “truth” of its desire—for unconscious communications that break through the deceptive edifices of the ego. That is, if Lacan is so intent on tearing down the ego, it is because he believes that only by so doing is it possible to release desire from the tightly woven nexus of fantasy that depletes the subject’s psychic life. And he believes that it is only on the ruins of the ego’s fantasmatic defenses that the subject can begin to rebuild its existence along lines that capture the momentum of its desire. One of Lacan’s greatest innovations was to connect the subject’s constitutive negativity to language—to collective structures of signification and meaning-production—in ways that provide a pioneering hypothesis of why and how lack comes to motivate the subject’s behavior in the world. Lacan explains that the subject’s sense of lack results from the processes of language acquisition that socialize the human infant into cultural systems of meaning—what Lacan calls the symbolic order (or “the Other”). Lacan proposes that in the preverbal state that precedes language acquisition, the child is not yet capable of differentiating between itself and the people and objects that surround it. It consequently possesses neither an inner life nor a social awareness. For these to emerge— for the child to enter a fully human existence—it needs to undergo a course of separation that teaches it to recognize itself as distinct from the world. Freud theorized this course of separation in terms of the Oedipus complex as a mechanism that severs the child’s dependence on its surroundings by forcing it to confront the painful fact that certain objects— most notably the mother or the father—remain erotically forbidden. Lacan in turn emphasizes that it is by internalizing the significatory codes of the sociosymbolic world that the child becomes aware of cultural interdictions and comes to regard itself as a discrete entity. In Lacanian terms, the process of internalizing the codes of language brings the child’s psychic life into being, making it capable of

THE FALL OF FANTASIES

93

producing meaning. In the same way as the Oedipus complex transforms the child from a creature ruled by chaotic primordial drives to one who enacts desire in culturally intelligible ways, language acquisition inserts the child into the world of collective rules and regulations (the world of the symbolic Other).3 This process is necessary not only because it teaches the child to conduct itself as a social and intersubjective entity, but also because it gives rise to more complex and advanced levels of internal organization. But it can also be coercive in the sense that it initiates the child into normative—and frequently quite unequal and repressive—collective structures, punishing all attempts to deviate from what the cultural order deems right and proper; it carries the force of prohibition, giving the child its first bitter taste of wanting what it cannot have.4 As a consequence, it generates lack—the relentless sense of incompleteness that characterizes human existence—as the melancholy underside of social subjectivity. Although most psychoanalytic approaches recognize the child’s separation from its caretakers and the surrounding world as a pivotal moment of subject formation, they do not necessarily see lack as an inevitable corollary of this moment. For many of them, the child only emerges from the process of individuation feeling wounded or insecure if something about this process goes awry—as, for instance, when the parents for one reason or another fail to fully facilitate the child’s transition to social subjectivity. What makes Lacan distinctive—and what makes his theory disagreeable to some—is that he believes the child’s awareness of lack and longing to be inescapable; it is, in a sense, the price that the child pays for being able to enter the social realm of meanings and values. The signifier, insofar as it carries cultural prohibition, forces the child to realize that it is not invincible, that it operates within a social world that is much more powerful than it could ever be, and that there are parts of that world that it does not have access to. In this fashion, the signifier dispels the child’s primordial impression of being at one with the world, causing an irreparable inner rift or division; the very developmental course that empowers the child to materialize as a psychically autonomous entity is also what makes it feel lacking and self-alienated. That is, while language initiates an

94

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

indispensable process of character formation, it also causes a kind of symbolic castration. What is lost in this process—what drains into the void of being—is the subject’s fantasy of self-sufficiency. This unfortunate event, Lacan suggests, is what the subject spends the rest of its life working through.5 Language generates lack. Lack in turn generates desire. While it is common to assume that desire is what is most “natural” about our lives, Lacan reveals the exact opposite, namely that desire is a product of culture—a function of the ways in which the signifiers of the social order cut into the child’s biological constitution. Indeed, a great deal has been made of the fact that, in Lacanian terms, desire emerges through the mortification and subordination of the body and its unmediated enjoyment. The signifier violates—mutilates and dismembers—the body as a “thing,” as a spontaneous nexus of drives that struggles for viability and fullness of being beyond the symbolic system into which it is inserted. As Slavoj Z+iz=ek explains: “Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence—by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present—but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word ‘quarters’ the thing.”6 The signifier thus carves out the body in specific ways in order to give rise to a particular form of subjectivity and desire. It is in this sense that the subject is vulnerable to what Lacan famously calls the “agency of the signifier.” The course of individuation initiated by the signifier may be necessary for the subject’s ability to orient itself in the world, but it simultaneously colonizes the presymbolic body in ways that evacuate the body of its enjoyment.7 Lacan hence underscores that it is only when the body’s immediate enjoyment is sacrificed to the signifier that subjectivity as a site of social energy and desire comes into being. This privileging of the “passion of the signifier”8 over the passion of the body is undoubtedly problematic in light of the denigration of the body—and particularly of femininity as what always carries the indelible trace of the body— that has characterized Western thought at least since Plato and Aristotle.9 Yet Lacan also presents a poignant insight about the nature of subjectivity when he suggests that it is only insofar as the signifier

THE FALL OF FANTASIES

95

causes the individual to desire that she is compelled to turn outward—that she is persuaded to care about the contours and unfolding of the surrounding world.10 Without the signifier—and the lack inaugurated by the signifier—the subject would remain stuck in the domain of preoedipal drives (the pleasure principle). Such drives provide the raw energy for psychic life, but they do not in themselves enable the subject to lead an inquisitive and self-reflexive existence. It is only the wounding intrusion of the signifier within this primordial realm that organizes these drives in ways that constitute the psyche as a dynamic entity capable of meaningful interaction with the world. Or, to put the matter in slightly different terms, the signifier, in prompting the subject to desire, grants it the spark of sociality by inducing it to seek out relationships with others. In this fashion—as Kaja Silverman has remarked—the subject’s very ability to care for others derives from its lack.11 In chapter 2, I remarked that the subject’s lack engenders the desire to bring new objects and meanings into existence—that the subject’s attempt to fill the void within its being gives rise to a whole host of imaginative and creative endeavors. In specifically Lacanian terms, because the subject can never repossess the blissful state of plenitude that it imagines having lost, because it cannot attain what Lacan calls the Thing—the primordial object that promises unmediated enjoyment—it is driven to look for surrogates that might compensate for its lack. As Lacan observes in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the Thing— which inevitably remains obscure and unattainable—can only be brought to life through a series of substitutes. “If the Thing were not fundamentally veiled,” Lacan explains, “we wouldn’t be in the kind of relationship to it that obliges us, as the whole of psychic life is obliged, to encircle it or bypass it in order to conceive it.”12 Precisely because the Thing is irrevocably lost, because it cannot be resurrected in any immediate form, the subject scurries from signifier to signifier to embody it obliquely. Like a potter who creates a vase around emptiness, “creates it, just like the mythical creator, ex nihilo, starting with a hole,”13 the subject fashions a signifier, or an elaborate string or sequence of signifiers, from the void of its being.14

96

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

Lacan stresses that emptiness and fullness—the void of the vase and the possibility of filling it—are introduced to the world simultaneously.15 On this account, the signifier is not merely what mortifies the body, but also what empowers the subject to move to an existential space beyond mortification by granting it the gift of creativity. Lacan’s vision of the subject’s relationship to the signifier is therefore complex in that although he consistently accentuates the subject’s relative helplessness vis-à-vis the larger systems of signification that envelop it, he at the same time suggests that it is only by virtue of its membership in the symbolic order that the subject possesses the capacity to make meaning in the first place. The symbolic, in other words, is not merely (or even primarily) a hegemonic structure that coerces the subject into its law, but also the foundation of its psychic and creative potentialities.16 Lacan in fact insists that though the subject can never master the signifier—let alone the signified—it enjoys a certain degree of imaginative leeway with respect to the signifier. He describes this imaginative leeway as the subject’s capacity to make use of the “poetic function” of language17—the fact that language by definition perpetuates the radical slipperiness, multiplicity, and polyvalence of meaning. In the same way that Heidegger connects creativity to the individual’s ability to dwell in the world in poetic rather than merely instrumental ways,18 Lacan conceptualizes creativity in terms of the subject’s capacity to take a poetic approach to the world—an approach that is content to play with meaning without attempting to arrest it in unequivocal or transparent definitions. THE APP EAL OF FANTASIES

It is therefore only insofar as the subject is asked over and again to reincarnate the lost Thing that it attains creative agency and that it can hope to engage in the continuous process of becoming a person. However, it is very difficult for the subject to conceive of its predicament in these terms. The realization that the self is not synonymous with the world, but rather a frail and faltering creature that needs to continuously negotiate its position in the world, introduces an apprehensive

THE FALL OF FANTASIES

97

state of want and restlessness. Lacan explains that because lack is devastating to admit to—because the subject tends to experience it as an aching wound rather than as a humanizing principle that gives it access to creativity—it is predisposed to seek solace in fantasy formations that allow it to mask and ignore the reality of this lack. Such fantasies alleviate anxiety and fend off the threat of fragmentation because they enable the subject to consider itself as more unified and complete than it actually is; by concealing the traumatic split or tear within the subject’s being, such fantasies lend (an always illusory form of ) consistency and meaning to its existence. Lacan hypothesizes that the origin of such narcissistic fantasies of plenitude and psychic salvation resides in what he labels the mirror stage. Lacan posits that, during the preverbal (or “imaginary”) phase, the child, in perceiving its image in a mirror (or perhaps in the adoring eyes of some caretaker), mistakes the apparent coherence of the image for itself; unable to distinguish between itself (as a physical, psychological, or ontological entity) and its image, the child is mesmerized by, and comes to identify with, the deceptive flawlessness of this image. This is Lacan’s version of the ancient myth of Narcissus who, upon catching his reflection in a pool of water, becomes so hopelessly enamored of his own loveliness that he is incapable of tearing himself away from his image. In the myth, the fact that Narcissus confuses the image in the pool with himself leads to his demise. Likewise, Lacan implies that the love that the (adult) subject feels for its romanticized image— an image that serves as a tantalizing token of the wholeness that the subject so ardently covets—signifies a certain kind of psychic death: the death of the creative potentialities that could be cultivated through an acceptance of lack as the basis of existence.19 Fantasies—even in their narcissistic form—are of course not a purely negative phenomenon. From time to time, we all need mirrors—moments when others complete, recognize, or witness us in idealizing, indulgent, and loving ways. This is the case particularly for those who have been narcissistically wounded. As Lewis Kirshner observes, for individuals whose early lives were characterized by deficiencies of basic care and recognition, and who consequently find it

98

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

arduous to sustain a viable subject position, compassionate mirroring may be essential for undoing a skewed perception of worthlessness. In such instances, mirroring is a benign form of empathy that responds to the subject’s legitimate demand for recognition and narcissistic repair.20 One might in fact argue that in cases that involve the forceful robbing of the subject’s sense of self-esteem, it may be necessary to reconstitute the ego before embarking on a critique of its ontological status. That is, Lacan’s adamant resistance to the narcissistic tendencies of the ego may make it difficult to appreciate situations where the ego has been so profoundly injured by abusive or oppressive interpersonal relationships that its capacity for narcissistic fantasies has been destroyed. Although Lacan is correct in being suspicious of the ego’s capacity to deceive the subject into thinking that it is more coherent or powerful than it actually is, his theory is less useful when it comes to cases when the subject is led to believe in its own absolute insignificance. This explains why Lacanian theory is not always particularly relevant when it comes to understanding and treating the aftereffects of traumatic life-histories.21 Perhaps even more fundamentally, it is possible to argue that there is no “reality” that is not always already a form of fantasy: that fantasy is all we have got. In other words, the very distinction between “reality” and “fantasy” is in many ways an artificial one, reminiscent of an Enlightenment worldview—one that believed in the power of the rational mind to tell fact from fiction—that has been seriously undermined in recent decades of postmodern theorizing. That is, the belief that we could ever relate to the world objectively, as it “really is,” has itself been discredited as a fantasy that occludes the recognition that the ways we perceive and interpret the world always necessarily reflect the value systems within which we operate. In effect, while the Enlightenment worldview distinguishes between “reality” and our more or less successful efforts to represent it, contemporary theorists recognize—as Nietzsche already did—that our very attempts to represent reality invariably shape the form of this reality. By this I do not mean to say that there exists no reality independently of human representations, but merely that we do not possess any immediate or

THE FALL OF FANTASIES

99

unmediated access to that reality; since we only understand the world around us through the conceptual frameworks, labels, and systems of thought that we impose on this world, there is no way to know what this world might be like outside of our endeavors to comprehend it. The fact that our understanding of the world—not to mention our sense of ourselves—can be posited to be a fantasmatic construct does not mean that we do not experience it as real; the recognition of the constructed nature of something should not be confused with the idea that it possesses no power over us or that it somehow lacks psychic resonance, for to the degree that fantasmatic constructs over time come to take on the force of reality for us, they function as a means of worldconstitution that “actualize” the world for us. Talking about the molding of subjectivity in particular, Anne Anlin Cheng observes that fantasy is not an activity undertaken by an already fully formed subject, but rather (in part at least) what allows the subject to engage in the process of fashioning its identity in the first place; fantasy can be an essential vehicle for the crafting of the kind of identity that feels viable and worthwhile. In Cheng’s words, fantasy is a medium of self-narrativization that “constitutes the subject’s sense of integrity and hence his/her potential for agency.” Fantasy, in this sense, is not the opposite of reality, but rather what brings reality into being; it is “what authenticates realness, what makes reality real.”22 If fantasies are how we constitute not only the world, but also our own sense of self, they can hardly be considered exclusively as an error of judgment, or a defect of being, that needs to eliminated. Indeed, the realization that what we take for reality is always a form of fantasy calls into question our very desire to find a foothold “beyond” or “outside” fantasy. Such a quest might in fact be argued to be indicative of precisely the kind of search for secure epistemological foundations that Lacan actively shuns. On this view, the idea that we could be freed from the mystifications of fantasy is itself a drastic type of mystification. What is more, it could be argued to be a mystification that keeps us from appreciating the various ways in which fantasies can enhance our existence by injecting splashes of passion or enchantment into our otherwise humdrum lives; it prevents us from discerning that fantasies

100

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

are not only delusions that derail us from the concrete realities of our lives, but also, potentially at least, a means of disclosing previously unknown realms of meaning. An imaginative approach to the world—one that actively engages the fantasmatic nature of reality rather than concealing or suppressing it—may well reveal dimensions of the world that under normal circumstances remain hidden; it may bring neglected aspects of the world into focus for us. As a matter of fact, to the degree that fantasies are always linked to our—conscious or unconscious—wishes and longings, they render the world more desirable to us, with the result that we scrutinize it more carefully, with a heightened degree of attentiveness to details and attributes that we might otherwise overlook. As Stephen Mitchell explains, taking fantasy seriously engenders “a more complex understanding of things, others, and ourselves, as offering many facets and considerable ambiguity, coming alive always, necessarily, partially through acts of imagination.”23 That is, when ordinary reality is perceived as a construction rather than as an objective fact, fantasy can no longer be thought of as what contaminates reality, but should instead be regarded as a process of bringing the world alive for us in a particularly vibrant fashion.24 According to this vision, “reality” is a fantasy that we elaborate on an increasingly intricate level during our entire lifetimes. THROUGH THE LO OKING-GLASS

When it comes to fantasy formations, it is therefore essential to distinguish between (1) unconscious fantasies that curb our existential options and (2) imaginative and creative fantasies that allow us to observe the world from novel angles. Lacan’s assault on narcissistic fantasies is directed at the former, whereas his commentary on the poetic potentialities of language could be argued to relate to the latter. I will return to the poetic aspects of language in the end of this chapter. For now, it is worth reiterating that the main reason Lacan resists narcissistic fantasies is that they tend to organize our psychic “reality” in ways that disguise all clefts, ruptures, and antagonisms

THE FALL OF FANTASIES

101

within that reality. They make our identities appear both reliable and immediately readable to us. As a consequence, they all too easily lead us to believe that we can come to know ourselves in a definitive fashion, thereby preventing us from perceiving that “knowing” one version of ourselves may well function as a defense against other, perhaps less reassuring, versions. In the Lacanian scenario, narcissistic fantasies deepen our confusion about the nature of our existence by imposing a false coherence where we should discern a complex and ever-evolving pattern of openended possibility. As Eric Santner explains, they deform our lives by freezing our being “into a schema, a distinctive ‘torsion’ or spin that colors/distorts the shape of our universe, how the world is disclosed to us,” and it is precisely this torsion that “sustains our sense of the consistency of the world and our place in it.”25 Fantasies, in other words, restrict our movement in the world, holding us captive to the idea that the basic structure of our lives is determined in advance rather than constituted in the process of living. In this manner, they keep us from our own aliveness. Although it is obviously important to attain a sense of self that is familiar and comforting to us, an excessively fantasybound self is not able to participate in the process of becoming, but instead takes refuge in the imagined certainty of its habitual ways of relating to the world. In this fashion, fantasies prevent us from recognizing that it is only when we come to accept the absolute alterity— the radical and at times terrifying alienness—of both ourselves and others that we are able to truly participate in the unpredictable rhythm of the world. I have proposed that lack gives rise to ever-renewed feats of symbolization. The fantasmatic attempt to deny lack, in contrast, prevents the subject from riding the signifier in innovative ways, for it limits meaning-production to those forms that accord with the worldview promoted by the subject’s foundational fantasies. This implies that it is only by embracing lack that the subject can begin to weave the threads of its life into a psychically supple tapestry. The subject who affirms lack understands—in however inchoate a manner—that lack is not merely a daunting or sterile void, but the precondition of its capacity

102

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

for imaginative living, including its ability to ask constructive questions about itself and the world. Such questions do not give the subject access to the ultimate meaning of its existence—and even less to that of the world—but, as I have attempted to illustrate in this book, this does not lessen the value of being able to ask them. One could say that the act of passing through the looking-glass of narcissistic fantasies—of dismantling life-arresting existential mirages—is what it means, from a specifically Lacanian perspective, to rewrite one’s fate. If fantasies perpetuate obstinate unconscious patterns, the purpose of Lacanian analysis is to loosen the grip of such fantasies in order to open the subject’s psychic life to less confining configurations. In Lear’s terms, one might say that the fall of fantasies releases the possibility of fundamentally new possibilities. In Santner’s terms, in turn, breaking the spell of fantasy—intervening in the “hypnotic commandments” that generate eccentric yet fully binding libidinal impasses—means to step into the midst of life and in so doing to enter into a more animated and multidimensional psychic economy.26 That is, the process of releasing psychic energies that are bound up in the unyielding encasing of fantasies converts these energies into “more life,” thereby making them available to more elastic psychic enactments.27 Lacan implies that learning to live without the kinds of fantasies that protect us from our lack entails an epistemological leap to a vastly different existential attitude. In particular, Lacan invites us to acknowledge that regardless of all the busy and clamorous activity that we habitually undertake in order to suppress or ignore our lack, deep down we know that there will always be moments when it breaks out into the open with the piercing clarity and sadness of a foghorn. No matter how many layers of fantasy we wrap around this hollow in our hearts, it reverberates through us like a muted but persistent echo that carries the uncanny messages of what most terrifies us about ourselves. From a Lacanian viewpoint, our existential assignment is to heed that echo, to withstand moments when nothing fills the void, and to work through the realization that neither we nor the world—nor any of the objects of this world—can ever live up to the perfection of our fan-

THE FALL OF FANTASIES

103

tasies. Our task, in other words, is to learn to endure the sharp points of existence without being irrevocably devastated. We may now be in a better position to understand (even if we do not fully endorse) Lacan’s critique of ego-psychology. If Lacan scorns the attempts of ego-psychologists to shore up the subject’s ego, it is because he believes that they have gotten things entirely backwards: instead of helping the subject accept lack as constitutive of subjectivity, they intensify its existential confusion—not to mention desperation—by playing into and reinforcing its narcissistic fantasies. Lacan deems this approach to be deeply flawed in that it hastens to prematurely close the void within the subject’s being instead of fostering the imaginative possibilities that arise from this void; it promises the end of alienation rather than teaching the subject to resourcefully live with this alienation; and it dilutes the subject’s power to mobilize the signifier in ways that would add creative agency to its existence. Such a tactic, Lacan suggests, is always to some extent dishonest in that it tends to leave the subject worse off than before. The “solution” that ego-psychology offers to the subject’s sense of lack is, for Lacan, therefore merely the highest manifestation of the problem: it thwarts, rather than advances, the subject’s capacity for living to the fullest of its potential.28 THE LACK IN THE OTHER

In light of his vehement criticism of ego-psychology, it is interesting to note that Lacan concurs with Loewald’s assessment that it is the subject’s existential responsibility to “own up” to and particularize its unconscious desire. As Lacan declares, the “only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire.”29 In this context, the purpose of liberating oneself from the grasp of narcissistic fantasies is to access the unique frequency—the “truth”—of one’s desire. Fantasies obscure this frequency to the extent that they mask the lack within the subject’s being that gives rise to desire in the first place. As a consequence, when fantasies dissolve, the insistent pulse of desire becomes mode audible, more determinedly solicitous of

104

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

the subject’s response. The subject who has managed to work through its fantasies is able to distinguish between surface noise—whatever masquerades as its desire—and the actuality of that desire. Such a self is able to enter into the ongoing process of becoming a person in accordance with the complexity of its desire.30 Lacan moreover intimates that a major component of becoming a person is the capacity to act “in conformity” with one’s desire rather than capitulate in the face of the (always fantasized) desire of the collective Other.31 Along the same lines as Loewald (and Heidegger), Lacan suggests that when the subject is estranged from its desire— when it allows itself to be overrun by the desire of the Other—its existence feels empty, apathetic, and devoid of meaning; when in the throes of such life-deadening conformity, the subject goes through the motions of life in a defensive manner, sacrificing the integrity of its desire for the convenience of an easily classifiable social identity.32 In this scenario, pathological symptoms serve as an indication that the subject has compromised its desire in ways that render satisfaction— beyond the tortured satisfaction afforded by symptoms—elusive. In effect, because the Other’s desire is always in one way or another normative in that it compels the subject to behave in culturally condoned ways, it can function as a roundabout defense against the subject’s own (often quite counternormative) satisfaction. That is, a subject who consistently submits to the desire of the Other may on some level be afraid of the very possibility of satisfaction. In chapter 1, we discovered that existential authenticity has traditionally often been conceived as a matter of resisting collective complacency and of assuming responsibility for one’s beliefs, passions, and unique perspective. I would propose that the line of reasoning that Lacan advances regarding unconscious desire represents a specifically psychoanalytic answer to the question of authenticity. In other words, I would like to highlight the similarity between the philosophical conception of authenticity and the Lacanian conviction that actively listening to, and taking responsibility for, the “truth” of one’s desire—even (or particularly) when this “truth” seems alien or uncomfortable—allows one to distance oneself from the dominant

THE FALL OF FANTASIES

105

dictates of the symbolic Other. Lacan in fact implies that only the subject who has been able to liberate itself from the Other’s desire retains the capacity for satisfaction. The flipside of this “unfettered” subject position is that the subject is less likely to expect the Other to compensate for the catastrophes of its desire. If the subject under the sway of fantasies tends to repeatedly re-create the same relationship—of being punished, suffocated, persecuted, loved, or admired, for instance—to the collective world of the Other, the shattering of fantasies allows it to gain a measure of self-sufficiency in relation to the Other. It grows to be less afraid of the world’s judgments, which suggests that it becomes increasingly capable of independent deliberation and action. As Bruce Fink underscores, one of the aspirations of Lacanian analysis is to facilitate the subject’s departure from ideals and configurations of thought that have been inculcated within its psyche by the various authority figures that surround it from birth; the goal of Lacanian analysis is to allow the subject to think and act without being overly dependent on the views and opinions of others.33 Lacan thus advocates a drastic shift in how the subject relates to the symbolic Other. In the simplest conceivable terms, one could argue that he wishes the subject to demystify the Other’s ideological power—particularly its power to dictate the subject’s desire—while at the same time retaining access to the significatory resources that the Other makes available. In more concrete terms, he wants the subject to recognize that the Other is haunted by lack and inconsistency as much as the subject is—that the Other’s reliability is ultimately as illusory as is its own: in the same way that there is a lack in the subject that keeps it from being identical with itself, there is a lack in the Other that keeps it from ever becoming a closed totality that could convincingly legitimate the ideology that it espouses. This is why Lacan maintains that there is no Other of the Other—no final arbitrator of the Other’s discourse.34 Some contemporary thinkers, most notably Z+iz=ek, have insisted that the most radical dimension of Lacanian theory is precisely this notion of the lack in the Other—the idea that the symbolic Other

106

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

itself is haunted by a kernel of impossibility, by an impotent inability to fully coincide with itself and therefore to secure its uniformity. Indeed, while Z+iz=ek agrees that one of the functions of fantasy is to obfuscate the fissures within the subject’s being, he stresses that fantasy also serves to screen the inconsistency of the Other. That is, to the extent that fantasies function as a support of cultural adaptation, they conceal the divisions and antagonisms of the collective field, thereby solidifying the subject’s ideological investment in, and attachment to, dominant social structures; they seal the gap in the Other so as to provide a seamless ideological support for the subject’s experience of collective reality, for its ability to envision the world as dependable and meaningful. As Z+iz=ek observes, “Fantasy conceals the fact that the Other, the symbolic order, is structured around some traumatic impossibility, around something which cannot be symbolized.”35 Z+iz=ek tends to read the lack in the Other as a site of linguistic breakdown where all attempts at signification falter—where the signifier rubs against a structural impossibility that neutralizes its power to generate meaning.36 I am more inclined to regard the Other’s lack as the very guarantee that there is no end to the play of signification, to the signifier’s inexhaustible ability to engender meaning without faithfulness to any permanent origin or center. I believe that in the same way that the subject’s lack keeps it receptive to the outside world—and therefore amenable to constant transformation—the lack in the Other by necessity renders it porous and alterable. In other words, the reason that the Other contains an infinite pool of significatory potential is that it does not possess enough consistency to ever entirely contain the open play, the infinite perpetuation, of signification;37 there is no way that the Other, however dominant, could ever inhibit what Jacques Derrida describes as the “overabundance” of signification—the fact that the signifier always inevitably signifies in excess of, and in variance from, “itself ” in a manner that forges an opening for a multitude of unexpected or surprising meanings.38 This explains the fact that although the Lacanian symbolic is hegemonic in the sense that it carries the weight of tradition—of all the cultural fictions that have over time solidified into seemingly binding conven-

THE FALL OF FANTASIES

107

tions—it is simultaneously a structure that both generates and responds to new forms of signification. It may help to distinguish between two distinctive modalities of the Other. On the one hand, to the extent that the Other successfully hides its lack, it manages to present a convincing front of authority and institutional power. On the other, to the extent that the Other’s lack persists as an invisible yet palpable presence that troubles its pretense of control, it serves as a versatile structure of signification that overflows with meanings that cannot be contained by the very configurations of authority and institutional power that it seeks to uphold. In this context, the task of the Lacanian subject is to learn how to proactively enter into the process of meaning-production while simultaneously sidestepping the more hegemonic tendencies of the Other. In the same way that the Nietzschean subject aspires to take advantage of its capacity to develop an artistic relationship to the world, and the Loewaldian subject endeavors to move from a passive to an active relationship to its unconscious, the Lacanian subject is called upon to develop an agentic (even poetic) relationship to the symbolic Other. It is asked to creatively contribute to the fund of ideals and meanings that constitute a given culture. These ideals and meanings may accord with the demands of dominant power, but they can also challenge these demands; they can constitute alternative loci of empowerment.39 On this account, the most efficient means of defending against the Other’s hegemonic desire is to gain access to symbolic resources of signification that permit one to articulate nonhegemonic configurations of desire. This is a matter of pitting the Other against itself, as it were— of fighting the repressive dimensions of the symbolic order with the resources of meaning-production that this very order makes available. THE SINGULARI T Y OF BEING

The acknowledgment that the signifier does not invariably obey the dictates of the normative order makes it conceivable to differentiate between a socially mediated identity on the one hand and the possibility of subjective singularity (and even of authenticity) on the other—

108

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

between an identity that relies on cultural forms of authorization and one that in one way or another manages to elude or exceed these forms. As I have endeavored to highlight, though Lacan regards language as something that can deprive us of singularity by subjecting us to sociodiscursive hegemonies, he admits that the signifier does not always coincide entirely with the symbolic order—that the signifier does not invariably speak or support the discourse of the Other.40 In effect, when commenting on the strangely inspired writing practice of James Joyce, Lacan explicitly asserts that language challenges normative structures of signification as much as it reinforces them and that to some extent one has the capacity to invent the language that one uses. As he observes: “This assumes or implies that one chooses to speak the language that one effectively speaks. . . . One creates a language insofar as one at every instant gives it a sense, one gives it a little nudge, without which language would not be alive.”41 Lacan therefore concedes that although language functions as an impersonal structure into which we are introduced at birth, we are nevertheless capable of giving it a little “nudge” that transforms it into something that is uniquely ours. Indeed, the fact that each of us has the power—in however limited a degree—to push aside congealed forms of meaning gives us a measure of creative freedom. That is, although being compelled to participate in a common symbolic system on one level deprives us of personal distinctiveness, on another level it offers us the possibility of carving out a singular place within that order, of claiming language for our own purposes; we can particularize or personalize the discourse that we are asked to inhabit. This is one way to comprehend what it might mean to insist on the possibility of agency—on the fact that we are not merely subservient to hegemonic social structures, but can and do have an impact on these structures; it clarifies why we manage from time to time to rearticulate and reorganize social reality. In chapter 2, I linked subjective singularity to those aspects of the self that elude social classification—that do not lend themselves to symbolic translation or domestication. However, our singularity is obviously also a matter of the various idiosyncratic ways in which we partake in

THE FALL OF FANTASIES

109

social systems, including the ways in which we insert ourselves into systems of language. I would in fact assert that what makes Lacan’s mention of the poetic potentialities of language so significant is that to distinguish between “ordinary” and “poetic” language is to initiate a means of thinking about subjective singularity in the sociosymbolic context. More specifically, one could argue that ordinary language—language that conforms to the hegemonic ideologies and practices of the symbolic Other—tends to distance us from our singularity by propelling us toward social generality. This is because it does not contain enough elements that are able to resist such generality. Poetic (inventive, artistic) usages of language, in contrast, by definition steer us away from generality and toward singularity because their very purpose is to challenge— or at the very least to offer alternatives to—habitual conventions of meaning-production. To the degree that poetic language aspires to alter our usual perception of how language functions, it automatically creates an opportunity for new forms of meaning, and consequently, potentially at least, for singular sorts of subjective enactments. It may of course seem counterintuitive to posit language (however poetic) as a mode of attaining singularity given that, as we have learned, it is precisely language that causes the kind of foundational lack that deprives us of psychic cohesion (and thus of uncontested personal integrity) in the first place. But I believe that it is useful to recognize the distinction between the formative experience of being subjected to a preexisting order of meanings on the one hand, and our subsequent capacity to participate in the shaping of that order on the other. The fact that we begin our lives in a position of helplessness with regard to the symbolic Other should not be taken to mean that we will never be able to gain agency in relation to it. This is why I have sought to demonstrate that even if our initial encounter with the signifier is devastating in that it causes lack and alienation, the signifier at the same time grants us access to structures of meaning-production that we can subsequently use to cope with this alienation. And I have tried to show that the fact that we cannot fill our inner void once and for all—that we cannot undo alienation—is precisely what sustains us as creatures of psychic potentiality.

110

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

Because the cultural order produces socially intelligible subjects by assimilating them into its disciplinary machinery, there by necessity exists a constant tension between our (largely fantasmatic) conception of ourselves as individuals who possess at least the potential for exceptionality and our recognition that we are always already dominated by a social order that bars us from exceptionality—that in fact sells its own normative definition of what it means to be exceptional, thereby eradicating any “genuine” possibility for exceptionality. No wonder, then, that we tend to find narcissistic fantasies more appealing than the reality principle, for such fantasies provide us, precisely, with an inflated sense of our exceptionality. However, as I have underlined, the illusion of uniqueness that such fantasies offer is in many ways the very antithesis of creative agency, for it merely reflects what is most stubborn and mechanical about our unconscious ways of relating to the world. In contrast, the signifier—the always peculiar ways in which we take up cultural meaning—provides an authentic opening for the emergence of psychic distinctiveness. On this view, it is not only how we die—or face the prospect of our mortality, as phenomenologists like to say—but also how we inhabit language that singularizes us, that gives our identities a distinctive resonance. Psychoanalysis could be argued to be a practice of negotiating the inevitable tension between being a subject (being subjected to the symbolic order) and being a unique individual (having a singular identity that somehow surpasses the parameters of that order).42 We are of course always both at once, but it is only as individuals that we feel fully engaged in our lives. What I have tried to demonstrate is that, in Lacanian terms, the more we are able to liberate ourselves from the spell of fantasies—the more we are able to accept lack as constitutive of our identity43—the better our chances for singularity. The act of disbanding fantasies—and of developing a degree of self-reflexivity with regard to the Other—empowers us to move from unconscious (passive) repetition of inert existential patterns to a more poetic and imaginative (active) connection with the world; it allows us to transition from unconscious fantasies that encumber our existence to the kinds of life-enriching (imaginative) fantasies that I previously linked to psychic aliveness.

THE FALL OF FANTASIES

111

Strangely enough, although the Other does not possess answers to our life-defining questions, the significatory resources that the Other makes available to us enable us to devise the kinds of answers that we can— always tentatively and provisionally—live with. One could in fact say that the process of becoming a person, from a distinctively Lacanian point of view, is first and foremost a matter of knowing that even though the question of the “sovereign good” is from the outset closed, questions that sustain us as singular creatures—questions pertaining to desire, creativity, and the passion of self-actualization, for example—are ones that can only be closed by our own (non)actions.

This page intentionally left blank.

FIVE

The Residue of Love

If I manage, by some mastery of writing, to utter this death, I begin to live again. —Roland Barthes

LIFE BEYOND LOSS

I HAVE PROPOSED in this book that there is an intimate connec-

tion between lack and creativity—that it is insofar as we are constitutively lacking that we possess creative capacity and that it is through our creativity that we manage to survive our lack. This far, I have talked about lack mostly as a ontological category, as a universal foundation of human existence. I would now like to transition to a more tangible register of lack by focusing on the relationship between creativity and object loss. More specifically, I would like to explore how the loss of a beloved person—through death, abandonment, or intersubjective disappointment—fits into the argument that I have been developing about our ever-renewed efforts to fill or redeem lack by our imaginative activity. I would like to examine what it is about our capacity, to borrow from Barthes, to “utter death”—to shape loss into words—that allows us to begin to live again, that (time after time) gives us access to a future. How does our ability to speak our despair—or to speak despite or in the place of that despair—open a space for life beyond loss? And how might we 113

114

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

characterize the psychic residue of love that survives—that persists with a peculiar kind of insistence—even when love itself is lost? The idea that the loss of a loved person causes the kind of void or inner emptiness that calls to be filled by creative activity is already familiar to us because it is conceptually quite similar to the argument regarding ontological lack and signification that I have advanced throughout this book. But it is also intuitively accessible to us to the extent that we have experienced the pressure toward signification— toward the expression and externalization of sorrow—that emptiness (whether sudden or prolonged) tends to occasion. Within this context, creativity could be said to represent a more or less conscious attempt to transform sadness into signification and in so doing to contain the longing within our being. As we will see, creativity gives structure to longing by drawing on the capacity of language—the logic and structure of signification—to provide an indirect means of holding onto the lost object. The object is, so to speak, captured within the folds of language, which implies that it will endure and live on in an altered form, as marks on a page, as an intricate assembly of signs, as a lasting imprint of meaning and beauty. In this sense, as Julia Kristeva remarks, creativity is a war “against abjection.”1 Freud already argued that creativity is, on a basic level, a means of containing the volatility of eros. He regarded sublimation—our capacity to invest our libidinal energies in artistic, scientific, cultural, or intellectual aspirations and accomplishments—as a means of transforming erotic passion into the gentler (more muffled) devotions of “civilized” existence, and, as such, a way of protecting us from the unpredictable and potentially always devastating effects of eros. Freud stressed that among the various strategies that human beings have devised for the pursuit of happiness, sublimation is the most reliable because it redirects our quest for satisfaction from external objects (over which we have little control) to endeavors that depend on our own internal resources: The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external

THE RESIDUE OF LOVE

115

world. . . . One gains the most if one can sufficiently heighten the yield of pleasure from the sources of psychical and intellectual work. When that is so, fate can do little against one. A satisfaction of this kind, such as an artist’s joy in creating, in giving his phantasies body, or a scientist’s in solving problems or uncovering truths, has a special quality.2

Sublimation makes satisfaction a self-generated state rather than something that we seek outside ourselves. This does not mean that Freud wishes us to detach ourselves from the world, but merely that he recognizes the futility of expecting consistency from the world. He notes that although we over and again turn to others for satisfaction, this is an inherently slippery and untrustworthy path in that we end up placing our happiness in the hands of individuals who possess the power—often without meaning to—to injure or disillusion us in profound ways. By turning our search for happiness inward, sublimation protects us from the treacherousness of intersubjective relationships. The pleasure that sublimation yields may be less intoxicating, but it is more dependable and enduring. As Hans Loewald succinctly states, sublimation “is passion transformed.”3 Sublimation is Freud’s solution to the quandary of a balanced existence in the sense that it makes it possible for us to meet the expectations of social life without repressing the unruly energies of eros. While sublimation may seem simply a particularly sophisticated version of repression—after all, like repression, it by definition curtails unmediated pleasure—Freud underscores that it is not a matter of elevating the reality principle over the pleasure principle, but rather of bringing the two together in a productive manner; it is a means of opening a space for a poised and unruffled kind of pleasure. As a matter of fact, though Freud’s account of sublimation is deeply ambivalent in that he recognizes that sublimation can act as a defense against the pressing (and often quite legitimate) demands of the id, he believes that it is the closest that we ever come to sustaining satisfaction over time. Indeed, Freud implies that satisfaction that lasts longer than a burning moment can only be obtained when we become resigned to the realization that

116

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

our craving for pleasure always exceeds what we can attain. At the same time, we need to ensure that the demands of the reality principle—the demands of civilized life—do not become so immoderate as to entirely starve the pleasure principle. Freud emphasizes that creativity and pathological symptoms frequently arise from the same unconscious cause, and that creativity can consequently be a means of circumventing symptoms. “The deeper you penetrate into the pathogenesis of nervous illness,” he posits, “the more you will find revealed the connection between the neuroses and other productions of the human mind, including the most valuable.”4 He explains that an individual who finds herself “at loggerheads” with a disappointing reality can escape the development of symptoms by channeling her energies into creative endeavors instead.5 This is valuable because, unlike symptoms that bind unconscious energies in a potentially corroding manner, creativity releases such energies into the current of life. In this context, it is worth evoking Nietzsche’s distinction between self-negating (ponderous) and cheerful (affirmative) forms of asceticism. If self-negating asceticism characterizes the mortified existence of the individual who is ruled by defensive and self-defeating ressentiment, cheerful asceticism—the kind of self-limitation that enhances the individual’s sense of power—is a precondition of innovation. In both instances, the subject’s “will to power”—the elemental energy that drives its actions in the world—is being tamed and restrained, but while self-negating asceticism wears down the spirit, cheerful asceticism distills and strengthens it. Self-negating asceticism, then, is a pathological formation that depletes the subject’s energy, whereas cheerful asceticism channels it into vigorously lifeenriching avenues. Likewise, in more Freudian vocabulary, the symptom arrests the subject’s desire, whereas sublimation displaces it indefinitely, enhancing the subject’s appetite for uncharted (and therefore potentially vitalizing) forms of life. If the symptom ensues from, and lends expression to, a blockage of unconscious energies, sublimation ensures that these energies flow in an unencumbered manner. This is why Freud asks us to work our way from symptoms to creative expres-

THE RESIDUE OF LOVE

117

sion; creativity, for him, is a means of fluently releasing energies that would otherwise be sacrificed to painful symptoms. In the Freudian universe, one of the main challenges that we face is to ensure that our various psychic losses get processed through creativity rather than solidified into debilitating symptoms. To pursue this line of thought, we must bracket the admittedly intriguing idea that symptoms might be an integral part of a multidimensional psychic life—that our subjective singularity might in part be measured by the ingenuity of our symptoms—and proceed under the assumption that most of us would rather respond to loss through creative acts that, however inadequately, compensate for what we have lost than through the formation of paralyzing symptoms. By this I do not mean that creativity serves to deny loss. As I have underlined, every attempt to deny loss only perpetuates the kinds of fantasy formations that rigidify our lives. I also do not believe that creativity can ever “heal” or “redeem” loss in any definitive sense, for, as we have learned, creativity can only provide a provisional remedy for our injuries. Even so, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that creativity possesses the power to mute the sharpness of loss by weaving a protective veil of symbols and signifiers around the raw wounds of absence. That is, creativity might enable us to move from a futile faithfulness to fractured interpersonal alliances to a more sublimated form of recollection and remembrance whereby lost objects—or perhaps even more significantly, the very concept of loss itself—are gathered within the pleats of our imaginative undertakings. From this perspective, creativity is a means of diffusing and managing loss, of transforming it into something that we can tolerate and live through, and, in the long run, perhaps even use as a basis for new life. Creativity thus protects the psyche from the chilling and life-draining devastations of loss. One reason that Freud views creativity as a valuable antidote to symptoms—and let us recall that symptoms are, by definition, indicators of psychic inflexibility—is that he believes it to be an active means of mourning loss. In chapter 3, I outlined the crucial distinction between allowing ourselves to be passively spoken by our unconscious desire on the one hand and developing an active relationship to this desire on the other. As we saw, the former leads to lifeless and

118

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

unyielding patterns of behavior whereas the latter opens up the field of psychic possibilities. Along similar lines, Freud illustrates that whereas symptoms express stagnant forms of sorrow that resist the process of mourning, creativity is an indirect yet effective means of allowing mourning to take its course; by enabling us to gradually dissociate ourselves from the sources of our sorrow, creativity makes loss manageable by converting it into something that we can actively mediate. Though it is counterproductive to repress the past, it can be even more detrimental to build commemorative psychic monuments— melancholy edifices—that aim to preserve that past within the present in an unchanging form. Such melancholy configurations trap us in the kind of yearning that is at once outdated (belonging to the past) and without hope (unrealizable in the future); they make it difficult to complete the process of mourning. It is for this reason that psychoanalysis is at its most insightful when it recognizes that creativity allows us to resume forms of mourning that have, for one reason or another, gotten stuck; it enables us to make our way from melancholia to mourning. Through creativity, we are able to signify our suffering and, in so doing, to gradually translate an unnameable ache into a nameable recollection; we are able to replace the void of nonmeaning by meaning, even if the status of this meaning is always necessarily unstable and fleeting.6 Through creativity, our losses, instead of becoming immobilized in the diffuse languor of melancholy states, fuel our acts of meaning-production, thereby defending the nimbleness of our psychic lives. It is in this sense that the ability to utter the death (or loss) of the beloved other can be profoundly transformative. CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

Creativity facilitates the work of mourning. Mourning, in turn, is a process by which lost objects are internalized and come to live on as integral parts of our psychic lives.7 That is, we sustain our relationship to lost objects—we prolong their cherished presence in our lives—by incorporating their memory into our inner world. Mourning, in this sense, entails not only the gradual letting go of lost objects, but also the taking in and appropriation of aspects of these objects. As Loewald states:

THE RESIDUE OF LOVE

119

Mourning is a psychic activity that comprises the relinquishment of intimate object relations and the re-establishment, in the internal arena, of elements of these object relations by indentificatory processes. In mourning, an object relationship is gradually given up, involving pain and suffering, and is substituted by a restructuring of the internal world which is in consonance with the relinquished relationship. In this way pain and suffering can eventually cease, even while the memories of the lost person do remain.8

We therefore cope with loss by identifying with and internalizing dimensions of the lost object. In more technical terms, we give up object cathexes for narcissistic ones, thereby contributing to the increasing differentiation and diversification of our psychic lives. Loewald observes that such differentiation and diversification of psychic structures are essential for individuation, for our ability to develop a distinctive personality. It is, in other words, in part through painful processes of loss and separation that we arrive at a sense of who we are. Such processes function as “boundary-creating” experiences that build singular and (more or less) self-sufficient psyches.9 One way to understand the matter is to recognize that when we mourn, we not only grieve the vanishing of treasured objects, but also those versions of ourselves that thrived within a particular (now lost) relational dynamic. In this manner, loss compels us to discard outmoded facets of the self. While this may give rise to bouts of regret and nostalgia, in the final analysis it serves to replenish the self in that in engenders new inner intensities and unforeseen psychic possibilities. One of the most famous examples of this phenomenon is Freud’s analysis of the “fort-da” game, of a child’s attempt to cope with his mother’s absence by repeatedly throwing and retrieving a reel of string. Adam Phillips comments on Freud’s well-known discussion as follows: Without the invention of this game, one might think, the child would feel the unbearable pain of his mother’s absence. And yet as Freud describes this scene . . . it is not as though the child is merely making a choice to manage his suffering, but rather that the mother’s

120

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

absence is an opportunity for the child to find another pleasure. And not only the ascetic pleasure of instinctual renunciation, but the pleasure of symbolization itself; the delight of making up the game. Whether or not loss is being mastered by the child—whatever that might mean—a new talent is being found; and being found to be so pleasurable that it is repeated, ‘untiringly, as a game in itself ’. The situation calls up something new in the child. Without the mother’s absence there would have been no game, no new pleasure nor Freud’s new theory. . . . All Freud’s language—the child ‘very skillfully’ throwing the reel, his ‘expressive,’ ‘joyful’ sounds, the child’s ‘great cultural achievement’—celebrates the child as artist discovering his artistry; and not merely (or bitterly) actively re-enacting with his toys what he has had unavoidably inflicted on him.10

The game of fort-da is therefore not only a means of managing suffering—of surviving a painful situation that has been inflicted on the child—but also an occasion for the child to discover artistry and the pleasure of symbolization, indeed, to invent an alternative mode of being in the world. Like Barthes, Phillips suggests that loss functions as an opportunity to become a subject of signification, to enter the game of meaning-production. As Jonathan Lear also remarks, in the context of the same Freudian scenario: “The child is, as it were, pressured into creating meaning. Without the game, the pressure would just break through and the child would be overcome with fright or flooded with anxiety. The game is that which enables the child to keep his emotional and mental balance.”11 Loss, in other words, calls forth something new and different, a new delight, a new kind of freedom and talent, the ability to play with one’s fate, to improvise and make things up. In Lear’s words, “It creates a cultural space in which the child can play with loss: in this way he comes to be able to tolerate it and name it . . . all sorts of playfulness and loose associations are now possible.”12 That is, the game not only allows the child to withstand the mother’s absence, but also add layers of possibility to its psychic life. More generally speaking, loss could be said to contribute to the emergence of psychic complexity. Because lost objects cannot be inter-

THE RESIDUE OF LOVE

121

nalized without restructuring the psyche that welcomes them into its creases—because the act of inviting lost objects to live on as parts of ourselves forces us to make space for them within our inner world— each new separation could be posited to add new dimensions to our character. Accordingly, separation is an indispensable component of character building, of the process of becoming a person that I have described in this book, in the sense that our identity by necessity reflects the history of our losses. I would in fact go so far as to propose that we cannot evolve as creatures of psychic strength and versatility without repeated experiences of loss—that although our inner lives are obviously fostered by our various interpersonal relationships, the loss of such relationships may be equally important in shaping our individuality. This argument goes further than the Lacanian proposition that subjectivity comes into being as a consequence of separation, for it implies that object loss is conducive to psychic multidimensionality. Does this mean that the more we have lost—the more we have suffered—the richer our psychic lives? My discussion this far implies that this depends on how we have lost, on whether our losses have solidified into leaden melancholy formations or whether we have managed to work through such losses in life-enhancing ways. More specifically, it may be that mourning “well”—if I may express things so awkwardly—is a matter of knowing, on a deep level, how to meet the ephemeral character, the always potentially devastating fragility, of our existence, for once we recognize that absolutely nothing about our lives is permanent, it becomes possible to relinquish objects, ideals, and modes of being more gracefully. Phillips posits that what makes us suffer—what makes us bad and bitter losers, as it were—is precisely the fact that we expect permanence out of things that are by their very nature transient. “It is as though,” he asserts, “we have added to the ordinary suffering of biological life the extraordinary suffering of our immortal longings, of our will to permanence. As though our equating of value with duration over time—good relationships, like great art, are the ones that last: truths are eternal essences amid the ruinous wastes of time, and so on—straightforwardly turns a blind eye to all the evidence.”13

122

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

What makes loss so painful, then, is the fact that we regard it as something unusual or extraordinary, as an insult to our happiness, rather than what, in the long run, keeps our lives alert and renewable. As I have already suggested, mourning is the price we pay for new forms of life, which means that to the extent that we find loss intolerable—to the extent that we find mourning an insurmountable obstacle to our well-being—we are unable to move forward in our lives; the inability to surrender outmoded passions equals the inability to embrace, and perhaps even to recognize, the vigor and seductiveness of emerging ones. As Phillips states, “Inability (or unwillingness) to mourn leads to fear of loving, which amounts for Freud to an inability to live.” “Refusal to mourn is refusal to live,” Phillips continues: “Mourning is the necessary suffering that makes more life possible. . . . Good mourning, in Freud’s terms, keeps people moving on, keeps them in time; bad mourning becomes something akin to an ascetic personal religion. It is impossible to love life, Freud intimates, without loving transience.” On this view, only the capacity to mourn lost life engenders more life; we can only create space for new loves and affective adventures—we can only remain receptive to fresh encounters with the world—to the extent that we are able to mourn. Good mourning is, Phillips concludes, “open-ended, a restoring of appetite.”14 I have emphasized throughout this book that the quest for permanence is an inherently illusory endeavor. This means that, along with our specific losses, we need also to learn to mourn the very notion of permanence. By this I of course do not wish to argue that there is no value in long-term commitments. And I am also not suggesting that we should not retain deep psychic attachments to our past. I am merely saying that an awareness of transience makes loss— and the life-giving transformation that loss facilitates—tolerable. We might in fact do well to enter into intimate relationships with the understanding that, no matter how important or meaningful a given relationship is to us, the death of the relationship is in some ways with us from its very beginning; the ending of each of our relationships is built into its composition from the start. The capacity to recognize this is not a matter of cynicism, but rather an invitation to esteem each

THE RESIDUE OF LOVE

123

moment for what that moment can yield, without worrying unduly about whether or not the relationship comes to an end. Indeed, this insight might allow us to give up our attempts to control what resides beyond our capacity to master. An attempt to control things is often an effort to make something last beyond its natural lifespan: to prolong love that has outlived its ardor; to sustain relationships that have lost their radiance; to resuscitate a spark that has long been extinguished. In the long run, such attempts lead to wooden psychic lives and equally wooden relationships. Stephen Mitchell remarks that one of the bitter paradoxes of love is that our desperate efforts to render it secure destroy the very passion on which it is premised; when we seek to minimize the risks of love and guarantee the safety of our relationship, we by definition undermine “the preconditions of desire, which requires robust imagination to breathe and thrive.”15 What is more, we tend to try to reduce the treat of love by aspiring to possess the beloved other even when we know full well that the possibility of losing the other is an inherent component of eros. In the previous chapter, I analyzed the manner in which fantasies limit our existential options by making our lives seem more coherent and predictable than they actually are. Along similar lines, Mitchell suggests that our fantasies of having “ownership” over the other—as well as the related idea that we can take steps to protect the future of the relationship against the tug of the unanticipated—in the long run slay passion, for it is only insofar as the other is not possessed, that the other retains an independent identity and existential space, that it remains of interest to us. Our endeavor to secure what is, by its very nature, insecure therefore suffocates the very thing that we are attempting to preserve. It may well be that we tend to be keen to discipline the unruliness of eros because on some fundamental level we are so afraid of its destabilizing power that we are willing to trade our psychic vitality for the trappings of an orderly interpersonal life. We are willing to give up (some of our) life to fend off the possibility of loss. And we resort to lukewarm and worn-out habits of intimacy because we cannot bear the raw vulnerability of undomesticated eros any more than we can tolerate

124

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

the prospect of aloneness. Yet, tragically, the more we crave stability— the more we subsume eros into what is most mundane and predictable about our lives—the less we are able to appreciate what is extraordinary (or even transcendent) about it. Against this backdrop, the ability to accept loss and transience—and consequently to relinquish the attempt to control the course and contours of eros—would animate us anew; it would forge a space for pristine pleasures and possibilities. THE DRAW OF SOLI T UDE

This far in my discussion, I have suggested that loss is a necessary underside of creativity. I have also implied that, to a certain extent, it is the absent other who reveals us as subjects of significatory possibility. In the fort-da game, for instance, it is the absent mother who allows the child to become a creator of meaning. From this point of view, creativity could be said to be an inherently selfish endeavor in that it “uses” the people we have lost as a source of inspiration. As Hélène Cixous states (in the context of talking about inspired forms of writing): “Writing: first I am touched, caressed, wounded; then I try to discover the secret of this touch to extend it, celebrate it, and transform it into another caress.”16 In other words: the fact that I am touched and wounded by the beloved other becomes the basis of my inspiration, of my feverish attempt to transmute the caress of the one I have lost into the caress of the written word. In translating the other into text, I celebrate the other, but in a manner that transforms it into something that bears only the faintest of resemblance to its original form; I substitute the caress of the living word for the caress of living flesh. In this scenario, I am amplified—become capable of fierce inventiveness—to the extent that I consume the memory of the other; my writing flows, my text takes shape, within the void that marks the impossibility of the other’s presence. I in fact erect my subjectivity—I fill my psyche with the electrifying promise of creativity—on the other’s decaying remains. As Barthes observes, “there is no benevolence within writing, rather a terror: it smothers the other, who, far from perceiving the gift in it, reads there instead an assertion of mastery, of

THE RESIDUE OF LOVE

125

power, of pleasure, of solitude.”17 Through writing, I declare my complete independence from the other; I show the other that it is not needed. I in fact flaunt the absolute legitimacy of my solitude.18 My words swell, come alive, find a rhythm in the residue of the other’s absence. In this manner, my writing is an utterance of love—an extension of the possibility of love in its very impossibility—that simultaneously conveys the violence of an emphatic farewell. Insofar as creativity feeds on loss, it tends to privilege our relationships to absent others over those who are still present. As such, it can be a strangely solitary endeavor that vehemently—brutally even— defends the creator’s right to withdraw from the realm of what is usually understood as intersubjectivity. Kristeva tells us that Stendhal once wondered—by scribbling a query in the margin of one of his novels— whether it was better to have written the novel or to have had three lovers. “The dilemma,” Kristeva remarks, “is not as rare or as absurd as one might be tempted to believe and ceaselessly haunts the writer and the work.”19 The question is of course answered by the very fact that the novel exists, yet Kristeva’s characterization of Stendhal’s predicament foregrounds the idea that the “choice” between the appeal of eros and the draw of solitude is a common enough artistic dilemma. And it moreover conveys that, for many creative individuals, the “choice” is resolved in favor of solitude: eros is sacrificed to creativity, as it were. By this I do not wish to propose that creativity is invariably a lonely or private matter, and even less that only grief-stricken individuals—individuals whose solitude arises from experiences of loss—are creative. Yet it would be difficult to ignore the impression that there exists a connection of some sort between creativity and solitude, that creativity commonly involves a more or less prolonged retraction of psychic energies from the external world.20 Interestingly, psychoanalytic theory remains relatively silent about solitude, and when it does talk about it, it is usually with a measure of reticence. Melanie Klein refers to an inner sense of loneliness—an insurmountable sense of being alone even when in the company of others or receiving love—in terms that resonate with my discussion of ontological lack. She connects such loneliness to the individual’s sense

126

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

that there are parts of the self that have been split off and can never be regained. Loneliness, Klein asserts, “is the result of a ubiquitous yearning for an unattainable perfect inner state”21 Klein therefore recognizes loneliness as a necessary component of being human. Furthermore, she regards the capacity to admit to and fully experience loneliness as a stimulus toward rewarding object relations. At the same time, she emphasizes that self-imposed states of aloneness—the individual’s flight to solitude—can be used defensively in an attempt to counteract dependence on external objects. Such a withdrawal from sociality, she argues, is in extreme cases “a symptom of illness.”22 There is obviously a big difference between loneliness as a state of deprivation and the kind of generative solitude that I have been outlining. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that Klein views withdrawal from sociality primarily as a sign of psychic deficiency—something that can be mitigated by the achievement of greater states of psychic integration, ego strength, and healthy object relations—rather than (at least potentially) as a precondition of creativity. More generally speaking, because psychoanalysis relies heavily on intersubjective models of psychic life, it can all too easily pathologize solitude as something that deprives, rather than enhances, the psyche; solitude is often interpreted as simply a lack of intersubjective care rather than as an attempt to establish a space for the deepening of creative insight. To the degree that psychoanalysis is by definition a relational practice (there are always at least two people in the room even when they remain silent) that relies on transference as a means of fashioning new intersubjective patterns, it is, understandably enough, mistrustful of whatever removes the individual from the realm of intersubjectivity. One might say that psychoanalysis is jealous of solitude, for the solitary self in many ways remains beyond the reach of analysis. But to the degree that psychoanalysis recoils from solitude, it fails to do justice to those aspects of the creative personality that yearn for solitude as a sought-after accompaniment to the hours, days, and weeks during which the imagination, shy and retiring, takes its tentative leap forward. The imagination is wary of interruptions, of those affairs of the world that break its delicate threads and destroy its elu-

THE RESIDUE OF LOVE

127

sive edifices. Indeed, it may well be that solitude is not only necessary for the successful execution of creative projects but, more broadly speaking, one of the prerequisites of the type of psyche that is capable of conceiving such projects in the first place. By this I do not intend to suggest that all modes of creativity require solitude, or that solitude is the only way to intensify the psyche, but merely that the habitual celebration of sociality and interpersonal relationships that characterizes our culture overlooks the generative (and regenerative) dimensions of solitude. And it hinders our ability to adequately appreciate the possibility that “intersubjectivity” can take on the form of relating to people who are—for the moment or for all eternity—absent from our lives. The silent conversations that we have with people who are not present are a valuable facet of intersubjectivity, as are our relationships with inanimate objects such as books, relics of our personal past, or other esteemed items that hold a special meaning for us. On this account, solitude is less a matter of detaching ourselves from others than it is of cultivating a different relationship to them: it is a way of honoring certain kinds of relationships (absences, memories) over others (actual presence of the other). This means that in solitude the individuals and social connections that are usually concealed (because they are not immediately present) surface to the forefront of our attention. We end up revering those who do not have a pressing or urgent claim on our interest over those who usually do. In this manner, we make space for individuals whom we might otherwise neglect; we recall a prized companion from two lifetimes ago rather than respond to the requirements of our present social world; we allow time to slow down so that we can better commit to memory what we do not wish to forget. And we suspend our ordinary desires so as to allow different, previously anonymous desires to become known; we listen to our desire with astute discrimination. On our own, we come to rest within the confines of our inner experience. In this fashion, solitude becomes a soft and gentle companion, a comforting cloak that shields us from the roughness and callousness of the world. This is because—like sublimatory activities—it is more predictable than most of our interpersonal and world-oriented

128

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

preoccupations. Yet, to the extent that solitude makes room for what we habitually ignore or overlook, it can also take us by surprise. By silencing the commotion of our everyday concerns, by arresting the hectic pace of our ordinary lives, solitude gives us access to meanings, insights, and aspects of being that are too timid to reveal themselves within the more turbulent exchanges of our social life. In this sense, solitude becomes a venue for those dimensions of psychic life that are marginalized by sociality. Furthermore, insofar as solitude tends to make us keenly aware of our emptiness, it adds urgency to our creativity. That is, if I am correct in positing lack as the precondition of meaning-production, then it may well be that, insofar as solitude builds a social void around us, it intensifies our sense of lack and therefore actively solicits acts of creativity. Most of us are used to the idea that our relationships with others induce the psyche to prosper. But I would say that solitude holds its own particular promise of psychic rekindling. This is the case because when the external world fades into the background, when our desire for the world is subdued, we have room for the kind of self-reflexivity that can, retroactively, make sense of the opacity of our social networks. As a matter of fact, if solitude sometimes appears selfish, it may well be because the solitary subject hauls the spoils of sociality into the secret labyrinth of its seclusion. Yet, in the long run, there is also a hospitability to solitude in the sense that it recharges us to better meet the worries and vulnerabilities of others. If the longing for solitude indicates that we are tired of talking, the (voluntary) breaking of solitude, like the breaking of a fast, indicates that we are once again hungry for words. One way to understand the relationship between solitude and creativity is to return to Winnicott’s distinction between the true and false self. As we have learned, Winnicott aligns the true self with inner aliveness and creativity, whereas the false self is characterized by stiff defensiveness. What is particularly interesting about Winnicott’s argument is that he associates the true self with solitude and noncommunication and the false self with social compliance. As he observes, “At the centre of each person is an incommunicado element, and this is

THE RESIDUE OF LOVE

129

sacred and most worthy of preservation.”23 “I am putting forward,” Winnicott continues, “the idea of the permanent isolation of the individual and claiming that at the core of the individual there is no communication with the not-me world. . . . Here quietude is linked with stillness. This leads to the writings of those who have become recognized as the world’s thinkers.”24 Winnicott thus draws a forceful link between the solitary nucleus of identity and creativity: the creative self not only turns inward, but actively pursues the stillness and silence of noncommunication as a means of detaching herself from the external world, for she knows that the world dilutes and thwarts creativity by exacting social compliance. It is intriguing to find Winnicott, who usually foregrounds the importance of object relations, defending the individual’s right to noncommunication. One manner of working around this apparent contradiction is to recognize that solitude, for Winnicott, allows the subject to relate to what he calls “subjective objects” (as opposed to “objective,” external objects). Although Winnicott relates subjective objects primarily to the infant’s preverbal experience of omnipotence—its primordial state of bodily aliveness and creativity—and argues that the adaptation to the reality principle entails a shift from such objects to ones that are objectively perceived, he also suggests that some adults retain a relationship to a personal world of meaning that is reminiscent of the subjective objects of early life. Speaking of mystical experience, for example, Winnicott proposes that attention should be paid “to the mystic’s retreat to a position in which he can communicate secretly with subjective objects and phenomena, the loss of contact with the world of shared reality being counterbalanced by a gain in terms of feeling real.”25 Likewise, Winnicott links the act of writing poetry— and the imaginative life more generally speaking—to the world of subjective objects.26 Winnicott underscores that it is precisely the world of subjective objects that grants the subject a sense of realness, whereas communication with the external world frequently feeds its sense of falseness. As he postulates, communication with the external world “easily becomes linked with some degree of false or compliant object-relating; silent or

130

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

secret communication with subjective objects, carrying a sense of real, must periodically take over to restore balance.”27 States of solitude and noncommunication are therefore a way to live in a subjective world that protects the true self from the potentially banal or traumatic demands of the external world. They shelter the self from being exploited by hegemonic sociality, from being “found” and “communicated with” against its consent, as it were. Such enforced sociality, Winnicott asserts, would represent an “alteration of the self ’s central elements by communication seeping through the defences,” and as such, would be a “sin against the self.”28 There is hence a kind of constitutive impossibility to Winnicott’s notion of the true self. On the one hand, the true self wishes to be found and communicated with in the sense that it yearns to be appreciated for “who it is,” for what is “genuine” about it. On the other, being found, being exposed by the other, is potentially exploitative in that it can overpower and annihilate the true self. The self ’s longing for authentic connection with others can consequently lead to the devastation of the very part of the self that esteems authenticity in the first place; if social interactions give the subject the opportunity to be reached in the intense and meaningful way that it longs for, the process of being reached is always also potentially one of being violated. Against this backdrop, solitude is an essential component of protecting the self ’s authenticity. As Winnicott observes, solitude is “part of the search for identity, and for the establishment of a personal technique of communicating that does not lead to violation of the central self.”29 Solitude sustains this search for a personal voice by providing a furtive haven in which our inimitable singularities and idiosyncrasies are free to come to the fore. This is to say that solitude serves the true self by making it easier for us to sidestep the pressures of the social collectivity. It also serves it by enabling us to become connected to ourselves in an immediate sense. Because solitude permits our usual social defenses to disintegrate—because it allows us to drop the various masks and facades that we uphold for the purposes of social acceptability—it empowers us to touch something “real” in ourselves; it gives rise to the kind of acuteness of self-experience that allows us

THE RESIDUE OF LOVE

131

(for the time being) to feel “like ourselves.” This is perhaps why Salman Rushdie discloses in an interview that he only feels like himself when writing.30 It is perhaps also why false or compliant object relating can wear us out so thoroughly that we need to retreat into solitude to restore our sense of who we are. From this viewpoint, the exhaustion that we sometimes feel in our social interactions may arise from the fact that such interactions do not always give us sufficient space to feel real. KEEP ING THE OTHER ALIVE

I have implied that to the extent that creativity draws on solitude, it tends to privilege the absent other over the tangibility of “real-life” object relations. On this view, creativity is a way of honoring and commemorating those we have lost. It can in fact function as a means of keeping lost objects conspicuously present, in the very vanguard of our psychic lives. Talking about writing in particular, Barthes conjectures that we “make an entrance onto the stage of language” precisely so as to halt the other’s definitive disappearance; we manipulate language “to delay as long as possible the moment when the other might topple sharply from absence into death.” In short, creativity “postpones the other’s death.”31 The text pours into the abyss created by the other’s departure, which suggests that the other is resurrected—reincarnated, venerated, and embraced—with each new sentence, phrase, or word. According to this account, absence is simply a heightened form of presence in that the other who cannot be forgotten occupies all the more space—signifies all the more fervently—in our psyches; the other is, as it were, more present in its absence than it might have been in its presence. Or perhaps more accurately, the other is simultaneously absent and present, erased and sustained. I underscored earlier that we often find it excruciating to give up past attachments. Yet it may also be the case that there are circumstances in which it is all too easy for us to forget those who are no longer present in our lives. More specifically, since those who are absent make no urgent demands on our awareness, since they do not

132

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

elicit our interest, solicitude, or care in any immediate manner, it can be difficult to maintain a connection to them in the face of the pressing demands of our day-to-day existence. If solitude fosters our relationship to absent objects, our everyday sociality is undoubtedly in many ways designed to facilitate the speedy disappearance of such objects in the sense that the absent inevitably compete against the intense allure of new impressions, enticements, temptations, and preoccupations. In this sense, acts of remembrance and reverence are constantly waging a losing struggle against the power of the present to cancel out the past. This implies, as Barthes observes with a measure of melancholy awareness, that whenever we manage to endure the absence of a beloved other, we betray the other: “This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival; for if I did not forget, I should die. The lover who doesn’t forget sometimes dies of excess, exhaustion, and tension of memory.”32 In this context, no love is as pure as our love of those whom we have lost, for our adamant refusal to tolerate the other’s absence represents an interpersonal gift of the highest order. Talking about our love for the dead, Kierkegaard remarks that “no love is as free as the work of love that recollects one who is dead.” In part this is because the dead offer us no hope whatsoever of reciprocation: we cannot expect the dead to return our affections or benefit us in any way. But our love for the dead is also free and faithful precisely to the extent that the dead possess little power to compete with the living. While life beckons us with multiple invitations to act and to strive for success, the dead crumble away in silent resignation, without recourse to complaint or communication. “Yes, time is a dangerous power,” Kierkegaard asserts: “In time it is so easy to begin over again from the beginning and then forget where one left off.”33 It is easy to arrest those who are absent from our lives to the spot where we last saw them, without any effort to plait them into the texture of our present lives. And since the dead make no active attempt to hold onto the living, the relationship will only persist to the extent that the living make an effort to hold onto the dead.

THE RESIDUE OF LOVE

133

There thus exists an inevitable tension between our need for psychic regeneration—which, as we have seen, depends on our ability to forfeit the past for the sake of being free to stride into the future—and our desire to remain faithful to those we have lost. Though Kierkegaard regards the capacity to “begin over again from the beginning” with a degree of suspicion, I have stressed throughout this book that this capacity is in many ways the very precondition of our ability to go on living, and this is particularly the case if we wish to live well. I have, in other words, emphasized the importance of our ability to enter into, and fully accept, the forward-moving cadence of our lives. I have even expressed a certain impatience to cast off the shackles of the past so as to be able to move toward the future without limitation or impediment. But I am aware that such an approach in many ways stands in direct opposition to our (always already faltering) ability to recall and recollect those who are absent. As Judith Halberstam declares, our efforts to make the lost “unlost” are always precarious because “to be unlost is to exist in that space between retrieval and obliteration where erasure waits on one side and something well short of salvation waits on the other side.”34 Our attempts to retrieve or salvage the absent thus cannot banish the ferocious specter of annihilation that lurks beneath our benevolence. Against this backdrop, it might be easier to discern why the endeavor to translate the absent other into text could be conceived as an act of deep generosity. Although it may at first glance appear that replacing the lost other by writing does a disservice to the other in that the other is overtaken and supplanted by a wholly different medium— in that the other as a tangible entity is replaced by a web of signifiers— one could also maintain that writing aims, however obliquely, at a loving resuscitation of a relationship that might otherwise be lost to the stealthy passage of time. Writing preserves and commemorates the other in a changed form, creating a poetic rather than a literal cradle for the legacy of the one who has vanished. And it is up to the writer to do justice to her absent muse. As Cixous states: “My only torment, my only fear, is of failing to write as high up as the Other, my only chagrin is of failing to write as beautifully as Love.”35 Cixous thus

134

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

expresses her anxiety of perhaps not being equal to the task of writing beautifully enough to fully convey the enduring magic and enchantment of the other. From this perspective, writing is a gesture of love that unavoidably contains the risk of maiming the memory of the other through the simple failure to write well enough. Yet the damage that bad or incompetent writing does to the other is never long-lasting. This is the case because, as we have discovered, the process of signification that loss initiates is by definition openended; to the degree that the subject of signification resists the temptation to reify the other into a fossilized icon—that it is motivated to compose ever-fresh substitutes for what it has lost—it in the final analysis cannot mar the other irrevocably. Indeed, insofar as the subject will search—cannot stop searching—for an adequate approximation of the other, it will fail to consume the other for the simple reason that there is no end to this search; the fact that no approximation will ever fully capture the original will prolong the search indefinitely. Cixous expresses the matter as follows: “The beloved, the one who is there, the one who is always there, the one who is never exhausted, the one who never runs out, but whose every phrase calls forth a book—and whose every breath inaugurates a song in my breast, a there that doesn’t disappear although I don’t ‘find’ it or enclose it. . . . Love gives me the space and the desire for endlessness. Ten thousand lives don’t cover a single page of it.”36 That is, the other who is absent animates, breathes life into, countless texts, countless attempts to communicate beauty. In this process, it becomes inscribed, over and again, and perhaps in an increasingly implicit or unrecognizable form, within texts that sustain the subject as a creative agent.37 CREAT IVI T Y AS SURRENDER

It is perhaps precisely because creativity invites the absent other to dwell within our inner world that we sometimes experience it as an alien and agitating force that possesses the power to momentarily reconfigure the boundaries of our subjectivity. In its most inspired forms, creativity can rupture the outlines of our everyday lives and

THE RESIDUE OF LOVE

135

transport us to furtive realms of the imagination that reside beyond our usual psychic regions; it can make us feel “erased” or “taken over” so as to usher us into an altered form of consciousness. Such remaking of consciousness exposes us to amorphous energies, including the disembodied voice of the missing other, that appear to originate from outside ourselves and to “speak through” our being. However, even though such incidents demand us to “surrender,” “capitulate,” or “submit” to a power beyond our control—even though we are seized or made captive in ways that generate intoxicating sentiments of self-loss and self-forgetfulness—we tend to feel enhanced and liberated by them. As Harry Frankfurt surmises, such incidents are highly appreciated not because of their usefulness, but because they “make available to us especially valuable experiences or states of fulfillment and of freedom.”38 In slightly different terms, one could argue that we tend to feel uniquely alive and elevated when we are able to enter the kind of creative furor that causes us to become fully absorbed in the present moment.39 Under normal circumstances, many of us find it exceedingly difficult to live fully in the present. We tend to ponder the past or fantasize about the future as much as to appreciate the passing moment. It may in fact be that there is something about the very nature of our psychic lives that makes it impossible for us to remain wholly immersed in the present. Our consciousness is inclined to vacillate and flicker in a fidgety manner that can be more than a little disconcerting. Furthermore, the instant we become aware of the present moment as the present, we have already lost it; we have already displaced our attention to what is no longer the present. It is consequently all the more remarkable that creative processes can fleetingly give us access to something that feels like a pure present—an opening to a place outside of linear time. Carolyn Dinshaw characterizes such episodes of being “out of joint” with time as “the capacious now,” as a kind of eruption of time within the body that allows us, fleetingly, to exist beyond historical time and the order of rationality.40 Such episodes ask us to acknowledge that there are forces within us that “know” things that we do not—cannot—consciously know. At their best, they can engender a

136

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

stunning intensification of perception—a heightened kind of epiphanic lucidity that discloses, to borrow from Roberto Harari, a “sudden glimmer” of an unexpected presence or depth. While the cause of epiphanic moments can be entirely banal or trivial, they have the power to convey us to palpable forms of wakefulness that are otherwise unapproachable. We might in fact conceive of such moments as startling jolts or flashes of insight that slice open the world and that compel us to experience both the terror and ecstasy of facing the sublime. Our best creative accomplishments could be posited to be translations or concrete renderings of these jolts. In this sense, the momentary renegotiation of subjectivity that characterizes inspired states of creativity can serve life by carrying us to what Harari calls “the hiding place of being.”41 Christopher Bollas describes such epiphanic moments in slightly more mundane terms, as “simple self ” experiences—transitory incidents of suspended consciousness—that allow us to fall to a place of depth “beyond thinking.”42 We emerge from that place amplified. Indeed, there are some very obvious similarities between such experiences and the piercing sensation of self-awakening that often accompanies erotic encounters. In the same way that eros—as Kristeva expresses the matter—gives us “the impression of speaking at last, for the first time, for real,”43 simple self experiences can make us feel profoundly transfigured. To the degree that such experiences allow for the kind of immediacy of self-relation that typically eludes us, they enable us to resurface within our more complex (more socially mediated) lives feeling uniquely revitalized. As Bollas asserts, “The person who cannot do this will have less psychic vocabulary, fewer props for the dreaming of lived experience, and so a diminished internal world when he returns to being the complex self.”44 Erotic encounters are potentially inherently destabilizing in the sense that they entail the temporary dissolution of the social conventions that separate us from others. Similarly, both inspired forms of creativity and simple self states can bring about a radical disintegration of our normal manner of interacting with our surroundings. Winnicott insists that such disintegration—our capacity to withstand “nonpurpo-

THE RESIDUE OF LOVE

137

sive” existential states—is in fact the very precondition of creativity as such. On this view, creativity demands our willingness to surrender our habitual psychic structures so as to allow nonhabitual lines of inventiveness to emerge; it is only by relinquishing the expected that the unexpected can be discovered. As Winnicott explains, “It is only here, in this unintegrated state of the personality, that that which we describe as creative can appear.”45 The inability to allow ourselves to experience such moments of disintegration—an inability that both defines and debilitates the false self—leads to excessive defensiveness, making it next to impossible to access creativity. In Winnicott’s words, “Organized defence against disintegration robs the individual of the precondition for the creative impulse and therefore prevents creative living.”46 Conceptualized in this manner, creativity becomes a somewhat disconcerting experience, for it demands us to momentarily relax the social strictures that constitute us as (seemingly) integrated entities. That is, creativity evokes states of being in which the usually quite well-defended borders of our social identity disperse so as to establish an opening for asocial energies to surge forth. One could in fact speculate—along the lines suggested not only by Freud’s discussion of sublimation, but also by Loewald’s analysis (examined in chapter 3) of the dynamic interplay between the conscious and the unconscious47—that creativity may by definition be a matter of generating fluid channels of communication between social (orderly) and asocial (at least potentially disorderly) levels of experience.48 In addition, imaginative and creative acts could be argued to draw the body into the process of meaning-production in ways that purely intellectual or rational tasks do not. Perhaps this is the case because inspired modes of creativity need, in a manner of speaking, to get around the intellect, need to temporarily defeat our rational (sociosymbolic) patterns of meeting the world so as to allow alternative repertoires to materialize. After all, we cannot access what resides beyond the normative cultural order unless we are willing to sidestep those psychic modalities that uphold us as members of that order.49 Creativity could therefore be described as a vibrant synthesis of elements that are refined, restrained, and knowable on the one hand,

138

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

and elements that are unrefined, riotous, and wildly enigmatic on the other. The matter might be summed up as follows: creativity calls for a disorderly and passionate element that is capable of breathing life into the imaginative process, yet it also demands a measure of discipline, for without discipline the disorderly and passionate element—however powerfully enlivening it might be—might not amount to anything concrete. Nietzsche in fact maintains that what we ordinarily conceive of as creative “freedom” is always in the final analysis a function of “unfreedom,” for it is only when the artist subjects herself to a strict regimen of rules and regulations that inspiration in any tangible form can take place. From such restraint, Nietzsche proposes, “there always emerges and has always emerged in the long run something for the sake of which it is worthwhile to live on earth, for example virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality—something transfiguring, refined, mad and divine.”50 According to this account, it is the artist’s self-discipline that establishes the confines within which the asocial and disordered elements of the creative process can be transformed into something spectacularly appealing. At the same time, too ruthless a repression of these elements would result in insipid and purely derivative art. This is to contend that discipline alone is not enough to engender sublime art, for even though it often manages to give rise to highly cultured and graceful forms of beauty, it lacks the raw energy and vitality to generate something truly inspired. Likewise, the asocial aspects of our subjectivity alone are not enough to produce transcendent art, for though they possess raw energy and vitality, they lack the element of restraint that is indispensable to transform this energy and vitality into a stirring work of art. In this sense, it is the delicate balance between the tamed and the untamed aspects of existence that ignites the embers of aweinducing creativity. Art that does not welcome the asocial, like rationality that does not contain a dose of irrationality, will shrivel up and die of its own indolence. What is at stake here are the conditions under which originality becomes possible. Although the civilized and neatly categorical dimensions of social life offer the discipline necessary for creative activity, it

THE RESIDUE OF LOVE

139

is the asocial energies of the psyche that frequently provide the invigorating blast of innovation. Psychoanalysis tends to associate the subject’s asocial energies with the unconscious as a site of the kind of inner upheaval and mutiny that rescues us from the dreary predictability of conventional existence. What I have endeavored to illustrate in this chapter is that the absent other—to the extent that it infuses our psychic lives with a highly resonant yet ultimately uncontrollable energy— may serve as yet another means of replenishing our creative capacities. As a matter of fact, I have attempted to demonstrate that if creativity comes into being as a residue of love in the sense that it anchors itself in the trace left by the absent other, it also gradually burns up—consumes and draws strength from—the rich energy of this residue. That is, insofar as creativity involves a constant negotiation between loss and our necessarily brittle attempts to undo loss, it uses up the psychic charge that is generated by the experience of loss. One could then argue that it is the endless to and fro of this negotiation that enables us to work our way from the vestiges of what has been lost to the ever tenuous promise of what has not yet been encountered. And one could moreover propose that this ongoing negotiation of love, loss, and fragile lives that creativity entails and encapsulates is what it means, from a specifically psychoanalytic viewpoint, to enter into the art of living.

This page intentionally left blank.

Epilogue

[T]here could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness. The man in whom this apparatus of repression is damaged and ceases to function properly may be compared (and more than merely compared) with a dyspeptic—he cannot “have done” with anything. —Friedrich Nietzsche

FOR NIETZSCHE, the capacity to forget is a precondition of being able to live in the present. The individual who is incapable of forgetting—who dwells among and relentlessly resurrects the sorrows, injuries, and grievances of the past—suffers from a spiritual indigestion, a bitter and unyielding ressentiment that makes it impossible for him to effectively enter into the flow of living.1 In contrast, the individual who forgets with ease, who is able to shrug his shoulders in the face of life’s disappointments, refuses to allow pain to become a permanent aspect of his being; instead of internalizing and nurturing trauma, such an individual regards pain as fundamentally alien to the self, and therefore something that does not contaminate the self ’s ability to embrace the present.2 Nietzschean forgetting accordingly has the same goal as Freudian mourning: it opens a space for new life, for new actions, passions, and existential opportunities. Nietzsche implies that without repeated acts of forgetting, the individual cannot sustain the process of becoming a singular person, but remains the melancholy victim of his past, devoid of the suppleness that would allow him to actively participate in the art of living. 141

142

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

One of the main insights that I have endeavored to communicate in this book is that what makes the psychoanalytic art of living distinctive is the recognition that when it comes to unconscious psychic experience, there is no such thing as the capacity to forget: not only does the unconscious invariably retain an imprint of past experiences, but our desperate attempts to forget the past can become a pathological means of defending ourselves against unconscious desire and meaning. It is for this reason that I have aspired to elucidate the manner in which unconscious levels of psychic life complicate our projects of selfconstitution. We have seen that the ideal of a unitary and seamlessly coherent self that underpins not only many traditional accounts of the art of living, but also our intuitive self-understanding, can actually keep us from living to the fullest of our potential. Likewise, Nietzsche’s endorsement of forgetting may offer a seductive image of strength and self-sufficiency, yet from a psychoanalytic point of view we know that we are likely to pay for such displays of psychic arrogance not only with debilitating symptoms, but also with the kinds of repetition compulsions that impoverish our intersubjective and imaginative lives.3 The pain that we suppress is pain that comes to haunt us in distorted and unpredictable forms. Indeed, what makes symptoms so persistent is exactly the fact that pain that might once have been piercingly easy to identify has been transformed into an unnameable and indecipherable discomfort. Or, worse still, it has been transmuted into repetitive patterns of meeting the world that misshape our destiny. This is one reason that processes of working through and mourning are so central to the psychoanalytic art of living, for such processes allow for a gradual letting go of lost objects and distressing memories without converting them into incapacitating symptoms and repetition compulsions. As I have attempted to illustrate, they contribute to the intensity of our psychic lives by adding layer after layer of depth, meaning, and versatility. At their most compelling, they allow us to rewrite our fate by opening the possibility for genuinely new possibilities, for generative shifts in the manner in which we approach our lives. In this sense, one could posit that it is precisely through processes of working through and mourning that forgetting—and the ensuing capacity to

EPILOGUE

143

step into the present (and the future)—becomes possible in the first place. Finally, insofar as processes of working through and mourning awaken dormant dimensions of our being, they grant us access to our idiosyncratic singularity, to what in us most resists being subsumed under the conformist directives of collective living. However, what is perhaps most important about psychoanalytic processes of working through and mourning is that they enable us to take (an always necessarily partial and tenuous) responsibility not only for the contours of our destiny, but also for how we interact with others. Our heightened understanding of how we unconsciously and repetitively bring the past into the present can help us to develop more ethical, generous, and thoughtful relationships with those we most care about in that it alerts us to the various ways in which we might be asking others to fulfill our unconscious ideals, thereby suffocating what is most alive in them independently of our fantasy lives. We can become more keenly aware of how our unconscious ideals violate the integrity of our loved ones by placing upon them hopes and expectations that have little to do with the singularity of their being—how, instead of meeting their singularity in its own terms, we might be tempted to treat them as objects that enhance our own sense of exceptionality or existential belonging. When we hold the other up to an impossible ideal, when we find the other lacking for the simple reason that it cannot match the perfection of our fantasies, we destroy our capacity to appreciate what in the other might be most captivating and worthy of our affection. We remain impervious to the luminosity of the other’s being, eclipsing it by the artificial brightness of our fantasy formations. And we forgo the possibilities for development and inner augmentation that an open encounter with what is radically other could grant us. Alternatively, there are times when the other, instead of falling short of our ideals, comes to embody them, when we elevate the other to the venerated status of personifying everything that we seek in the world. In such instances, we fall “in love” with the other, with the consequence that—for the time being at least—the other provides us with an incentive to try to raise ourselves to the level of our ideals: instead of judging the other to be lacking, we deem ourselves to be flawed in

144

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

comparison to the other; we strive to prove ourselves worthy of the other’s esteem. Yet, as much as we covet this state of affairs, it is something that we find difficult to sustain over time for the simple reason that the other cannot in the long run live up to the image of perfection in our minds; the other cannot but disappoint our ideals. When this happens—when we, to borrow from Roland Barthes, discover in the other a small “speck of corruption,” a minuscule detail that somehow renders the other banal or commonplace4—our illusion crumbles and we find ourselves face to face with the other’s (by comparison quite paltry and unoriginal) actuality. If we under normal circumstances endeavor to protect the sanctity of the beloved other against the assaults of the world, this attitude of devotion falls apart the moment we discern “on the skin of the relationship, a certain tiny stain, appearing there as the symptom of a certain death.”5 The death in question, of course, is the death of our desire for the other as an incarnation of our ideals. Ideals are therefore deceptive in more ways than one. Yet they are not something that we can easily avoid. Nor are they necessarily inherently problematic or unethical. Indeed, even though it is obviously important to stay mindful of the ways in which our ideals can mutilate or denigrate the other, it is also worth underlining that the notion that we could relate to the other in a non-idealizing manner is in turn founded on the somewhat questionable assumption that the other possesses a “real” or “authentic” personality that is being distorted by idealization. As my discussion in this book suggests, what we consider “real or “authentic” is always a psychosocial construct, which implies that there are instances in which idealization could be said to be simply a particularly indulgent way of fashioning a relationship with the other. Rather than being a blatant misrepresentation of the other as it “really” exists in the world, idealization could be seen as a magical way of illuminating the other. As soon as we recognize that the idealized version of the other is not necessarily any less “accurate” than any other version, but merely a caressing way of observing the other, it becomes possible to see how the idea that we could meet the other in non-idealizing ways is in itself a

EPILOGUE

145

misguided (and overly earnest) illusion. It could even be argued to diminish the other in the sense that it replaces a lofty image of the other as extraordinary by a less charitable vision of it as uncompromisingly ordinary. We may believe that by taking such a realistic approach to the other, we can elude the falsifications of fantasy, yet our conception of the other as ordinary is in many ways no less drastic an infringement of the other’s integrity than is our fantasy of its extraordinariness. However, the recognition that a down-to-earth approach to the other is not necessarily any more authentic than one based on idealizations does not mean that all forms of idealization are equally valid or ethically defensible. Some idealizations highlight and release aspects of the other’s being that customarily remain concealed. As such, they allow the other to come to life in an enchanting manner, opening a space for subdued or suppressed dimensions of the other to sparkle and shine. Yet there is a fundamental difference between idealizations that lovingly animate parts of the other’s being and ones whose sole purpose is to draw the other into the narcissistic folds of our own fantasy world. In other words, there is an important difference between idealizations that are ignited by some (visible or invisible) detail of the other’s being that we find appealing, and ones that arise from, and faithfully cater to, the self-serving circuit of our fantasies of interpersonal gratification. It is, moreover, crucial to keep in mind that our idealized vision of the other is merely one way of approaching the other—that it does not sum up or capture the other’s entire being—because the moment we equate our idealized vision with the other’s “essence,” we desecrate the other’s status as a creature of open-ended becoming. There are hence more or less productive, more or less imaginatively inspired, ways to idealize. An idealizing elaboration of qualities that the other to some degree possesses—and enjoys possessing—is less damaging than worshipping (and insisting on) qualities that do not in any way correspond to how the other views itself. And even with idealizations that reflect the other’s self-image, it is vital to allow ample room for disappointment. An expectation of consistency—an expectation that the other will always meet our ideal—is disastrous in robbing the other of the capacity to be less than perfect. It is, in other words,

146

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

important to recognize the transient nature of all idealizations. Even though the other’s adored features may not be wholly illusory—even though they may connect to something deeply meaningful in the other’s being—the expectation that they are entirely dependable inevitably is. In the same way that we need to be able to tolerate multiple and conflicting readings of ourselves, we need to come to terms with the manifold and ever-evolving realities of the other. The worst we can do is to fix the other into a static ideal, or to measure it against an inflexible external standard. As Stephen Mitchell explains, whether fantasies “are enriching or depleting depends on the way they are positioned in relation to actuality. Do they encourage an episodic selectivity and elaboration of the beauty of the partner? Or do they foster the illusion that there are other potential partners in the world who are only beautiful and never disappointing?”6 We do not, then, want to freeze the other to an idealized image that cannot be revised or that only has room for one version of the other’s multifaceted reality. Yet to the extent that we value security in our interpersonal relations, we are tempted to do exactly this. As I argued in chapter 2, we are tempted to erase the unsettling elements of the other’s alterity—the ways in which the other does not coincide with our fantasies—because we imagine that, by so doing, we manage to stabilize our lives. Rather than allowing ourselves to be surprised by the other, rather than allowing the other to touch us in unforeseen and potentially enlivening ways, we resort to idealizations that seem to guarantee the reliability of our life-worlds. In this manner, we deprive ourselves of the kinds of transformations that can only ensue from a courageous encounter with the other’s irreducible alterity. Our ideals can therefore become an obstacle to psychic renewal— a roundabout means of thwarting the process of entering into the current of life and of crafting a distinctive identity that I have associated with the psychoanalytic art of living. Along related lines, to the extent that ideals orient our attention to the luster of (always unfulfilled) possibilities, they can serve as a defense against fully experiencing the present; they can serve as a means of deflecting the actuality of existential episodes or interpersonal encounters that we for one reason or another

EPILOGUE

147

find too intense or threatening. Paradoxically enough, even though we are creatures who seek pleasure, we can also be overwhelmed by its acuteness, with the result that we at times spend quite a bit of energy trying to defer it, trying to protect ourselves against the very possibility of satisfaction. Ideals are one way to accomplish this. Not only do they keep us from appreciating the richness of our tangible lives by imprisoning us in a reified image of (an always deferred, always unattainable) future that promises to deliver us from the deficiencies of the present. But they also prevent us from discovering what life would be like if we ceased to erect obstacles on our path to satisfaction. In this sense, ideals protect us from unintended futures; they shut down alternatives that would allow another kind of future—one not dictated by our ideals—to come into being. This is one reason that the psychoanalytic art of living asks us to loosen our ideals and fantasy formations. As we have learned, when we discard fossilized ideals and fantasies, we by definition create a new world of meaning for ourselves; we allow the unexpected to direct us to previously foreclosed life scenarios and opportunities. For instance, when we perceive the other as a living subject—as a singular creature absorbed in its own relentless and at times confusing process of becoming—rather than as someone who either meets or fails to meet our ideals, we gain access to deeper levels of intersubjective possibility. And we may even be able to reach new levels of self-awareness. As Luce Irigaray explains, “What makes me one, and perhaps even unique, is the fact that you are and I am not you.”7 That is, it is my encounter with the other’s inimitable uniqueness that allows me to emerge—to come to my own—as a similarly unique entity: I define my singularity in part in relation to what I am not. This implies that the more I perceive and respect the other’s difference from me, the more I will be able to activate my own distinctiveness. The fact that the other remains a robust subject in its own right (rather than a hollow reflection of my ideals) enhances the existential viability of both of us. In Irigaray’s terms, to allow the other “to be” (outside of structures of possession and assimilation)—“to contemplate him as an irreducible presence, to relish him as an inappropriable good, to see him, to listen to him, to touch him,

148

A WORLD OF FRAGILE THINGS

knowing that what I perceive is not mine”8—not only ensures that the other is never reduced to an object, but also sustains my own experience of becoming. More generally speaking, what is most valuable about the restructuring of existence that results from the dissolution of stagnant ideals and fantasies is that it creates an entryway for fresh psychic and affective engagements that make acts of forgetting relatively painless for us. After all, there is nothing that makes it easier for us to forget the past than the ardor that we feel for something that fully captivates us in the present. The surplus of our love or devotion for the present arrests the unremitting pressure and movement of our memories—what Alenka Zupanc=ic= describes as a distressed state of “alert insomnia” in which “no great thing can happen”;9 it rescues us from an overly nostalgic attachment to the past. Although psychoanalysis recognizes that the past shapes both the present and the future, we have seen that an excessive faithfulness to the past can prevent us from gracefully entering the art of living. In this context, every new delight, every novel allegiance, induces us toward this art to the degree that it empowers us to develop a more discerning relationship to our past. This is not a matter of repressing the past, for as I previously indicated, this would merely convert what is traumatic about this past into symptoms and repetition compulsions. Rather, it is a way to go on with our lives without letting the ordeals of the past diminish our aptitude for aliveness in the present. Though the present is always imbued by the dissatisfactions and wounding aggressions of the past, we can learn to hold ourselves open to the myriad existential opportunities that emerge in the course of our ongoing process of fashioning a singular identity. We can, for example, feel deep sorrow or regret about past betrayals, abandonments, lost loves, or missed chances, yet still know how to welcome new loves and interpersonal alliances. Even if it is the case that the best we can accomplish at any given moment is to get one step closer to living the life that we want to live, we can activate our particular art of living to ensure that the step we take is a feisty one.

Notes

INTRODUCT ION 1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), p. 311. 2. For an informative account of the history of the art of living, see Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 3. Jonathan Lear, Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony (New York: Other Press, 2004), p. 84. 4. I will return to this in chapter 1. 5. There are of course many psychoanalytic approaches that seek to build secure foundations for the subject’s psychic life. Such approaches tend to have a much stronger investment in coherent and linear life narratives than I am willing to entertain. I think that the demand for such narratives all too easily translates to an aspiration for normative existential trajectories, which in turn threatens to align psychoanalysis with the questionable task of upholding traditional forms of social organization. In this book, I draw freely from various psychoanalytic schools, but my preference is for theories that envision the self as an open-ended entity. I like to think of psychoanalysis as a process that facilitates a continual inquiry into the enigmas of psychic life rather than as a method of arriving at definitive answers. 6. Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 4. 7. I will return to this point in chapter 3. For now, it is worth noting that Hans Loewald discusses this idea in “Repetition and Repetition Compulsion,” in The Essential Loewald: Collected Papers and Monographs (Hagerstown, MD: University Publishing Group, 2000), pp. 91–92. CHAP TER ONE. THE ART OF LIVING 1. For more detailed analyses of Socrates, see Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Oxford: 149

150

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

Blackwell, 1995); Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 2. Hadot provides perhaps the most comprehensive overview of the various postSocratic ancient traditions, among them Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Epicurenism, Cynism, and Skepticism. Major post-Socratic thinkers include Epicurus, Plotinus, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. 3. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), pp. 50–51. 4. See Hadot, p. 265. 5. It is useful to note that Hadot criticizes Foucault for presenting ancient selfcare as an aesthetic practice—a practice that aims primarily at the refinement of the self—without paying sufficient attention to the “cosmic” dimensions of this practice. Hadot posits that the objective of Stoicism and Epicureanism, for instance, was the kind of expansion of the self that granted the individual access to the infinity of cosmic reason. As he explains, “Whereas the average person has lost touch with the world, and does not see the world qua world, but rather treats the world as a means of satisfying his desires, the sage never ceases to have the whole constantly present to mind. He thinks and acts within a cosmic perspective. He has the feeling of belonging to a whole which goes beyond the limits of his individuality. . . . Scientific knowledge was objective and mathematical, whereas cosmic consciousness was the result of a spiritual exercise, which consisted in becoming aware of the place of one’s individual existence within the great current of the cosmos and the perspective of the whole, toti se inserens mundo, in the words of Seneca” (p. 273). On this view, the purpose of self-care was not to promote one’s individuality, but rather to transcend the self so as to think and act in unison with cosmic principles. Speaking of Stoicism in particular, Hadot specifies, “it is not the case that the Stoic finds his joy in his ‘self ’; rather, as Seneca says, he finds it ‘in the best portion of the self,’ in ‘the true good.’ Joy is to be found ‘in the conscience turned towards the good; in intentions which have no other object than virtue; in just actions.’ Joy can be found in what Seneca calls ‘perfect reason’ (that is to say, in divine reason) since for him, human reason is nothing other than reason capable of being made perfect. The ‘best portion of oneself,’ then, is, in the last analysis, a transcendent self. Seneca does not find his joy in ‘Seneca,’ but by transcending ‘Seneca’; by discovering that there is within him—within all human beings, that is, and within the cosmos itself—a reason which is a part of universal reason” (p. 207). 6. Ibid., p. 83. 7. Foucault, p. 59. 8. Ibid. 9. Hadot, p. 87. 10. See chapter 11 of Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life. See also p. 33 of Arnold Davidson’s introduction to Hadot’s book. Nehamas’s The Art of Living includes detailed analyses of Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

151

11. For valuable discussions of Nietzsche, see Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); Graham Parkes, Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Richard Schacht, Making Sense of Nietzsche: Reflections Timely and Untimely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). In this context, it is worth stressing that although Nietzsche was strongly influenced by ancient philosophy, he criticizes Socrates for his overemphasis on rationality, as well as for his tendency to privilege the mind over the body, the purity of the soul over the impurity of corporeality. Nietzsche also disagrees with the Socratic quest for absolute truth and the related valorization of the eternal and transcendent over the concrete realities of existence. Yet Nietzsche shares Socrates’s conviction that human beings possess the capacity for various forms of self-fashioning. 12. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), p. 84. 13. Ibid. 14. Nietzsche, for instance, asserts that “we want to be the poets of our life—first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters” (The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Vintage Books, p. 240]). 15. Ibid., p. 232. 16. Ibid. 17. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 191. 18. Ibid., p. 182. 19. Ibid., pp. 183–184. 20. Ibid., p. 188. 21. Nehamas, The Art of Living, p. 4. 22. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 216. 23. Nehamas, The Art of Living, p. 5. Commenting on Nietzsche specifically, Nehamas maintains that the art of living “requires that the whole one constructs, the self one fashions, be significantly different from all others. If it isn’t, then one is not distinguishable from the rest of the world: one has not become an individual. But to be different in a significant way, one will have to produce, one will have to become something significantly new. To become something significantly new, one must develop an unprecedented way of doing things, of thinking, feeling, and living. And to accomplish that, in turn, it will be necessary to break some long-accepted rules, some principles and practices that have been taken for granted so far” (ibid., p. 142). 24. Ibid., p. 10. 25. It has been fashionable in recent decades to talk about agency as an illusory concept that misleads the subject by offering it the comforting fantasy of being the author of its own existence. More specifically, contemporary (postmodern) theories of

152

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

subjectivity have foregrounded the manner in which human beings are inserted into, and subjected to, collective systems of power and signification—invisible networks of ideological entrapment as well as visible institutions of authority—that define their existence. If the art of living in its traditional forms was interested in the subject’s ability to distance itself from the norms and conventions of its society, postmodern theories have attempted to explain why it is frequently quite difficult for individuals to escape their social positionality. These theories have tried to clarify how social directives are internalized and become an integral part of the subject’s “private” self; how the subject’s thoughts, beliefs, and preferences are always to a considerable extent a reflection of the values that it has received from its cultural setting; and how even acts of resistance can be incorporated back into dominant systems of meaning-production. The brilliance of much of postmodern theory resides, precisely, in its capacity to reveal how subjectivity is always conditioned by impersonal social structures. 26. Postmodern thinkers have remarked that Western master narratives have frequently been narratives of mastery predicated on the vehement exclusion of otherness in its various forms. As Graig Owens asks: “[W]hat made the grands récits of modernity master narratives if not the fact that they were all narratives of mastery, of man seeking his telos in the conquest of nature? What function did these narratives play other than to legitimize Western man’s self-appointed mission of transforming the entire planet in his own image? And what form did this mission take if not that of man’s placing of his stamp on everything that exists—that is, the transformation of the world into a representation, with man as its subject?” (“The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster [New York: New Press, 1998], pp. 75–76]. The recognition that there is often a connection between the pursuit of mastery on the one hand and epistemological as well as political violence on the other explains in part why postmodern theories have sought to deconstruct discourses of mastery by emphasizing the inherent ambiguity and multivalence of meaning. One could in fact argue that one of the main goals of deconstruction is to create a conceptual space for meanings that have been prohibited from, or marginalized by, dominant ideologies and social structures. That is, deconstruction aspires to make visible and operative meanings and modes of signification that have been vilified by hegemonic representations of human experience. As a result, it transforms our very understanding of what it means to be a human being, expanding the sphere of viable definitions of human life. This is an ethical dimension of deconstructive criticism that is frequently overlooked by its critics. 27. See Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) and The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). 28. Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, pp. 28–29. 29. Ibid., p. 29. 30. Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in The Anti-Aesthetic, p. 152. 31. Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, p. 74. 32. Ibid., p. 72.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

153

33. Ibid., p. 40. 34. Ibid., p. 88. 35. Ibid., pp. 72–73. 36. Jonathan Lear, Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony (New York: Other Press, 2004), p. 81. 37. Ibid., p. 95. 38. Christopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self-Experience (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 30. 39. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study of Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 213. 40. Ibid., p. 215. 41. Bollas, p. 3. CHAP TER T WO. THE PURSUI T OF HAPP INESS 1. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. James E. Strachey (London: W. W. Norton, 1961), p. 26. 2. Eric L. Santner, On the Psychopathology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 9. 3. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), p. 189. 4. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 114. 5. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 6, 23. 6. Ibid., p. 99. 7. Slavoj Z+iz=ek discusses the Hegelian concept of “tarrying with the negative” in many of his books. See, for instance, pp. 50–55 of Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out (New York: Routledge, 2001). 8. Kaja Silverman, World Spectators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 146. 9. Adam Phillips, Darwin’s Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 74. 10. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 69–72, 158–159. 11. Quoted in Phillips, Darwin’s Worms, p. 75. 12. Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 12. Phillips emphasizes that psychoanalysis is somewhat ambivalent about the accidental or contingent dimensions of our existence in that although it on the one hand recognizes the

154

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

power of contingency to shape our lives, on the other it seeks to reduce contingency by reading everything as an expression of unconscious desire. As he explains, “Through psychoanalytic interpretation Freud takes the luck out of accidents and makes them available as non-mystical sources of meaning. What looked like accident or chance was in fact voices from the past pressing for recognition. There are lives inside us competing to be lived. We must assume from what Freud says . . . that the ‘suppressed psychical material’ wants to express itself—that there are personal histories inside us in conflict but clamoring for recognition. Accidents are reminders of unfinished business, that we are living too few of our lives” (ibid., p. 13). 13. Phillips, Darwin’s Worms, p. 74. 14. Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. 110. 15. Santner, p. 9. 16. Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 61. 17. Ibid. 18. Santner, p. 86. 19. Ibid., p. 74. Santner is here referring to the Lacanian real. Both he and Z+iz=ek have highlighted the connection between the real and subjective singularity. This connection is beyond the scope of my present discussion. 20. Mitchell, p. 25. 21. The following books by Winnicott provide a good introduction to his thought: The Maturation Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (London: Karnac, 1965); Playing and Reality (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 1971); and Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986). See also Adam Phillips, Winnicott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). 22. Winnicott writes, “There is but little point in formulating a True Self idea except for the purpose of trying to understand the False Self, because it does no more than collect together the details of the experience of aliveness” (The Maturation Process, p. 148). That is, although the true self is connected to the subject’s experience of aliveness, it does not have any predetermined content. 23. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 68. 24. Winnicott, The Maturation Process, p. 142. 25. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. James E. Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), pp. 29–30. 26. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 65. 27. Ibid., p. 78. 28. Winnicott, The Maturation Process, p. 143.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

155

29. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 65. 30. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 380. 31. Michael Eigen, Damaged Bonds (London: Karnac, 2001), p. 168. 32. Sigmund Freud, “On Transience,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIV (1914–1916), ed. James E. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 306. CHAP TER THREE. THE REMAKING OF FATE 1. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. James E. Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), p. 23. 2. Ibid. 3. In this context, it is helpful to consider the following reflection from Loewald: “Psychoanalysis has discovered psychic determinism, which implies that behavior that either had been considered a chance occurrence, or as a matter of conscious choice and in that sense not predetermined, or as caused by biological processes, could be demonstrated as being determined by unconscious memories, fantasies, conflicts. What has been mainly emphasized about psychic determinism is the fact of cause-effect relations between psychic events, the causes being unconscious, the effects frequently being conscious psychic events or processes. But the main impact of psychic determinism resides in its being psychic determinism: the causes are conceived not as purely external or physical and biological, but as potentially personal, unconscious processes having a psychological effect on overt behavior. And secondly, these causes thus are susceptible to being influenced and modified in their turn by psychological processes. If this were not so, the whole idea that the reactivation of unconscious conflicts and their re-creation and working through in analysis could lead to change in present behavior would fall to ground” (The Essential Loewald: Collected Papers and Monographs [Hagerstown, MD: University Publishing Group, 2000], pp. 91–92). 4. Jonathan Lear, Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony (New York: Other Press, 2004), p. 205. 5. Jonathan Lear, “Introduction” to The Essential Loewald, p. xxxvii. 6. Lear, Therapeutic Action, pp. 48–49. 7. Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 161. 8. Roberto Harari, How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan, trans. Luke Thurston (New York: Other Press, 2002), p. 120. 9. Christopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self-Experience (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 24. 10. Ibid., p. 31. 11. Loewald, pp. 560–561. More specifically, Loewald maintains, “To acknowledge, recognize, understand one’s unconscious as one’s own means to move from a

156

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

position of passivity in relation to it to a position where active care of it becomes possible, where it becomes a task worthy of pursuit to make one’s business and concern those needs and wishes, fantasies, conflicts and traumatic events and defenses that have been passively experienced and reproduced” (ibid., pp. 95–96). In other words, the aim of analysis is to shift unconscious conflicts from passive repetition (the repetition compulsion) to the realm of active (conscious) repetition and working through. As Loewald puts the matter, “The transference neurosis, in the technical sense of the establishment and resolution of it in the analytic process, is due to the blood of recognition, which the patient’s unconscious is given to taste so that the old ghosts may reawaken to life. Those who know ghosts tell us that they long to be released from their ghost life and led to rest as ancestors. As ancestors they live forth in the present generation, while as ghosts they are compelled to haunt the present generation with their shadow life. Transference is pathological insofar as the unconscious is a crowd of ghosts, and this is the beginning of the transference neurosis in analysis: ghosts of the unconscious, imprisoned by defenses but haunting the patient in the dark of his defenses and symptoms, are allowed to taste blood, are let loose. In the daylight of analysis the ghosts of the unconscious are laid and led to rest as ancestors whose power is taken over and transformed into the newer intensity of present life, of the secondary process and contemporary objects” (ibid., pp. 248–249). 12. Ibid., p. 146. 13. Ibid., p. 546. 14. Ibid., p. 93. 15. Lear, Therapeutic Action, pp. 96–97. 16. Loewald, p. 550. 17. More specifically, Loewald states: “Let me once more come back to the phrase: Wo Es war, soll Ich werden; where id was, there ego shall come into being. . . . If ego and conscient life mean higher mental organization, in the sense of evolving, then id would be ego in statu nascendi. The coming into being of higher organization, of a more complex, richer mentality, seen as the realization of a potentiality represented by the id, seems ordained, as it were, by the laws of evolution. Man is understood in psychoanalysis as tending toward higher organization, future development of his unconscious life forces. He tends to become a person” (ibid., p. 543). 18. Ibid., p. 545. 19. Ibid., p. 543. 20. Lear discusses this aspect of Loewald in his introduction to The Essential Loewald, pp. xxxvi–xxxvii. 21. Loewald, p. 543. 22. Ibid., p. 549. 23. Ibid., p. 550. 24. Ibid., p. 545. 25. Ibid., p. 566.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

157

26. Ibid. 27. In this context, it is interesting to note the tension that exists, in Freudian psychoanalysis, between the scientific pursuit of rationality on the one hand and the emphasis on the irrational components of psychic life on the other. Loewald observes the following: “Psychoanalysis in its scientific approach to psychological problems, i.e., in acknowledging and exploring the unconscious, and especially also as a psychotherapeutic art, has greatly contributed to revitalizing the communication and interplay between fantasy and rationality. In many of its conceptualizations psychoanalysis, nonetheless, is still affected by the disease of the age and especially of official science— the disruption between fantasy and rationality—which it is intended to cure or ameliorate. . . . Freud does not appear to have recognized that the objective reality of science is itself a form of reality organized (although not created in a solipsistic sense) by the human mind and does not necessarily manifest the culmination of mental development or represent any absolute standard of truth, as he assumed” (ibid., pp. 363–364). Stephen Mitchell in turn points out that if Freud’s theory of the instincts and the unconscious—the idea that we are driven by dark and mysterious forces beyond our control—reveals Freud’s indebtedness to Romantic sensibilities, this Romantic strain is consistently undercut or reined in by his staunch commitment to Enlightenment rationality, particularly the idea that science allows us to see, and relate to, the world objectively, freed from the mystifications of earlier, more primitive worldviews (see Mitchell, Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time [New York: W. W. Norton, 2003], pp. 97–98). Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that Freud came to view fantasy formations as regressive constructs that threaten to eclipse or contaminate our eagle-eyed perception of reality. This, Mitchell maintains, led to the idea that the “fantasy-driven illusions of the pleasure principle can and should be replaced, through hard work and discipline, by the objective understanding of the reality principle” (ibid., p. 97). 28. Loewald’s argument is obviously related to Freud’s discussion of sublimation, for Freud postulates that, in sublimation, the energy of unconscious impulses “is not cut off but remains ready for use—the unserviceable aim of the various impulses being replaced by one that is higher.” That is, sublimation does not eliminate or repress unconscious impulses, but merely reshapes and rechannels them so that they become available for use in a modified (more socially acceptable) form. “It is probable,” Freud thus concludes, “that we owe our highest cultural successes to the contribution of energy made in this way to our mental functions” (Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, ed. James E. Strachey [New York: W. W. Norton, 1961], p. 60. 29. Adam Phillips, Darwin’s Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories (London: Basic Books, 1999), p. 95. 30. Slavoj Z+iz=ek explains that any attempt to construct a coherent life-story is necessarily a deceptive and wholly fantasmatic endeavor to hide the fissures within our being. As Z+iz=ek states, “fantasy is the primordial form of narrative, which serves to occult some original deadlock . . . the ultimate aim of psychoanalytic treatment is not for the analysand to organize his confused life-experience into (another) coherent narrative, with all the traumas properly integrated, and so on. It is not only that some narratives are ‘false’, based upon the exclusion of traumatic events and patching up the

158

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

gaps left by these exclusions . . . [but] the answer to the question ‘Why do we tell stories?’ is that narrative as such emerges in order to resolve some fundamental antagonism by rearranging its terms into a temporal succession. It is thus the very form of narrative which bears witness to some repressed antagonism” (The Plague of Fantasies [London: Verso, 1997], pp. 10–11). 31. Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 6. 32. Ibid. 33. Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life, p. 112. 34. Lear, Therapeutic Action, p. 203. 35. Ibid., 204. 36. Harry G. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. ix. 37. Frankfurt states: “The fact that someone cares about a certain thing is constituted by a complex set of cognitive, affective, and volitional dispositions and states. . . . It certainly cannot be assumed that what a person cares about is generally under his immediate voluntary control” (ibid., p. 85). 38. Phillips, Darwin’s Worms, p. 29. CHAP TER FOUR . THE FALL OF FANTASIES 1. My next project (tentatively entitled The Singularity of Being: Self, Other, Ethics) addresses key components of Lacan’s later work, particularly his concepts of the ethical act, subjective destitution, the sinthome, and traversing the fundamental fantasy. The present chapter for the most part addresses fantasy from the early Lacanian perspective. 2. I am aware that the term “existential” is not often used in Lacanian contexts. However, I will employ it in this chapter—along with some other decidedly nonLacanian terms, such as “identity,” “psychic potentiality,” and “self-actualization”— because I believe that such terms provide access to aspects of Lacanian theory that are rarely discussed. That is, even though Lacan himself seldom uses these terms, I think that he is interested in the concepts that we usually associate with them. The specificity of Lacanian vocabulary should not obscure the fact that Lacan is frequently concerned with central questions about human existence that have preoccupied philosophers from the beginning of Western thought. At the same time, the “humanistic” tone of my discussion should not be interpreted to represent an attempt to deny the generally antihumanist thrust of Lacanian theory. 3. The Oedipus complex, in its classically Freudian rendering, is inherently hegemonic in the sense that it prohibits forms of desire that are not normatively acknowledged as legitimate. Not only does it channel desire into heterosexual object choice, but it privileges reproductive (goal-oriented) sexuality over more amorphous pleasures. And it could be argued to teach women to “live out” their femininity in submissive and masochistic ways. Yet the very fact that the Oedipus complex functions hegemonically

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

159

also brings into existence the unconscious as a simmering undercurrent of wishes, fantasies, and desires that society deems unacceptable, shameful, or somehow “unnatural.” In this sense, the Oedipus complex—as the ancient Greek depiction of Oedipus’s predicament already implied—is as much about breaking the rules as it is about enforcing them. Or perhaps more accurately, it displays the inevitable failure of sociocultural rules even as it seeks to implement them. From a slightly different viewpoint, one could argue that the fact that the system frequently fails—that not all people are heterosexual or reproductive, and that many women are far from submissive or masochistic—suggests that the “content” of the Oedipal prohibition may not be fixed for all times to come. If the Oedipus complex compels us to desire in culturally intelligible ways, then perhaps we can create space for alternative desires by expanding our definition of what is culturally intelligible. Oedipal hegemony, in other words, is caused less by the abstract “mechanism” of the Oedipus complex than by the particular form of the cultural establishment that surrounds it—an establishment that upholds the sanctity of the heterosexual nuclear family, that approves of gender inequality, that shuns homosexuality, and that defines pleasure in limited and small-minded ways. 4. As I already implied in the previous note, the cultural designation of certain desires as “unnatural” is particularly ironic in light of the fact that desire is always by definition a cultural phenomenon. In effect, one reason that many socially progressive critics are drawn to psychoanalysis is precisely the fact that it offers us a cultural rather than a biological explanation of human subjectivity and desire, which implies that the form of this subjectivity and desire can be altered. Biological definitions of what it means to be human tend to lock us into unassailable expectations of behavior and social organization. Sociocultural analyses of human phenomena, in contrast, open a space for transformation. Thinking about sexuality as a matter of sociopsychic processes rather than of biological givens, for instance, allows us not only to highlight the often quite repressive character of our social systems, but also liberates us from the idea that sexualities are fixed for all times to come. 5. Here it is important to emphasize that the blissful sense of self-sufficiency and “oceanic” plenitude that the subject imagines having lost is always a retroactive and purely fantasmatic construct that is designed to conceal the fact that no such primordial condition of wholeness and unmitigated enjoyment ever existed. The presymbolic body is not characterized by a harmonious rhythm of satisfaction and symbiotic fullness, but rather by a constitutive vulnerability in the face of the chaotic and insistent force of its own drives. On this view, the sociolinguistic structure imposed by the signifier is not merely something that robs the subject of enjoyment and imposes a painful self-division, but also a means for the subject to escape its intrinsic state of disequilibrium and disorganization. In short, social subjectivity could be argued to function as a complex defense-formation against the otherwise overwhelming onslaught of the drives. Indeed, to the degree that social subjectivity (however implicitly or obliquely) generates a vision of enjoyment as a lost state that might one day be recovered, it protects the subject from the disillusioning realization that unmediated enjoyment is antithetical to human existence not so much because we have been forcefully deprived of it, but because we are inherently incapable of managing our drives. 6. Slavoj Zi+ z=ek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 51. Z+iz=ek here paraphrases Lacan, who states: “Thus the

160

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing, and this death constitutes in the subject the eternalization of his desire” ( Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: W. W. Norton, 1977], p. 104). I am in this instance using Sheridan’s translation rather than the more recent one by Bruce Fink because it (in being more literal) highlights the similarities between Lacan’s statement and that of Z+iz=ek. 7. As Lacan puts the matter, the “real” of the body “suffers from the signifier” (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. JacquesAlain Miller [New York: W. W. Norton, 1992], p. 118). 8. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 578. 9. It is also something that Lacan appears to rethink in his later work when he shifts his focus from the signifier to the body (from desire to the drives). Commentators such as Bruce Fink, Roberto Harari, and Slavoj Z+iz=ek have in recent years emphasized this transformation in Lacan’s thought. In Lacan’s early work (the seminars of the 1950s), Lacan was primarily interested in the imaginary and symbolic aspects of existence. In contrast, in the later seminars—beginning with Seminar VII (1959–1960)— Lacan became increasingly interested in the “real” of the body. As he announces in his 1975–1976 seminar, “What is important is the real. After having talked of the symbolic and the imaginary at length, I have been led to ask myself what might be in this conjunction the real” (Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XXIII: Le sinthome, 1975–1976 [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005], p. 107; my translation). For a useful delineation of the different stages of Lacan’s thinking, see Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 207–217, as well as Slavoj Z+iz=ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 133. 10. By this I do not mean that the psyche has no relationship to the outside world prior to the inception of signification, but merely that the signifier transforms this relationship into one of desire. 11. See Kaja Silverman, World Spectators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 15. 12. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 118. 13. Ibid., p. 121. 14. Silverman analyzes this statement in World Spectators, pp. 45–49. 15. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 120. 16. In Reinventing the Soul: Posthumanist Theory and Psychic Life (New York: Other Press, 2006), I argue against the temptation to equate the Lacanian symbolic with what Foucault means by hegemonic power. Although the symbolic can be (and often is) harnessed for regulatory ends, it is not synonymous with disciplinary power. And as I will try to show, although the symbolic carries the Law of the Father, it simultaneously perpetuates the slippery logic of signification—a logic that by definition undermines law in all of its incarnations. By this I do not wish to discount that fact that there are specific signifiers—signifiers that carry the unequal effects of power—

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

161

that wound particular subjects, that cut up subjects in devastating ways. What is important, in this context, is to ask who in our culture tends to be denigrated by signifiers and who has access to their creative potential. 17. Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, p. 264. 18. See Martin Heidegger, “. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . ,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 19. Jonathan Lear takes issue with Lacan’s argument that the mirror stage activates a misleading dynamic of misrecognition and mistaken identity that is invariably detrimental. Might it not be possible, Lear asks, that the (admittedly exaggerated) unity that the child attributes to itself is a necessary component of a healthy process of psychological development rather than, as Lacan claims, a form of falsehood that covers over an underlying emptiness and fragmentation? Lear acknowledges that there are personalities—false selves—that display a phony and defensive coherence. And he also admits that even individuals with richly formed psychic lives can fall into “false unities that misshape their souls.” This, however, is not the same thing as the Lacanian argument that unification always and by definition misshapes us. As Lear maintains, “There are all sorts of occasions for misfire, for self-misunderstanding. But Lacan isn’t talking about how things can go wrong some of the time; he is trying to give a constitutional account of the ego as such. His claim is that the ego is always and as such a méconnaissance. What legitimates that claim?” (Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony [New York: Other Press, 2004], pp. 139–140). 20. For a discussion of this point from a Lacanian perspective, see Lewis A. Kirshner, Having a Life: Self-Pathology After Lacan (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2004). For a more general analysis of narcissistic injury, see Lynne Layton, Who’s That Girl? Who’s That Boy? Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory (Northvale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1998); Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); and Kelly Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 21. I think that Lacan’s approach represents a potentially useful response to the widespread contemporary phenomenon of indefinable existential malaise—of vague sentiments of inner emptiness and psychic meaninglessness. It must, however, be acknowledged that his theory is less immediately applicable to instances of psychic abjection that are circumstantial rather than existential. The notion of learning to live with one’s lack or insecurity takes on a wholly different valence when that lack or insecurity emerges from past abuse, intersubjective victimization, or social oppression. Indeed, recognizing the difference between existential and circumstantial forms of lack is valuable because it helps clarify the distinction between deconstructive forms of psychoanalysis—which Lacanian analysis could be argued to be—on the one hand and more restorative approaches on the other. The latter tend to work with circumstantial forms of lack, whereas the former often focus on lack as an existential state. This means that while restorative approaches tend to rely on processes of self-narrativization that empower the subject to resist being “named” by wounding external forces, and that allow it to over time rewrite its traumatic past along more affirmative lines, deconstructive approaches aspire to take apart the subject’s narratives so as to expose their

162

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

fantasmatic and illusory status; while restorative approaches seek to capitalize on the power of narratives to facilitate a constructive reclaiming of the self and its history, deconstructive theories tend to question the very legitimacy of the subject’s narratives. (Note that my usage of the term “deconstructive” here should not be interpreted to mean that I equate Lacanian theory with that of Derrida, but merely that I think that Lacan’s approach to narrativization is deconstructive in the broad sense of the term.) 22. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 120. 23. Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. 107. 24. Mitchell writes, “as a steady fare, objective reality becomes a devitalized shadow of a fuller experience that is made possible when the actual can be animated and brought alive through fantasy” (ibid., p. 106). 25. Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 39–40. Santner specifies, “To put it paradoxically, what matters most in a human life may in some sense be one’s specific form of disorientation, the idiomatic way in which one’s approach to and movement through the world is ‘distorted’” (ibid., p. 39). 26. Ibid., p. 51, note 9. 27. Ibid, p. 40. 28. Lacan may have aimed his indignation at ego-psychology for largely idiosyncratic reasons—such as his vehement dislike of what he saw as a specifically American tendency to turn psychoanalysis into a tool of social conformity—but his commentary on the dangers of ignoring lack remains highly relevant to contemporary debates about the purpose of clinical practice. Mitchell Wilson (“Nothing Could Be Further from the Truth: The Role of Lack in the Analytic Process,” The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 54 (2006): pp. 397–422) has recently noted that Anglo-American clinicians are not, generally speaking, used to thinking about lack in the Lacanian sense, with the result that they are likely to overlook its generative potential. More specifically, Anglo-American clinical practice tends to be biased toward presence and plenitude (the filling of lack) in the sense that analysts are tempted—and sometimes even feel compelled—to make sense of their patients’ dilemmas by providing accurate, meaningful, and seamless interpretations. Wilson points out that it is not at all clear that such affirmative giving of meaning to the patient always serves a curative function, for it runs the risk of signaling to the patient that interpretative closure is more important than her capacity to dynamically inhabit a space of existential uncertainty and incompleteness. Or—to frame that matter in terms that resonate with my discussion of fantasy—it holds the patient captive in comforting fantasy formations that radically constrict and distort the possibilities of her life. 29. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 319. 30. In his later seminars, Lacan becomes increasingly interested in how fantasies thwart and frustrate the momentum of the drives. He ends up opposing the drives to desire, raising the possibility that desire in the final analysis serves as yet another fan-

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

163

tasmatic ruse that impedes the subject’s pursuit of enjoyment (drive satisfaction). That is, instead of living out the drive—and getting actual satisfaction—the subject takes pleasure in the anticipation (fantasy) of satisfaction that desire represents. In this sense, desire—by obstructing the fulfillment of the drive—becomes an elaborate defense against satisfaction. This line of argumentation is one that Z+iz=ek foregrounds in much of his work (see, in particular, The Plague of Fantasies [London: Verso, 1997]). 31. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 314. 32. Lacan characterizes the predicament of such a subject as follows: “He will make an effective contribution to the collective undertaking in his daily work and will be able to occupy his leisure time with all the pleasures of a profuse culture which— providing everything from detective novels to historical memoirs and from educational lectures to the orthopedics of group relations—will give him the wherewithal to forget his own existence and death, as well as to misrecognize the particular meaning of his life in false communication” (Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, p. 282). 33. Fink, pp. 33–38. 34. Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, p. 688. 35. Zi+ z=ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 123. Zi+ z=ek reads ideology as a fantasy formation that, by concealing the various (unsymbolizable) divisions and antagonisms of the social field, supports and lends legitimacy to our version of “reality.” As he states, “The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” (ibid., p. 45). 36. There are components of Lacanian theory—particularly the notion of subjective destitution and the ethical act—that support this reading. 37. From this perspective, Lacanian theory is not incompatible with poststructuralist theories of polyvalent meaning—as Z+iz=ek sometimes implies—but rather another means of understanding what it implies for the subject to enter into the play of signification without any ultimate security. 38. See Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Derrida of course notoriously accuses Lacan of having envisioned a phallocentric symbolic order that impedes rather than facilitates play. That is, Derrida criticizes Lacan for having raised the phallus into the organizing principle of signification, into the privileged signifier around which the symbolic order revolves (see Derrida, “The Purveyor of Truth,” Yale French Studies 52 [1975]). However, insofar as the phallus for Lacan is a symbol of power that every subject covets but that no one can actually possess, it merely marks the place within the symbolic structure where the subject’s agency falters, where the subject’s ability to control either itself or its meanings fails. As such, the phallus, far from unifying the symbolic order, highlights the manner in which this order itself is never a consistent or self-contained structure. 39. This is related to what Michel Foucault means when he argues that power always generates its own resistances. 40. Here one should recall the distinction that Lacan makes in “The Function and Field of Speech” (in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English) between “empty” or

164

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

“false” speech that fails to carry the subject’s desire, and “full” or “true” speech that manages to convey the specificity of this desire. 41. Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XXIII, p. 133; my translation. 42. Roberto Harari expresses the distinction between subjectivity and individuality (personality) as follows: “if the notion of the subject—unlike the classical paranoiac personality—is useful for psychoanalysis, this is because it comes from the Latin subjectus, ‘cast down,’ ‘supposed,’ subjected. In this sense, to indicate that the subject is supposed is nothing new, but is rather somewhat tautologous. It is supposed by its very definition: it is posed (hierarchically) beneath a structure that determines it. It is diametrically opposed to the personality, as the latter boasts that it is its own master, it is self-born. It is the notion of the subject that accounts for the condition of being supposed, determined by the field of the Other” (How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan, trans. Luke Thurston [New York: Other Press, 2002], pp. 103–104). 43. Z+iz=ek argues forcefully that the lack to be assumed by the subject is not—as I have here proposed—its own lack, but rather that of the Other. As he postulates, “one can only wonder at the fact that even some Lacanians reduce psychoanalysis to a kind of heroic assumption of a necessary, constitutive sacrifice. . . . Lacan is as far as possible from such an ethic of heroic sacrifice: the lack to be assumed by the subject is not its own but that of the Other, which is something incomparably more unbearable” (Enjoy Your Symptom!, p. 58). I would maintain, however, that in the end these two scenarios amount to the same thing: accepting the fact that the Other is lacking implies coming to terms with the fact that the Other does not possess the answers to one’s existential predicament—that the Other cannot fill one’s lack. CHAP TER FIVE. THE RESIDUE OF LOVE 1. Julia Kristeva, The Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 23. 2. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. James E. Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), p. 29. 3. Hans Loewald, The Essential Loewald: Collected Papers and Monographs (Hagerstown, MD: University Publishing Group, 2000), p. 449. 4. Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, ed. James E. Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), p. 55. 5. Ibid., pp. 55–56. 6. In Black Sun, Kristeva expresses the matter as follows: “The imaginative capacity of Western man . . . is the ability to transfer meaning to the very place where it was lost in death and/or nonmeaning. This is a survival of idealization—the imaginary constitutes a miracle, but it is at the same time its shattering: a self-illusion, nothing but dreams and words, words, words. . . . It affirms the almightiness of temporary subjectivity—the one that knows enough to speak until death comes” (p. 103). 7. The internalization of lost objects is of course also one of the main characteristics of melancholia. However, if the melancholy individual remains pathologically

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

165

tied to the past by incorporating lost objects in a congealed and unchanging form, the person who enters into the process of mourning is able to assimilate aspects of lost objects with a degree of future-embracing flexibility. 8. Loewald, p. 559. 9. Ibid., p. 266. 10. Adam Phillips, Darwin’s Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 120–121. 11. Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 96. 12. Ibid., p. 94. 13. Phillips, Darwin’s Worms, p. 127. 14. Ibid., pp. 27–28. 15. Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 47. 16. Hélène Cixous, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 45. 17. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), pp. 78–79. 18. On this view, creativity is an inherently narcissistic pleasure. Mitchell in fact proposes that it may be impossible to achieve creativity without a dose of self-idealization. “Taking oneself seriously,” he remarks, “requires some modulated, childlike grandiosity, a self-expansiveness unencumbered by concern with criticisms and other points of view, without fear of deflation. Healthy self-experience requires a certain episodic idealization of the self, a romancing of the self, as a source of vitality and creativity” (Mitchell, p. 108). In other words, creative self-expression—being able to claim one’s “own” voice—demands a degree of narcissistic self-regard and a sense of oneself as an agentic subject. And, as I will suggest later, it may even demand a high measure of disregard for the outside world; it may demand the ability to distance oneself from the expectations of others. This may explain, in part at least, why some individuals find it demanding to activate their creative capacities, for those who have been narcissistically wounded may lack the predilection for the kind of selfish ruthlessness that creativity calls for. 19. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 346. 20. In Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposes that withdrawal from everyday life is often a precondition of creative activities because distractions interrupt the flow of intense concentration demanded by such activities. In this sense, the isolationist tendencies of creative individuals, far from being pathological, are a means of protecting the kind of focus that allows them to sustain the creative process. 21. Melanie Klein, “On the Sense of Loneliness,” in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works: 1946–1963 (London: Hogarth Press, 1975). Klein also links this sense of lone-

166

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

liness to the individual’s longing to be understood “without words” in the same way that the child is “understood” by the mother in the preverbal stage (p. 301). 22. Ibid., p. 311. 23. D. W. Winnicott, The Maturation Processes and the Facilitating Environment (London: Karnac, 1965), p. 187. 24. Ibid., pp. 189–190. Winnicott connects noncommunication to the idea of being alone in the presence of someone. He proposes that this capacity is “one of the most important signs of maturity in emotional development” (ibid., p. 29). It initially appears as the ability of the infant or small child to be alone in the presence of someone else (usually the mother), and only later turns into the more sophisticated capacity to endure actual states of aloneness. This capacity, which allows for “withdrawal without loss of identification with that from which withdrawal has occurred” (p. 188) is, for Winnicott, a sign of psychic health, as well as, among other things, a precondition of the ability to concentrate on a creative task. 25. Ibid., pp. 185–186. 26. Ibid., pp. 186–187. 27. Ibid., p. 184. 28. Ibid., p. 187. Along related lines, Winnicott argues that analysis becomes potentially problematic when the analyst is permitted by the patient to reach to the deepest layers of her personality. In such a situation, the analyst has “not changed over from a subjective object to one that is objectively perceived,” with the result that he knows too much, and becomes dangerous to the patient because he is “too nearly in communication with the central still and silent spot of the patient’s ego-organization” (p. 189). 29. Ibid., p. 190. 30. Rushdie states: “I think, like most writers, that I am most completely myself when I write, and not the rest of the time. I have a social self, and my full self can’t be released except in the writing” (Conversations with Salman Rushdie, ed. Michael Reder [ Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000], p. 46). 31. Barthes, p. 16. 32. Ibid., p. 14. 33. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 354. 34. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), p. 47. 35. Cixous, p. 43. 36. Ibid., pp. 43–44. 37. Such ceaseless creative activity can become compulsive. Barthes describes such a “fever of language” as follows: “I am aware of nothing but a machine running all by itself, a hurdy-gurdy whose crank is turned by a staggering but anonymous bystander, and which is never silent. . . . Once I happen to produce a ‘successful’ phrase in my mind

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

167

(imagining I have found the right expression for some truth or other), it becomes a formula I repeat in proportion to the relief it affords (finding the right word is euphoric); I chew it over, feeding on it; like children or the victims of mercyrism, I keep swallowing and regurgitating my wound . . . I am (inwardly) voluble, because I cannot anchor my discourse: the signs turn ‘in free wheeling.’ If I could constrain the sign, submit it to some sanction, I could find rest at last. If only we could put our minds in plaster casts, like our legs! But I cannot keep from thinking, from speaking; no director is there to interrupt the interior movie I keep making of myself, someone to shout, Cut! Volubility is a kind of specifically human misery: I am language-mad: no one listens to me, no one looks at me, but (like Schubert’s organ-grinder) I go on talking, turning my hurdy-gurdy” (pp. 160–161). Because signification can never definitively compensate for the loss of the other, because it can never restore the subject to wholeness, it must be relentlessly worked at and renewed. As a consequence, the subject can be driven to the kind of relentless creative frenzy that borders on pain or discomfort. Indeed, one could argue that in a certain sense, creativity is merely a highly evolved version of the repetition compulsion. It is then up to the subject to negotiate the thin line between raw and unprocessed sorrow on the one hand and the constant recycling of sadness that creativity makes possible on the other. In addition, it is worth noting that, for some individuals, the experience of loss— being disappointed in love, for instance—can become the very precondition of creativity. As Barthes points out, “The fulfilled lover has no need to write, to transmit, to reproduce” (p. 56). For some individuals, this insight is so powerful that they end up courting disappointment precisely so as to be able to create. 38. Harry G. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 89. 39. Csikszentmihalyi emphasizes that our ability to enter the flow of the present moment requires that the task that engages our attention is complex enough to feel demanding while at the same time appearing manageable. If the task is too difficult, our attention breaks out of frustration; if it is too easy, boredom impedes our full absorption. It is, moreover, intriguing to note that entering the flow of creative activity is not necessarily the same thing as feeling happy. At the moment of creative selfforgetting, even happiness is experienced as a distraction, with the result that it is felt mostly after the creative task has exhausted itself (or during moments of distraction within this task). Yet the more creative flow we experience in our daily lives, the more happy we feel overall. 40. See Carolyn Dinshaw, “Temporalities.” In Twenty-First Century Approaches: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 109. 41. Roberto Harari, How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan, trans. Luke Thurston (New York: Other Press, 2002), p. 74. 42. Christopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self-Experience (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 17. 43. Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 3. 44. Bollas, p. 23. 45. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 1971), p. 64. Winnicott’s examples of such unintegrated states include the “formlessness” of

168

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

free association in psychoanalytic practice, children’s ability to “lose” themselves in play, and inspired forms of artistic productivity. 46. D. W. Winnicott, Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), p. 29. Winnicott’s theory of subjectivity is thus complicated in the sense that it posits psychic integration as a precondition of unintegration. That is, if Winnicott privileges early developmental processes that allow the subject to attain a greater degree of integration, it is because he believes that unintegrated (nonpurposive) states of being can only be attained by a psyche that feels secure enough to momentarily surrender its sense of mastery. Integration is therefore important not so much because it gives the subject a coherent sense of being but, quite the contrary, because it makes the subject feel sufficiently protected to be able to relinquish its coherence. A subject who has experienced a reassuring degree of psychic integration trusts its environment enough to be able to occasionally surrender its vigilance vis-à-vis the world. According to this account, one of the functions of psychic integration is to enable the individual to every now and then undo that integration. 47. See note 28 in chapter 3 for parallels between Freud and Loewald. 48. Kristeva has long insisted that creativity consists of the irruption of the asocial within the realm of the social. Kristeva conceptualizes the asocial in terms of primordial and preverbal bodily drives and energies—what she calls the semiotic—and posits that it is only when we open ourselves to such asocial forces (which by definition undercut the security of our social identities) that we invite creativity into our lives. Kristeva is primarily interested in processes of signification that give rise to innovative forms of meaning. She maintains that it is when the signifier as a tool of meaning-production manages to capture something of the disruptive asocial energies that new and poetic forms of signification become possible; while signification always takes place within the conventions of meaning-production that govern any given society, the bubbling up of semiotic impulses within these conventions allows us to begin to use language in genuinely imaginative ways. In this sense, the distinction between everyday language and poetic language resides in the fact that poetic language is capable of appropriating and making use of volatile asocial energies. Like the Loewaldian process of fashioning oneself into a person—a process that incorporates unconscious energies into higher levels of psychic organization (see chapter 3)—poetic forms of signification bind asocial energies on an increasingly complex level of meaning-production. Without this infusion of the asocial within the social, Kristeva suggests, the signifier would have no way of refurbishing itself, with the result that it would remain forever caught in a sterile and hackneyed itinerary of preexisting meanings. 49. It may help to consider the issue in this manner: the coherent aspects of identity result from processes of socialization that transform infants who do not yet possess a cultural identity to adults who behave in culturally intelligible ways. This implies that if there existed no realm of human experience that managed to escape the organized structures of the social world, human beings would never be able to envision or invent anything that exceeded the conventions of this world. The social world would rapidly become a self-contained entity with no space for change or replenishment. However, because human beings are ravaged by asocial impulses that refuse the discipline of the

NOTES TO EPILOGUE

169

social order, this order is time and again disrupted in ways that compel it to readjust and reorganize; the asocial facets of our being function as an in-built mechanism of resistance and rebellion that adds suppleness to our existence. 50. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 111. EP ILO GUE 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), pp. 57–58. Nietzsche also writes, “When someone cannot get over a ‘psychological pain,’ that is not the fault of his ‘psyche’ but, to speak crudely, more probably even that of his belly (speaking crudely, to repeat, which does not mean that I want to be heard crudely or understood crudely—). A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (his deeds and misdeeds included) as he digests his meals, even when he has to swallow some tough morsels. If he cannot get over an experience and have done with it, this kind of indigestion is as much physiological as is the other—and often in fact merely a consequence of the other” (p. 129). 2. In The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), Alenka Zupanc=ic= postulates that Nietzschean forgetting “refers above all to the capacity not to nurture pain . . . not to make pain the determining ground of our actions and choices” (p. 57). 3. Here it is important to specify that Nietzsche’s notion of forgetting is complex in the sense that it does not imply that the individual simply fails to recall (in the banal sense of the term) what happened in the past, but rather that he does not form a psychic attachment to what was hurtful about the past event. 4. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), p. 25. 5. Ibid., p. 108. 6. Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. 117. 7. Luce Irigaray, To Be Two, trans. Monique M. Rhodes and Marco F. CocitoMonoc (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 16. 8. Ibid., p. 46. 9. Zupanc=ic=, p. 58.

This page intentionally left blank.

Index

Accidents, 24, 26, 53, 56, 61–64, 71, 154n.12 Agency, 5–7, 21–22, 27–28, 86–88, 94, 96, 99, 103, 108–110, 151n.25, 163n.38 Alienation, 43, 45–46, 48–50, 65, 90, 103, 109 Anxiety, 2, 21, 22, 42, 59, 76, 89, 97, 120, 134 Authenticity, 11, 19, 22, 28–34, 87, 104, 107, 130, 152 Barthes, Roland, 45, 113, 120, 124, 131–132, 144, 166n.37 Baudrillard, Jean, 31 Beauty, 2, 33, 44, 48–49, 51, 63, 88, 114, 134, 138, 146 Bollas, Christopher, 3, 38, 70–71, 136

and surrender, 134, 136–138 and the repetition compulsion, 167n.37 and the traditional art of living, 26 as means to alleviate symptoms, 116–117 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 165n.20, 167n.39 Davidson, Arnold, 149n.1, 150n.10 Derrida, Jacques, 106, 162n.21, 163n.38 Destiny, 2, 10, 12, 18, 64, 68, 70–71, 86, 90, 142–143 See Fate Dinshaw, Carolyn, 135 Drives, 76, 93–95, 159n.5, 160n.9, 162n.30, 168n.48 Ego-Psychology, 103, 162n.28 Eigen, Michael, 63 Enlightenment, 98, 157n.27 Epiphany, 136 Eros: and creativity, 125 and epiphany, 136 and instability, 123–124 and sublimation, 114–115

Cheng, Anne Anlin, 99 Cixous, Hélène, 124, 133–134 Creativity: and accidents, 64 and agency, 5 and lack, 12, 48–49, 51, 96–97, 113–114 and loss, 124–125, 131, 139 and mourning, 13, 118 and narcissism, 165n.18 and narrativization, 82 and sociality, 32, 168n.48 and solitude, 126–129

False Self, 30, 57–58, 60, 128, 137, 154n.22 See True Self

171

172

INDEX

Fate, 2, 9–12, 58, 67–68, 70, 84, 86–89, 102, 115, 120, 142 See Destiny Fink, Bruce, 55, 108, 160n.6, 160n.9 Forgetting: and creativity, 167n.39 and the art of living, 141–142, 148 169n.2 and the repetition compulsion, 142 “Fort-da,” 119, 120, 124 Foucault, Michel, 15–19, 52, 150n.5, 150n.10, 160n.16, 163n.39 Frankfurt, Harry, 85–86, 135, 158n.37 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 7–9, 12, 41–42, 50, 55–53, 58, 60, 64–65, 67–68, 71, 78, 81, 90, 92, 114–120, 122, 137, 141, 154n.12, 157n.27, 157n.28, 158n.3 Hadot, Pierre, 16, 18–19, 150n.2, 150n.5 Halberstam, Judith, 133 Happiness, 12, 41–47, 50, 57, 61–62, 64, 66, 114–115, 122, 141, 167n.39 Harari, Roberto, 70, 130, 160n.9, 164n.42 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 49, 153n.7 Heidegger, Martin, 19, 76–78, 96, 104 Idealization: and imagination, 164n.6 and narcissism, 165n.18 of the other, 144–146 Imagination, 17, 43, 48, 64, 100, 123, 126, 135 Inspiration, 5, 17 divine, 51 flashes of, 17 and loss, 13, 124 and restraint, 138 Intersubjectivity, 33, 125–127 Irigaray, Luce, 147 Joyce, James, 108 Kierkegaard, Søren, 19, 132–133 Kirshner, Lewis, 97, 161n.20 Klein, Melanie, 125–126, 165n.21

Kristeva, Julia, 48, 61, 114, 125, 136, 164n.6, 168n.48 Lacan, Jacques, 12, 70, 85, 89, 90–111, 121, 158n.1, 158n.2, 159n.6, 160n.7, 160n.9, 160n.16, 161n.19, 161n.20, 161n.21, 162n.28, 162n.30, 163n.32, 163n.36, 163n.37, 163n.37, 163n.38, 163n.40, 164n.43 Lack: and creativity, 11, 12, 113 and ego-psychology, 90–91, 103, 162n.28 and fantasy, 97, 99, 101–103 and narcissism, 97 and signification, 92–95, 109, 114 and solitude, 125–126, 128 and the Other, 105–107, 110, 164n.43 and trauma, 161n.21 as possibility, 46–51 and imperfection, 38, 39 Language. See The Signifier Laplanche, Jean, 52 Layton, Lynne, 161n.20 Lear, Jonathan, 3, 35, 69–70, 74, 84, 102, 120, 161n.19 Levinas, Emmanuel, 47 Loewald, Hans, 12, 67, 73–80, 90, 103–104, 107, 115, 118–119, 137, 149n.7, 155n.3, 155n.11, 156n.17, 156n.20, 157n.27, 157n.28, 168n.48 Loss, 62, 64, 139 and creativity, 13, 49, 113, 114, 117–121, 124–125 and mourning, 87 and signification, 134 and imagination, 48 and working through, 87 as threat to security, 123–124 of external objects, 19, 33 of the other, 167n.37 self-loss, 135 Love: and fantasy, 75, 105, 143–144, 148 and happiness, 41 and lack, 47

INDEX

and loss, 113–114, 118, 122, 124–125, 132–134, 139, 148, 167n.37 and narcissism, 97 and the repetition compulsion, 68–69 and transience, 65, 122–123 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 37 Melancholia, 118, 164n.7 See Mourning Melancholy: and authenticity, 31 and forgetting, 141 and lack, 93 and loss, 121, 132, 164n.7 and imagination, 48 as obstacle to mourning, 118 See Mourning Mirror Stage, The, 97, 161n.19 Mitchell, Stephen, 54, 57, 100, 123, 146, 157n.27, 162n.24, 162n.28, 165n.18 Mourning: and creativity, 13, 118–119, 121–122, 141 and happiness, 45 and loss, 65, 117, 165n.7 and melancholy, 118 and symptoms, 60, 118 and working through, 87, 121–143 See Melancholy Mystical Experience, 129 Narcissism: and authenticity, 31, 33 and creativity, 165n.18 and fantasy formations, 12, 89, 91 100–103, 110 and loss, 119 and the mirror stage, 97–98 and the other, 85, 145 injury, 161n.20 See The Reality Principle Narcissus, 97 Narratives: master, 152n.26 personal, 37, 63, 81, 83, 84, 99, 149n.5, 157n.30, 161n.21 progress, 10, 83

173

Narrativization, 83, 99, 161n.21 Negativity, 49, 91, 92 Nehamas, Alexander, 5, 16, 19, 23–25, 149n.1, 151n.11, 151n.23 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9, 24, 26–28, 30, 43, 47, 61–62, 76, 98, 107, 116, 138, 141–142, 150n.10, 151n.11, 151n.14, 151n.23, 169n.1, 169n.2, 169n.3 Oliver, Kelly, 161n.20 Other, The, 54, 55, 78, 85, 123–125, 127, 130–134, 138, 143–148, 167n.37, 169n.1 Other, The (Symbolic Order), 92, 103–108, 110–111, 164n.42, 164n.43 Owens, Graig, 152n.26 Parkes, Graham, 151n.11 Passion: and authenticity, 33, 104 and creativity, 20, 77, 82, 138 and fantasy, 99 and loss, 122, 141 and love, 123 and self-actualization, 111 and sublimation, 114–115 and the body, 94 and the art of living, 6, 18, 28 Phillips, Adam, 9, 51, 53–54, 83, 88, 119–122, 153n.12 Pleasure Principle, The, 58, 95, 115–116, 157n.27 See The Reality Principle Poetry, 25, 33, 129 Potentiality, 48, 56, 87, 156n.17 psychic, 82, 109, 158n.2 Psychic Life, 4, 6, 10, 29, 35, 52, 59, 78–80, 84, 87, 89, 92, 95, 102, 107, 120, 126, 128, 142, 149n.5, 157n.27, 160n.16 Reality Principle, The, 110, 115–116, 129, 157n.27 See The Pleasure Principle Remembrance, 117, 132

174

INDEX

Repetition Compulsion, 7–9, 50, 60, 68–71, 73, 87, 142, 148, 149n.7, 156n.11, 167n.37 Resignification, 82 See Narratives Ressentiment, 116, 141 Rushdie, Salman, 131, 166n.30 Santner, Eric, 44, 55–56, 101–102, 154n.19, 162n.25 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 2, 22, 26 Schacht, Richard, 151n.11 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1, 19, 149n.1 Self-Actualization, 5–6, 31, 46, 49, 111, 158n.2 Self-Reflexivity, 18, 38, 68, 72, 110, 128 Signification, 160n.16, 163n.37, 163n.38 and lack, 48–49, 92, 106–108, 114 and loss, 120, 134, 167n.37 systems of, 96, 152n.26, 160n.10 Signifier, The: and authenticity, 107–110, 159n.5 and creativity, 96, 117, 160n.10, 168n.48 and lack, 93–96, 101, 103, 106 and psychoanalysis, 82 and the “talking cure,” 81 and the body, 94, 96, 160n.7, 160n.9 and the other, 133 and the symbolic order, 160n.16, 163n.38 Silverman, Kaja, 49, 95, 160n.14 Singularity, 11, 15–17, 25, 27, 32, 34–35, 55–56, 62, 66, 85, 87, 107–110, 117, 143, 147, 154n.19, 158n.1 Sinthome, The, 158n.1, See Symptoms Social Conventions, 13, 21, 25–26, 136 Sociality, 26, 32–33, 35, 80, 95, 126–128, 130, 132

Socrates, 2, 16–17, 26–27, 149n.1, 151n.11 Sublimation, 114–116, 137, 157n.2 Sublime, The, 136 Symptoms, 3, 13, 60, 104, 116–118, 142, 148, 156n.11 Taylor, Charles, 29, 31–34 The Thing, 95 Thrownness, 77 Trauma, 11, 35, 45, 50, 57–59, 69, 76, 81, 91, 97–98, 106, 130, 141, 148, 156n.11, 157n.30, 161n.21, 163n.35 True Self, 57–58, 60, 128, 130, 154n.22 See False Self Truth, 6, 20–21, 30, 43, 46, 51–52, 54, 73, 92, 103–104, 115, 121, 151n.11, 151n.12, 157n.27, 162n.28, 163n.38, 167n.37 “Will to Power,” 116 Wilson, Mitchell, 162n.28 Winnicott, D. W., 57–61, 128–130, 136–137, 154n.21, 154n.22, 166n.24, 166n.28, 167n.45, 168n.46 Working Through, 8, 73, 87, 94, 142–143, 155n.3, 156n.11 Wound, 10, 23, 42, 45, 62, 71, 91, 93, 95, 97, 117, 124, 148, 161n.16, 161n.21, 165n18, 167n.37 Writing: and imagination, 129 and loss, 124–125, 131, 133–134 and signification, 108 and solitude, 131, 166n.30 in ancient philosophy, 17 Z+iz=ec, Slavoj, 94, 105–106, 153n.7, 154n.19, 157n.30, 159n.6, 160n.9, 162n.30, 163n.35, 163n.37, 164n.43 Zupanc=ic=, Alenka, 148, 169n.2

PSYCHOLOGY

How are our lives meaningful? What is the relationship of loss to creativity? How can we best engage and overcome our suffering? From Socrates to Foucault, Western philosophers have sought to define “the art of living”—the complex craft of human existence that elicits our thoughtful participation, and the idea that even though death escapes our control, life is not something that simply happens to us in a passive manner but is instead a process that invites our active and lively engagement. A World of Fragile Things offers a distinctly psychoanalytic perspective on “the art of living,” one that focuses on ongoing and ever-evolving processes of self-fashioning rather than defining a fixed and unitary sense of self. With a compelling blend of philosophical insight and psychoanalytic acumen, Mari Ruti asks experts and readers alike to probe the complexities of human existence, offering a contemporary outlook on some of the most enduring questions of Western thought. “Ruti’s bracing postmodernist sensibility is well ballasted by genuine open-mindedness and even a refreshing dash of humanism. Her eloquent argument that ‘psychoanalysis teaches us to make a virtue of contingency’ should be heeded not only by scholars of literature and philosophy but also by practicing clinicians.” — Peter L. Rudnytsky, coeditor of Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine “Passionate, persuasive, ambitious and caring—Ruti cogently bridges ontological issues into psychoanalytic thought.” — Ellen McCallum, author of Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism

MARI RUTI is Associate Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Toronto and author of Reinventing the Soul: Posthumanist Theory and Psychic Life. a volume in the suny series in psychoanalysis and culture Henry Sussman, editor

SUNY P R E S S

state university of new york press www.sunypress.edu