Lacan Reframed: A Guide for the Arts Student (Contemporary Thinkers Reframed)

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Steven Z. Levine

Published in

2008 by I.B.Tauris

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6 S alem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauri s . com

In the United States and Canada distrib uted by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue , New York N Y 10010

C opyright

© Steven Z. Levine, 2008

The right of Steven

Z. Levine to be identified as the author of this

work has b een ass erted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Des igns and Patents Act 1988.

All rights res erved. Excep t for brief quotations in a revi ew, this book, or any part thereof, may not be rep roduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval s y s tem, or transmitted, in any form or by any means , electronic, mech anical, p hotocopying, recording or otherwise, without the p rior written p e rmis sion of the p u b lisber. ISBN: 9781 84511 5487 A full CIP record for this book is avail able from the British Library A full CIP record for this book i s avail able from the Library of Congre s s Library of Congress catalog card : available

Typeset in Egyptienne F by Dexter Haven Associates Ltd, London Page design by Chris Bromley printed and bound in the

UK by T.J. International, Padstow. Cornwall.

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

List of illustrations

ix

Foreword: Why Lacon?

xi

Chapter 1.

The Do Vinci Code according to Freud

Chapter 2.

The Do Vinci Code according to Lacan

Chapter 3.

The Thing from another world

Chapter 4.

The lost object

Chapter 5.

What is a picture?

Chapter 6.

Representative of representation

Chapter 7.

Am I a woman or a man?

Afterword: Enjoy!

Suggested reading Index

141

57

131

Selected bibliography

31

135 137

67

111

91

15

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Susan Lawson for inviting me to write this book

and for improving it with her keen e ditorial eye . I also want to thank my students and colleagues in the dep artment of History of Art and the C enter for Visual C ulture at B ryn Mawr College for tolerating my translation of their scholarship and convers ation into the Lacanian terms of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. Notable among them are David C ast, C hristiane Hertel , Homay King, K. Malcolm Richards, Lis a Saltzman and Isabelle Wallace, a s well as recent undergraduate and graduate seminar students OIl self portraiture and p sychoanalysis . The art historians Benjamin Bins tock, Bra dford C ollin s , Keith Moxey and Jack Spector gave me the opportunity to present or publish some of my thoughts on art and Lacan, as did the p sychoanalysts Heather C raige and D avid S charff, and members of the Phil adelphia Psychoanalytic Center. Patricia Gherovici and Jean Michel Rabate introduce d me to Philadelphia's vibrant Lacanian community. And in the background of many of my sentences lies the phenomenology of Michael Fried. My wife Susan Levine, practitioner of psychoanalysis , and my daughter Madeleine Levine , researcher in social psychology, were indispensable in the completion of this project. My parents Natalie and Reevan Levine opened the space of possibility, and it is in their name and with love that I dedicate this book.

List of illustrations

Figure 1. Marcel Duchamp, L. H. o. o. Q. , 1919 (1930 replica), p rivate collection. Photo credit: C ameraphoto Arte, Veni ce/Art Resource, NY. © 2007 Artists Rights So ciety, NY/ADAGP, Parisi Succes sion Marcel Duchamp .

2

Figure 2. Leonardo da Vinci, The Madonna and Child with Saint

A nne, 1508 10, Louvre Museum, Pari s . Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY. 6 Figure 3. Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, 1499 1500, National Gallery, London. Photo credit: Art Resource, NY.

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F igure 4. Hans Holbein the Yo unger, The A mbassadors, 1533, N ational Gallery, London. Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 5. Jacopo Zucchi, Psyche Surprising Cupid, 1589, Borghese Gallery, Rome. Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

59

Figure 6. Gus tave C ourbet, The Origin of the World, 1866, Orsay Museum, Paris. Photo credit: Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 7. S alvador D ali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of

Modern Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, NY. © 2007 S alvador Da li, Gal a Salvador Dali Fo undation/Artists Rights S o ci ety, NY.

77

Figure 8. Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas, 1656, Prado Museum, Madrid. Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

93

Figure 9. Rene Magritte, La Condition humaine, 1 93 3 , Gift of the C ollectors C ommittee, Image © 2007 B o ard of Trustees , National Gallery of Art, Washington. © 2007 C. Herskovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society, NY.

1 06

Fi gure 10. Gian Lorenzo Bernini , The Ecs tacy of Saint Teresa, 1 647 52, C o rnaro Chapel, S anta Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Photo credit: Nimatall ah/Art Res ource, NY.

1 16

Foreword: Why Lacan?

Why Lacan, specifi cally, for re aders such as ourselves, who are students and teachers, producers and consumers in today's complex world of vis u al culture? The French have a word for it: un visuel, a visual p erson, s omeone who s e way of b eing in the world i s primarily oriented b y vision, images , art. Jacques Lacan ( 1 901 8 1 ) was such a one, and also not such a one; a p a s sionate man o f the visual. to be sure, but still more of the invisible. Friend of modernist artists such as S alvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Masson, his brother in l aw, and Pablo P i c a s s o , his sometime medical p atient, Lacan was an occasional collaborator with artists , a long time collector of art, and an episodic commentator on architecture, s culpture , p ainting and film, from the pal aeolithic caves to the medieval cathedrals and from renaissance to contemporary art. His voluminous contributions to the clinical psychoanalytic literature extended across h alf a century from the early 1 930s to 1 98 1 , when he died, and along his tortuous but strangely consis tent itinerary in p sychoanalytic theory and practice he regularly returned to explanatory analogies borrowed from the visual arts . In this he was not unlike the inventor of p s ychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud ( 1 856 1 9 3 9 ) , who famously wrote about the art of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti in the first two decades of the twentieth century and to whos e founding psychoanalytic texts Lacan never ceased to return. Others could be Lacanian if they wished, but he always affirmed his allegiance to Freud.

Ecrits, meaning 'Writings', is a lengthy volume collecting many of Lacan's formally presented lectures and essays over the course of thirty years . Published in French to acclaim and notoriety in

1 966, when the sixty five year old Lacan was near the height of his fame, Ecrits was selectively translated into English by Alan Sheri dan in 197 7 and in a more reliable and complete e dition in 2005 by Bruce Fink. Reference s to works of art adorn s everal of the essay s in Ecrits, but none is developed at length and these densely written essays are not the most accessible introduction to the thought o f Lacan. Far more numerous were the references to a rt i n L a can 's weekly lectures conducted in Paris in front of packed

audienc e s of psychologi s t s , philosophers , poets , painters and other curi ous persons from 1 953 to 1 980. From 1953 to 1 963 Lacan s poke at the psychi atric h ospital of S a inte Anne to an audience composed primarily of p s ycho analysts and psychoanalysts in training from the Ps ychoanalytic Society of Pari s , which he had

j o ined in 1 934, and from the breakaway society that he had helped to found in 1 95 3 , the French Society of Psychoanalysis. Dismissed '0 4>

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as a training analyst of the l atter group for the infraction of varying the standard ho ur l ong s e s s ion of p sycho analyti c

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treatment, Lacan founded his own training institution known as

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the French S ch o ol of P s y choanalysis and, l ater, the Freudian

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Louis Althu s ser, from 1 964 to 1 968 Lacan held his seminar at a

IX

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S chool of Pari s , in 1 9 64. Sponsored by the Marxist philosopher p restigious Parisian centre of higher learning, the Ecole Normale Sup erieure, but he was m a de unwelcome there after he voiced hi s support for the s triking stu dents and workers during the revolutionary events of M ay 1 96 8 . Thereafter invited to lecture at the Faculty of Law of the University of Pari s by the cultural anthropol ogist C l aude Levi Straus s , L a c an addre s s e d his ever growing and increasingly mystified audience until the year before his death. Among L a c an's frequent auditors were m a ny of the most famous French intellectua l s fro m the 1 9505 through the 1 970s . Among them were the exi s tential p h enomenologist o f visual p erception Mauric e Merl e au Ponty, the s emiological critic of literature and culture Roland Barthes, the historian of knowledge

and power Michel Foucault, the deconstructionist philosopher of l anguage Jacques Derrid a , the feminist critic s and advo c ates Luce Irigaray, Helene C ixous and Julia Kristeva , and many more. Jacques Alain Miller, a philosophy student of Althus s er and later the son in law of Lacan, was entrusted in 1 973 with the task of transcrib ing and editing the annual volumes of the long running public seminar, Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, a monumental task that is still unfinished today. To date fourteen volumes out of twenty s ix have appe ared in French and s even have been translated into English, with additional transcriptions, recordings and translations of unpublished sessions available in unauthorised editions and via the Internet. I spent the year 1 970 1 as a graduate student in Paris , and although I b egan to be exposed to Lacanian theory that year in the cinema magazines I compulsively c onsumed instead of dutifully working on my dis sertation on the art of the impres s ionist p ainter C l aude Monet, I regret to s ay that I never attended the public seminar of Lacan, then in its eighteenth year. This little book is by way of making up, impossibly, for that failed encounter with Lacan during the brief French flower of my youth. Why should students of the visual arts bother to read the notoriously difficult writings of Lacan? The reason that I offer here is that the que stion of how to l ive our l ives is a fundamental question for us, and it is my belief that Lacan help s us to address this question in productive ways. Other species of living creatures on this planet seem to know by natural instinct how to carry on with their lives in their given ecological niches on the land, in the waters and in the skies. Ants do it, bees do it, cats do it, dogs do it, even elephants do it, but unlike these other earthlings with which we share the b iosphere of this planet we humans do not seem to know how to do it, for we no longer live in nature by ins t inct alone. We vari o u s ly envis ion our l ives in the changing style s of architecture, p a inting, film and fashion

and there's the rub .

Acro s s the s p an of human h istory and across the exp anse of the globe, we have always found ourselves ensconced not simply in

a given natural niche but, rather, in a complex cultural situation for which we have been destined by our p arents from before the moment of our birth. Born humans all as the result of the chance intertwining of X and Y chromosomes in the universal proces s o f s exual repro duction, w e s o on o b s cure that species wide universality as we take up the tasks and opportunities of our lives withi n a s pecifi c moment in time and at a specific geographical place. We soon discover that we are not s imply part of a single family of humanity but rather of particular groupings of different l anguage s , ethnicities, rac e s , religions , s o c i al clas s e s , p olitical affiliations, family traditions and, for the readers of this book, artistic schoo l s . How we b e come new members of thes e widely varying cultural groupings has always posed profound questions to each and every one of us. The multifarious world of art p o s e s s u c h questions to us . It is the claim of thi s book that the sp oken and written words of Lacan offer us useful approaches to the fundamental questions of life and art. For Lacan, a s I read him, the key to our questions i s t o recognis e to whom they are addressed and from whom answers are expected. Lacan's l e s s on is that our questions are always addres sed to the other who is supposed by us to know the answers , such as p arents, teachers , p hysicians, priests , friends , lovers , even enemies . In the final analysis, our questions are addressed beyon d thes e p articular others to the generalised Other of the cultural order into which we are b orn, in which we are educated, which we willingly or unwillingly join, and in the various idioms of which we must try to formulate answers to our nagging questions : 'What do you want o f m e ? ' 'What kind of a person d o you expect m e to be?' For Lacan, these existential questions were clarified by Freud in his pioneering efforts to alleviate the psychological suffering of p atients for whose enigmatic corporeal symptoms contemporary medical science could offer neither physiological explanation nor p romis e of cure. Freud learned from the stories of his p atients

that their suffering was real. and it is my belief that their anxious questions remain p ertinent to us all to day. 'Am I a woman or a man?' is the fundamental question p o s e d by the s o c alled hysterical subject, who stubbornly resists taking up one of the standard roles of masculine and feminine convention. 'Am I alive or am I dead?' is the question enunciated by the s o c alled obsessional subject, who rigidly insists on enacting the standard role precis ely as p rescrib ed by the social code. For each the vital question involves a fundamental anxiety regarding the enigmatic de sire enshrined in the demands of the repres entatives of authority, such as parents, teachers, bosses, supervisors, officers , editors , critics, ministers , rabbis, imams , shamans, gurus , priests . E ach individual subject wonders what the Other, as represented by his or her painting p rofessor, perhap s , wants of him or her. The hysterical subject responds to thi s basic worry by resisting what she or he imagines the Other wants her or him to b e . The resistance of the hysteric is akin to that of the avant garde artist who refu s e s to abide by the s tandard artistic rules of the day. The obses sional subject academic artist

or, in our world of visual culture, the

responds to the imagined desire of the Other by

insisting that the normal order must be maintained at all costs. When enc ountering the hysterical or ob s e s s ional questioner in the course of clinical treatment today, the psychoanalyst seeks eventually to convey that there is neither a need to resist nor need to insist upon the reign of the law, for the simple reason that the Other who is s upposed to know the answers to life's fundamental questions does not in fact exist as an all knowing will that must always p revail over the subject's own d e s ire . Through the lengthy and p ainful proc e s s of calling up and eventually cancelling out this constraining fantasy of the Other's desire, the s ubject of p sychoanalysis in the end discovers that he or she is actually free to try to be what he or she uniquely desires to b e . There is in our human corporeality a real limit to this freedom of desire that we must acknowledge, but it is not the

conventional limit of the law. The greatest artists have always known thi s . I n positioning u s n o t i n the iron grip of natural instinct but in the malleable grasp of culture, Lacan distinguished three registers of h um a n exp e rience that I will try to animate and keep in play

throughout this brief book. Right now, as your eyes visually scan and m en tal ly decode these black marks that we call letters on this otherwis e blank page, we are variously immers e d in the three dimensions of experience that Lacan i denti fied a s the Real. the Symbolic and the Imaginary. The forms of these letters are graphic images - or s i gnifiers , in the terminology taken by Lacan from the Swis s lingui s t Ferdinand de S aussure

that mobilise the

register of vis ual recognition that Lacan s aw as the Imaginary realm. The meanings of thes e words and s entences are also images , mental images - or signifieds

that p articipate in the differential

interplay of verbal understanding that Lacan named the Symbolic order. Finally, the unmarked blankness against which the visual shapes of letters and verbal meanings of words s tand out in their fragile consistency constitutes a necess ary ground, which in its elf can neither be fully visualised nor verb alised. Thi s blanknes s of the page, like that of the b o dy and world prior to the mappings and markings of l anguage , is what Lacan enigmatically indexed as the Real. Lacan's uncanny paradox is that the Real comes into b eing for u s only retro s p e ctively, only after its p rimordial unmarked fullne s s has b e en irretrievably lost among the icons and inscriptions of Imaginary and Symbolic sign s . Nevertheles s , s ometimes, as o n 9/1 1 i n New York or 717 in London, the inhuman meaninglessnes s of the Real suddenly and traumatically intrudes to de stabili s e the Imaginary and Symb olic c o ordinate s of our familiar worlds . When the three initial letters of Real, Symbolic and Imaginary are pronounced in French the resulting acronym, R. S. 1., sounds like the word h{!rf3Sie. The intertwining and unravelling of material form a n d immateri al me aning in this sp oken p un is a typical

Lacanian example of the heresy of a s s erting that the s e three orders completely cover the whole truth of human experience. Indeed, in such seriously playful nonsense lies the truth according to Lacan, though not the whole truth, as he frequently insisted. On account of our transformation by the introduction of the signifiers of language from a naturally proliferating animal species into culturally regulated and historically differentiated human grou pings we h ave l o st immediate acce s s to any instinctual fullnes s of being in the world. As sighted beings we are left to face up to that primordial loss of the world beneath the gaze of the compensato ry visual images with which our cultures confront us and console us. As s peaking beings we are asked to make some provisional sense of ours elves in the verbal meanings of the symb o l s with which our langu ages addre s s us and attire u s . And as corporeal beings w e are left t o endure the traumatic blankness that silently and invisibly enframes , and eventually expl o de s , the precarious cultural configurations in which we struggle to live. So, why Lacan? In order to try to be free.

Chapter 1

The 00 Vinci Code according to Freud

Let us begin our Lacanian inquiry in art with the most familiar yet also enigmatic work of art in the world, Leonardo's Mona Lisa ( 1 503 7) , a p erennial riddle recently explored in the b e s t selling novel and blockbuster film The Da Vinci Code. Why is the woman smiling at us? Although I have been an art historian for more than thirty years I really have no idea, but let us see whether Lacan knew s omething of the secret of her smile. In one of his e s s ays he comp ared the enigm a of the Mona Lisa with that of the young patient known as Dora, who abruptly broke off her treatment with Freud when he plied her with too many answers , failing to ask the questions that might have helped her toward her own cure. Identifying himself more wi th Dora than with Freud, L ac an insisted that the analys t knows nothing, that the analyst, like the hysteric, only asks ques tions . That is what the enigmatic face of art makes us do . It hystericises u s , and in our anxiety we aim to resolve its enigma by historicising it. The Mona Lisa smile

What was p ainted in that famous smile, or so Freud imagined in his interpretation of the work, was the lost loving smile of the artist's m o ther that had formerly l o oked up o n him as a child. Within a decade of Freu d's discussion of the M ona Lisa the anti moderni s t artist D uchamp drew a moustache on the face of a postcard reproduction of the p ainting and ins cribed it with the letters L. H. O. O. Q. ( 1 919; Figure 1 ) . Punning in French, just as his

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L.H.o.O,Q. (191 9),

chaud au cui, Hearing the title p ronounced in English, we are imperatively told, 'Look! ' Later, in 1965, Duchamp affixed an undefaced reproduction of the Mona Lisa to a mat, entitling it L, H. 0, 0, Q, rasee, or the Mo na

Lisa shaved,

In 1 9 54 L a c an's surre ali s t collab o rator posed for a self portrait photograph as a twirlingly mustachioed hybrid Dali/Lisa. Four decades later a similar act of cro s s - gendered self projection was performed by the Japanese p o s tm o derni s t photographer Yasumasa Morimura, who presented himself as a naked, pregnant, Asian Mona Lisa in 1 998 . The Russian p ainter Kasimir Malevich in 1 9 14, the French p ainter Femand Leger in 1 93 0, the American painters Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns in the 1 960s, the television Muppet Mis s Piggy in the 1 980s , the White House intern Monicq Lewinsky in the 1 9 90s , and the film actress Jul i a Roberts in 2003 all variously re posed in their paintings , photographs and performances the enigma of that smile. A contrarian cartoon in the

New Yorker magazine wondered why she wasn't l aughing, and it is my gambit in this book that reading Lacan will help us clarify why these practitioners of elite and popular culture have continued to sustain an ageless obsession in seeking an answer to a question posed by a 5 00 year-old p ainting of a long deceased Florentine lady's face. Media accounts at the time of this writing suggest on the basis of her costume that she was either pregnant or had just given b irth. Is that the truth? Like many others before and since, Freud travelled to the Louvre Museum in Paris to confront the enigma of the woman's smile. Her smile has been s een by generations of commentators as deeply alluring yet profoundly troubling all at the s ame time . Later, Freud asked the infamous question 'What does Woman want? ' , and an answer of sorts is already implied in the title of the little book he published a century ago , Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His

Childhood ( 1 9 1 0) . There he prop osed that, while painting the face of this Florentine lady, Leonardo was reminded of the smile of his mother at the time when he was a child, and it was this smile in all its ambiguous allure that he reanimated in a painting which he then found hims elf unable to complete. Thus the psychoanalyst sought to solve a riddle that art critic s had been unable to s olve themselves, that of Leonardo's ambivalent intention and inhibited

execution. Freud's a ccount of the recovery in a work of art of a wom

an 's lost smile

a lost object in the language of psychoanalysis

inaugurated the hundred year long altercation between art and psychoanalysis that is my subject here. The los t object was one of the key principles of psychoanalysis that Freud was elab orating in the fertile decade b etween the public ation of his most famous work , The In terp retation of

Dreams ( 1 900) , and his s p ecul ation concerning Leonardo's chil dho o d memory. Like a dream, Freud argued, Leonardo 's childhood memory was not the objective transcription of an event in the p a s t but rather a subjective fantasy in which a wish of the arti st was visually staged. The wish of the artist was to see once again the lost s mile of his mother in his p ainting of the elegant lady's smile, but just as importantly it was to be seen by this s tand in for his mother as if in a b ittersweet moment of his mother's l o s t loving gaze. On one side was the smiling face, at once the present object of his gaze and the l o s t object of his wish. On the other side was the smiled at face of the wishing and desiring subject, the p ainter. Linking the mother, the s on and the lady was the work of art in the ambiguity of its associations and ambivalence of its affections . This renewed linkage of the desiring subject and the lost object was the vital work performed by the work of art, a p sychological action that Freud called sublimation . In chemistry sublimation is the direct pass age of a s olid sub stance into a gaseous state. In psychoanalysis, s ublimation is the transformation of an intens ely private desire into a publicly valued piece of cultural expression. This is a key concept for both Freud and Lacan. As hyp othesised by Freud, Leonardo's private desire was to look and to be looked at with love , an infantile lust to see and to show voyeurism and exhibitionism

that the p sychoanalyst had

described in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality ( 1 905) . In Freud's story the young b oy's mother was imagined to be the original object of his desire, j ust as he was said to desire to be the

reciprocal object of her desire. In addition to his desire for her desire he also identified himself with her in his own m anner of desiring, as he learned to substitute for her lost childhood embrace the subsequent objects of adult love. The mother's lost loving look was at once the specific obj ect of Leonardo's desire and the general cause of his own des irousness as he scanned the faces of potential p artners in love for the kind of loving look he had once seen in her eyes, or remembered he had seen, or dreamed he had seen, or wished he had seen. In life you do not always get what you want, but in the making and viewing of art you may get some satisfaction. And for Mick Jagger and Leonardo that is sublimation. In identifying Leonardo's looking for l ove with his mother's loving look, Freud sought to explain the app arent historical fact of the artist's predilection to love - and to p aint

b eautiful male

youths like himself at the time that his mother had loved him. Leonardo was thus s aid to follow the pathway of the mythological hunter Narcissus, who saw in a forest pool a beautiful face looking at him and fell in love at first s i ght with that face. Initi ally the jubilant Narcissus did not realis e that the face in the pool was merely the reflection of his own, but in a s econd moment of alienation he c am e to rec o gni s e that this was so. The result of this impo s s ible l ove for a reflected image of himself was the splitting of his b eing between desiring subject and desired object, an unbridgeable split that was sp anned only by his dying metamorphosis into the b eautiful flower that still bears his name. What I wish to stre s s in Freud's p s ycho analyti c re ading of the myth is that the beautiful image of the self encountered by Narcissus/Leonardo was lo c ated outside the individual subject in the mirror image of the p o o l or in the mother's mirroring eye . By means of what Freud called the mode of narcissistic i dentificati o n , the corporeal look of the eye was placed in a strict but skewed correlation with the psychological birth of the Ego a s an alluring yet inac c e s s ible image p erceive d outside itself. Our own Ego is an alter Eg o . Or, as Lacan s aid in

2. Leonardo do Vinci, The (1508-10).

Madonna and Child with Saint Anne

quoting the French nineteenth century poet Arthur Rimb aud, 'I is another. ' Freud saw a redoubling of Leonardo's desire in another of the artist's p aintings at the Louvre , The Madonna and Child with

Saint Anne ( 1 508- 1 0; Figure 2 ) . Here the mother's lost smile was rep eated in the twin visages of the youthful Madonna , b ending to pull to her lap the b aby Jesus in whose eyes she looks , and the Madonna's own mother, an unc annily youthful Saint Anne, from whos e throne like l ap the Madonna twists down toward her child playing with a lamb upon the ground. Whereas this human trinity of grandmother Anne, mother Mary and b aby Jesus came from the Christian story of the H oly Family, the two smiling mothers were also seen to correspond to the personal history of the painter, who was first nourished in the peasant home of his unwed mother before b eing removed to the urb an residence of his father, where he was raised by his father's mother and l awful wife. As in the blurred image of a dream, these two mothers and their unequal circumstances of matrimony, j oy and wealth appeared as if condensed into a s ingle two headed configuration in which the lost maternal look was wishfully refound by the adult p ainter not once but twice. Leonardo had thus not only recovered the lost loving look of his mothers; he had also reclaimed the lost image of himself as beloved that was reflected in their eyes. In this way, according to Freud's theory of art as a sublimated s atisfaction for an unrealised desire, Leonardo was said to triumph indirectly in his art over what he could not directly triumph over in his life . There was at least a p artial cons olation there. Almost fifty years after the publication of Freud's treatis e Lacan returned t o the analyst's interpretation i n his lectures of 1 9 5 7 , insisting not on the a rti st's supposed s atisfaction in the refinding of the mother's l o s t smile but, rather, on the representation in the painting of the Madonna's own wistful look of l o s s or lack. Unlike the nurturing breast, enlivening voice, or lingering gaze that must be lost to her son if he is to grow beyond

the limits of the nursery, the lost object that Lacan s aw in the mother's look of desire i s the b oy child himself in the form of the notorious psychoanalytic object of fantasy known as the maternal phallu s , the symb ol of the desired p enis that she is s aid not to have . This illus ory object i s a p art of the b o dy that the s o n imagines his mother to have or perhaps not to have; t o have and at the s a me time not to have; to have in the very form of a lack. Thi s imagining o f the m aternal phallus is the child's answer to the inaugural question of desire: 'What does Mother want?' What does she want both in the sense of what does she lack and in the s ense of what might she d esire to fill up this empty pl ace? Must she really l o se her b aby and can she ever find its like again? And can I ever be , and do I really want to b e , the Imaginary phallus that she lacks? The controversial idea of the m aternal phallus has fomented great resistance on the p art of women authors and analysts over the course of many decades, but it would take more than the little bit of exposition at my disposal to l ay out all the stakes of this ongoing debate. Suffice it to s ay that the crucial point for Lacan is to see in the so called maternal phallus not the Imaginary outline of a p enis that w o u l d be physiologically useles s to a mother's Real corporeality but, rather, the Symbolic emblem of her lack of the elevated social s tatus traditionally conferred upon fathers , brothers , husbands and sons in patriarchal societies. More simply, the maternal phallu s as lacking is the symbol of whatever it i s beyond her condition a s mother that s h e might desire, or that her son o r daughter might imagine her to desire, in her capacity as friend, lover, or perhaps writer or p ainter in a room of her own.

The bird's tale Let us return to the memory of Leonardo's childhoo d not a s ambivalently enshrined in a p ainte d smile b u t as enigmatically recorded in the written pas s age that provided the basis for Freud's expl anation of the artist's p erplexing inhibition to complete his

work s . In the midst of a discus sion in his notebook on the flight of birds Leonardo interrupted himself to record his only self des cribed childhood memory. In this memory the adult artist and scientist s aw himself as a b aby in a crib b eing visited by a large bird , which ins erted its tail in his mouth, b eating it about inside. What might this strange tale have possibly me ant to the artist, and what might it mean to us? According to the substitutive mechanisms of fantasy a s proposed b y Freud, the representation of s omething of disturbing affective interest was replaced in Leonardo's recorded memory by the repres entation of something else of les s dis turbing intensity. Here the s triking insertion of the bird's tail in the child's mouth replaced in disgui sed form the infantile s cene of nursing at the nipple that Freud b elieve d was too full of disrup tive emotion for direct repres entation in Leonardo 's text. Thi s first level of the scenario's disguise

or displacement, in p sychoanalytic parlance

- corresponded to the location of the event in early childhood; but Freud s aw more here as well. The displaced memory fantasy of the bird's tail inserted in his mouth as a child also s creened from the adult artist the soci ally unacceptable wish of having a penis inserted in his mouth in an a dult sexu al act. Thus , in one fell swoop Leonardo 's disrupted love for his mother and censored love for beautiful young men was b oth revealed and concealed in the intrusive oral thrust of a bird's tail. As we will see in many other examples to come, the double function of the fantasy, the dream and the work of art was to reveal the truth and conceal it as well. Freu d was keenly aware that most e arly twentieth c entury readers would have found it distasteful in the extreme to follow him in his apparently mad s u b s titutive leaps along a chain of association b etween a tail , a penis and a nipple, between a natural human ins tinct, a tab o o homo sexual act and a biz arre ornithological s cene. In unravelling the tangled knot of Leonardo's personality Freud sought documentary support in an ancient myth that might have b e en known to the renai s s ance artist. In thi s

Egyptian myth Freud found the same motifs of the bird, the breast and the penis united in the erection bearing body of the vulture

h eaded mother goddess Mut. This was a p otentially signi ficant corrob oration for Freud, but it turned out that in p ursuing the mythology of the phallic female vulture Freud went astray in re lying on an erroneous German translation of Leonardo's original Italian word for his b ird of childhood memory. That word, nibbio, o ught to have been translated as k ite, a hawk l ike b ird of p rey unencumbered by the myth of the maternal phallus . Much has b een made of Freud's unwilled, or perhaps even w il lful, error of tran slation in the voluminous criticism that has delighte d in debunking his work, but the p sychological p o int for which Freud

was s e eking mythol ogical and archaeological c onfirmation rema ine d intact nonethele s s . This was the attribution of the p hallus to the mother by her young son on the assumption that this

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s eemingly all powerful nourisher of life must not be thought to l ack the sa me useful and pleasurable organ that he himself enjoyed

;gj

l est by s o me fateful m ischance he might come to lack it too.

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The fetish of LiHle Hans

I: "

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Basing h is a s s ertions on the clinical case of a five year old boy known as L ittle Hans that he had p u b l ished just a year before his Leonardo tale, Freud claimed that the boy's attribution to his

mother of a phallus might persist even in the face of contradictory ol:s ervations of the real or represented b o dy of a woman or girl. According to the notorious Freudian s cenario of penis envy, the young boy's s is ter might blame her mother for failing to provide her with the phallus that her brother enjoyed. As for Little Hans, it

was his stubb orn belief that his mother had to have a penis even thJugh it was hidden from view; his sister's p enis couldn't be s een b Ecause it was still little and would grow later; or p erhap s the ir p enises had become detached, by accident or in p unishment, and if s operhaps his could b ecome detached as well. In order to overcome s l1ch castration anxiety, as it was called, Little Hans fashioned for

hims elf the n eurotic symptom of a fea r of horses in the street, in which his intolerable fear of castration was effectively displaced. In his commentary on the case of Little Hans , Lacan stressed that the horse of the boy's phobia m ay have functioned as a fetish in which the fantasy of the maternal phallus was both affirmed and denied. Lacan insisted that it was this Symbolic negation of Imaginary visual experience

the observable presence or absence

of the genitals of the mother or the horse

that constituted the

fundamental discovery of Freud . Do not trust what you see with your eyesight but what you s ay with your insight according to the gaze of your desire. This split between the Imaginary eye and the Symb olic gaze is one of the key ideas of Lacan for those of us who are students and practitioners of the visual arts . Please stay tuned. The unconscious

Lacan always insisted that he was nothing but a Freudian and that his teaching was nothing but a return to Freud by way of a clo se rereading of his fundamental text s . First and foremost for Lacan was The Interpreta tion of Dreams, where Freud articulated the grammatical mechanisms through which were linked the words and pictures of the dream and the uns aid and unseen desire of the dreamer. Jus t as important for Lacan were Freud's discussions of our bungled actions and slips of the tongue - the famous Freudian slip s

in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life ( 1 90 1 ) , and his

treatment o f the comp act formul ation and explosive release of unspoken o r socially censored desire in Jokes and Their Rela tion

to the Unconscious ( 1 905). It was in the name of the transformative wordp lay of dream s , slips and p un s that Lacan's most famous dictum was spoken again and again in his work: 'The uncons cious is structured like a language . ' The unconscious. There, I've finally said it! But just what is the unconscious? Or, better, what is it not? The Freudian unconscious as understood by Lacan was not s o me primal repertory of bestial instincts that inexorably motivated human beings to perpetrate

horren dous deeds of murder, maiming, mayhem and lust. For Lacan, the Freudian uncons cious was not s ome darkly hidden re s ervoir o f animal instincts imperfectly suppressed by civilisation b ut, rather, an inescap able domain of language literally lying in plain view, for instance in the full black letters and emp ty white bl anks of the very lines of type you are reading now. As the s e words are written and as they are read in turn, a s ubj ect

the subject of the uncons cious

intermittently fli ckers

into being and just as quickly fades from view, retaining the trace of the word just read, hanging on the anticipated word to come, and retroactively conferring meaning at the end of this unwinding chain of words. The ins tability of this position of the subject in l anguage is a function of our deciphering of these letters and blanks all the way to the end of this book and beyond. Such reading is an unending process of subjecting ourselves to these graphic 'tI Q)

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,gQ)

Il C o u o .. N

images of words according to our grasp of the current idioms of the E nglish language. We would not be the paradoxical psychological s u bjects we are but merely the physiol ogical organisms and physical objects we are as well without this matter of language, which constitutes the unconscious and delineates the contours of the worlds in which we b elieve we live. The journey of this book will take us across an Imaginary tightrop e perilou sly suspended acro s s an abyss between a vanishing subjecthood unconsciously encoded in the Symbolic puls ati ons of our language and an o b durate objectho o d indes crib ably embedded in the Real pulsations of our b o dy. And, to leap in a single bound acro s s this internal chasm of mind and body, ' art' will b e the general name offered here for many of our most p recious cultural practices that may help to stabilise the rope and s ave us from falling into the void. Freud acknowledged frankly that his study of Leonardo da Vinci might b e nothing other than a psycho analytic nove l . In s eeking to understand the motivations of the artist he admired, he admitted that he might have been duped into error by the enigmatic tale of a bird in the mouth and the enigmatic depiction of a

woman's smile. But if the m aternal interpretation of the smile was not the historical truth of L e onardo's art it was a monument to

psychoanal Y tic theory itself, for Freud used that smile to construct a scenario of ambivalent affect in which mother and child cleaved

together and were cleaved a s under as well . From the Desire of the Mother to the Name of the Father

What is the enigmatic Desire of the Mother as theorised by Lacan? What does the painted woman known as the Mona Lisa want in smiling at me in that ambiguously alluring yet alienating way? And what do I want from her in ambivalently facing and defacing her smile in order to bring her close and at the s ame time to keep her at b ay? If the anxiety of castratio n was first mobilised in the baby boy by comp aring his little penis with the maternal phallus that he imagined to be lacking, then perhaps her unspoken desire was for him to be that Imaginary p hallus for her so as to make good that lack. It was in the face of the mother's invitation or threat to reclaim the child as her own lost object that the child required a champion to protect him from that fate and, equally, from his own desire to embrace that fate. In the traditional family the one who exercised the function o f separating the child from the mother was , of course, the father

he who had the culturally mandated task of

stepping in and s aying an unequivocal 'No' to the double sided Desire of the Mother, hers for the child and the child's for her. In desiring hi s mother for himself and thus fearing the castrating punishment of his father, Little Hans was, in Freud's words , a little Oedipus , modern heir of the man of ancient myth who killed his father and wed his mother. According to Lacan, the father of Little Hans did not fulfil his duty to negate the private Desire of the Mother by offering the chil d an alternative identification with the N arne of the Father on which the family's public identity was based. This ineffectual father did not do his duty early enough or fully enough in the twin case histories of Little Leonardo and Little Hans .

At s take in Freud's psychob iographical interpretation of a childhoo d memory of a renaissance genius was nothing less than the autobiographical proclamation of the genius of Freud himself in his signature i nventi on of the O e dipus complex, in which tragedy ensued when the son murdered his father and married his mother, whether in mythological deed or in psychological fantasy. The preferred outcome was o therwi s e . In the Name of the Father the child must learn to tear himself away from the seductive Desire of the Moth e r, to i dentify himself with the father's naysaying to incestuous desire, to renounce the impossible burden of b eing the Imaginary phallic object that the m other lacks , to accept the Symbolic promise of becoming a father in the future, but only after having waited his turn. But in leaving his smiling p aintings unfinished Leonardo had remained transfixed upon the mirror stage of the nursery, failing to take responsibility for his p aintings'

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care just as his father had left him to linger too long in the embrace

E E!

of a mother who lacked a lover and who thus became the enigmatic

§

exp l anation o f the riddle o f Leonardo 's art and character a s

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..

s e ductres s of her s on's uncomp rehending desire. That was the prop osed by Freud, but it was not altogether what motivated the commentary of Lacan, to who s e altern ative articulation of the question of art and psychoanalysis we now turn.

Chapter 2

The Do Vinci Code according to Lacon

Whereas Freud lo oked to the unconscious fantasy of an individual artist in order to throw light on the singularity of his works , Lacan looked inste a d to works of art in order to exemplify the universal structures of mind and b o dy that he hoped to articulate in the cours e of his p s ychoanalytic teaching. Freud's treatise on Leonardo took the biographical form of the monograph, in which the images and themes o f an artist's works were meant to be illuminated by the facts

in this cas e , the allege dly unconscious facts

of the

artist's life. For his part, L acan discuss e d Freud's study of Leonardo at the end of a s eries of lectures in

1 95 7 . I will have more to s ay

about the p e dagogical circumstances of the seminar that Lacan conducted for almo st thirty years , but for the moment let us take a brief look at this early phase of his teaching.

From Ego, Superego and Id to Imaginary, SymboliC and Real In his first year of public te aching, in

1 9 53-4, Lacan focused on

Freud's e s s a y s on p sycho analytic techni que. Lacan took p ains to distingui sh b e tween two orders of exp erience encountered in the treatment of p atients: the domains of deceitful images and truthful words that he called the Imaginary and the Symbolic. At this time Lacan's contributions to international psychoanalytic debates were ro oted in h i s di stinction b e tween the Imaginary (or image based) and Symbolic (or word based) ways of structuring human experience upon the formle s s ground h e called the Real. In this shifting dialectic of mute m ateriality, frozen images and mobile

words Lacan provides us with a rich triple p aradigm for differentiating the physical materials, illusory forms and inferred

meanings of works of art. Lacan s aw the Imagin ary register as con s i s ting in the individual's largely conscious but distorted visualis ations of Self and Oth ers that Freud had situated in the so called E go (in German, Ich, or II. In The Ego and the Id ( 1 923) Freud had postulated a p s ychic app aratus of three distinct agencies . The Id

(Es, or It) was the hypothetical s ite of the drives (Trieben) , ideational representatives o f the human organism's primordial instincts for nouri shment, s exual attraction and aggres sive self protection. The Ego took on the difficult task of reconciling the demand of the drives for immediate pleasurable discharge with the p o s tp onements and constraints imposed upon the individual by the demands of society. These demands were brought to b ear 'C CI>

E

i 6

upon the partly consciou s , partly unconscious interplay between the Ego and the Id by the so called Superego ((jber Ich, or Over I) , the internalised imperative of social norms . This Freudian triple mapping of the p s ychic app aratus can be s e en roughly to

g

corre s p ond to the Lacanian tri a d of the Imaginary (Ego) , the

-0

Symb olic (Superego ) and the Real (Id) .

..

It was Lacan's distinctive contribution to the theory of the Ego to propose a visual s cenario by which the Ego first came into being. Ba sed on the alien but alluring images glimp sed in the mirror in childhood, the E go was seen by Lacan to be crystallised in response to the admiring behaviour of the mother and to the actions of a dmired counterp arts such as older siblings with whom the individual subsequently came to identify both in opposition and in emulation. We can see this formative interplay at the mirror of mother and child in numerous works of art across the centuries, notably in the late eighteenth century colour woodblock prints by the Japanese master Kitagawa Utamaro and in the paintings, prints and p a stels of the nineteenth century American impressionist

Mary Cass att. In contrast to thi s private maternal pres erve, the

Symb o l i c order was

s a i d to

be c o n s titute d by the chi l d 's

introduction to the public world of cultural meaning that was associated by Lacan with the father's s p eech . For the p atients who came to speak to Lacan of their intransigent sufferings of b o dy and thought, the motor of the cure was the uncens ored outpouring of their words in the p resence of the a n a ly s t . Punctuated

enigmati c ally by the unpredictable interventions of the analyst, this mobilisation of signifiers was me ant to generate new sets of Symbolic meanings so that the p atient might move b eyond the maternal idealisations and fixations of the Imaginary E g o . I n the second year of h i s seminar Lacan continue d to elaborate upon Freud's theory of the E g o . Lacan insis ted on the alienating implications of the chi l d 's discovery of its Ego a s an alter E go reflected in the image of the m/other of the mirror stage, a s tage (in French,

stade)

that was at once a p assing p h a s e o f childhood

deve l o pment and a l i felong arena or stadium o f p s ycho l o g i c a l conflict. In order t o clarify t h e complex mirror stage dynamic s o f s e l f a n d other, Lacan returned to a distinction that Freud had not fully devel oped b etween two aspects of the Superego: on the one han d, there was the i d e a l Ego of the Imaginary other that the emerging Ego aspires to be like; and, on the other hand, there was the E g o i deal, the p o s i ti o n of S ymb o l i c sp eech fro m which the aspiring Ego wished to b e judged as wholly exemplifying its ideal. At its core the Ego was split, alienated from itself a s an alter Ego, constructed on the b as i s of a vi sual mo del found outside itself. To add insult to injury, the E g o was oriented toward an impossible project of i d e al self fashioning with respect to which it could never be judged as anything o ther than unsucces sful and incomplete. The dual relation b etween the asp i ring Ego and the alienate d E g o was thus

a

duelling relation as well. Within t h e indivi dual

there l oomed a tension packed stand off between the internalised alter Ego

the me I see mys elf a s b eing

ideal Ego or mirroring other

and the image of the

the me I want to b e and can never be.

In order to dislodge the individual from this p aralysing visual

c " ()

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01 c

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o (.) () "

-8 8 ·0

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fac e off Lacan instead endorsed the p acifying rel atio n of the speaking subject with another Other, the Ego ideal. Lacan sp elled the first other, which was visualis e d as a counterp art and rival in the mirror, with a lower case 'a' for the French word autre. The second Other he spelled with an upper case 'A' for Autre, the image less Other of l anguage's impersonal storehouse of words in which we dwell even when we are expre ssing our most p ersonal selve s . It was the w i dely held delusion of an inner self b a s e d on the Imaginary other of the mirror stage that Lacan was most at pains to comb at. His alternative champion was the subject of the unconscious , the Symbolic subject of speech. We see his friend Pic a s s o alternating in the p o rtrayal of his teenage m i s tre s s Marie-Therese Walter b etween the anxiety of c onfronting the Imaginary other reflected in Girl Before a Mirror ( 1 932, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the appeasement of identification with

'g

the Symb olic Other of language in Girl Reading at a Table ( 1 934,

E

Metropolitan M u s eum of Art, New York) . In the l atter p ainting

c

wreathed head.

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g

.9

10

a b l a ckened mirror hangs on the wall b ehind her flower In his insistence on the dangerous duel of s elf and other in the Imaginary dimension of the Ego, Lacan was extending Freud's formulations on the self loving and s elf loathing narcis sism of the Ego that we encountered in the story of Leonardo. Lacan claimed to be faithfully returning to Freud's fundamental theories in respect to the meaning making resources of the Symbolic dimension of the subject in l angu age through which Imaginary misperceptions might b e dispelled.

Schema L In a memorable diagram addressed to the avid eye of visual culture, Lacan s chematised the troubled crossing of the Imaginary and Symbolic axes of conscious and unconscious experience. C alled S chema L o n a c c o unt of its resemblance to the capital l etter lambda in Greek, thi s crossing will help to envision a key lesson

of psychoanalysi s for both novice and expert users of images and word s . In the di agram, one of many blackb o ard aids drawn by Lacan during hi s l ecture s , the Imaginary relation is fixed in a straight line of affectual reciprocity between the alienated alter Ego of the individual, denoted as (a) , and the unattainable image of the other, denoted as ( a ' ) , the i deal Ego with which it vainly identifies and seeks to resemble and replace. It might help here to visualise a painter (a) looking at his reflection (a') in a mirror in the process of painting a s elf portrait, a complex triple s cene famously depicted on a

1 960 magazine cover of The Saturday Evening Post

by the American illustrator N orman Rockwell. As a result of the illusory and elusive face off with his Imaginary mirror image, the self p o rtraitist must sacrifice that major p art of the authenticity of his Real and Symb olic being that is not adequately expressed in his external appearance . But the physically awkward sixty six year o l d Ro ckwell is supported at his e a s el by an array of Symb o l i c attributes of arti stic glory, including a gilt American eagle and a golden armoured helmet. Quizzically b espectacled in the mirror but clear eyed and glasses free in the portrait, Rockwell attests that the recording of mere Imaginary resemblance need not be all that a self p o rtraitist aspires to p o rtray. Unlike the glassy vacancy o f the mirror, Rockwell's white canvas proudly b e ars the black block letters of his name.

(Es) S

�----,

"

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�� .�'lf (ego)

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-----

@'

other

@

Other

· o�

��

,,�

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�d'

C ros sing the Imaginary vector of the alter Ego facing the mirror image of the i deal Ego in Lacan's diagram (a a') is the interrupted p l ane of the Symb olic relation ( S

/

AJ . This vector attemp ts to

traverse the gap b e tween the indivi dual Subject (Sujet) of s p eech, denoted in French and English as a capital ' S ' , and that Other place of the Ego ideal designated by the capital letter '/>: (for Autre) , the never completely excavated archaeological site of the buried tr e a s ure trove of our artefacts and language . To travers e this gap b etween Subject and Other the interrupted vector S

/ A mus t leap

over the Imaginary wall of language , in which the uncons cious s ubjective connotations of words are consciously congealed into b rick like units of objective denotation. The initial ' S ' s ound of the name of the unconscious Subj e ct of free sp eech puns upon the German s ound of Es, Freud's ordinary daily word meaning 'It' that was misleadingly Latini s e d by his English translators into the '0 Ql

s c i entific s ounding word ' I d ' . L a c an's retrans lation p o ints to

i

uncon s c ious I d driven urgency that re sults from the l o s s of

E

I¥

a n indwelling within the s p e e ch of the human b eing of an

6

immedi acy of ins tinctual life .

�

unconscious addre s s of the subj e c t to the golden s toreho u s e

.9

For the s elf p o rtraiti s t at the mirror, the equivalent of the

of language ( S

/

A) i s t h e exhibition of h i s or h e r p ainting in

the Virtu al Museum within which s elf p o rtraits by the great masters appear alongside his o r her own. Tacked onto Rockwell's c anvas are colour reproductions of s elf p ortraits by Albre cht Diirer, Rembrandt van Rijn and Vincent Van Gogh, as well as a surrealist portrait by Picas s o of a female model with the p ainter's profil e peeking out b ehind her from

a

mirror on the wall. For

it i s to the words and i m a g e s of our c o l l e c tive tre a sury of l anguage and art and their inherit e d forms of meaningful expres sion that the s p e aking or p ainting individual is unrep ayably indebte d if he or she is to exp r e s s the s ingul arity of his or her b eing

by means

or wor d s .

of a unique s e l ection and comb ination of images

With his diagrammatic image of the cri s s - cros s e d and s t ar cros s e d rel ati ons of the s e eing E g o , the v i s u a l i s e d other, the speaking Subj ect , and the mute Other of l anguage , Lacan was ironically showing u s that there is more to our b eing than may b e seen in a single mirror image, that there is more t o our b eing than will ever meet the instantaneous glimp se of the eye. In this visual diagram Lacan was telling u s that it is only in the intersubj ective and mobile medium of speech that p sychoanalytic treatment artistic practice

or

m ay hope to res tore to the p atient p ainter the

unfo lding p otentiality of our fullness of being in time. We may be inescapably alienated from our primordially embodied experience in the words and images of o thers , but it is, p aradoxically, only in the transpers onal linguistic and arti stic discourse of the O ther that we can get b ack some s crap of the vitality we feel ourselves to have lost. In the third year of his public teaching Lacan return e d to Freud's writings on psychosis in order to dramati s e the m a l a dy of l anguage that a ffl i cted tho s e who s uffered from external persecutory voices rather than the guilty internal recriminations of neurotic i l l n e s s . In the c a s e o f neuro s i s , the indivi d u a l 's impos sible attempt to be the Imaginary fulfilment of the mother's imp uted d e s ire for the phallus m ay be overcome through identification with the father's forbidding of incestuous desire that Lacan called Symbolic cas trati on. Thi s process is not, however, without symp tomatic res i du e . On the one h a n d , the hys teric rep eatedly re enacts the Imaginary wound of the mother's phallic loss in her own b o dily malfunctions , thus re sisting the p aternal regulation of the roles of the sexes and putting the unc ertain question of sexuality directly to the test: 'Am I a woman or a man?' On the other hand, the obses sional stages fantasies of p aternal phallic p otency in the form of compulsive rituals or recurrent thoughts that insist upon the father's authority and thus avoid confronting the insoluble questions of life and death: 'To b e or not to be?'

In both the hysterical and obsessional forms of neurosis I l o s e b y giving up t h e i l l u s i o n of b eing t h e Im aginary phallus of the

m o ther. I grieve for my l o s s in the uncon s c i o usly meaningful suffering of my symptom in b o dy o r mind, but at the s ame time I gain a Symbolic p ower of negation over the mother's enigmatic d e sire in my fledgling c ap acity as an indivi dual s p eaker of the c o llective dis course a s s o ci ated with the father's wider role beyond the Imaginary confines of the nursery. In p sycho s i s this critical father-functi o n is n o t adequ ately p erformed in the name o f s e parating t h e s ubject from t h e Imaginary drama o f the mother's desire. This failure of Symbolic castration and its enabling accession to subjectho o d m ay l e a d to p aranoid fears o f dis memberment or delusions of phallic omnipotence, but the crucial c omponent for Lacan was the lack of the phallic signifier of p aternal negation that might counter the regre s sive p ull of m aternal desire . In French 'C Q)

le nom du pere, le non du pere.

the Name of the Father,

is s ounded just like the

E E Gi

father's ' No ' ,

6

nothing but a No and a N ame (Non/Nom) lies the fateful difference

IX

.9

�

In the presence or absence of a Symbolic identity made of

between the neurotic's relatively succes sfu l management of un acceptable des ire by means of obsessional thinking or hysterical symptom formation and the much more disastrous mental illnes s of p sychosis . Whereas the neurotic p o s se s s e s a sufficiently stable form of i dentity for it to b e the s ubject of extremely vexing questions, the p sychotic's lack of such an identity forecloses on the very possibility of meaningful convers ation with others within the fundamental framework of the Other's s o cial norms . I am first and my M/other is s econd, but we can c o nvers e only by way of the Other/Father of l anguage that is our shared third. And so we s e e the solitary self- p o rtraitis t labouring on the surface o f the canva s , anxio u s ly p o sitioned b etwe en a v i s u al likene s s seen in the nostalgic maternal mirror and the uncompleted painting still to be shown to the p aternal Other. Real corporeality, Imaginary love, Symbolic recogniti on. Me, Mommy, D addy. Now we are Three.

Lacking a stable i dentification with the anchoring signifiers of the s o cial realm of the father, the Symbolically deficient world of the p sychotic is pulled b ack into the l ethal gravitational pull of the omnip o tent phallic mother of t errifying Imaginary fantasy. Just this sort of vampiric fantasy was expressed acro s s the ages in the troubl e d response of many male writers to what they s aw as

the Mon a Lisa's blood curdling smi l e . According to Lacan, th i s anxious fate of maternal dominance and p aternal inadequacy was

share d at l e a s t in part by Leonard o . Unlike the internally riven world of the p sychotic, however, Leonardo's world was held more or less together through the s tructures of art by means of which Symb o l i c r e p r e s entatives o f Mother, Father and S elf were precariously fixed in place. Near the end of this book we will see how Lacan, i n his late s emina r on the revolutionary verbal art of James Joy c e , came to sp eak of the w o rk of art as a fourth term providing the artist with a crucial s emblance of self consistency by tying t o g e ther the otherwi s e d i s s ociated orders

of the

Imaginary, Symbolic and Real.

From the Imaginary Mother to the SymboliC Father Lacan offered his audience an extended discussion of Freud's account of Leonardo during the final l ecture prior to the s ummer break of his

1 9 56-7

s eminar on o bject relations . Unlike the

American p sycho analytic orientatio n known as Ego psychology which focused its theory and treatment on the strengthening of the defens e s of the Ego against the dis ruptive p r e s s ure of un c o n s ci o u s l y repres s e d s exual a n d aggre s s ive drive s , British object relations theory foc u s e d i n s t e a d on s trengthening an individual's interpersonal relationship s against the fragmenting forc e s of the uncons ciously interna l i s e d objects repres enting persons o r p arts of p ersons from his or her early life history. Rather than a loved or hated whol e o bject such as the mother or a parti al o bj e c t s u ch a s the b re a s t , the Frenchman was more interested in Freud's theory of the o bject that was not there, the

Imaginary matern a l phallus that Freud had p o stulated as lost in the s t ories of the hors e p h o b i a of Little Hans and the bird fanta s y of Little Leonardo . In s ummarising Freud's account of the bird's tail ins erted in the infant's mouth, Lacan questioned the sup erimp o s ition of the two repressed wishes concerning sucking at the breast and sucking on the peni s . Ins tead, Lacan insisted on reattributing the s e wishes to the Imaginary an d Symbolic registers of Leonardo's unconscious mental life . At the Imaginary level Lacan interp reted Leonardo's memory of the bird's tail a s s creening from consciousness the overwhelming intrusiveness of his mother during the time she was b ereft of Leonardo's father and took her b aby as a comp ens atory love object. Lacan reinforced the hyp othesis of damage done to the young Leonardo by the suppo s e d selfishne s s of his mother's desire by referrin g not to the ancient folklore of the mother

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L a c an opposed to the idealised duality of mother and child in object relations theory his own insistence on the tri adic nature of the mother child relation as mediated by the lacking phallus . The D esire of the Mother was for s omething b eyond the symbiotic embraces o f her child, something lacking that was symb olically repres ente d by the phallus of her lover, the child's father. By exten s i o n , the p aternal phallus b e c a m e the s ignifier of the Symbolic order as such, a verb al signifier that might fill in a Real vo i d with an ab stract word but was not to b e v i s u a li s e d a s a concrete thing. The metaphorical op eration of replacing the Imaginary phallus of the Desire of the Mother with the Symb olic p hallus of the Name of the Father was called Symb olic castration on account of its signifying cut into the lost sub stance of the Real.

3 . Leonardo do Vinci , The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist

( 1 499 1 500).

Think of the p e n of the cl erk i n s c ribing your name on your certificate of birth. Think of the chisel of the s culptor incising your name on the stone of your grave. Thus, unlike Freud, Lacan s aw no blis sful reconstitution of the Imaginary reciprocity of mother and child in the Madonna's smile. It was not her eyeing an Imaginary phallus in her b aby son that woul d bring her j oy. Instead, Lacan stre s s e d the active role of the father's Symbolic phallus displaced within the figure of the l amb (like the h o r s e o f Littl e Hans) with which the H o ly Child was playing. S tanding for the crucifixion, the Lamb of God was also the name through which Jesus the p l ayful son o f Mary was transforme d into C hrist the s acrific e d son of God. From the visible to the invisible, the Imaginary human trinity of S aint Anne, the Virgin M a ry and the b aby Jesus was superseded by the Symb o l i c divine trinity of G o d the Fathe r, the crucifi e d and

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signifying the univers ality of the C hurch and the eternity of the

regis tered in the p ainting in the impassive face and hidden hand of S aint Anne, who prevents her d aughter Mary from retaining her c hi l d in her d e s iring gra s p , thus a l l owing the child to a s s ume his Symbolic mandate as the s acrificial lamb for his flock. In contrast to Freud's Leonard o , who emb r a c e d in his art the Imaginary recove ry of the mother's lost smile of d e s ire, Lacan's Leonardo p ointed to the Symbolic separation from her body that every one of us must make along his or her individual way toward an eventual death . Of course , neither Freud nor Lacan ever alleged that L e o nardo would have been c o n s cious o f the un c o n s c i o u s meanings they dis cerned in h i s work.

The pointing finger Lacan s aw evidence of a displacement from the Imaginary relation to the m o ther to the Symb olic rel ation to the father not only in Leonardo's painting in the Louvre, but also in an earlier large

drawing or c artoon of this same subject in the National Gallery in London

( 1 499 1 500; Figure 3). Referred to in a footnote by Freud as

a dream like melting together of the b o dies of the two mothers into a single hybrid fantasy, the drawing uncannily positioned the b aby Je sus as if he were a marionette like extension of his mother's b o dy s p ringing upward from b etween her legs . Thi s Imaginary phalli c signifier o f the maternal b o dy is s upplemented by the Symb olically elevated index finger of S aint Anne pointing upwards beyond the frame of the drawing to the realm of God the Father, in who s e name the s acrifice of Christ will have taken place. All of Lacan is in the following pas s ag e : 'This is s o m ething that images very well the ambiguity o f the Real mother and the Imaginary mother, the Real infant and the hidden phallus . If I make of the finger its symbol, it is not because it crudely reproduces its profile, but because this finger, which one finds thro ughout Leonardo da Vinci, i s the indication of that l ack of-being o f which we fin d the inscri b e d term throughout hi s work . ' In the finger that p o ints to something uns een Lacan moved from the enigmatic question of the Imaginary maternal phallus

' D o I see it or do I not?'

to the

appeasing answer of the Symb olic p aternal phallus whose invisible pres ence is necess arily a matter o f p ure blind faith. D etachable from the body like the phallus and thus susceptible for appropriation as a Symb olic marker, the p ointing finger of S aint Anne was made by enc l o s ing the emptines s of the s urface of the paper with the b arest indication of a drawn line. As such it was a concise indication of the fundamental dilemma of human development, namely the indirectly inferred role of the father versu s the directly observed role of the mother in the life of the child. The finger pointing b eyond the frame tells us that in visual art there is always m o re than meets the eye . Any a e s thetic exp erience in the realm of the senses is implicitly frame d by the Symb o l i c c ontract of a share d s o cial me aning that cannot be reduced to an empirical visual representati on of the worl d . Here again is the split between the animal-eye of the p erceptual organ

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of sight and the human I of the affectual organ of desire that in art Lacan called the g a z e . I n h i s commentary on Leonardo, Lacan questioned t h e concept o f sub limation upon which the edifice of Freud's p sycho analytic a e s thetics was built. For Freud, Leonardo's sublimation wa s the achievement o f a substitute s atisfaction in his p aintings of smiles for an unsatisfied unconscious wish to recover a love he had lost. Less focused on the individual psychology of the artist. Lacan saw s u b l imation as a general s tructure in s o ci e ty whereby the Imaginary world of present p erceptual exp erience was covered over by a Symbolic grid of signifiers pointing to a p a s t life of Real primordi al b eing and a future path to a meaningful human death. S ecular scholars steeped in the s criptures of Ju daism and Christianity, Freu d and L a c an were non religi o u s h e i rs to a cultural tradition in which the Symb olic inscription of the Name

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of G o d the Fath e r h e l d sway over the Imaginary depiction of the D e s ire of the Mother N a ture G o d d e s s . B u t in their evi d ent enj oyment of the Roman C atholic art of Leonardo b o th men were susceptible to the b eauty of the mother's fac e . Freud wa s moved by the maternal mirage of androgynous bli s s that Leonardo had narcissistically fa shioned upon the faces of his male and female figures from S aint Anne to S aint John the B aptist, also in the Louvre. Lacan, however, was moved more by the sight of the s aints' index fingers emphatic ally p ointing to the invisible realm of heaven's gaze b eyond the s ensuous pleasures of the eye's vision. In spite of thi s p otential p aternal identification, Lacan noneth e l e s s i n s i s t e d that L e o n a r d o primarily i d entifi e d him s elf w i t h t h e Imaginary m/other of a natural worl d of fulfille d physical b l i s s rather t h a n w i t h the S ymb o l i c O t h e r of c o rp o r e a l death a n d s p i r i t u a l c ommemoration. T h i s maternal fixatio n , rather than homos exuality a s such, was what Lacan referred to a s Leonardo's inversion, a trait he i dentifie d in the artis t's idio syncratically rever s e d mirror writing as if i t were perfo rme d to be re ad not by the Ego looking into the mirror but by the idealised other looking

back at the Ego from the maternally mediated matrix of the mirror. In referring in his notebooks to his daily activities and artistic o r scientific aspirations, Leonardo habitually spoke from the inverted Imaginary p o sition of the little other in the mirror and addressed himself a s 'You' . In concluding this chapter I want to l o o k again at Schema L (page 1 9) , a c c o rding to who s e Imaginary a n d Symb o l i c vectors Lacan charted the mirror inversion o f the renaissance mas ter. At the upp er left let u s place the Symbolic lamb in the place o f the unconscious subject of speech ( S ) , which, like the s acrifice of Christ, the Lamb o f God, must also undergo Symbolic castration. The Symb o l i c function i s that o f the Freudian death drive , inasmuch as the Real

Of the organi s m must be metaphorically

put to death in o rder for it to gain access to its humanity by way of the grammatical workings of the inhuman mechani sm of speech. Acro s s the fragile Imaginary membrane of the mirroring gazes o f the Madonna and Child (a a ' or me youl . the disemb o died subj e c t o f s p eech must l o c ate that Other s p ace of the p aternal dictionary, where it must find the imp ersonal tenus of its Symbolic inscripti o n ( S

/

A, I

/

It) . I n L e o nardo 's p ainting this final

resting place is occupied by the grave like marker of the p ointing index finger of S aint Anne . The Symbolic axis (S

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A) travers es Leonardo's s chema from

the l amb to S aint Anne; it commemorates the two superimp osed deaths o f Real c o rporeal loss and S ymb olic inscripti on in the afterlife of cultural memory. After all, this is a p ainting made by a dead p ainter's hand, not sainted fle s h . Interrupting the Symbolic axis of the p ainting is the Imaginary screen (a a') upon which are projected the l oving and sorrowing images of the Ego and its i deal mate , the Madonn a and Chil d . We find o urs elves seduced by the beautiful Ego in the smiling face s of the b aby Jesus and his mother Mary, b o th miraculously imp ervious to corp oreal dec ay. It was from the inverted feminine p o sition o f the ideal Ego of the Virgin Mary that Leonardo saw hims elf seen as an o bject, an alter E go of

androgynous gender (a' a) . It was this reframing of the bo dily Ego a s the Imaginary object of des ire of the feminine or feminised other that Lacan defined as Leonardo's act of sublimation, an act through which the renais s ance artist transformed himself into an admired work of art. C arrying his p aintings with him on his final

j ourney, Leonardo ended his days according to legend, in the ,

p aternal arms of the King of Franc e.

For Lacan, Leonardo's Imaginary sublimation of the Ego in the deathles s smile of the b eautiful woman was achieved at a high price. Leonardo's Imaginary sublimation as the mother's cherished object c onstituted a denial of the father's truth that he was als o the precious subject o f unconscious desire and Symbolic speech.

"0 41

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Chapter 3

The Th i n g from a n oth er world

'Who are you looking at? Are you looking a t me? In looking a t m e are you acknowle dging me a s the object o f your desire, the beneficiary of your love, the victim of your lust?' These, and others , are the unanswerable que stions we unc onsciously pose to the staring eye s of the Mona Lisa and her myriad sister paintings, from wide eyed Byzantine Madonnas to Edouard Manet's Olympia ( 1 863, Orsay Museum, Paris) , Pablo Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon ( 1 907, Museum of Modern Art, New York) , Willem de Kooning's

Wo man I ( 1 9 5 0 2 , Museum of Modern Art, New York) , Andy Warhol's Gold Marilyn ( 1 962, Museum of Mo dern Art, New York)

' Jenny Saville's Branded ( 1 99 2 , Saatchi Gallery, London) and Cindy Sherman's many untitled l arge scale colour photographs of the 1 9 90s showing herself looking out of the frame in the disguis e of famous holy women and femmes fatales from the history of art. Am I the eye to who se view you wish to s how yourself in the fear and fearsomeness of your gaze? We want the work of art to confirm us in the wished for unity of our being, we want the work of art to appear to want us to b e its ideal viewer. B ut all this is an Imaginary illusion, because as we move aside and another viewer comes to stand before the work in our stead we come to realis e that the gaze of the painting does not address us at all in the uniqueness of our own corporeal being. The painting's gaze addresses its elf to an Other place, the empty Symb olic place of the s p ectator of art in which we s e e our subjecthood come and go. For an instant the work holds us with its

gaze, and our eye and I are jointly appeased. This was what Lacan called the princip le of artistic creation: that the world we see in art is the world of our desire. The dilemma, however, is that the Imaginary world of our infant desire was misconstructed from the outs et from the enigmatic traces of another's desire, perhap s the mother's , and therefore we never simply desire on our own.

Sublimation For many years Lacan taught that the goal of psychoanalysis was to assist suffering individuals to sublimate their di s s atisfaction . Their exceedingly difficult task was to renounce inhibiting ties to an Imaginary maternal p aradise of lost bodily bliss by way of a Symbolic identification with the collective ideals of a particular social group. The induction of the novice into the norms of the group was traditionally the responsibility of the father, but this

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thus be transformed into a Symbolic object of creative passion. The Imaginary demands is the work of art, which Lacan defined in a 1 93 8 essay on the pathologies and sublimations of modern family life as an ordinary object erected into the light of astonishment. The subject might be nothing m o re than a l owly still life of pots and p ans but its p ictorial refashioning as the material signifier of an ab sent presence might transform the work into an amazing masterpiece. In 1 95 9 60, in the s eventh year of his public seminar, Lacan devoted the majority of his lectures to the question of the work of art. Lacan affirmed that the Symbolic labour of artistic sublimation illuminated what he called the ethi c s of psycho analysis, namely the analyst's duty to facilitate the articulation of the patient's imp eded desire. The Symbolic articulation of unconscious desire in the course of p sychoanalytic treatment offered the possibility of an art like sublimation of the regressive allure of the inaugural.

inaccessible, intangib l e , invi sible, imp o s sible object of desire. Following Freud, Lacan called this mysterious obj ect 'the Thing'.

The Thing In his posthumously published Project for a Scientific Psychology

( 1 895) Freud made the distinction that Lacan exploited in his Ethics sixty five years later, between the representation of a thing (in German, die Sache) and another kind of thing altogether (das Ding) . whose unrepres entable existence could only retro actively be inferred. The Lacanian Ding (in French, la Chose) was also related to the transcendental Thing in Itself (das Ding an Sichl of the German philos opher Immanuel Kant that, l ike God or the infinity of the cosmos, was posited as being beyond the perceptual capacities of human exp erience. For Lacan, the Thing was the retrospective name for that nameles s entity of b eing that would have engaged the full scope of infantile experience prior to the acquisition of language. Thus , there was not yet a Thing as such until the time it woul d h ave become irrevocably lost when the immediacy of wordles s experience first c ame to b e mediated by

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conscious and unconscious representations, and the Thing became that spectral being which lingered in the unconscious as that which could not be named. In Harry Potter's world of wizards, Lord Voldemort (Full of Deathl is the not to be named Thing. In Lacan's world of psychoanalysis , the mother was p laced in the mythic position of the Thing. She was the Thing of the infant prior to its cap acity for linguistic repres entation not because of her instinctual provision of corporeal s atisfaction to her needy, dependent b aby. The mother became the child's lost Thing when she frustrated its demands for her loving attention during a time of her own corporeal s atisfaction, for example when she was eating, defecating or h aving s ex. Such independence of maternal enjoyment would have been beyond the child's capacity to accept.

This self abs orbed, unavailable Thing would thus have become an object of discordant fantasy offering the child no satisfaction at all. In its withdrawal from the enclosed mother child duality of c o rporeal need and urgent demand, the autonomously desiring Thing b oth provided the initial cause of an unassuageable desire and als o constituted its unattainable object. This Thing that was also No Thing situ ated the individual vi s a. vis a p sychological space that might be made indirectly accessible through the Imaginary and Symbolic mediation of memorial images and words . But this Thing also situated the individual outside the inaccessible space of the Real, lying entirely b eyond the grasp of its flimsy images and words . So what does this Thing have to do with the work of art? In the formula for sublimation that Lacan repe ated throughout the seminar, the work of art was seen to negate the apparent reality 'tI CIl

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of thing s and rais e everyday objects susceptible to word and image representation to the dignity of das Ding, the Thing, that lies beyond the cap acities of representation. In its split between

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dignitelDing was itself a characteristic verbal enactment of the ' extimate' Thing, b oth inside and outside at one and the same time. Much of the doublenes s and duplicity of Lacan's sublimated wordp l ay is lost when we read written trans criptions and translations of his s poken seminar. Like his friend and neighbour Tristan Tzara, the original Dadaist poet of the provocative spoken word, L a c an was a brilliant performance arti st, and his oral s eminar was his art. If artistic sublimation enacts an appeasing play of words and/ or images in place of a persistent Dlockage in s exual satisfaction, complete s atisfaction nevertheless remains unachieved. The work of art provides a genuine substitute satisfaction for the l ack of a successful sexual relation, but it does not thereby eliminate the p ermanent deficit of desire. In L a c an's view, Freu d l e d many of

his followers in E go psychology and object rel ations theory to underestimate the stubb orn pressure of uncon s cious desire by maintaining that sublimation p rovided a change of aim for the sexual drive, for example from the b o dy of the mother in neurotic fantasy to a p icture's p ainted smile . In contras t, Lacan proposed that the crucial change in sublimation did not alter the aim of the drive from a forb i dden object of s exuality to a socially sanctioned asexual substitute. Lacan affirmed that in the act of sublimation there was a reconstitution in fantasy of the object itself, a transformation of the object from its ordinary appearance into its extraordinary manifestation as the Thing . :2

Formula o f fantasy Lacan agreed with Freud that members of society took consolation from the mirages of art, but he did not attribute the power of art to the mere fact of social consensus. Rather, Lacan insisted on the force of the fundamental fantasy of artistic sublimation, whereby the subject of unconscious desire was safely positioned face to face with the inaugural cause and impossible object of its unrelenting

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