ANY BODY ANYBODY: LACAN-LAPLANCHE DEBATE 2016
Refusing Choosing
Tim DEAN
This contribution to the “La/La Showdown” was composed on the day after the US presidential election. It may be worth the reader’s knowing that what follows was written under conditions of political trauma. Will this be a debate in which both sides declare victory the moment it’s over? What would it mean to “win” a psychoanalytic debate? You can win an intellectual debate or a political debate (even if you can’t win the election), but I’m less sure that it is possible, or even desirable, to win a psychoanalytic debate. The nature of psychoanalytic exchange remains foreign to the discursive structure of debate, with its position-taking, its repression of competing viewpoints, its zero-sum commitment to vanquishing the other. When intersubjective exchange takes on the coloring of debate, psychoanalysis vanishes. In the seemingly interminable run-up to the recent presidential election—a period that is starting to look positively prelapsarian by comparison to the political situation in which we find ourselves—voters who fell into the category of the “undecided” were regarded with disbelief, even contempt. Given what has been made public about Donald Trump, you still can’t decide? The election gave the undecided a bad name. Nevertheless, here I must declare myself undecided in this debate. When Elissa Marder wrote to ask if I’d be willing to serve on Team Laplanche, I replied that I’d be happy to serve on either team, to swing either way. (As my father often said, I used to be undecided, but now I’m not so sure.) Elsewhere I have elaborated a psychoanalytic defense of intellectual promiscuity as a positive virtue.1 The position I’m articulating here may not serve the interests of Team Laplanche, but it represents my sense of what psychoanalysis is and what it can do. The claim I wish to make concerns the specificity of psychoanalysis as a mode of thinking, rather than the specificity of any individual thinker. My reluctance to choose sides in this debate stems partly from the sense that I’m being asked to defend one party in a doctrinal dispute. The somewhat technical nature of the dispute feels especially distant in the wake of the election, as we’ve witnessed a largely unanticipated triumph of ignorance—a result of the galvanizing jouissance of hatred on a newly national scale. Psychoanalytic theory may help us understand what happened, but it cannot change the political result or its consequences. Here we confront a limit of what psychoanalysis can do. After the fateful choice of the election—after the triumph of ignorance—choosing between Lacan and 1. See Dean (2009), chapter 4. The psychoanalytic defense of intellectual promiscuity draws on multiple sources, including Phillips (1996).
Laplanche feels impertinent. Yet my reluctance to choose sides—in fact, my commitment to choosing not choosing—stems also from decades of experience finding both Lacan and Laplanche tremendously generative for my thinking and writing.2 They each provide various tools to think with—for intellectual as well as clinical work—and I would not want to be without either of these toolkits. Here I have in mind Foucault’s description of concepts as tools, with one implication being that the more tools you have at your disposal, the better. Why jettison as unworkable one set of implements when, in the face of contingency, you can never predict the future contours of the task? The necessity of leaving room for the unpredictable in our work represents a constant challenge for psychoanalysis. It may be heterodox to say so, but we do not need either Lacan or Laplanche to be “right”; what we need is for their work to continue to be useful, evocative, and, indeed, inspiring for us today, in our various contexts, national and professional. The danger of victory in a debate of this kind is that it may exacerbate the unfortunate human propensity for following a single leader or master. The unconscious ironizes mastery. Rather than a master whose teachings we faithfully follow and disseminate, we would be better off embracing methodological pluralism. A single, doctrinally correct leader is appropriate for a church, not for the world of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis—whether in the clinic or the university—is a practice, not a belief system or a doctrine. When it degenerates into orthodoxy or system, the vital work of psychoanalytic thinking grinds to a halt. Theoretical correctness spells the death of thought. It is in keeping with the groundless ground of the unconscious to claim that every concept and position must be subject to revision. I wish to conclude these remarks by offering one final point. In his introductory framing of this debate, David Lichtenstein suggested that the notion of the enigmatic signifier may be a way of describing how the unsymbolizable real functions within language. I regard that as a very helpful way to put it. The term enigmatic signifier was coined by Lacan but developed into a concept by Laplanche; we might say that the “enigmatic signifier” belongs to neither of them.3 I have found the 2. I take the phrase “choosing not choosing”—along with the idea that refusing choosing is itself a valid choice— from Sharon Cameron’s philosophical account of Emily Dickinson’s use of variants in her unpublished poetic fascicles. See Cameron (1993). 3. See the following sentence from Lacan: “Between the enigmatic signifier [le signifiant énigmatique] of the sexual trauma and the term that is substituted for it in an actual signifying chain there passes the spark that fixes in a symptom the signification inaccessible to the conscious subject in which that symptom may be resolved—a symptom being a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element” (Lacan, 1977, p.166). 56
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notion of an irreducible enigma especially useful in my own research, not least because it works to resist the hermeneutic frenzy that I associate with certain Lacanian traditions, particularly that of Slavoj Žižek and his epigones. The ease with which some psychoanalysts appear able to interpret anything and everything in their own terms makes some versions of Lacanianism seem like a paranoid system with no outside. Hence, the significance of what, in her lecture yesterday, Tracy McNulty emphasized as the uninterpretable, the untreatable, the intractable (McNulty, 2016). Leaving space for the uninterpretable as an indispensable element helps to differentiate psychoanalysis from those hermeneutic practices that would treat it either as simply a blockage to be overcome or as a regrettable failure of hermeneutic technique. By soliciting interpretation even as it refuses any finality of meaning, the enigmatic signifier undermines psychic determinism. Thus, if forced to choose sides in this debate, I come down on the side of the uninterpretable enigma. The psychoanalytic choice is for equivocation. z REFERENCES Cameron, S. (1993). Choosing not choosing: Dickinson’s fascicles. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dean, T. (2009). Unlimited intimacy: Reflections on the subculture of barebacking. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lacan, J. (1977). The agency of the letter in the unconscious, or reason since Freud. In Alan Sheridan (Trans.), Écrits: A selection. New York, NY: Norton. McNulty, T. (2016, November). The body in the procedure of the pass. Plenary lecture at the Ninth Annual Meeting of the International Society for Psychoanalysis & Philosophy, The New School, New York, NY. Phillips, A. (1996). On flirtation: Psychoanalytic essays on the uncommitted life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tina and Jonas, Berlin