Self and Emotional Life

by Adrian Johnston

  Anyhow, in the passages from the tenth seminar quoted earlier, Lacan also, as is manifest, repeats his mantra according to which Freud flatly denies the existence of repressed (i.e., unconscious) affects. (This mantra ignores the fact that Freud, as seen, tacitly distinguishes between, on the one hand, feelings [Empfindungen] and, on the other hand, affects [Affekte] and emotions [Gefühle]; additionally, as shown, he vacillates considerably on the issue of whether affects or emotions can be unconscious.) Again, in the wake of repression, affects are said to undergo only detachment from their original ideational partners (i.e., Freud’s ideas or Lacan’s signifiers) to which they are coupled initially; subsequent to this, they meander off and end up reattached to other ideational partners further away down the winding, branching tendrils of enchained representations. Curiously, Lacan, instead of declaring that what he states regarding affect echoes Freud, announces the reverse: what Freud states regarding affect echoes him (“Freud says this just like me” [Cela, Freud le dit comme moi], and not “I say this just like Freud”). Perhaps, whether consciously or not, Lacan is signaling, through this odd reversal of positions between himself and Freud, an awareness that the Freud he presents in his teachings as regards affect is one retroactively modified and custom-tailored to the needs, constraints, and requirements of a specifically Lacanian framework.

  But, although none of the above is new relative to Lacan’s basic metapsychology of affect as sketched in earlier contexts, he does utter something very important, something pregnant with crucial implications: affect “is not being [l’être] given in its immediacy, nor is it the subject in some brute, raw form.” As ought to be crystal clear by now, I agree with Lacan on this key point. That is to say, there’s agreement here that affects, at least those affecting the sort of subjectivity of concern in analysis (i.e., the human qua speaking being [parlêtre]), are anything but primitive phenomena of a self-evident nature calling for no further analysis or explanation. Affects are not ground-zero, rock-bottom experiences incapable of additional decomposition; they are not Gestalt-like, indissolubly unified mental states of an irreducible sort. As per the very etymology of the word, to “analyze” affects (as an analyst) is to dissolve them into their multiple constituents. Along these lines, Harari, in his commentary on Lacan’s tenth seminar, helpfully highlights what’s entailed by Lacan emphasizing, in fidelity to Freud, anxiety’s position as a “signal”:70 “The mere fact of pointing this out implies considering it as something referring to another order. Thus, it is not a self- or auto-referential phenomenon but, on the contrary, has a condition of retransmission to another field. Anxiety does not represent itself.”71 However, on this reading, if anxiety is emblematic of affects in general, then the “other order” in relation to which this affect is a residual phenomenal manifestation (i.e., a signal) is none other than Lacan’s “symbolic order.” Affect is thereby once more reduced to the role of a secondary by-product of the intellectualizing machinations of “pure” signifiers. But, what if it’s possible for certain affects to “represent” different affects? Or, what if the complex, nonatomic organizations of subjects’ affects involve components that aren’t strictly of either an affective or signifying status? These are hypotheses yet to be entertained whose consequences await being pursued.

  In 1970, during the seventeenth seminar, Lacan refers back to the tenth seminar. Speaking of the latter, he observes: “Someone whose intentions I don’t need to describe is doing an entire report, to be published in two days time, so as to denounce in a note the fact that I put affect in the background, that I ignore it. It’s a mistake to think I neglect affects—as if everyone’s behavior was not enough to affect me. My entire seminar that year was, on the contrary, structured around anxiety, insofar as it is the central affect, the one around which everything is organized. Since I was able to introduce anxiety as the fundamental affect, it was a good thing all the same that already, for a good length of time, I had not been neglecting affects.”72 Immediately after using the seminar on anxiety to exonerate himself, Lacan continues: “I have simply given its full importance, in the determinism of die Verneinung [negation], to what Freud has explicitly stated, that it’s not affect that is repressed. Freud has recourse to this famous Repräsentanz which I translate as représentant de la représentation, and which others, and moreover not without some basis, persist in calling représentant-représentatif, which absolutely does not mean the same thing. In one case the representative is not a representation, in the other case the representative is just one representation among others. These translations are radically different from one another. My translation implies that affect, through the fact of displacement, is effectively displaced, unidentified, broken off from its roots—it eludes us.”73 Lacan’s reference to “die Verneinung” sounds like an invocation of the concept of negation à la Freud, and not a citation of the paper of the same title from 1925. That is to say, he seems to be asserting that he indeed pays attention to affects, albeit in a negative mode emphasizing what affects are not: not repressed, not unconscious, not irreducible, not primitive, not self-explanatory, and so on. If he talks about them as a psychoanalyst, it tends to be under the sign of negation. Furthermore, Fink’s previously noted reading of the Lacanian translation of Freud’s Vorstellungsrepräsentanz appears to be supported here; in these particular remarks, Lacan too evidently reads backward the positioning of Repräsentanzen and Vorstellungen relative to each other in the core texts of Freudian metapsychology. Perhaps a contributing factor to the confusion evinced by Lacan and Fink with respect to Freud’s original German writings is the distinction between “primal repression” (Urverdrängung) and “repression proper” (eigentliche Verdrängung) in the paper on “Repression.” More precisely, in primal repression, a Repräsentanz qua Triebrepräsentanz is condemned to unconsciousness, thereafter to be represented in the psyche by other ideas qua Vorstellungen. Some of these Vorstellungen of the primally repressed Triebrepräsentanz, if the former become too closely associated with the latter, can succumb to (secondary) repression as repression proper.74 But, once repression proper, as secondary in relation to primal repression, is up and running—by this point, a whole web-like network of ideational representations is established in the psychical apparatus—one could speak of certain representatives (signifiers as Vorstellungen) being represented by other representatives (signifiers as Repräsentanzen).

  The alternative translation of the Freudian Vorstellungsrepräsentanz that Lacan mentions seems to be that of his two protégés Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire. In their famous paper “The Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Study” (given in 1960 at the Bonneval colloquium, the same venue in which Lacan orally delivers his écrit, rewritten in 1964, “Position of the Unconscious”), Laplanche and Leclaire discuss this vexing compound German word. They indeed translate it as “représentant représentatif.”75 In the third chapter of this text, Leclaire explains: “It is emphasized that the drive, properly speaking, has no place in mental life. Repression does not bear on it, it is neither conscious nor unconscious and it enters into the circuit of mental life only through the mediation of the ‘(Vorstellungs-)Repräsentanz.’ This is a rather unusual term of which it must be immediately said that in Freud’s usage, it is often found in divided form as one of its two components. We will translate this composite expression by ‘ideational representative’ and we shall inquire into the nature of this mediation, through which the drive enters into (one could even say ‘is captured by’) mental life.”76 Laplanche and Pontalis, in their psychoanalytic dictionary, echo this interpretive translation and definition proffered by Leclaire.77 Therein, Laplanche and Pontalis explain: “‘Representative’ renders ‘Repräsentanz,’ … a German term of Latin origin which should be understood as implying delegation.… ‘Vorstellung’ is a philosophical term whose traditional English equivalent is ‘idea.’ ‘Vorstellungsrepräsentanz’ means a delegate (in this instance, a delegate of the instinct) in the sphere of ideas; it should be stresse
d that according to Freud’s conception it is the idea that represents the instinct, not the idea itself that is represented by something else—Freud is quite explicit about this.”78 In the passages from his seventeenth seminar quoted in the preceding paragraph, what appears to concern Lacan about the way his students Laplanche, Leclaire, and Pontalis translate and define Freud’s Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is that their rendition of this compound German word implies that the affective forces of libidinal life are adequately represented by the ideational inscriptions (as Lacan’s signifiers) forming the signifying networks of the structured psychical apparatus. Although he grants that his students’ perspective on this issue of interpreting Freud’s texts is hardly unjustified (“not without some basis”), Lacan feels that, when it comes to the (non)relation between affects and signifiers in the speaking subjectivity of interest to psychoanalysis, it’s inappropriate to imply that affects are accurately represented (i.e., depicted, mirrored, reflected, transferred, translated, and so on) by signifiers as ideational representations—hence, Lacan’s emphasis that, in his own translation and definition of this Freudian term, “the representative is not a representation” (and, as he proceeds to clarify apropos this point, “My translation implies that affect, through the fact of displacement, is effectively displaced, unidentified, broken off from its roots—it eludes us”). As Lacan presents this disagreement in which he’s embroiled, Laplanche et al. hint at the hypothesis that fundamental affective phenomena connected with the driven psyche can be and are distilled into more or less faithful representational delegates, whereas he insists upon the disjunctive break creating a discrepancy or gap between affects and their nonrepresentative “representations” (maybe akin to renegade diplomats). According to this presentation, Laplanche and company posit a synthesizing rapport that is harmonious enough between affects and their signifier-like delegates; Lacan, by contrast, maintains that (to paraphrase one of his most [in]famous one-liners) il n’y a pas de rapport représentatif entre l’affect et le signifiant. The Lacanian metapsychology of affect stresses, among other things, the estrangement of the parlêtre from its affects. Rather than remaining self-evident, self-transparent experiences, the affective waters are, at certain levels, hopelessly muddied from the viewpoint of the speaking subject struggling to relate to them. For signifier-mediated subjectivity, the feel of its feelings ceases to be something immediately clear and unambiguous. Or, as Green, even in his post-Lacanianism, expresses this, “The human condition is affective alienation.”79

  In the seventeenth seminar where the last passage quoted from this text leaves off, Lacan remarks, “This is what is essential in repression. It’s not that the affect is suppressed, it’s that it is displaced and unrecognizable.”80 To be more precise, there arguably are two senses of displacement operative here (parallel to the two types of repression, primal and secondary or proper): first, the shuttling of an affect from one signifier-like ideational representation to another (a displacement of affect corresponding to secondary or proper repression); and second, the split between an affect and its nonrepresentative “representations” introduced with the originary advent of the mediation of signifiers (this mediation amounts to a primal repression of affects through irreversibly displacing them into the foreign territories of symbolic orders). Consequently, not only can affects become “unrecognizable” (méconnaissable) through being transferred from one ideational-representational constellation onto another (à la such common analytic examples as the displacement of emotional responses linked to one significant other onto a different person who is somehow brought into associational connection with the significant other); the foundational gap between affects and signifiers means that, to greater or lesser extents, the subject’s knowledge (connaissance as much as savoir) of its affective life in general is problematized through the unavoidable distorting intervention of the signifying systems shaping speaking subjectivity. These statements are made by Lacan during a question-and-answer session entitled “Interview on the Steps of the Pantheon” (May 13, 1970). Right after this discussion of the representation (or lack thereof) of affect, Lacan is asked an unrecorded question about “the relations between existentialism and structuralism.” All he says in response is this: “Yes, it’s as if existential thought was the only guarantee of a recourse to affects.”81 This one-sentence reply is worth highlighting if only because it serves as yet another indication that Lacan doesn’t conceive of himself as seeking to eliminate any and every reference to the affective in psychoanalysis (as he is sometimes accused of doing). He doesn’t perceive his Saussure-inspired rereading of Freud as entailing the reductive elimination of everything other than the signifier systems of Symbolic big Others.

  At the start of the immediately following session of the seventeenth seminar (May 20, 1970), the topic of affect resurfaces. Lacan’s succinct statements here with respect to this topic are rather inscrutable, at least at first glance. To begin with, he comments that “thought is not a category. I would almost say it is an affect. Although, this is not to say that it is at its most fundamental under the aspect of affect.”82 This easily could be read in several fashions. However, Lacan undoubtedly intends in this context to call into question what is often assumed to be a firm, sharp distinction between the cognitive-structural and the emotional-energetic (but, as the last sentence of this quotation indicates, he nonetheless doesn’t deny some sort of distinction between the intellectual and the affective). He then proceeds to declare: “There is only one affect—this constitutes a certain position, a new one to be introduced into the world, which, I am saying, is to be referred to what I am giving you a schema of, transcribed onto the blackboard, when I speak of the psychoanalytic discourse.”83 Lacan goes on to note that there are those, such as some student radicals who reproached him when he appeared at Vincennes in 1969, who would protest that Lacan’s mathemes in dry white chalk against a black background (such as his formulas for the four discourses forming the focus of his annual seminar in 1969–1970) are bloodless, sterile academic constructs with no bearing whatsoever on anything truly “real” (qua concrete, palpable, tangible, and so on).84 Lacan retorts, “That’s where the error is.”85 On the contrary, “if there is any chance of grasping something called the real, it is nowhere other than on the blackboard.”86 Resonating with prior reflections on the dialectical entanglement of the concrete and the abstract in both Hegelian and Marxist reflections on the nature of reality (not to mention with the history of mathematical models in the modern natural sciences from the seventeenth century through the present), Lacan denounces the naïve appeal to any concreteness unmediated by abstractions. Human social and subjective reality is permeated and saturated by formal structures and dynamics irreducible to what is simplistically imagined to be raw, positive facts on the ground. Hence, only a theoretical grasp of these abstractions, abstractions that do indeed “march in the streets” in the guise of socialized subjects, has a chance of getting a handle on a real(ity) that is so much more than a mere aggregate of dumb, idiotic, concrete givens.87 It ought to be observed that Lacan makes this point on the heels of talking about affect, thus insinuating that affects are not to be thought of (as some in psychoanalysis do) as elements of a brute, preexistent psychical concreteness already there before either the analysand on the couch speaks (or even becomes a speaking subject in the first place) or the analyst clinically interprets or metapsychologically theorizes.

  Lacan quickly returns to his assertion of there being solely a single affect. Again invoking the “psychoanalytic discourse” (i.e., the discourse of the analyst, as distinct from the other three discourses delineated in the seventeenth seminar, those of the master, university, and hysteric), he maintains that “in effect, from the perspective of this discourse, there is only one affect, which is, namely, the product of the speaking being’s capture in a discourse, where this discourse determines its status as object.”88 A series of steps are necessary to spell out the reasoning behind Lacan’s assertion. F
irst of all, one must remember that, according to the Lacanian theory of the four discourses, the analyst’s discourse has the effect of “hystericizing” the analysand.89 In other words, through the peculiar social bond that is an analysis, a language-organized situation in which someone occupies the position of an analyst in relation to another speaking being, he/she who speaks under the imperative to associate freely (i.e., the analysand) is led to lose the certainty of being equal to his/her discourse, of meaning what he/she says and saying what he/she means. Such a loss of self-assured certainty is inseparable from what is involved in any genuine confrontation with the unconscious. Along with this, the analysand comes to wonder whether he/she is equivalent to his/her previously established coordinates of identification, coordinates embedded in sociosymbolic milieus (i.e., avatars and emblems of identity embraced by the analysand as constitutive of his/her ego-level “self”). Hystericization occurs when the parlêtre on the couch is hurled into a vortex of doubts through coming to be uncertain about being comfortably and consciously in charge of his/her discourse and everything discourse entails for an entity whose very identity depends on it. From a Lacanian perspective, one of the analyst’s primary aims in an analysis, to be achieved through various means, is to derail the analysand’s supposed mastery of speech and meaning, to disrupt the discourse of the master as the (illusory) mastery of discourse.90 In reference to the brief quotation at the start of this paragraph, the thus-hystericized subject becomes riveted to questions about what sort of “object” he/she is, first and foremost, for both intersubjective others (i.e., incarnate alter egos, embodied partners actual and imagined, and so on) and transsubjective Others (i.e., the symbolic order, the anonymous “They,” institutions and societies, and so on), as well as for him-/herself in terms of self-objectifications: “Who or what am I for you and others?”; “Am I really the ‘x’ (man, woman, husband, wife, son, daughter, authority, professional) I have taken myself to be?”