I
The Proletarian Unconscious
The Drama at the Hotel PLM Saint-Jacques
On 15 March 1980, more than 300 members of the École Freudienne de Psychanalyse gather at the PLM Saint-Jacques, a hotel in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris. The hour is grave: in a missive dated 5 January, Jacques Lacan summoned the faithful to tell them why he has decided to dissolve the school. For some time now, rumours have been circulating that his capacities are diminished – that he is senile, over and done. Obsessed with devising a topology of the unconscious, Lacan has been confusing the participants in his seminar by tracing geometrical figures on the blackboard and using pieces of string to make Moebius strips and tori. News that the organization founded sixteen years earlier is now being dismantled hits the disciples hard. Some of them feel abandoned; others consider it the epilogue to an intellectual collapse.
The venerable master is seated behind an ordinary table facing two rows of chairs; there is no platform in the room. He has already been speaking for a while, in a very low voice, when someone comes to the door. The young woman ‘screening’ visitors asks the new arrival if he has been invited. The stranger responds that yes, absolutely, he was invited: ‘by the Holy Ghost, and not by God the Father, but that’s even better’. The attendees hear the door open noisily, and the whole room murmurs. Everyone realizes who has forced his way in. Among the participants, Jacques-Alain Miller – Lacan’s son-in-law and spiritual kinsman – is sitting in the first row on the left, next to an empty chair. Suddenly, he recalls,
I feel something like a breeze; someone has just rushed to my side. I turn, it’s Althusser. I haven’t seen him in years. We speak to each other. He is in a state of agitation I have never seen him in. I suggest that he go with me to the rear of the room, listen to his comments, try to calm him. He gets up and takes the floor.1
Althusser lights his pipe, moves towards where a podium should be, and shakes Lacan’s hand – even though Lacan does not recognize him right away. ‘I showed all the respect I felt towards this great old man, who was dressed like a pierrot in a blue-checked tweed jacket.’2 Seizing the microphone, the philosopher calls those in attendance fearful and cowardly, strangely comparing them to ‘a woman attempting to sift our lentils while war is breaking out’.3 He declares that he is speaking ‘on behalf of … the worldwide crowd of analysands, millions of men, women, and children’, in order that ‘their existence and … problems and the risks they run when they enter into analysis be taken seriously’.4 ‘That’s it, that’s just it’, Lacan is supposed to have agreed …
Althusser is escorted to the door.
The spectacular episode at the PLM Saint-Jacques, which occurred six months before Althusser killed his partner and disappeared from public life forever, has long counted as a matter belonging to his medical file – a sign foreshadowing the tragedy. Before long, Roland Barthes and Jean-Paul Sartre died (on 26 March and 15 April 1980, respectively). In September the following year, Lacan passed away, and Althusser’s words remained a dead letter. Why had he staged this intervention? What was the point of bursting onto the psychoanalytic scene and making the ‘analysed’ heard, loud and clear? Apropos of the Lacanian school being disbanded, a brief and hastily written text – which remained unpublished during Althusser’s lifetime – describes his point of view:
On that I have no opinion, but it is a political act, and such an act is not taken alone, as Lacan did, but should be reflected on and discussed democratically by all the interested parties, in the first rank of which are your ‘masses’, who are the analysands, your ‘masses’ and your ‘real teachers’ which the analysands are … otherwise, it’s despotism, even if it’s enlightened.5
In other words, Althusser took the floor in the name of democracy – in the name of the anonymous proletariat formed, in his eyes, by the ‘mass’ of patients. The theorist of ‘class struggle in philosophy’ shifted his discourse to the couch in order to equate material production and the human psyche; he described the process of the analytic cure in ouvrierist accents, evoking ‘the analysands, of which there are perhaps millions in the world’, as a new class fighting for its rights. Althusser continues:
then there’s the price they have to pay (I’m not even speaking of the money they have to fork out) as much to accomplish their own work as analysands (the often atrocious and always very difficult and testing ‘Durcharbeiten’ at the edge of abysses, often on the brink of suicide) …6
Such words generally apply to factory work. Durcharbeiten, a Freudian concept translated as ‘working-through’ (perlaboration in French), refers to repetitive labour: in analysis, working-through means returning to the same scenes until repression disappears and the patient achieves conscious knowledge of the history of his or her symptom.
Does this mean that the psychoanalyst is a kind of foreman supervising the ungrateful and mechanical labour of his subordinates? Was Althusser pointing to a new form of alienation, or to a particular instance of general alienation? The philosopher makes his position clear in a series of allusions. He criticizes the division of labour in analysis: ‘sessions without preestablished length, without a contract determining length, as if the analyst were alone able to impose his own measure of length’, which prompts the question: ‘why wouldn’t it be the analysand, if that is how one is reasoning, who would impose his own?’7 ‘Measure of length’ represents the nodal point for Marxist reflections on labour. Ever since Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theses on the rationalization and chronometry of factory work (1893) – which echo Benjamin Franklin’s famous axiom (‘time is money’) – mastery of time has been fused with social activity: hyperspecialization and management of both work and ‘leisure’ represent the principal factors of alienation. For Althusser, the analysand can only liken himself to an intellectual proletarian. The wretched of the earth are also found on couches …
This amounts to the thesis advanced in Anti-Oedipus: the unconscious is not a miniature theatre, but an immense factory: a production site filled with ‘desiring machines’ that flow less into domestic and familial space than into social space and metaphysical lines of flight. That said, it is doubtful that Lacan – against whom Deleuze and Guattari’s book takes direct aim – ever considered the unconscious a ‘theatre’, or that the Oedipus complex ever obscured his view. The war-machine of Anti-Oedipus – which appeared in 1972 to combat a Freudian psychoanalysis still under the spell of parental relations – underestimated what Lacan could contribute to the cause. In fact, the Lacanian unconscious does not function as a familial drama at all; it works through channels that only topology can describe. If one discounts the lexical and thematic differences, Lacan could only have agreed with Deleuze and Guattari when they affirmed that psychoanalysis does not seek to unearth tawdry secrets, but to set chains of signification in motion – the ‘desiring machines’ of Anti-Oedipus. All the same, a profound difference holds on the matter of desire: Lacan is much more Spinozan than he appears at first glance.
Anti-Oedipus brought a political opposition of the times to the fore. Like Althusser, Deleuze and Guattari presented a leftist critique of psychoanalysis, attacking Lacan on the plane of ideology. They went after the same Lacan who had struck out at students of the University of Vincennes – not long after May 1968 – when he declared that the revolutionaries wanted another ‘master’. ‘And you’ll get one’, he added. Indeed, Lacan’s lifestyle and the haughty scepticism oozing from his discourse were less revolutionary than his thinking. The correspondences between Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphors of industrialization and the class struggle that Althusser brought into the psychoanalytic field are striking. These three thinkers describe the unconscious as the natural extension of political combat. They go to battle under the banner of a critique of productivism – in the name of a proletariat of the unconscious with as little self-awareness as the subjects of ideology.
At the time, this debate might have appeared technical, restricted to psychoanaly
sis or philosophy. Since then, however, it has proven of capital importance to parties who have made it their own and displaced it onto another site, where other relations are articulated between politics and mental production: the realm of art. The question of whether the unconscious is a factory or a theatre involves asking about the nature of what it produces, and how it does so. Does it produce spectacles, revelations, or, rather, arrangements of ‘particles’ (as Deleuze and Guattari put it)? The distinction is crucial. Since the 1960s – from minimalist and conceptual art up to Mike Kelley and Pierre Huyghe – the individual work has been measured in terms of general production: its formats of visibility and social conditions, whether spatial or temporal. In other words, reflection on the norm represents the point of departure. It’s as if art had set out to pursue and perpetuate the founding concern of ‘French theory’: to shed light on norms and what remains unthought, by analyzing the social and biopolitical conditions for our utterances and behaviours.
Now, in the early twenty-first century, artistic production directly descends from Althusser’s mortal battle with idealism: to demonstrate, in an unremitting and occasionally violent way, the absolute materiality of the void, chance, ideology and the unconscious – that is, everything constituting the natural preserve of the ineffable or mystical. Contemporary art proceeds with a similar anti-idealism, which finds expression in its will to concretize economic abstractions, represent immaterial fluxes, produce chance artificially, and lend form to the invisible (or to certain spiritual forces). Contemporary art’s motto, ‘Everything admits figuration’ – that is, even what is impalpable counts as raw material or surface – echoes Althusser’s declaration that ‘everything is material’. Inasmuch as artists devote equal attention to preparing, making and exhibiting their works, one also senses the dream of activity without waste: a process brought out into the open, whereby everything is useful or significant. This, incidentally, is not unrelated to the aims of the psychoanalytic cure. What, exactly, does an idea, sensation or sign produce in terms of the circuit of distribution it occupies and the format it assumes? In what way is artistic form overdetermined (to employ an Althusserian term) by the discourses surrounding it?
If art were a machine, it would be a kind of eidetic generator: attitudes, gestures, scenarios, discussions and human relations – the vaguest and most unsayable matters – can take shape here. The common denominator of the varied activities comprising the field of art is formalization. Translating an idea, a sensation, into organization and order gives it new meaning. Now, the unconscious – which (unbeknownst to us) gives concrete form to our obsessions and the traumas of daily life – offers the artistic tool of choice: an operative model, a representative exform. In other words, the art of our day is wholly inscribed in an ongoing debate about the metaphor used to describe the unconscious – Deleuze and Guattari’s quarrel with Freudian psychoanalysis. Is the unconscious a theatre or a factory? Guattari was the fiercest critic of frozen clinical dogma and inert chemistry: he called for psychoanalysis to discard the ‘invisible lab coats’ that kept it from questioning itself, and to start over on the basis of artistic creation. ‘More so’, he wrote, ‘given that the domain of psychiatry has established itself as the extension of, and at the interface with, aesthetic domains’.8
Psychoanalysis aims to ‘produce’ human beings who are fully alive, just as a factory manufactures material goods. One question remains, however: what can be produced without any waste? Althusser asks what the object of psychoanalysis is, then gives an answer by describing a bloody epic. The analytic cure involves ‘the effects, prolonged in the surviving adult, of the extraordinary adventure that, from birth to the liquidation of the Oedipus complex, transforms a small animal engendered by a man and a woman into a little human child’.9 Once we have become adults, a state of amnesia about this ‘battle’ prevails: ‘the wounds, infirmities, … aches’10 and cruel ‘training’ it implies. Self-production cannot occur without something breaking …
Louis Althusser Reread by Philip K. Dick
When Althusser’s death was announced on 22 October 1990, my first reaction was surprise that he had still been alive, such a heavy cloud of oblivion had descended on him. Then, The Future Lasts Forever appeared. This posthumous text, published in 1992, was written between March and June 1985 – five years after events. Here, Althusser seeks to justify the dismissal that occurred after he murdered his partner in the apartment at the École Normale Supérieure he had occupied for more than twenty years. Found ‘not responsible for his actions’, he was interned at the Sainte-Anne Hospital as an emergency measure. Thanks to the intervention of former pupils, he escaped judgement. Althusser was the object of psychiatric attention for three years, and then relegated to what Foucault called ‘the life of infamous men’ – a silence that could be measured only in terms of his erstwhile glory. There is no point in detailing the saga Althusser describes in his autobiography. It suffices to identify the key elements. His mother, whose ‘purity’ he idealizes, was engaged to a young man named Louis, who fell during the First World War; she married his brother, and from this union a son was born who inherited the departed uncle’s name. In due course, Althusser describes his years of captivity in a German prison camp, which nourished his reclusive nature; his shift from Catholicism to communism; his defloration, at the age of twenty-nine, by a woman older than himself (with whom he lived until he took her life); and, finally, his teaching position in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure, where his students included Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Jacques-Alain Miller, Alain Badiou, Régis Debray, Étienne Balibar, Robert Linhart, Chantal Mouffe and Clément Rosset. The whole of his story is punctuated by recurrent manic-depressive crises.
To my knowledge, no other philosophical autobiography like this one exists. Throughout this fascinating text – in the literal sense – the author weaves in interpretations resembling so many aspects of an analytic cure a posteriori that started forty years earlier, in 1947. The book teems with incongruous ideas and parentheses that never close; the author’s need for precision prompts pullulating associations: high-flown philosophical discourse shot through with slang and vernacular cheek, implacable logic swollen with tumorous delirium. Occasionally, the style becomes totally unhinged. For all that, the tension leading both author and reader to the dénouement never slackens: the motivating drama – the murder Althusser seeks to explicate by summoning all the circumstances of his past life – draws a singular line of division between the biographical and theoretical domains. An initial reading yields a psychoanalytic account closely resembling the unbridled discourse of an analysand on the couch. At the same time, one cannot help but think of the Joycean stream of consciousness – or the final texts of Antonin Artaud – more than the model Althusser himself invokes: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. Over and above a biography with its specific mise-en-scène, one reads a philosopher revisiting his entire oeuvre – and, with it, Marxism – from a wholly original perspective: that of ‘aleatory materialism’, presented here for the first time.11
In effect, Althusser conceived this delirious book according to an exacting theoretical principle that resumes a long-term line of psychoanalytic and philosophical questioning. ‘I consider as fundamentally religious’, he had written in 1966, ‘the concepts of origin and genesis … when taken, of course, in the rigorous sense constituted by their couple.’12 In contrast to the notion of genesis, which presupposes that the mature individual has been programmed ‘from the origin of the … process of engendering’, here, Althusser writes his itinerary from a standpoint within philosophy AND madness. The view does not come from an indifferent point of origin whose evolution must simply be unfolded. Instead, it follows the logic of emergence, eruption or springing-up (surgissement), whereby ‘something new begins to function in an autonomous manner’.13 This logic of emergence – as opposed to the logic of an origin – points back to the analytic cure: nothing preconditions what emerges in the
course of the narrative, and nothing else comes in to explain it. As such, Althusser’s story represents a series of ‘absolute beginnings starting from nothing’. The Future Lasts Forever functions according to the principle of aleatory materialism: it starts from the void and proceeds according to the rules of chaos, progressing in concentric circles that arise from the collision of facts, ideas, buckled analyses, and digressions which shake, in every sense, the traditional conception of the memoir.
Strictly speaking, the unconscious has nothing to do with memory for Althusser: ‘If we say that the unconscious is a memory, we lapse back into one of the worst concepts of psychology(!), and we are tempted to think that memory = history, that therapy = rectified rememoration = correct historicity …’14 In other words, ‘the unconscious is no more a memory than is absolutely any functioning mechanism, including the most advanced cybernetic mechanisms. On that, if my “memory” is correct, there are some rather good things in Lacan.’15 It bears repeating: for Althusser, origin and genesis are religious and idealist notions – ‘the concept of memory takes the place of, represents the equivalent of, a genesis’.16 The primary material presented in The Future Lasts Forever is not memory as, say, Proust understood it, but anamnesis such as it surges up in the psychoanalytic cure. Accordingly, this book of falsified memories owes nothing to classic rememoration, nor to the logical order the latter imposes. For Althusser, ‘the structure of every genesis is necessarily teleological’. That is, one can find in (supposed) origins only what one seeks in the present: ‘every process is governed by its end’.17 Here, too, the present modifies the past, and not vice versa.
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