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PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE NIGHT*
Rob Weatherill
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it . . . A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
The contract binding the word and the world, the Covenent between logos and cosmos, held until the late nineteenth century in Europe and Russia. The break-up of this linkage virtually defines Modernity itself. Psychoanalysis was central in this endgame. Freud, after all, was called the 'demoraliser' by Karl Kraus, the influential Viennese satirist of the time. We have entered what Steiner ominously calls the 'after-word'.
There are two key quotations around which I want to situate some developing thoughts:
1) 'If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims'.
2) '[J]ust as terror, and abjection that is its doublet, must be excluded from the regime of the community, so it must be sustained and assumed, singularly, in writing as its condition'.
Later we will take up where this extreme that must measure our thinking, or this horror that must be a condition of our writing, can be located in our enclave, so to speak, of psychoanalysis. Fundamentally, this thinking or writing the extreme is an ethical question for us.
Indifference
But firstly, Bill Richardson asked two critical questions about the ethics of psychoanalysis that have not been taken up. (1) While the analyst's desire is necessarily constrained, 'If the measure of the
analysand's desire is desire itself as metonymied through language, how are other essential ingredients in the analysand's life (for example, the needs, demands, desires, legitimate rights of other subjects - like spouse, children - dependants of any kind) to be factored in as limits to the analysand's desire?'. (2) Given the fact that the subject is so often described as fleeting, fading or vanishing, he asks, 'How can so fleeting a subject abide long enough to accept responsibility for anything, that is, be an ethical subject at all?'.
Richardson's last word: 'Without an accountable subject, there is no ethics, and an ethics of psychoanalysis no more than chimera. The whole enterprise would have to be rethought, then - or call itself something else'.
The current emphasis on the signifier in psychoanalysis and cultural theory generally, while being correct and irrefutable, in the context of 'there is no outside of language', involves an inescapable moral relativity and in-difference which excludes 'the extreme' in advance. The extreme is clearly a value judgement, therefore part of a Master discourse, which needs to be deconstructed. Who authorises himself to say such and such is extreme? Like, who says this fighter is a 'terrorist'?
The marginalisation of affectivity, by the pre-eminence given to the signifier, narrows our field by leaving aside all the great ethical dilemmas to do with affect - namely, hate, narcissism, conflict, ambivalence, apathy, separation, unbinding, anxiety and suffering.
Has psychoanalysis retreated into the University and the Institute, whose well planned courses buy its (text)books, whose loyal analysts conduct that marvellous contradiction in terms, the so-called 'training analysis'? A deeply transferential atmosphere is created where independent or even different thinking is discouraged, parodied or ridiculed and where an academic elite vie for control and interpretation of the sacred texts. This has been the history of psychoanalysis. Needless to say, I am not advocating any dumbing down, any less academic rigour, but more in the way of 'free association' (of ideas and people), more tolerance of what Heidegger in his work on language refers to as a 'wandering', a 'gathering', a 'lighting', a 'being on the way'.
We are within language before all else. The unity of language is referred to by Heidegger as 'design'. The 'sign' in design relates to secare to cut. To design is to cut a trace, like cutting a furrow in the soil to open it to seed and growth. This metaphor of opening, a clearing in the forest, so that something can be presented or shown, recurs in Heidegger's writings. A Way is made across a snow-covered field, that is, transitively, way-making, being the way (Ereignis: appropriating). Language is the flower of the mouth in which the World is made to appear. And it is the 'Saying' rather than the 'Said' that is the lighting-concealing-releasing offer of the world. The world appears and at the same time holds itself in reserve.
The Differend
Set against this Heideggerian free engagement with the openness of Being, our descent into poststructualist language games, splits, dissensus and the so-called Differend. Threat is in the air. Loyalty and tribe are what counts on the ground. We suffer this in Ireland as elsewhere.
There is said to be a Differend when a conflict between two parties cannot be resolved or judged fairly due to the lack of a rule of judgement which applies equally to both parties. The victim is one who has suffered a wrong yet lacks any means with which to prove his case. Lyotard's example is with Marxist theory itself, which;
… thus presented itself not as one party in a suit, but as judge, as the science in possession of objectivity, thereby placing the other in the position of stupor or stupidity . . . incapable of making itself understood, unless it borrowed the dominant idiom - that is, unless it betrayed itself.
What emerges here for us at the extreme is that a failure to think or write the extreme, returns as the acting out of extremism, the same old icy intolerance and hatreds.
Lost ethos
There are problems for the humanities in general, as well as psychoanalysis in particular. 1) The emphasis on the 'text' has led to a gulf opening between the text and historical reality, however problematic such a 'reality' now is. 2) The deconstruction of authorship, of the 'I', has led to a de-coupling of aesthetics and ethics with devasting losses to both. 3) A somewhat idealized notion of Western civilisation still persists, derived from the nineteenth century - high levels of literacy, freedom, the rule of Law, the advancement of science, the bourgeois excessively consumerist life-style, should be seen against the real of structural poverty, suffering and violence. For these reasons, the humanities may have become inhumane and are failing before the Night of the extreme and the horror.
Heidegger, in his well known 'Letter on Humanism', wants thinking, freed from technique, from technical application, to be thinking as the engagement of Being, where the 'of' goes both ways: thinking is of Being; thinking belongs to Being. Heidegger indicates that our thinking has become stranded on dry land: 'Thinking is judged by a standard that does not measure up to it. Such judgement may be compared to the procedure of trying to evaluate the essence and powers of a fish by seeing how long it can live on dry land'. Such dessicated thinking gives rise to various competing '-isms' and what Heidegger refers to as the devastation of language and its instrumental use for domination over human beings which he says undermines aesthetic and moral responsibility and is a threat to the essence of humanity because it does not realise the proper dignity of man. Heidegger regards man as the 'shepherd' and 'good neighbour' who guards the truth of Being. This forgetting of the truth is termed 'ensnarement' [Verfallen], which lead to homelessness and the oblivion of Being. For Heidegger, we have lost our home, our ethos, which means our dwelling place, our habitat, our natural abode.
Yet what troubles Steiner, and indeed all of us, is Heidegger's 1933 and 1934 pronouncements and his complete silence on the Holocaust after 1945. Steiner in his 1989 Armistice Day sermon in King's College Chapel, speaks of the Death Camps and the appalling aporia that opens when, 'men and women, apparently sane, could flog and incinerate guiltless victims during their working day and recite Rilke and play Schubert . . . in the evening'. 'One of the principal works that we have in the philosophy of language . . . was composed almost within earshot of a death camp'.
Responding to Richardson's questions on the ethics of psychoanalysis, one might invoke how Freud uniquely created a special form of cultural space in which one is listened to with what Nina Coltart calls 'bare attention'. However, with this special emphasis on listening to the other, which as Antony Giddens has suggested forms the protypical nucleus of our liberal democratic forms, the absolute freedom implied has become indifferent to the wider culture. Does it have a responsibility to the wider culture in terms of supporting its institutions?
Does our preoccupation with language, for instance, serve as a disengagement from the being of the other and with what Klauber calls a loss of dramatic tension necessary in the process? Is what Levinas calls our 'pre-originary suceptibility' allowed to radically and anarchically energize the discourse? Or is this potentially explosive immediacy of the other blocked completely by the mediating effects of speech and technique?
Ethics in this radical sense is not a question of analytic style. For Levinas, the ethical is not an attitude one assumes or adopts, or leaves out. It undercuts all assumptions. Ethics like language is something we undergo. We are in Ethics just as we are in language. So, with Richardson, does the whole psychoanalytic project need to be rethought? Without some ethical struggle towards right and wrong, truth and honesty, the genuine and the sincere, however problematic and shifting these values now are, psychoanalysis is just a game or indeed a cult, perhaps a smart career move, but not a serious activity.
Here is a narrative demonstration of this ethical undergoing, in which a young man comes to a certain realisation:-
One by one they come knocking at your door. They cry out, they beg you for help and you say: get them away from me ... these people who come with these ridiculous stories ... I've always loved people who enjoy good meals, who look forward to watching good performances ... I've struggled hard to get what I have, but my struggle has always been against others. In fact I have been struggling against the ones who are poor ... I'm not on their side, and that too is a choice I am making. What will be home? My own bed, my night table, then on the table, what?, then on the table, what? blood, death, a fragment of bone, a piece of a human brain, a severed hand. Let everything filthy, everything vile, sit by my bed, where once I had my lamp and clock, books, letters, presents for my birthday, left-over from the presents, bright coloured ribbons. Forgive me. Forgive me. I know you'll forgive me. I'm still falling. I'm still falling ...
Three ethical levels
There are three incompatible ethical levels. The first, the level of the autonomous subject, the Aristotelian or Kantian level of the 'Ought', which informs codes of ethics for psychological practitioners, for instance. It also informs the values that underpin our liberal democracies. Secondly, at the level of desire itself, the ethics of the extreme: My not giving ground to my desire in an otherwise glacial universe of the impersonal Other - the narcissistic imperative? My answer, my response. But where are the needs of the larger community?
Finally, there is a third level, the level of an a priori openness to the other, face to face, prior to any possible signification. Thus a radical ex-posure which faces the impossible, the world as evil. For Levinas, the power of ethics is entirely other to the power of identity, the power of the first two levels above. It escapes and explodes any synthesising, centralising forces of the ego. This third level of ethics unseats all essences and totalities. Ethics is anarchic and violent, it cuts through any provisional codes. It stares at us accusingly though the naked destitution of face of the other against which there is no defence and no escape only an illusory well-being. It shatters any sense of ethical complacency. For Levinas, ethics is the first philosophy.
Therefore, what is ethical is violent. This accusation, which leaves me devastated by its violating effraction, requires the protective intervention of the third that comes between that face and me. The third is the Law that mediates what is im-mediate and forbids the latent violence bound up with this excessive presence of Being. However, the Law creates a cover, which the ethical will repeatedly blow open in its infinite negativity. The Law is secondary, distilled from the infinite proximity of the primary relation, and by its birth perjures (parjure) itself. Calculations, comparisons, codes, language, (psychoanalytic) technique cut across, violate the absolutely unique encounter of the face to face. The other, therefore, is marginalised, he ceases to exist.
How can psychoanalysis retain some trace of this effraction, this infinite response-ability for the other, or this absolute proximity of Being? Not by being more caring, empathetic or sympathetic. Not by making any assumptions about what the other needs. There is no new skill we must develop or position we must adopt. This ethics is never something we can be.
Levinas' ethics parallels the primary repression of the erotic for psychoanalysis that founds the subject, desire and the Law. Just as the foreclosed erotic will haunt the subject, so, therefore, will the ethical. Freud's myth of the murder of the Father of prehistory is an ever present crime. This primordial trauma that grounds history and the Law, creating an illusion of peace and stability, comes at a cost of a permanent sense of accusation and discontent. Just as the law is the inverse of desire, so it is also the inverse of the ethical.
The account of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac illustrates at the most extreme point this paradox of the ethical. Abraham is willing to sacrifice Isaac in absolute obedience to God, but in a secret betrayal of all reason, law and morality. A father is ready to put to death his loving son because the Other asks or orders him without any explanation. Abraham is faithful to God only via his absolute treachery to his family and to all human values. As Derrida says: 'I offer a gift of death' everytime duty or responsibility binds me specifically to an other in his or her singularity. Consequently, I am bound to betray others, an infinite number of them.
As soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look, request, love, command, or call of the other, I know I can respond only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me to also respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others.
Furthermore, I can never justify or excuse my sacrifice: why I respond here and not there, to this other and not that other. I have nothing to say about it. Nothing can be said about it.
At the last moment, when Abraham has said to God, 'Here I am', and with the knife poised over Isaac, God reprieves Abraham: 'Lay not thine hand upon the lad ... for now I know that thou fearest God.' (Genesis 22:12). Abraham is both absolutely responsible and irresponsible at the same time. As Derrida comments, '[He] speaks to us of the paradoxical truth of our responsibility and of our relation to the gift of death of each instant'. Furthermore, it exemplifies its own status as essentially secretive, beyond words.
Psychoanalysts can never be complacent about their work, as if it is on the one hand something well done, productive and complete, or, on the other hand, nihilistic and distant about an impossible real of suffering. And against the tendency to fetishize theory, the analyst is caught on every boundary: of responsibility and irresponsibility; of being in the Clearing on the Way and in the Night; haunted by the ethical, by an unacknowledged yet irrufutable guilt about the other and ourselves.
If we turn to the wider contemporary context of atomisation and decadence, the Czech philosopher, Jan Patocka, defines decadence thus:
A life can be said to be decadent when it loses its grasp on the innermost nerve of its functioning process, when it is disrupted at its innermost core so that while thinking itself full it is actually draining and laming itself with every step and act. A society can be said to be decadent if it so functions as to encourage a decadent life, a life addicted to what is inhuman by its very nature.
And Patocka was a victim of this same inhumanity when he was tortured and murdered by the Stasi. Is psychoanalysis itself decadent as it encourages just this loosening of the grasp, a paradoxical 'liberation', the subversion of the Master discourse, the movement from symbolic consistency to its excremental remainder?
The death drive
Nowhere is this question more critical than with Freud's elaboration of his speculative theory of the death drive. When Freud posited the death drive as a defining principle, he re-sets the agenda for the psychoanalysis beyond humanism (and left most of his followers behind). He was implicitly taking account of the extreme, terror and abjection. Freud, potentially at least, was becoming the 'fist hammering' or the 'ice-axe breaking'. The good, the rational, the linear is always to be subverted, indeed is predicated upon, the hidden entropic principle, that is mute, silent, does not reveal itself. Behind discourse, death. Behind the lament, death. There is no signifier for death in the unconscious, so death and its drive will always be Other; always outside representation and therefore more present than anything else. As the Isreali writer Amos Oz declares, life is pregnant with death. The death drive is a singularity, pure and irredeemable, a radical evil that potentialy ends all regenerative cycles. Here there is no duplicity, no simulation, no chimera, everything is resolved and transparently clear. To be alive, on the other hand, is to be eccentric, ek-sisting, off centre, where the epicentre is the death drive itself, the inhumane. All life is distorted by this singularity and spins haphazardly into movement, into activity at all costs because if it. Here is Freud the heretic at the extreme, where the screams of the victims are not drowned out. The death drive is the Night.
For Zizek, though, this reading of the death drive hypothesis is too extreme and essentialist. 'My contention is that the Freudian death drive, which has nothing whatsoever to do with some 'instinct' that pushes us towards (self-)destruction' is linked to the so-called fundamental fantasy and the primarily repressed, or in Heideggerian terms, the concealment (lethe) in the very heart of truth (aletheia). From this point of view the death drive is like the yeast in the dough of the suffocatingly good lawful life. The death drive is a necessary 'radical evil' that supports the stability of a gentrified Eros grown predictable and deathlike. For Zizek, evil itself comes in the shape of religious and ethnic fundamentalists, where the obscene Father of prehistory re-emerges from behind the (increasingly PC) Law, with his superego command to Enjoy! Rape, murder, incest. Enjoy!
Has psychoanalysis become indifferent in its coldness (or its softness) and the ethical an impossible complication along the road to the fetishisation of desire, of das Es, the inhuman? In the future, beyond psychoanalysis, beyond the unconscious, desire and freedom and the transvaluation of values, looms the ultimate metadiscourse, the base sequence of the genetic code, and a new base molecular ethics. All ethical codes will be replaced by the genetic code. The psychoanalytic insistence on the subject and its recent and paradoxical self-immolation (the death of the subject), has ironically prepared the way for psycho-therapy to be swept away by geno-therapy. No more the metaphorical translation of the unconscious, but instead the metonymical transcription of the genome; no longer the guilt of having given ground relative to one's desire, but the bio-ethical paramilitary imperative: to act in conformity with your genes. The ineluctable and the smart move, will be away from the approximation and inefficiency of 'psychic cleansing' and 'emotional intelligence' towards the pure eugenic and final form: 'genetic cleansing' and 'artificial intelligence'.
Address for correspondence: APPI
43 Rock Road, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland
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