Necessity and the split-subject

It is the dissonance of the Lacanian split subject and the dissonance of all experiences of difficulties, hardships and injustices which are approached by Weil through Metaxu. Weil states “Contradiction is the criterion. We cannot by suggestion obtain things which are incompatible. Only grace can do that.”  If I am to follow the ways of Weil and Lacan I will accept the world for what it is, this does not mean always accepting the master signifier, I will not foreclose and become so rigid in belief that I cannot be convinced otherwise on matters in the world that operate by the law(s) of the world, which Weil calls necessity.  As Weil says, “The mechanism of the world rests on necessity and the obligation that the sun and all stars do shine and all matter does create gravity. These are necessary elements and fundamental to the continuous nature of the cosmos. Necessity is the subsistence of all things both finite and eternal, earth and heaven.” Then as I understand it that, Metaxu is an active way of understanding the moment of actual change, difficulty, complication and contradiction, not a conceptual or cognitive construction of an understanding of a historical process.  As necessity is law(s), so Metaxu is the acceptance of contradiction.  The implication here is that through Weil’s understandings I can accept a law or state of being which determines my way of being.  To refuse to accept this mechanism, law, or way is to foreclose on the Name-of-the-Father, in Lacanian terms.  This following of the way is not resignation to some inactive abstract “God,” but rather participating in Life with the flexibility to be a subject that is aware of itself through its two levels, ego and object.  I speak or enunciate a self indicating phrase like “I am alive” with the illusion of a unity, imaginary unity. This unity is presumed from the self reflecting or split-subject.

Narrator is fictitious

Please note that the narrator it fictitious

Horror and the return to mommy

“Affliction in itself is not enough for the attainment of total detachment. Unconsoled affliction is necessary. There must be no consolation—no apparent consolation. Ineffable consolation then comes down.”   There is an assumption here with which I differ from Weil; it is a matter of dichotomies.  Weil understands that there is something which descends, assuming a transcendent, which I just know is incorrect.  I worry more about the behind and the ahead, not past and future, but the trek through the unfamiliar territory I find myself travailing, a sometimes psychological territory, though the flash that terrifies me is quite real and formidable. That there is no consolation seems clear enough, that is in the case of affliction which is in itself not enough for the attainment of total detachment.  It seems that total detachment is entirely possible, but is it desired or beneficial?  What does Lacan seem to say about desire in this respect? Let’s face it psychoanalysis and the treatment of the unconscious, or that about ourselves of which we are-not-knowing, found in things we say and do of which we are ignorant, is based in lack and desire for Lacan.  Enter desire and language; crying, of want, persuading the other, and the content of the action we use, language.   Our mother induces our desire (though we have to desire the Other in order to survive by way of suckle and dependence.  Our desire is first thwarted by another (Lacan calls this the Name-of-the-Father).  That interference we realize is significantly swaying us away from our symbiotic relationship with mOther; so the Name-of-the-Father is the object of foreclosure.  If I were to foreclose, I would retreat into my mOther and become psychotic.   If I were to face the beast behind me I might have some movement toward detachment and enlightenment; hence I continue to evade the Other, be it transcendent, I doubt, as I have said, and be mesmerized by thoughts of foreclosion.  I insist not to re-enter that symbiotic relationship and enjoy the certainties of psychosis. I would rather run, not knowing.         

THE human predicament

The human predicament surely is the struggle between entropy and joy spiraling out of control. Weil announced that “The imagination, filler up of the void, is essentially a liar. It does away with the third dimension, for only real objects have three dimensions. It does away with multiple relationships. To try to define the things which, while they do indeed happen, yet remain in a sense imaginary. War. Crimes. Acts of revenge. Extreme affliction.”  To dissect this moment is the first step in understanding Weil’s relationship with Lacan.  I put it in statements from Weil and about Lacan’s theory, with special emphasis on keywords: It is a lack which causes desire to arise, there must be a tearing out, (a death), something desperate has to take place, the void must be created in order for there to be truth. To love truth means to endure the void and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death (all from Weil).  Lacan’s . . . subject of desire . . . (that is the subject which is) alienated from its natural needs and derailed onto the tracks of non-natural desires (and is) doomed never to reach enjoyable destinations (taken from Adrian Johnston on Lacan). In my words desire and truth are predicated by lack and void, there can be no life and death without void and truth, note the order of words here.  The whole of the process of being and becoming is perishing both from and into emptiness. To put it more simply: life is about lack, desire, void, truth which is death.  The problem is that Weil uses such profoundly theistic language and Lacan psychoanalytic language (presumed to be atheistic).  The further I go into looking at Weil and Lacan the more I see parallels with the experience of that which gnaws at me, that creeps-up, that lingers, of which I dare not look at, even from a distance (if that were possible). The fear I see is clear, not through some dim glass, but rather flagrantly and ferociously breathing down my neck.  The human predicament surely is the struggle between entropy and joy spiraling out of control.     

Interpretation of lack and void

Simone Weil addresses my emptiness in the following way: “Not to exercise all the power at one’s disposal is to endure the void. This is contrary to all the laws of nature.“  Weil speaks this way in the context of accepting the void.  That exercise is beneficial when one is facing the void, of that which is lacking in existence.  But, can I truly accept what I desire? For Jacques Lacan, desire is the metonymy of the lack of being; no matter what, it is the want-to-be, to be something or to exist.  I desire, therefore, there is want-to-be; and that is the lack of being.  The lack is something that can never be filled.   I want-to-be rid of that which lingers behind me and I know it is not holy or divine but wholly Other.  I struggle not to circle around the object of my desire, and it certainly is not the monster (the flash) which run from; my way to my ultimate end, that which I driven toward, my goal, is to get ever closer to it.  My goal is the object of my desire, and again it is not the beast behind.   I am not quite sure what that goal-object is.  I am not conscious of my innermost desire, I admit, it must be what I sublimate. I can openly say that I feel like it is illusive and that I consciously avoid the void, the hole in my being.  That is one thing I will not detract from; my desire, I consciously believe, is to work toward something which I avoid.  Am I anxious about all of this and the many interpretations of my actions are subject to scrutiny, by others.  That is alright though; I can handle the criticism near and ahead of me, as long as I am moving forward. The burn on the back of my shoulders feels like the ice from Hades or the fire from some Hell.  That is what frightens me, is the source of my anxiety! Lacan as well indicates ‘the essential object which isn’t an object any longer, but (is) this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence’  As I can attest that which waits behind is not an object and cannot be described with words or be put into a category, it just elicits fear.   If it were an object or could be objectified it would be anxiety in the strongest and strangest and uncanny sense, yes anxiety par excellence.   

The most formidable

Again, fear is of the potestas which Spinoza spoke of, being dominated – or – alienation the inescapable experience attested to by psychoanalyses, like Lacanian.  Lacan coined “extimacy,” whereby the other inhabits the innermost part of who we are; would it be that my experience from the inside/out would be inculcated by some other than what I would ideally signify?    Would it blow-me-up from the inside out, into fragments?  Anxiety rules the day with its tendency to cause the heart to stutter and sweat on the brow, clammy hands and a shifting world.  How could something from without cause so much internal turmoil?  It demonstrates somatic properties for a phenomenon which cannot touch the body?  Or, can it? And that is the very fear of it; that it can!  Yes, it can be a monstrous exigency; an external need for angst, pushing to the edge of horizons never noted in oneself, ever, before its grip.  To strangle from the outside; to choke from within.  The desire to go beyond such bondage, to escape that limitation and freedom found in which is the alterity and the exterior.   Prior to such trauma is readiness or fear, the waiting on something awe-inspiring, yet at the time fragmentary, and even after its arrival. Does it rail into me or do I run flush on into it.  Neither representation nor even inkling that such an event will take place, there is complete and utter inevitability, a complete joy and exactitude of experience on the earth, which by the way is acceptable and pronounced in the face of shame or remorse.  Fear annihilates shame and remorse for the standard bearer is fear or even angst.  Reducing myself to a constellation of acts or a jeweled necklace of connectivity of conscious moments is more startling than any attempt to face the outer or inner world.  As before, the experience of fear has outward (and inward) orientations.  Hope in the face of any of these experiences seems only a representation or a signification.  The grammar of the event is sloppy and at times incoherent.                 

Lacan, Fear and Horror

Can I write the name Lacan upside-downward?  Can I flip Lacan on his head? It seems that the Real is in a peculiar place, that the Other is a contagion.  The Other is matted in the hair of the old school-woman or the teacher laughing in his glee over stupidity.  I have wondered how many times I would have to rip the binding of the good book, The Four Fundamental Concepts.  Everyone that understands Lacan is flippant in their presentation and stodgy in their attire.  But, Lacan is not captured, but is an ever-moving target. He reminds me that at the absolute limit of what I can think or desire is death, fear, horror.  Again, I just glance over my left shoulder, a pillar of flames and white hot embers on a backdrop of darkness, which has no horizon itself.  There is no bottom, no end to the utter light and darkness, as far as I can tell; my memory does not serve me as I notice sweat drip over my eyelid and down my face.  I must carry-on to the degree that I am not overcome by the monster behind me.  It is a limitless plunge forward or backward, but unlike with Nietzsche, who falls into a pit, there is nothing but a hot scolding flamed pavement ahead of me.  I shan’t look back, especially as to go on the hunch that I would be engulfed and necessity is what shields me from that destiny, back.  My passion is self-destructive as I do not linger, but desire to press into the heat of my seeming, forward pushing, desiring-machine, which is my desire itself.   That desire has the capacity to evoke and promulgate such destructiveness, its capacity of a thousand strong-persons.  The disguise is the disgust that my desire trudges up,; the passion or eruptions and enjoyment.  The limit of my language touches on something eternal and eternity is a construct; I am afraid my desire leads me to death’s door.

The subject and annihilator

Rancière writes: “Do the themes of the end or the probably interminable death of the subject not live off the identification of any subjective schema with the archetypes of the subjectum or of the  substantia? Is this identification of the ‘subject’ with the wrong schema of presence (and thus with the presence of evil) not an only-too-convenient manner of getting rid of the question of the present, that is to say, eliminating the question of reason as well?” (After What, 249)  When I consider subjectivity, I think of its life before its death; that is, what was the subject before its death.  I think that Rancière (who produces disruptions and dis-ordering the dominant ways of the world) and all those like Jacques Derrida (The Ends of Man) who sees this indeterminable death of the subject are aiming at deconstruction of the world as it is known, or as it was known in modernity.  The subversive path is the route to accomplishment, but the end of the subject (as is seen in the Rancière quote above) eliminates reason as well.  David Hume said that reason is and always will be the slave of the passions.  The Buddha said that desire (of the subject [which is not]) leads to suffering or dissatisfaction.  In one tradition if the Buddha gets in one’s way to enlightenment she should kill him.  The West has somethings to learn from peaceful egalitarian culture in the East.  However, there is one act of protest that stands out among oppressed peoples is the self-immolation by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk.  This may seem brutal, but it assumes the absence of a self, soul, subject, in a tangible demonstrative way.  The subject in the West, though it is terminally ill and dying or indeed dead, is in no way as violently disruptive of the act of a monk engulf in flames.  I worry that all this talk about the subject deters from the real problem, which is the preservation of the or a person from being completely consumed in fear and devastation, with the likelihood of total scorching of subject (and/or body), for which Simone explains that the law of necessity protects us from.     

Seeing-self-in-other

No matter how much explaining is done to demonstrate reasons for why I think the mind is an epiphenomenon of brain activities, we latch onto the psyche or subject as though it were a lifeline rescuing us from drowning in a whirlpool or as I have wondered about, a void. I can think about the inner workings of the brain, all the while being subject to a perspective that accounts for my thoughts as only phantoms that trick me into believing that they are real.  Somehow, if I can prove that I am minimal, I will be able to ignore the beast behind me.  That beast presses me up against the stark reality of the emptiness I feel and delivers a blow which rocks my inner world in such a way that is fundamentally unable to be dealt with, no matter which defense I might wield against it.  It is better for me to think I don’t exist, on my own terms, than it is to have that conclusion remind me as a force and in such a shocking way.  If I were to put myself into other’s shoes then I might have some empathy, hence the definition of empathy.  What good empathy does when I find such fear and grievance against myself?  Speaking in such terms seems trite considering all that ails the world around, but between the fear and the suffering I know or know of nothing haunts like which I once felt honing in on me over my shoulder.  Thinking about the other reminds that the other which behaves like me is like me; somehow this seems like faulty thinking, because the other may just be acting and therefore just seem to be like me. Getting beyond self in order to see the other clearly is a monumental movement toward self awareness. The concern with so many other entities which arise from my interactions with the world convinces me that there is something impersonal about the entity over my shoulder. By looking at the other I realized my consciousness is interdependent upon that person or thing.