narco-analysis

crosspost from Trinketization 30 July 07

narco-analysis

Dave Boothroyd's book "Culture On Drugs" (2006) is a sound and entertaining read, and is just as much a carefully argued account of the influence of various substances on theory and theorists across a wide field - Freud and Cocaine, Benjamin and Hashish, Sartre and hallucinogens - as it is a commentary on, and plea for, a narco-analytic turn in culture theory. Good. All the way through the book there were important questions raised and important answers offered - and experimental writing is approved here and there (but perhaps not adopted in the text as much as might be anticipated).

All that said however, I think there was something held back...for example, I expected something on Marx and the opium wars: old beardo advocated that the Chinese not prohibit homegrown manufacture of the stuff so as to thereby undermine the East India Company's efforts to force their trade advantage via Indian producers. So basically Marx comes out in favour of legalising Class As! And while I think I would have preferred - or is it that I fear - an extended treatment of Sartre's experiences with amphetamine sulphate (those huge books on Flaubert, more on Flaubert than Flaubert wrote himself), I do appreciate Dave's attempt to cover all the bases in an even handed way. Especially when he works through the Freudian cocaine versions. Freud as experimenter and advocate; Freud as liberated by use; Freud as promoter.

But it was weird to be reading this text just a day after writing out my own notes for a piece on Irma's injection as mentioned by Slavoj Zizek in his little starter book on Lacan. (on Zizek, see here and here). Irma's story - Freud's first dream analysis - is cited in an admittedly perfunctory way by Zizek in order to explain Lacan's contribution to Freud's insight that the melancholic is 'not aware that he has lost the lost object' as a realization [by Lacan] that it is not an inability to mourn a loss, so much as a loss of desire for an object that he may still possess, but which has lost its efficiency, that governs melancholia.

This might have been a great opportunity to consider Freud's own melancholia and mourning in relation to the Irma dream. And here there is much more to be said about the figure of Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow [somehow Dave leaves out the second part of his hyphenated surname]. It is this E-v-F-M to whom Freud had recommended the 'superdrug' cocaine in large quantities, as a substitute for morphine, which Ernst then took in large intravenous injections and became more dependent upon the marching powder than on the M he was into in the first place. So much into it that he died of related complications of the substitution (or what could be caled a 'speedball' syndrome, thanks uncle bill). All so far just a footnote... but what if the guilt Freud exhibits in relation to the faulty diagnosis of Irma's injection in the dream that founds psychoanalysis (in The Interpretation of Dreams Irma has pride of place) were to be read in relation to the later guilt (some 80 or so pages later) that Freud reports in a footnote in relation to Fleischl-Marxow's death? We are familiar with displacements in the dream work, so why not here find the symptomatic explanation of Irma in the text of the dream book itself, and Freud's feelings of responsibility for having introduced his (ten years) older colleague to the drug that would allegedly kill him - though it was more likely to have been a dirty needle, as also noted in relation to the diagnosis of Irma herself. Perhaps I am not expressing this well, but I would be lying if I did not share a little in the melancholia of having read Dave's book, seen mention of E-v-F-M, and yet not seen the connections laid out as clearly as they so seemed to me when we read (thanks Carrie, Nicola, Atticus, Miriam, Saul) the Interpretation in our reading group back in 2001 (on its 100th anniversary). It could be that Freud's loss of his colleague is one he can only admit via a displacement in a dream that forces itself down Irma's neck. Indication - that Irma should be prescribed some of that very same acetate.

So, narco-analysts to be deployed - the deflection of Irma into the text of Lacan deflects once again a forensic investigation that would explain both Freud's interest in injections and Irma's throat, and might lay some blame where blame might-maybe-ought to lie. Dirty needles, guilt and melancholia - time perhaps to lift the lid off this (La)Can of worms, and get back to work...

John @ Trinketization

we must take the matter pretty deep

Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, Section VI, "Of personal identity"

There are some philosophers who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our SELF; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. The strongest sensation, the most violent passion, say they, instead of distracting us from this view, only fix it the more intensely, and make us consider their influence on self either by their pain or pleasure. To attempt a farther proof of this were to weaken its evidence; since no proof can be deriv'd from any fact, of which we are so intimately conscious; nor is there any thing, of which we can be certain, if we doubt of this.

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la rochefoucauld favorites

22
Philosophy triumphs easily over past, and over future evils, but present evils triumph over philosophy.

26
Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily

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rev tim haggard: music saturday

A song I listened to recently put me in mind of Reverend Tim Haggard's situation.

The song is by the band 'Garbage.'

The title of the song is "Sex is not the enemy"

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turning: the voice that tickles

[A guest post by blah-feme.]

What do you want of me, siren?  Why do you turn me so, why do I stop and listen?  How am I to remain after your song?  What am I after you fall silent again?  Where will I have moved to?  The siting (and citing) of the voice in song with the feminine has a long and continuous history, and it marks a certain texture of the Western episteme, a certain materiality that is formidable.  To turn to that voice is not to be hailed in the Althusserian moment of becoming-again, but to wonder.  It is to raise a question, to pose the nature of agency, of self, of the ground of the resources of subjectivity as we think it has arrived to us.

If there is one thing that makes thinking about voices, especially the voice in song, infuriatingly complex, it is its parallax function:  the singing voice shortcircuits the mythological composure of he-who-speaks and invokes the troublesome knave-who-feigns.  This Narrenschiff, this ship of singing jesters, has long since set its course for the heart of Arcadia, and threatens to bring the most impudent thuggery to its heart.  Sing and you shall lose who you are and, what is worse, listen to that song and you are forever lost.   Proust was one who saw this with extraordinary clarity, in this much-quoted passage from The Fugitive:

My mind ...was entirely occupied with following the successive phrases of O sole mio, singing them to myself with the singer, anticipating each surge of melody, soaring aloft with it, sinking down with it once more... Each note that the singer's voice uttered with a force and ostentation that were almost muscular stabbed me to the heart ... This I remained motionless, my will dissolved.

This sirencic trope of song as seduction is very old and always remarkable for its fidelity to the structure of the parallax: 

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a surprise at the acropolis

As I mentioned in a previous post, Michael Wood has written an interesting article on Freud. It is availiable here.

The opening story in Michael Wood's "There is no cure" tells of Freud and his brother being shocked in a strange way upon seeing the Acropolis "face to face" for the first time. Both Freuds, for different reasons, were 'surprised,' -- and surprised at their own surprise -- that the Acropolis was, after all, a really existing structure.

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lrb on freud

The London Review of Books has an article by Michael Wood on Freud I want to recommend, here. It's on the occasion of the publication of The Penguin Freud Reader. I'll have a few things to say about the essay in a bit, and wanted to give anyone interested a heads up on the original essay.

Zizek on psychoanalysis

At the risk of adding in a non-symposium related post, and in posting here what I would usually post at I Cite, I thought it worth introducing some of Zizek's remarks on psychoanalysis from Parallax View. (I'm rereading the book because I have to write a couple of reviews of it; I find it more interesting and compelling this time, perhaps now that I have more time to go through the details.) At any rate, Zizek argues that the focus of psychoanalysis is "the Social, the field of social practices and socially held beliefs." He points out, moreover, that this field

is not simply on a different level from individual experience, but something to which the individual himself has to relate, which the individual himself has to experience as an order which is minimally 'reified,' externalized.

This is important, I think, because it explains how psychoanalysis is not simply some kind of account of individual psyches, or individualized perceptions and patterns of thought, but an account of the the Social--of society in all its ruptures, tensions, ideologies, laws, desires, fantasies, and enjoyments--and how this Social level is inscribed within individuals. As Zizek writes,

this objective order of the social Substance exists only insofar as individuals treat it as such, relate to it as such.

In a way, for the version of lacanian theory that Zizek continues to develop (and not for the clinic), the individual is interesting only as a vehicle or host for larger social tensions, struggles, and formations. Psychoanalytic theory enables him to consider ideology, ethics, open secrets, and the like because these exist only insofar as they are materialized in the practices of subjects.

Desiring "9/11"

The US desired September 11th.

I don't mean that the US desired the specific attacks and losses. But, the US did desire the shock, the horror, the rupture. It may be more accurate then to say that the US desires "9/11" meaning that the series of events and articulation of meanings captured by the term "9/11" are an object of intense US desire.

I say this because were it not the case that the US desires "9/11" the Bush administration would not have been able to mobilize a very specific set of meanings and emotions in accordance with the term. I say this because were it not the case that the US desires "9/11" journalists, in print and on television, would not continue to sacralize the term, speaking in hushed voices, in awe with continued shock before the horrors of the day. I say this because were it not the case that the US desires "9/11" we would not continue to have feature films ("United 93" and Oliver Stone's upcoming "World Trade Center") about it.

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Transference

How is it that blogs become sites of overinvestment? Rather than fora for discussion and disagreement, they all too quickly become stand ins for horrors, hopes, and disappointments of a sort clearly beyond their import. How easily we lapse into malign misreadings, or readings of another clearly in bad faith. How quickly we speed from disagreement to total disparagement.What sense can it possibly make to condense into specific exchanges on specific blogs the entirety of American first amendment jurisprudence, to speak of rights to own and to express and to own what one expresses? What is achieved by attacks masked as requests for clarification, attacks on others who offer themselves and their ideas, for nothing? Why do small exchanges come to stand for the entirety of the political situation of the world? For all of the history of philosophy? How is it that failure to agree comes to stand for the ultimate in complicity with evil? Surely we do not leap to such conclusions when we interact with others face to face, when we hear their voices.

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So all this really does exist

It was Marx's 188th birthday yesterday, as s0metim3s, carlos rojas, and Steven Shaviro, among others, note.  I hope to write up something apropos before long. 

But it is Freud's today.  And old Sigismund would be 150 were he still alive, which is quite a milestone by anybody's standards.

Moreover, I have returned to thinking about ruins, one of Freud's many obsessions.  Freud took a keen interest in archaeology, and his home in Hampstead was filled with a collection of over 2,000 curios that had been excavated from the Ancient World: no wonder the London Freud Museum should comment that, surrounded by his antiquities, Freud "worked in a museum of his own creation".  (See also The Vienna Freud Museum.)

As the museum further indicates, these curios were prized for more than their aesthetic value alone.  Freud believed they told something of the truth of pyschoanalysis and its theories of the unconscious:

One example of this is Freud's explanation to a patient that conscious material "wears away" while what is unconscious is relatively unchanging: "I illustrated my remarks by pointing to the antique objects about my room. They were, in fact, I said, only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been their preservation."

Freud often compared the unconscious to buried ruins, and the task of the analyst to that of the archaeologist, uncovering ever deeper strata for the prizes hidden in the depths, clues to the ways of life only dimly discerned from mere surface inspection.

But in a late essay, Freud turns this metaphor on its head.  In "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis," ruins stand for what is clearly in view, in front of the analyst's face.  And the issue here is why what is so straightforwardly visible, uncompromisingly material, should be strangely denied or disavowed.

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For Shame

The World Socialist website includes today a report on a North Carolina man, Harry Taylor, who confronted Bush during one of his recent events. Taylor

expressed the hope that the president had the “the humility and the grace” to be ashamed of himself “inside” himself.

Joan Copjec's discussion of shame in the new collection, Lacan: The Silent Partners provides an valuable counterpoint to Taylor's remarks.

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The Echo of the Subject

I've been looking around for an online version of Lacoue-Labarthe's essay, "The Echo of the Subject," in Typography:  Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics.  It would be a useful and provocative starting-place, I think, to assist in weaving certain themes together.  But maybe, in the end, it's better not to blog about such things, or at such length as would be necessary.  I'll settle for quoting just the very beginning, to give a taste.  (Let it be said that I'm not at all sure this is a great idea, however.  Maybe it's still a good idea, if it encourages some people to read further, or at the very least:  "it's pretty bad but nothing terrible.")

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Paxless in Americana

It's a match made in heaven.  One wonders if they know each other?  A commenter on the latter, one "Big Billy" asks a good question:

What if a pair of opposing hypocrits (where one says one thing and doesw [sic] the other, and the other says the other and does the one thing) team up? As a human, I find it impossible to constantly avoid hypocrasy [sic], so why not pair up and embrace out hypocritical natures, and then we can really progress, right? My partner will do my work for me while I do his work for him. We will both get our jobs done while approaching more exagerated extremes.
But then again, we're probably better off if you just call me an idiot too.

In this our quest, for the ultimate blog brevity I then leave it to you, dear eater, to draw your own excursions.  For it is a black and white world, with the Author sitting f'evern top (ever'n especially whilst claiming the bottom!) and we was only ever kiddin', once Hugh challenged e to a duel. 

A duel, e says!  At dawn, no less.  E dunno, somehow "be offended, but say so" just don't 'ave the same ring to it.    An' sometimes it be da fools who call idiots, "idiots" best.

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Unknown Knowns

"In February 2002, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: "There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns-the ones we don't know we don't know." For Rumsfeld, these "unknown unknowns" represent the greatest threats facing the United States. But Rumsfeld forgot to add the crucial fourth term: the unknown knowns, things we don't know that we know-which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the "knowledge which doesn't know itself," as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan used to say. In many ways, these unknown knowns, the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to, may pose an even greater threat." Zizek, Iraq's False Promises

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Can psychoanalysis think biopolitics?

What might a psychoanalytic approach to biopolitics look like?

In her contribution to Reading Seminar XX, Suzanne Barnard considers the way that an object missing from its proper position appears outs of place, as an enjoying substance or organ without boundaries, that is with no internal relation to its organism. This organ without a body, then, contrasts with the disciplined Oedipal body, the body produced through the inscription of proper zones for libidinal pleasure, the body capable of work and pleasure, the restricted, desiring body. In contemporary communicative capitalism, this bodiless organ can become a site of enjoyment, can take the form of objet petite a, circulating and swarming and providing little sites of enjoyment that take the place of and remind us of enjoyment's lack. Sure, they are fun! But, they aren't the Real Thing. At any rate, it is against this background of teaming organs, of excessive little a's floating around, that our efforts at community, alliance, and, yes, violence, segregation, and elimination take place.

What psychoanalysis contributes, then, to biopolitics, is a sense of unproductive, undisciplined bodies spotted by enjoyment. It suggests a biopolitics counter to the productive, desiring biopolitical multitude of Hardt and Negri. The roving (Rove-ing) organs are opportunities of attachment to waste and spectacle, to moments of enjoyment that extend not to productive, loving, new, contestatory or alternative community but to subjected, consumerist, hate-filled confirmations of fear.

But at least they feel good.

Necessary Fictions?

From here (via PTDR):

Since ancient times, writers such as Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry have satirised hypocrisy, snobbery and pretension but they have never succeeded in eradicating these things, nor have they removed shame, guilt and derision from our emotional vocabulary. Instead they provide a kind of psychic safety valve for our own seemingly innate need for acceptance and respect.

According to the social theorist Slavo Zizek, being part of a civilised society necessarily involves deceiving others about your true self, or at least paying lip service to some higher ideal of human behaviour. The veneer of civilisation is just that, he argues, a convenient cover for our baser natures: "I'm sorry, but hypocrisy is the basis of civilisation. Rituals and appearances do matter.

If you drop the appearances and go to the thing itself, it's sometimes pretty horrible."

I'm no f&cking Buddhist, says Bjork & Zizek

Link: Revenge of Global Finance, by Slavoj Zizek.

I like this article from Zizek. Watching the stupid film I turned after Yoda's 'let go of everything' speech to someone or rather, and said to a friend: "fucking Buddhist". I like the "fucking" here, for it in itself announces a passionate dislike - itself an attachment, and one I refuse to let go of despite seeing my amigos one by one succumbing to the true Dark side. In this very attachment I announce my desire for the Other, my desire to refuse this capitalist supplement of meditating after a hard day's work. Instead I have a Guinness and blog (pardon the self-referentiality at this exact moment).

But I'm a copycat here: Bjork said it first, no doubt because many confused her as such.
"I’m no fucking buddhist, but this is enlightenment" (from "Alarm Call").

Zizek's `most interesting' point, I think, is that the reason the Revenge of the Sith seemed so bland, so narratively inferior, is because Anakin's transformation into Darth Vader was not, as it should have been, because he became Evil precisely because of his zealousness to battle Evil, but simply because he was weak-willed. Boring, especially if Lucas really wanted to make a political point... (though I'd say Bush's handlers are Evil from the get-go, not that they are perverted in their very quest for `rooting out' Evil - or if so, they were perverted a long, long time ago...). Anyway, this explains why it lacked "the proper tragic grandeur... Anakin should have become a monster out of his very excessive attachment with seeing Evil everywhere and fighting it".

ADDENDUM (for those not familiar with Zizek's understanding of Christianity, i.e., for those who aren't aware that he is, in fact, an atheist):

Part of the logic in the background of this article is that to be an atheist (as Zizek is), one must pass through the Christian experience.

Christianity is the only religion where God dies. When Christ dies on the Cross, God dies too. God only remains, then, through the faith of Christians (in the Holy Spirit, the community of believers). Obviously, then, Christians are likely to waver in their faith. This can lead to extreme violence towards others in the desperate attempt to `shore up' one's wavering faith.

It can also lead to atheism. We can only be atheist because of Christianity. If we just reject the Christian legacy tout court, we are only presupposing a dumb pagan or Buddhist God from which we cannot find a path to atheism.

There is, then, nothing more regressive than denying `our' Christian legacy.

(Of course, if you get this confused with the neocon agenda, I shall have to bonk you over the head.)

Public? Yes, please!

What is a public?  Jodi Dean lucidly suggests that since calls for the 'public' are voiced, well, in a pre-existing public, such calls are mostly political interventions for a certain kind of public, i.e., one more amenable to one's own orientation.  We might say, then, that these calls for a public are disengenuous, not actually concerned with achieving a true public.  (One can obviously place in this context Republican calls for a less `liberal biased' PBS.)

What, then, is a true public?  Is it the pre-existing public that allows for various factions to fight within it for their particular definition of a public?  The set that exists before the battle to hegemonize its definition and practice?  Does a true public only pre-exist the hegemonizing of the set through the rise of the master-signifier?

Or can we say that, only with the right master-signifier, the right political order, the true public actually comes into being? 

A true public is one without pigeon-holing, where one doesn't automatically place oneself in five seconds of speech.  It's one where you don't know what I am going to say next.  It's where I am not merely offering pre-digested soundbites.  Most of the blogosphere then has nothing to do with this true public; partisan hackery is but more TV (which is precisely why the TV networks can so easily report on this sector of the blogosphere), as are the endless ruminations on what one fed one's cat today.

The true public goes beyond your surprise at my words, my positioning.  I must be surprised myself.  As in the decisive act that overwhelms you, that preempts one's understanding of one's own actions, here I must myself be surprised by what comes from my `pen'.  Only after the fact, upon the establishment of a new order, can I come to understand what I have done.

But then the question is: does the new order in fact get created here, in this part of the blogosphere?  What could that mean?  No, yes, maybe new orders are constantly being tested.  We're playing at being vanishing mediators.  But playing with an enormous sense of responsibility, for the Other.  So maybe, then, Long Sunday is both the `true public' before the hegemonization of the very term 'public', and the Just `public' after the right hegemonization. 

Having it both ways?  Ah, the life of a vanishing mediator...

Zizek writes, in a sort of parallel:

The "political" dimension is... doubly inscribed: it is a moment of the social Whole, one among its sub-systems, and the very terrain in which the fate of the Whole is decided - in which the new Pact is designed and concluded.  (For they know not what they do, 193)