Intermission: Lacan, The Stars And You?
"A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably."
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
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“The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery.”
When I was alone on a hotel bed somewhere, there was a mirror in the corner of the room. If I leaned to it, I could see my face appear in the mirror—staring back at me in the dim light—and there was a moment in the late afternoon where I saw nothing in the mirror except the empty reflection of the room, which elongated the room and gave it an imaginary depth, that I saw for an instant a reflection of myself—gazing at me with my own eyes—in the darkness, and I felt that the Devil itself was hiding in that mirror, and could step out to steal my soul—the abyss of the Real.
My father once remarked that mirrors have no entity of their own, and therefore, they must be carefully placed in a house. Away from any entrance, place the mirror at a perpendicular angle, because a mirror has no substance except that which it reflects, and what it does reflect can be uncanny, especially in the dark, and illusive with the image of ghosts.
Gaze into a mirror long enough and you will notice a living spirit in the silver; there is a living being in its image, as if the Devil were tricking your eyes, and challenging you with a glib substitute of yourself from another world; what confronts you in the mirror is the real and freakish reality of yourself, such that I fear it could suddenly wrench free and seize me by the throat. If such encounters with the real are subterraneously violent, or at least subconsciously aggressive, then Narcissus was likely a masochist who, for each day until he starved, longed to have the visage of himself pull himself under the waters and drown him with a vengeance.
As the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, wrote in his 1948 paper, Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis, as translated by Bruce Fink, “What I have called the "mirror stage" is of interest because it manifests the affective dynamism by which the subject primordially identifies with the visual gestalt of his own body. [...] A child who beats another child says that he himself was beaten; a child who sees another child fall, cries. Similarly, it is by identifying with the other that he experiences the whole range of bearing and display reactions—whose structural ambivalence is clearly revealed in his behaviours, the slave identifying with the despot, the actor with the spectator, the seduced with the seducer. [...] It is in this erotic relationship, in which the human individual fixates on an image that alienates him from himself, that we find the energy and the form from which the organization of the passions that we will call his ego originates.”
For Lacan, the mirror stage is the unifying moment for the young toddler; it is the moment of confrontation between the disunity of the actual self and the perceived unity of the other self in the mirror, which the toddler has identified as the specular image, or the other of themselves which they self-recognise for the first time. In other words, once we see ourselves in a mirror, we recognise that it is both us and not us, and that it is simultaneously accurate and inaccurate, or rather, that this is how we exist to others but strangely not to ourselves.
In this way, I am actually the Devil in the mirror; and what resides in the mirror is the Real, or that which is impenetrable to express, but which pervades everything and yet cannot be seen nor acknowledged directly. For instance, the Real is why we grieve over our loved ones, because the Real suddenly invades the Imaginary register of our everyday world, where the premise of death is everywhere, and yet we illusion ourselves into believing a principle of unity, continuity and predictability, such that the Real of death is impossible until it finally happens, and then it is catastrophic and shatters the Imaginary world of ourselves—the Ego—such that we are left to slowly mend the wound or the hole in the universe that it creates and leaves behind.
By looking in the mirror, I confront that which I am not and therefore that which I am: in the mirror, I appear as a unified and clear subject, and seemingly altogether, such that I appear more complete than how I really am, because as I really exist I am an inconsistent, obscure and incomplete being—and thus, I fear that this twin could out-strength and murder me if they became real.
As Lacan elaborates, “Indeed, this form crystallizes in the subject's inner conflictual tensions, which leads to the awakening of his desire for the object of the other's desire: here the primordial confluence precipitates into aggressive competition, from which develops the triad of other people, ego, and object.”
And this aggressiveness, which awakens out of the mirror stage, emerges from the self-alienation of the toddler, wherein to become themselves, they must first situate themselves as the counterpart to themselves—they must become the Other—in a pivotal moment, after which their innocence as the subject is lost forever, and yet, it is this innocence which they seek to reclaim again, as the unattainable objet petit a, or the little object, which is always out of grasp at the base of every desire henceforth; this is to say, I wish to become innocent again, and unburdened by the image of me as the other, and to return to the way I was before I knew I was a human being.
Before the mirror stage, I was unaware of the disunity of myself and yet my unity as an other was always there in the gaze of other people; however, every instance of the Other of another person or thing is also a mirror, such that my life is a hall full of mirrors, constantly reflecting to me that I am not myself and yet that also I am, given my reaction and what it says about me. And I wish I could spare myself from this continuous ossification, because my unconscious was not always structured like a language—but now it is.
However, the Other of another person is different from the Other of the mirror, because with other people, I may recognise myself in them, and thus alienate myself from them, but with a mirror, I do not recognise myself in its silver, and thus I alienate myself from myself—under a frightful anathema of mirrorballs.
Psychoanalysis is like the Other of the mirror, insofar as the source of psychoanalysis is the Self and that which you already know, but currently you are unwilling to admit or express, and which psychoanalysis makes you relive and thus confront again.
As the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, remarked in his 2016 book, Disparities, “The stupid commonplace about psychoanalytic treatment is that it has a double goal: to release us from suffering and to bring about our self-knowledge (by making part of our unconscious, of course, connected: we suffer because we don’t really know ourselves—or, as the old Platonic and gnostic formula says, suffering accessible to consciousness). The two dimensions are, is caused by our ignorance. But is this view adequate? […] This point is crucial: psychoanalysis does not aim at replacing the false or cyphered self-knowledge with the real one, but at getting rid of the need for self-knowledge, at enabling the patient to act without self-knowledge. Does this bring us back to the ancient wisdom, ‘Just do it, don’t think about it!’ Does it amount to a return to naiveté? […] The answer is that knowledge gained in analysis is a knowledge to be forgotten, discarded: once I ‘see what it is that I feel’, I don’t go on dwelling in it, I just leave it behind—why? Not because of some decisionist mystique (‘to be creative, one should overcome Hamlet-like procrastinations, too much self-analysing, and just do it!’) but because the true task of analysis is to open up a void in the midst of our subjectivity: when we discard the knowledge gained in analysis, we open ourselves to this void.”
Hence, I find an explanation for my love of psychoanalysis, inasmuch as I have not been searching for a method but for an absence of method, so as to comb out of myself that which I already am, but which I have simply forgotten, given how the acedia or sloth of language was established by the early mirrors of my life.
But as Lacan clarified in Seminar XXIV, which he delivered from 1976–1977 and titled L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre, in my own translation, “Psychoanalysis—I said it, I repeated it very recently—is not a science. It does not have its status of science and it can only wait for it, hope for it. But it is a delirium which is expected to bear a science. It is a delirium that we expect to become scientific. One can wait a long time. One can wait a long time, I said why, simply because there is no progress and what one waits for is not necessarily what one collects. It is a scientific delirium, therefore, and one expects it to carry a science, but that does not mean that the analytic practice will ever carry this science. It is a science that has all the less chance of maturing because it is antinomic; that nevertheless, by the use that we have of it, we know that there are its relations between science and logic.”
Therefore, my heartening to psychoanalysis rests on this premise: in rehabilitating psychoanalysis from his Austrian predecessor, Sigmund Freud, Lacan distanced psychoanalysis from any pursuit of itself as a serious science, even as he incorporated analytic and mathematical traditions into his work. My interpretation is that Lacan, near the end of his career, forwent any expectation that psychoanalysis could be accepted as a science or could be achieved with a methodological rigour akin to the sciences, especially if its principal subject was the variable cause of the human psyche. Therefore, what remained of psychoanalysis was its practice, its instrumentalism, or its ability to endure as a speaking cure for its patients, who went uncaptured by the austere clinics of medicine; in this way, I am not concerned whether psychoanalysis is factual or not, because my sole concern is whether it works for me.
If the tool offers no insight, discard it; if the tool offers insight, keep it; these are the dual maxims which dominate my approach to psychoanalysis, because to me, psychoanalysis is purely a mirror and thus an Other of the second kind. As previously cited, it is not that psychoanalysis will reveal anything new to you nor anything revelatory; it is that psychoanalysis reminds me of who you are, as well as what you are not, such that once you remember this, you no longer need it.
However, the psychoanalytic method is no longer precise with Lacan; if language is the structure of the unconscious, then clear and unambiguous language as an expression of the unconscious will be insufficient too—unlike the unity of the mirror, the self is a disunited mess. In other words, what Lacan attempts to do is similar to the Buddhist concept of upaya, or to the notion that some things cannot be explained directly and therefore must be elected to take the long way around.
It is also reminiscent of the ideas of the Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his premise of silence, or the notion that some things must simply be intuited without words, because any attempt to codify it within language ruins whatever it could meaningfully say, especially if you do not say it; therefore, if the unconscious is structured like a language, then it is also structured by its negation and thus silence, or what you no longer need to say.
As one of Lacan’s translators, Bruce Fink, writes in Lacan To The Letter (2004), “Situated in the context of Lacan's comments on analysts' use and abuse (mostly abuse) of Freud's texts, we might assume that Lacan deliberately attempts to write in such a way that his work cannot be co-opted by any form of psychology, ego psychology, or anti-intellectual reductionistic psychoanalysis. He wants to write in such a way that we either crawl right up into his head or belly or anus (we can probably take our pick) and follow his every theoretical gyration, or we throw his book down in disgust within a few minutes, which is, in fact, what happens with a great many readers: They read him either for years or not at all. […] (1) His work is declarative rather than demonstrative, and the reader is hard pressed to find an argument in it to sustain any one particular claim, Lacan leaving the task of supplying arguments to the reader. (2) He has a tendency to want to avoid being pinned down to any one particular formulation of things and prefers to answer questions about earlier formulations by referring to newer formulations. […] Instead, he tantalizes us, suggesting that if we just read one more text, read one more seminar, we will get the answer we are looking for—whether we are trying to understand what he means by the fundamental fantasy, the divided subject, or what have you. Those who have been reading Lacan for some time know how frustrating it can be to locate a particular thesis about, say, anxiety, and build on it and attempt to apply it clinically. […] Lacan, especially in his written texts (not so much in the seminars), provides very little indeed for scientists and philosophers to latch onto; while Lacan's strategy has stopped scientists (I know of no attempt thus far to empirically validate or invalidate any Lacanian thesis), it has not stopped philosophers from taking his work as a system and trying to reconstruct and deconstruct it. Indeed, it is very difficult to convince scientists and philosophers that psychoanalytic practice and theory cannot be held to the same standards as their disciplines, that psychoanalysis is structured in a fundamentally different manner than their fields are. Their response is often simply that, in that case, it is no more than poetry.”
Therefore, Lacan is difficult on purpose, insofar as his use of language has a purpose: to gesture to the toys and to the carts instead of the burning house, as per the Parable of the Burning House, from the Buddhists’ Lotus Sutra.
In this famous scripture, as translated by Hendrik Kern, the conversation between Lord Gautama Buddha and his disciple Shariputra goes as such, “Now, Sâriputra, that man, on seeing the house from every side wrapt in a blaze by a great mass of fire, got afraid, frightened, anxious in his mind, and made the following reflection: I myself am able to come out from the burning house through the door, quickly and safely, without being touched or scorched by that great mass of fire; but my children, those young boys, are staying in the burning house, playing, amusing, and diverting themselves with all sorts of sports. They do not perceive, nor know, nor understand, nor mind that the house is on fire, and do not get afraid. […] So resolved, he calls to the boys: Come, my children; the house is burning with a mass of fire; come, lest ye be burnt in that mass of fire, and come to grief and disaster. But the ignorant boys do not heed the words of him who is their well-wisher; they are not afraid, not alarmed, and feel no misgiving; they do not care, nor fly, nor even know nor understand the purport of the word 'burning;' on the contrary, they run hither and thither, walk about, and repeatedly look at their father; all, because they are so ignorant. […] The man, knowing the disposition of the boys, says to them: My children, your toys, which are so pretty, precious, and admirable, which you are so loth to miss, which are so various and multifarious, (such as) bullock-carts, goat-carts, deer-carts, which are so pretty, nice, dear, and precious to you, have all been put by me outside the house-door for you to play with. Come, run out, leave the house; to each of you I shall give what he wants. Come soon; come out for the sake of these toys. And the boys, on hearing the names mentioned of such playthings as they like and desire, so agreeable to their taste, so pretty, dear, and delightful, quickly rush out from the burning house, with eager effort and great alacrity, one having no time to wait for the other, and pushing each other on with the cry of 'Who shall arrive first, the very first?'”
Hence, for Lacan, the advantage of such indirectness is cognate to the formation of the open-minded carriage and the patient temperament which he believes are necessary to conduct psychoanalysis; which is to say, by his deliberate method of obscurity and his resistance to codification, he trains and invites us to engage at breadth with interpretations instead of ready-made explanations. To quote Fink as a counterpoint: “To Lacan's mind, a teaching worthy of the name must not end with the creation of a perfect, complete system; after all, there is no such thing. A genuine teaching continues to evolve, to call itself into question, to forge new concepts.”
Therefore, the task of psychoanalysis is akin to art: it is a lie which tells us the truth, it is an artificial structure which stages the organic to grow around it, and it is an unquantifiable ladder which works in a similar way as a poem does to elucidate the complots of the mind.
“Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us. One might also give the name “philosophy" to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions.”
For more than five thousand years, astrology was synonymous with astronomy in the similar way that alchemy was coincidental with chemistry; from the Babylonians to the Greeks to many of the Renaissance Europeans, astrology was a science of the stars, which could divine the heavenly influences on mortal fates; in other words, we have lived longer with astrologers than without them.
For ancient Mesopotamian civilisations like Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria, the art of divination was important to anxious rulers in search of peace and stability, especially with regards to the future of their enemies and of their own heirs, such that their astrologers and soothsayers had a political role as much as a spiritual one.
Consider the Babylonian Omen No. 27 from The Reports of the Magicians and Astrologers of Nineveh and Babylon in the British Museum (1900) by the British assyriologist, Reginald Campbell Thompson, “When Sarur and Sargaz of the sting of Scorpio are bright, the weapons of Akkad will come. (The sting of Scorpio is the great lord Pabilsag). Venus is standing in Pabilsag. When Nirgal stands in Pabilsag, a strong enemy will raise (his weapons in) the land, Bel will give his weapons to the enemy; the wide forces of the enemy will slay troops. When Scorpio is dark, the kings of all lands will cause hostility (?) (or) the kings of all lands will rival (?). When Scorpio assumes a darkness, the food of men will be evil. (Mars stood within it.) When Libra is dark, the third year locusts will come and devour the crops of the land (or) locusts will devour the land . . . will devour the standing crops. The third year . . . Mars has stood within Scorpio: this is its interpretation. When Mars approaches Scorpio, the prince will die by a scorpion's sting (or) will be captured in his palace. When Jupiter has culminated and passed Regulus and brightened it, the back part of Regulus (which Jupiter had passed and brightened) reaches and passes Jupiter, and it (Jupiter) then goes to its disappearance, there will be war, and the enemy will come and seize the throne, the land will be ravaged twice. All the omens that have come to me concern Akkad and its princes; none of their evil concerns the king my lord: the eclipse of the Moon and Sun which happened in Siwan—these omens which are evil for Akkad and the kings of Aharrû are for Akkad; and yet in this month Marcheswan an eclipse happened . . . and Jupiter stood within the eclipse—it is well for the king, my lord. This is all which Bíl-ušízib has sent to the king. Let the king so act that I may raise myself before the king, my lord. The princes of Akkad whom the king, thy father, had appointed have ravaged Babylon and carried off the goods of Babylon; in consequence of these omens of evil which have come to me, let the army of the king go and in the palace . . . capture them and appoint others in their stead. Unless the king acts speedily, the foe . . . : he shall come and change them, I am clear. . .”
This omen is one of numerous predictions that were made and collected over centuries by Babylonian and Assyrian astrologers, such that the mapping of the night sky was a process of centuries of gradual observations and cyclical events, such that any soothsayers of all kinds, whether they be augurs or haruspex, could be lauded if any of their predictions were right.
However, it was the negative opinion of early Christians, such as Isidore of Seville and Saint Augustine, that astrology was antithetical to the tenets of Christianity itself; consider the former’s opinions at the end of Book III of his Etymologiae (circa 600–625), in the translation by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach and Oliver Berghof, “But whatever the type of superstition with which they have been named by men, the stars are nevertheless things that God created at the beginning of the world, and he set them in order that they might define the seasons by their particular motions. Therefore, observations of the stars, or horoscopes, or other superstitions that attach themselves to the study of the stars, that is, for the sake of knowing the fates—these are undoubtedly contrary to our faith, and ought to be so completely ignored by Christians that it seems that they have not been written about. But some people, enticed by the beauty and clarity of the constellations, have rushed headlong into error with respect to the stars, their minds blinded, so that they attempt to be able to foretell the results of things by means of harmful computations, which is called ‘astrology’ (mathesis). Not only those learned in the Christian religion, but also Plato, Aristotle, and others among the pagans, were moved by the truth of things to agree in condemning this in their judgment, saying that a confusion of matters was generated by such a belief. For if humans are forced towards various acts by the compulsion of their nativity, then why should the good deserve praise, and why should the wicked reap the punishment of law? And although these pagan sages were not devoted to heavenly wisdom, nevertheless they rightly struck down these errors by their witness to the truth. But clearly that order of the seven secular disciplines was taken by the philosophers as far as the stars, so that they might draw minds tangled in secular wisdom away from earthly matters and set them in contemplation of what is above.”
Nevertheless, I believe there is a symbolic dimension to astrology; if the cause of psychoanalysis is to evoke the mirror stage in the subject again, insofar as it both alienates the subject as the Other and assists the subject in identifying themselves through this alienation, then astrology might be rehabilitated inasmuch as you must disagree with it being factually true, and yet observe what this response can tell you about yourself according to your reaction to it—do you agree or disagree?
Compare what the Roman astronomer, Claudius Ptolemy, writes in his 2nd Century astrological treatise, Tetrabiblos, and what the British astrologist, Alan Leo, writes in his early 20th Century astrological textbooks, which popularised modern astrology into the 20th Century and beyond.
As Ptolemy wrote in Book III, Chapter XVIII, “Should the said planets, however, not be thus constituted, but be posited in places not particularly appropriate to themselves, they will yet, even then, infuse into the composition of the mental energy the properties of their own nature; but obscurely and imperfectly, and not with such force and strong evidence as in the other case. […] The planet Saturn, therefore, when alone possessing dominion of the mind, and governing Mercury and the Moon, and if posited in glory, both cosmically and with respect to the angles, will make men careful of their bodies, strong and profound in opinion, austere, singular in their modes of thinking, laborious, imperious, hostile to crime, avaricious, parsimonious, accumulators of wealth, violent, and envious: but, if he be not in glory, cosmically, and as regards the angles, he will debase the mind, making it penurious, pusillanimous, ill-disposed, indiscriminating, malignant, timorous, slanderous, fond of solitude, repining, incapable of shame, bigoted, fond of labour, void of natural affection, treacherous in friendship and in family connections, incapable of enjoyment, Jupiter in the mode and regardless of the body.”
For Ptolemy, the influence of the heavenly bodies on the mind is not an expressive nor internal force; this is to say, if the stars are aligned in this fashion, your otherwise rational mind will be oppressively and externally affected. As he continues, “Fixed signs make the mind just, uncompromising, constant, firm of purpose, prudent, patient, industrious, strict, chaste, mindful of injuries, steady in pursuing its object, contentious, desirous of honour, seditious, avaricious, and pertinacious.”
But the import of ancient astrology is distinguished from modern astrological horoscopes; the latter ascribes expressive and internal psychologies to astrological signs. For example, if you were affected by a fixed sign in modern astrology, you would psychologically resemble a fixed sign as an innate trait or temperament, instead of a temporary affliction based on the current positioning of the stars, as per ancient astrology.
As Alan Leo wrote in Astrology For All (1910), “The Taureans are slow plodding, patient, enduring, persistent, executive and matter-of-fact persons. They are remarkable for their conservatism and they never seem to waste their forces like the Aries types who scatter them broadcast. Persons of the strongest wills are born in this sign, and when living exclusively for themselves, they become exceedingly obstinate. They can be very determined, persistent and dogmatic; they usually speak with a quiet, firm and authoritative tone. Possessing a great amount of physical vitality, the Taureans become very furious and violent when severely angered, though as they are usually slow and cautious it takes a very great deal to rouse them; when very excited, however, they are beside themselves with rage. They can do a great amount of good by their steady, building capacity, and are thoroughly capable of carrying out all plans entrusted to them.”
Draw your attention to the psychological differences of each writer: once again, if Ptolemy warns that your fate is affected by certain signs and therefore that you are under its influence to acting towards a certain way, then Leo affirms that this sign is congenitally yours and therefore that you are already this way. In another way, if Ptolemy is warning that these are affected parts of yourself, Leo advocates that these are innate aspects of yourself. But the relevance here is not that we take these descriptions factually; instead, what matters is whether we agree or disagree with the description—it acts like a mirror here—and whether it reveals anything to us by function of our agreement or disagreement.
In this way, astrology can have a purely instrumental function: in the case of Leo’s modern astrological system, it posits a claim or a proposition about the way you are, and therefore, it expresses in tangible form an aspect of the other of yourself by which you can reify yourself around or reject—either you will agree or disagree with an astrological reading, but at least you now have something to tangible to agree or disagree with, instead of otherwise pure and abstract feeling.
The classical astrological system of Ptolemy is less helpful, because it posits an external force acting upon you; therefore, it is more divination than psychology, and thus can inform you of nothing which you already know, but only that which you do not know, and hence, it cannot act as a mirror insofar as you believe or disbelieve its prediction—and thus agree or disagree.
By acting as a mirror, or as a challenge or beacon, the modern astrology of Leo is more helpful to insight, because it makes possible for you to orientate yourself as either a subject towards or away from it; in other words, the abstract and disunity of the self is made tangible and unified in the description of words, which codify the loose and ever-changing reality of yourself into a crystalline shape, which once again, you can choose to accept or deny or reaffirm or destroy.
The notion of choice is important here: it is not that astrology has anything to teach me, but that I choose to let it teach me, and this forms the basis of my relationship with psychoanalysis as well as astrology, because to me, both systems are not analogous but have a reminiscent function of mirroring.
In other words, I must ask myself if this insight by the Other is good enough for me; I am wary of mistaking a mirror for reality, such that I may become the slave of the mirror instead of choosing to reify what the reflection means; I must therefore choose to allow or prevent this Other—in this case, the Other of astrology—to enter into my life and how it situates me as a subject. Therefore, we have learnt how to read Lacan as well.
“It makes sense to ask: "Do I really love her, or am I only pretending to myself?" and the process of introspection is the calling up of memories; of imagined possible situations, and of the feelings that one would have if...”
For example, as Lacan explained one aspect of his theory of love in Seminar VIII, titled Transference and delivered from 1960–1961, as translated by Bruce Fink, “Love is a god, in other words, a reality that manifests and reveals itself in the real. As such, we can only speak of it through myth. This is also what allows me to lay out before you our orientation here, by directing you toward the formula, metaphor, or substitution of erastës for eromenos. This metaphor generates the signification of love. To illustrate it for you, I will take the liberty of completing my image and of truly making it into a myth. The hand that extends toward the fruit, the rose, or the log that suddenly bursts into flames—its gesture of reaching, drawing close, or stirring up is closely related to the ripening of the fruit, the beauty of the flower, and the blazing of the log. If, in the movement of reaching, drawing, or stirring, the hand goes far enough toward the object that another hand comes out of the fruit, flower, or log and extends toward your hand—and at that moment your hand freezes in the closed plenitude of the fruit, in the open plenitude of the flower, or in the explosion of a log which bursts into flames—then what is produced is love. But we must not stop there. We must say that what we are looking at here is love—in other words, that it’s your love when you were first eromenos, the beloved object, and suddenly you become erastés, he who desires. […] But there is something still more remarkable, as Phaedrus explains. It is even more remarkable that, instead of returning to his land to be with his father amid his fields, Achilles accepted his tragic destiny, his fatal destiny, the certain death that was promised to him, if he avenged Patroclus. Now Patroclus was not his beloved. Achilles was the beloved. Phaedrus claims—rightly or wrongly, and this is of little consequence to us—that Achilles was the beloved of the couple, and that he could have occupied only that position. Through his action, which comes down to accepting his fate as it was written, he places himself, not in the stead of, but rather in the wake of Patroclus. He makes of Patroclus’ fate the debt he must pay, the debt with which he must come to terms. And this is what commands, in the eyes of the gods, the most necessary and the greatest admiration, for the level attained by Achilles in the order of love's manifestations is, as Phaedrus tells us, higher. Achilles is more honored by the gods, inasmuch as it is they who judge his action. They are full of admiration, strictly speaking, and simultaneously astonished—for they are overwhelmed by the value of love as they see it manifested by humans. To a certain extent, the gods, being impassive and immortal, are unable to understand what happens at the mortal level. They detect a certain gap between themselves and mortals, and view what happens in the manifestation of love as a miracle.”
As per Lacan’s interpretation of The Iliad, Achilles takes upon himself the debt of the beloved, sacrificing his advantaged position as the beloved of the relationship, so as to become the alienated subject of the lover—who always chases their beloved as the Other which contains that which would satisfy their insatiable objet petit a—as a gesture of love for the one who loved him more.
But the question of deriving insight from a Lacanian theory of love, for instance, is whether such a metaphor—and thus Lacan—can speak to anything in your own life: are you already the beloved Achilles or the lover Patroclus; or are you implicitly the hammer Wanda von Donajew or the anvil Severin von Kusiemski; or are you satisfied as the husband Takeyama Shinji or the wife Reiko? Is the symbol of the theory like a mirror in the way that it reveals the Real to you—in the way that it mirrors reality in everything but reality itself?
In the same way that a passage of literature or a moment of a film can swiftly inspire a great change in you, because it acts like a mirror to how would you prefer to live, or as an affirmation of how you already live, people are also like mirrors in that they reify how you would like them to see you, and frightfully, how they already see you—seek out such encounters.
Consider the language of Lacan: “formula, metaphor, or substitution”; the obfuscation of language is a means of elucidating the truth through language itself; in other words, you cannot touch the subject of the Real itself, but you must go around and encounter what it shows you along that alternate path, and there you will encounter the secret of the Real, or that which you cannot gesture to directly because it would become too much otherwise.
But if the nature of words borrows and imposes meaning onto pure and specific desires, then the greater the number of words, the greater the number of imposed meanings—or signifiers and their attendant signified—such that if sentences are webs of signifiers, the tendency is to become trapped within them, such that the immanence of whatever you initially feel, and thus what first arises out of the unconscious into the conscious through words, obtains a symbolic distance that brings you too far from where you need to be; this is to say, if the unconscious is structured like a language, it is not a language we know how to say, and thus, when we borrow from languages we can say, like how I say apple and you might understand apple, something is lost.
In other words, if words operate in a vacuum, whereby there is no hope of communicating anything to anyone else, and yet, we gesticulate like advertisements what we need to say, what we need to gesture, and what we need to throw out as an expression of our unconscious—as a method of reaching catharsis—with these borrowed words, then saying more and more words is counterproductive to our efforts of clarity, because the base expression of “I love you” because muddled in the effort to say anything more than that—in heaping more words and designs onto our straightforward desires—such that in our anxiety over being misunderstood, we become more incomprehensible and covered in symbols which we have borrowed from the web of language and its signifiers in trying to say what we purely mean.
As Lacan spoke on anxiety in his 1974 lecture, La Troisìeme, as translated by Yolande Szczech, “It’s this which demonstrates this curious phenomenon, on which I gave a seminar for a whole year, and which I named anxiety. Anxiety, it’s precisely something which is located elsewhere in our body, it’s the feeling that arises as a result of this suspicion that comes to us, of being reduced to our body. All the same, as it’s very curious that this debility [débilité] of the speaking being has managed to get so far in the end, of course . . . it’s that we have realized that anxiety is not the fear of anything via which the body is stimulated [se motiver].”
For Lacan, anxiety is the imaginary fear, or the anticipation of existence, that you are being wholly-perceived as the unity of your body—as that unity of yourself—but only as that unity which defines you as other and separated from the disunity which defines you internally; in other words, something is lost in translation in the name of you, which is captured and delimited by language, because there is in fact another you which exists, and which you can only gesture to, such that not even a mirror could suffice—you need something more obscure to let you become transparent about yourself to others, and therefore you attempt to speak.
But in speaking you are borrowing from the dictionary of meanings, from the history of words, which separate you from the pure feeling, because the universal definition of love is insufficient to represent your specificity of love—but you must make this symbolic exchange and therefore obscure yourself to a minimum symbolic distance; and this specificity, which arises from the unconscious to the conscious, in a frothing to the surface of the words, “I love you”, becomes obscured by the more anxious, “I love you because…”, into a desperate and symbolic effort to demonstrate that you are more than what you seem.
Therefore, if language is not the real thing, but a symbol of the real thing, limited to the register of the Symbolic, or that which I inherit from society and I am directed to follow, then perhaps I ought to say less and not more; I ought to say “I love you”, or the basest of my expressions, because that is the closest expression of how I feel about you, and hence it is the one I choose to say, and I leave the rest to silence.
“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”
If a lion could speak, it would lack the language game to make sense to us; as Wittgenstein wrote in Remark 23 of Philosophical Investigations (1953), as translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, “Here the term "language-game" is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life. Review the multiplicity of language-games in the following examples, and in others: Giving orders, and obeying them—Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements—Constructing an object from a description (a drawing)— Reporting an event—Speculating about an event—Forming and testing a hypothesis—Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams—Making up a story; and reading it—Play-acting—Singing catches—Guessing riddles—Making a joke; telling it—Solving a problem in practical arithmetic—Translating from one language into another—Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.”
For Wittgenstein, language-games are how language functions; we are essentially playing a game with each other, such that the rules of the language-game entail the understanding of the game and the meaning or information that is exchanged, and that these games are played on the basis of mutual understanding and following of such rules. However, these rules are reflective of organic evolution of communication between people, such that language-games are formed by themselves over time and that they become awkward if enforced or held to be unchanging like an instance of martial law, because innately they evolve out of the natural responses of life; therefore, if a lion could speak, it would lack the way of life to meaningfully express to us its own way of life—that is to say, unless it began to live our way of life too, although by then, it would be too late and therefore it is impossible because a lion cannot be human.
Wittgenstein later remarks in Remark 32, “Someone coming into a strange country will sometimes learn the language of the inhabitants from ostensive definitions that they give him; and he will often have to guess the meaning of these definitions; and will guess sometimes right, sometimes wrong. And now, I think, we can say: Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child could already think only not yet speak. And "think" would here mean something like "talk to itself".
In other words, it is this strangeness, but a deeper strangeness as well, that the lion would need to overcome to learn a new way of life, and therefore, the speaking cure of psychoanalysis is always self-alienating, because the private and impossible language of my inner world is thrown into symbolism by the public language of society, wherein to become comprehensible to the Other of others, I will be misidentified and misunderstood for whatever symbols I borrow to say, and yet, I will attempt to live with these others—and likewise they too with me—nonetheless.
This harkens back to what I wrote about the French-Caribbean philosopher, Édouard Glissant, who wrote in Poetics Of Relation (1990) about the right to opacity as a mode of understanding, as opposed to the historical and colonial Western demands for modes of transparency; in other words, I may not understand you, but that does not mean that I cannot love you, respect you nor build things with you—I accept your right to be incomprehensible to me, and thus, to always remain Other to me, but I will accept you and therefore, in some way, I can understand you, instead of demanding the impossibility of unambiguously knowing your inner life.
Therefore, if the language-game of the Enlightenment posed that we are equal-footed by reason—that the faculty of the reasonable mind is the great equalising factor between nations of human beings, such that through reason, we may come to the same conclusions about the same things together and thus become transparent to one another—then psychoanalysis and modern astrology reveal an opposing antithesis: that you and I are both human beings and yet we are innately different, such that sometimes I cannot understand you, and therefore, I should not approach you with the same methods of reason and communication as I approach myself, but that I will try to find another way for you, because I want to live with you in this world.
For instance, the modern astrology of Leo concludes that a Virgo, a reasoning Earth sign, should not approach a Cancer, a feeling Water sign, with logic but sensitivity; a Leo, an instinctive Fire sign, should not approach an Aquarius, a floating Air sign, with too much passion but with much more space; which is to say, we are different from one another, and we will create a different universe out of the same things, but that if we can accept the universe of each other, and accommodate for the differences, we can live in this universe together.
Likewise, if a lion could speak, we would not understand what it said; and yet, we should accept this lion nonetheless. If the mirror of ourselves becomes the mirror of the Other for the lion, then the lion is a mirror for us too: it reveals that aspect of Otherness, or the metaphysical limits of who and what we are—and outlines us clearly as human beings—and yet we can still love a lion.
But if you are going to misunderstand me because of our language, or acknowledge that there is something about me which you cannot understand because we lack the language games to say anything to each other, and yet, if you will look at me as if I were complete—like I look at myself in the mirror—then I should still attempt for you to see something of my own choice; in other words, if you are going to delude yourself with a false image of me, pick this image at least: consider me through psychoanalysis or as a Virgo sun and consciously treat me as that other, and I shall ask you the same thing. In this way, I am a lion who you will misunderstand, but treat me as though I were a symbolic lion who you could—so long as I get to choose the colour too.
“The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.—The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question.”
I was a mirror for you and you were my mirror; if you revealed to me everything I wished to be—the brightest and most ambitious aspects of myself, such that I wanted to conquer the world after you—what did I reveal to you, and what did you see in the reflection I cast back at you?
As the French psychoanalyst, Jacques-Alain Miller, answered in an interview article, We Love the One Who Responds to Our Question: “Who Am I?”, for the October 2008 issue of the French women’s magazine, Psychologies, as facilitated by Hanna War and independently translated by Adrian Price, “To really love someone is to believe that by loving them you’ll get to a truth about yourself. We love the one that harbours the response, or a response, to our question: 'Who am I?'”.
But I begin with the premise that I understand nothing about you anymore, and yet, I would like to again; I continue with the premise that there is nothing in the past of you which I can now depend on to know, but that my love for you survives, insofar as it is cautious against a second castration; I end with the premise that there is nothing of you now, which I might hope to understand anymore, even if you would explain yourself to me, but I will nevertheless try.
I want you to forgive me, because I am attempting a difficult thing, which you have never asked for, and yet which I give to you, because I do not have you—I cannot know you, and therefore I do. But I write these things and yet I do not understand them in practice: I declare that you are opaque to me, and yet I write as if you were transparent and as if I could understand you—not in a symbolic way, but in a real way—and therefore you frustrate me, until a day arrived when the speaking cure worked, and I traced along the line of my life the memory of replacing you with a symbolic substitute: I filled the gaps of you with a sculpture who I grew frustrated with because it would not move in the way I knew it could—and obviously I did not know nor could I accept this.
Hence, there are no more words I give to you, my sculpture, because I must destroy you for the real thing, which disappeared from my sight so long ago, but which has now returned and so my words are at the end of their use. I offer you no more words, because I do not understand you anymore, so no words will suffice because I can give you no more description, no more symbols, and offer no more sculptures of you; I cannot speak, and therefore, I must be silent, because I accept you altogether for the first time. I know I could not abandon you, but I ask if I am herculean for myself or herculean for you, which is much less than what was asked of Heracles—and also more.
I wish you would—I stop myself; aposiopesis. I recall that Miller continues in his interview, “I’m the one that loves, but you’re also mixed up in this, because there’s something in you that makes me love you. It’s reciprocal because there’s a to and fro: the love I have for you is the return effect of the cause of love that you are for me. So, you’re implicated. My love for you isn’t just my affair, it’s yours too. My love says something about you that maybe you yourself don’t know.’ This doesn’t guarantee in the least that the love of one will be responded to by the love of the other: when that happens it’s always of the order of a miracle, it’s not calculable in advance.”
In other words, I have reached the limits of communication by choice; I have become the lion who lacks the language game to make myself understandable to you and so I stop myself. In love, you can never be transparent with the other, and yet, there is an attempt at the impossible: I wish to render myself as a non-Other to you, such that you could peer into the mirror of myself and see yourself there, or even better, see me, and together we could live by seeing each other like an infinite pair of reflections, each of us revealing how the other could wish to live, because if I showed you what you lacked in your life, you showed me what I lacked in mine too.
It reminds me of the curious adage which Lacan wrote to the French journalist, Madeleine Chapsal, in an intimate letter dated 28th December 1955, “What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe”, which I authenticated from a 22nd September, 2020 auction catalogue by the French auction house, Artcurial—the rest of the letter is not included in their abstract for Lot 23, unfortunately.
The expression is intriguing because it demonstrates what Lacan says about love as much as how delusional he was with his own love. Essentially, if your lover cannot really give you anything, because they are impossible to understand as the Other of themselves, to you, and yet, if you can nevertheless create the entire universe out of them, and thus out of nothing, it is because they showed you the universe of yourself, which you then gave to yourself—out of everything—like the stars and you.
Therefore, even if I know this is impossible, I am still willing to make this exchange of mirrors with you—this futile trade between ourselves and each other—even if we are essentially lying to ourselves about one another, and even if we are pretending to understand, when in fact, we are really talking to ourselves alone. In other words, with you I can create the universe, and this is what you gave to me and what I can invent out of myself whenever I look at you, and so this is the gift, like Achilles, which I repay you with love.
“So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.”
To try another way: we are talking to the Is of each other, which we have generated as symbolic substitutes for one another, both through the symbolic of language and our own imaginations, which we cannot penetrate beyond into the Real of both you nor me, because there is a you I have created from you, such that I am not speaking to you but to myself; likewise, you are not speaking to me, but to the me you have created to symbolise me. It symbolically gives us a structure of unknowledge, but the unknowledge of another person is almost mystical.
However, if intimacy is an illusion—if, essentially, everyone only has sex with themselves—it is one of our greatest illusions as human beings, alongside friendships, because it says that I have created a symbolic stand-in for you, and that this stand-in is so important to me that I cannot live without it. I cannot penetrate into the Real of you, but in this symbol which I have created out of an aspect of you, which I may recognise as lacking or being similar to myself, there is something to love—the universe—such that I cannot live without it and therefore I will do anything to keep you in my life, and I say nothing more so as to annihilate as much symbolic distance between you and me as possible, and therefore, I keep you as close to me as I can.
In this self-conscious way, my love is a recognition that there is someone there—who I love—and yet that there is no one there except myself—who I love more; nonetheless, we press to encounter this moment of love, and to turn this moment into an event which can transform our lives, because it is the closest we can reach to understanding the Other as the Other of you and not as the Self of me, such as the moments I held you and gazed at you and kissed you, and said not a single word, become the annihilation of every other inessential thing.
As human beings, this is the most we can do; and therefore, in the mirror of you, this is the closest I can gaze at you, while knowing, inevitably, that I am only gazing at myself—like Narcissus and his pool. And yet Narcissus was beautiful, and I know this because of how beautiful you are—sunlight—and therefore, I—.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.