Series: The Seminar Of The NUS Psychoanalysis Society - Seminar II: Finger Lacan Good?
"And the only thing that he knows is the nature of desire; and that desire is lack."
This seminar is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on psychoanalysis, covering the works of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud.
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Seminar II: Caught Lacan? was delivered by Thomas J. Pellarin on Sunday, 16th October 2022 in the Philosophy Graduates Room at the National University of Singapore (NUS).
Introduction to Seminar II
Before I delivered Seminar I, I had believed that a question-based format would be best and so I prepared for it, as reflected in the previous seminar notes, which used guiding questions as a structure to orient the seminar; this is to say, I doubted that it would have been possible to engagingly conduct a Lacanian seminar via a direct explanation of psychoanalysis over an hour-long session, and that it would have been better to orient the seminar around a set of guiding questions, which could be individually asked and then answered so as to clearly structure and direct the flow of the teaching, such that the content was not overwhelming or boresome.
I made this observation in a rehearsal: reciting the seminar notes, once they had been dictated from speech, encountered the loss of a flowing and living spirit, from which I believe all good teaching emanates as a spontaneity succeeding from enough and particular knowledge of a subject, such that it became unbearable to continue, and I had to raise myself to the energy which the material demanded—the seminars of Lacan himself are fun, dynamic and unpredictable—and therefore, I had to release myself from the script and begin to simply teach.
Therefore, I proved myself wrong, because it is not only possible to conduct a Lacanian seminar by speaking about Lacan systematically, such that the difficulty of the content can be assuaged by hinging the connective tissues onto the symbolic workhorse of the Borromean Knot, such that the Knot becomes the focal point of reference and a continuous visual guide, which can be pointed back to as necessary, but it is also possible to speak for a complete hour about him and not lose your audience whatsoever—or at least, that is what the feedback reflected.
In returning with Seminar II, the backswing is with confidence, under the promise of delivering a tighter, bolder and more enjoyable seminar on the subject of love, which always stands for a tremendous topic because of its relatability, relevance and possibilities with interweaving other thinkers, such as Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes and Alain Badiou in this instance. If the purpose of Seminar I was to foster an attitude towards reading Lacan, then in Seminar II, we could say we already have begun—retrospectively.
Unfortunately, the first seminar lacked coffee, which was a missed opportunity, and hopefully it will be remedied in the second seminar; if teaching has revealed itself to me as another mirror, such that I can look into myself while reciting words from the inners, and see whoever I wish to see and want to be, and therefore, I engage with the process of becoming myself, then I can see myself as continuing these seminars for a long while more, with the promise of consistent coffee as an escalating and secondary obligation.
Guiding Questions
What is Love?
What is the Beloved?
What is the Lover?
What is the significance of the myth of Achilles and Patroclus to Lacan?
What is the relevance of the story of the Gift Of The Magi (1905) to Lacan?
What is Annihilation?
What is Lack in relation to Love?
What is the Signifying Chain?
What is Hainamoration?
What is the Name-of-the-Father?
What is the Phallus in relation to Love?
What is Castration in relation to Love?
What is toxic masculinity?
What is a nice guy?
What is a girl-boss?
What is ghosting?
Seminar Notes
Welcome to the second seminar of NUS Psychoanalysis Society. Today, we will be discussing the topic of Love, which is a very interesting and fun subject with Lacan, because Love is the grand hope that we might fulfill our desire through the Other and therefore each other, which is something Lacan thinks is impossible but nonetheless what we try to do. Unfortunately, we were not able to get coffee last week; hopefully, so hopefully we make up for it now.
With Lacan, the subject of Love comes as the sort of centrepiece in the matrix of his thought, to the extent where you can understand the basic interaction of most of the Lacanian concepts through interlocking them with the case study of love, and he explores it again and again from his early to his late seminars. And it is obviously one of the most applicable concepts, given how ubiquitous it is.
To begin the seminar, I will be re-drawing the Borromean Knot from the previous session. This will likely be a staple feature of all the Lacanian seminars, given how useful it is in mediating between the various registers; however, later in Seminar IV, you will be introduced to next set of Lacanian topological diagrams—namely, the Elementary Cell of his Graph of Desire as well as the intermediate and complete Graphs of Desire to observe the inner workings of desire, and therefore, more closely how we negotiate the looking through of one another, and later with institutions, through the explorations of the Four Lacanian Discourses.
We start by asking what does Lacan mean by Love. In Seminar VIII, Lacan brings up the mythological example of Achilles and Patroclus, such that he designates the two of them within the structure known as the Beloved and the Lover subjects—the one who is desired and the one who desires—and from this, we can begin to see what Lacan means when he says that love is about giving what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.
In the case study, he gives that Achilles is the Beloved subject, the passive erômenos, or the one who receives love, whereas Patroclus is the Lover, the active erastês, or the one who does not have, insofar as he is the one who must give what he Lacks, and therefore gives love, in the fashion of Ancient Greek pederasty, taken as a general form of love relations. The Lover does not have the object of desire, or that which would satisfy the objet petit a, or the impossible, that sits at the centre of all desires, from its emergence and therefore denial at the instance of the mirror stage, and hence, in love the Lover offers this very condition of Lack—the fact that I need you in my love, that I cannot live without you, that I miss you to the point of agony, to the Beloved, or to whom the possibility of fulfilment encircles. It is obvious that the Beloved, in the case of Achilles, does not want this Lack; who would want to be given Lack, inasmuch as they too Lack and desire to fulfill this Lack in their own way, such that the act of Love is a declaration of impotency to the Other, such that I say that I do not have the Phallus, and yet that I hope that you do, such that you hover with the threat of being able to use it and destroy me—to screw me—and yet I surrender it to you nonetheless, because you are my greatest chance of satisfying the hole in my heart.
Therefore, we find an explanation for the famous quotation by Lacan, that in love “love is to give what one does not have to someone who does not want it”, or that to give Others the fact that we Lack them is not what they want, insofar as they want to fulfill our Lack and likewise that we could fulfill their respective own.
We return to what we spoke of last week with regards to the Phallus: that the Phallus is essentially a symbolic stand-in for potency, or the signifier for the Other’s desire, or all that which allows you to give, to dominate, to have the power over; and likewise, what you seek in a moment of love, such that you would castrate yourself, denying your own Phallus, to be able to say I love you and therefore, I open myself to the vulnerability of you screwing me, if it means that I could be satisfied as the whole which I no longer have, and which opened to escape—symbolically—in the mirror so many years ago.
The trick is that the Other wishes to be screwed as well in a symbolic sense, because everyone wishes to be castrated in Love if it means that fulfilment can be found, and therefore in love, we observe a distinction between sexual attraction and Love, and therefore, find another explanation for what Lacan means by saying that there is no sexual relation, because sexual attraction requires a sort of phantasmagorical element, which cannot penetrate into the alleged wholeness of a human being, but the almost self-masturbatory fulfilling of one’s desires through the presence of an Other, which is starkly different from the phenomena of Love as the relenting of the Phallus for Castration, or for annihilation under the hope of being complete.
We also discussed last week that the Phallus is essentially mythological and not substantive, such that he or she who has the Phallus does not actually have it, but is perceived to have it, so that is possible to fake having the Phallus in this regard. Therefore, we observe a strangeness in the myth of Achilles and Patroclus. Even though it is Patroclus who has the Phallus, or can be imagined as wielding it as the dominant erastês against the receiving erômenos, it is Patroclus who is the one who offers himself to destruction by Achilles, such that if Achilles refused to love him, he would suffer more.
In this way, Patroclus has given the power, which he has over Achilles, to Achilles himself out of love, such that Patroclus is dominant in the realm of subservience, or as a slave to the jouissance of the Other, or that he seeks his own jouissance in the symbolic realm of risking everything, including its loss, in search of it. If the lover subject is the one who is inevitably castrated, even if they are the one who screws the Other, it is because he demonstrated his love for Achilles through the principle which defines castration as the submission of the Phallus, or the revelation that I Lack you, or what in other words is characteristic of what is known as Love.
But this act of castration is defined by Lacan through its deliberate nature: in love, we dangerously say to the Other, “I lower my walls for you, and thus, I put myself in a position of vulnerability for you, such that if you so wished, you could destroy me, but I am willing to nevertheless try and risk myself with you, because this is how I express how much I need you in my life, and how much you mean to me, and how much I desire you, such that I am willing to potentially be destroyed by you, if it means I can continue to have you in my life, because you essentially give me the universe which I cannot create with anyone else.”
Another aspect of Love is its imbalance, such that in Love, there is someone who is the Beloved and the other who is the Lover; however, what defines this relationship and thus Love is the capacity of interchanging these positions of the Beloved and the Lover, such that the latter, out of Love, is willing to let go of their privileged position as the Beloved, or the one who holds the symbolic phallus, in favour of handing it to the Lover, who is at greater risk of annihilation.
The Beloved now says, because you love me so, I give everything back to you, because I love you too—you who loves me more—and that it is the sort of exchange, the back-and-forth, which defines the depths of love that we could find in the example of Achilles and Patroclus, because the former has the choice of surviving or dying, depending on whether he avenges Patroclus by slaying the Trojan prince Hector. In a move that impresses even the Gods, Achilles seals his fate and renounces his position as the Beloved, as loving gratitude to the one who Loved him more in their life.
There is another story which illustrates this dynamic, or the necessity of the act of exchange which makes love work, albeit the advantage is never clear, because it is constantly being exchanged: the Gift Of The Magi (1905) by William Sydney Porter. In the parable, there is a husband and wife on Christmas Eve, one who cuts her hair to buy a new chain for his pocket-watch and one who sells his watch to buy a new comb for his wife’s hair, such that when they meet each other to exchange gifts, they both laugh in the realisation that each of them has sacrificed something of their own willingly, be it the Phallus or a symbolic stand-in or signifier, and thus something which in its absence leaves them castrated or worse-off, in favour of potentially satisfying the Other.
This story describes the insanity in the nature of Love, such that in Love, you offer yourself up to annihilation, such that if you so choose to do so, you could annihilate me and yet the insanity of love is that you have two crazy people offering this to each other again and again: each one other saying “Annihilate me!” to the Other, but neither taking the offer up, in an exchange of impotencies, of a lack of killing blows, and thus prostrated necks on the guillotine racks, between each other forever. And yet, this is the point of the story: that in this double-attempt lies the impossibility of success—the preposterousness of a premise in which, I Love you so much, because I am so grateful for what you offer me, I offer my life in gratitude to keep you part of it—whereby we shall never become the impossible objects of desire for each other, our respective objet petit a, and nevertheless we make the exchange of our gifts together, in the grand and depraved phenomena known as our Love for each Other, because if you can give everything to me, paradoxically, I will give everything to you.
Speaking of annihilation, the French philosopher Georges Bataille was famous for his writings on the subject of love and annihilation, both as part of his writings for the French secret society Acéphale as well as his scholarly work on eroticism and passions.
And speaking of Bataille, it is actually quite amusing that, during a period of separation, Bataille’s wife Sylvia Bataille, had a love affair with Jacques Lacan, such that after the war, the two of them married and had a daughter, Judith Lacan, who had a unique academic career, aside from being the wife of Jacques-Alain Miller, the French psychoanalyst who edited the Seminar of Jacques Lacan series.
For Bataille, the act of annihilation is one of our greatest, possible experiences as human beings, such that the call to annihilation is a call to the sublimation of the self—of a destruction of me and you—so that we may become more than each other, and become something more together, and I find this to be a good metaphor to apply to Lacan in explaining Love, because in Love we open ourselves up to such annihilation, to such transfiguration, to such mutilation, such that I open myself up to you to destroy myself because you are worth more than myself: an aspect of eroticism at the heart of Love like a sacred and ultimate transgression against the frail Ego of I.
I will quote from his eponymous essay for the College of Sociology, which he published in 1939, “Two beings of opposite sex lose themselves in one another, and together form a new being that is different from both of them. The precarious state of this new being is obvious: it is never such that its parts can be distinctly its own; and in its brief moments of darkness there is nothing more than a tendency to lose consciousness. Yet if it is true that the unity of the individual stands out far more obviously, it is also just as precarious. [...] Love expresses a need for sacrifice: every unity must lose itself in some other unity which exceeds it. Yet these joyous movements of the flesh work in two directions. Just because passing through the flesh—passing to the point at which the unity of the person is torn apart in it—is necessary if we wish in losing ourselves to find ourselves again in the unity of love, it does not follow that the moment when that tearing apart occurs is itself meaningless in terms of the existence that is torn apart. It is difficult to know what part is played during copulation by the feeling of passion for another being, the part played by erotic frenzy; so too the extent to which this individual is seeking life and power, the extent to which he is led to tear himself apart, to lose himself, at the same time as tearing apart and losing the other person.”
The full quote can be referenced in the Seminar Notes, but I will quote once more—this time from the French philosopher Roland Barthes, who wrote in his 1977 book, A Lover’s Discourse, a indirect description of annihilation in the definition of gentleness, which I believe consummates the idea beautifully: “Another day, in the rain, we're waiting for the boat at the lake; from happiness, this time, the same outburst of annihilation sweeps through me. This is how it happens sometimes, misery or joy engulfs me, without any particular tumult ensuing: nor any pathos: I am dissolved, not dismembered; I fall, I flow, I melt. Such thoughts— grazed, touched, tested (the way you test the water with your foot)—can recur. Nothing solemn about them. This is exactly what gentleness is.”
However, we must understand that the structure of Love, or how we understand that we are in love and therefore how we realise annihilation, for Lacan, is similar to the structure of the Signifying Chain, which I will draw out here as four interlocking rings on a horizontal plane, such that this is the way in which language, and thus the unconscious, is structured, given that we can only understand things retrospectively, such that the sentence “I love you” can only be understood when the pronoun you enters into the understanding. Hence, annihilation can only be experienced once we have experienced it; in other words, we can only understand that we are in Love once it is already too late, and this is also why grief is always a catastrophe to us.
I once wrote in an essay called The Captive, which was a three-part essay series I wrote on the subjects of love, grief and memory, structured along on the grand novel of Marcel Proust, In Search Of Lost Time. If you would like to read further on the treatment of annihilation in Love, you can give it a look.
But I reiterate, according to the Lacanian line, that this invitation for mutual annihilation, or to the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction—unsurprisingly, its acronym is M.A.D.—and thus to participate in a sacred and immanent union known as We, which could transcend the experiences of us as individuals and lead us to an experience known as the Love of you and me, is an impossible proposition. For Lacan, this is impossible to achieve, and therefore, it becomes a tragic element in the same way that at the end of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the only way the two lovers can be together forever is to mutually-commit suicide, and therefore always remain together by forever staying apart.
You can never satisfy the Lack at the heart of Love, even if Love itself appears as the greatest hope for filling the hole at the centre of the world, mooring not to the impossible object of desire, the objet petit a, which forms at the mirror stage and from which every desire flows, insofar as other people people inspire you to the possibility of being fulfilled by how they see you as Other, and not how they fail to see you as yourself, but as a symbolic signifier that stands-in for everything that real Love is not, and yet, which we gloss over for the sake of romance and the possible impossibility of Loving.
Therefore, to be in Love is essentially to live with your own failure; and to speak of Love using the more technical structure of the Borromean Knot, as opposed to a more general definition about how love operates, as per the case studies, is to say that Love begins in the Imaginary and is mediated by the Symbolic, thus tiptoeing around the Real of the fact that nobody can satisfy you. Hence, the person who you Love is not actually the person you think they are, but what you imagine them to be, as the nearest symbol or approximation for the Imaginary being which they stand-in for, such that they are simultaneously more and less than they really are, under your Gaze of them as the Other who could give you the universe.
At this junction, I need to note things here: firstly, that this forms an explanation of what Lacan wrote to the French journalist, Madeleine Chapsal, in his famous December 1955 letter to her: “What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?”. It is not that the Other gives you the real universe, nor the symbolic universe, but the imaginary universe of yourself, mediated by themselves as a symbolic catalyst, to be able to give yourself the universe to yourself: that I do not love you because there is something in you, but rather, that there is something within me, which I cannot live without, but which I can only have if I have you, such that my castration for you is essentially a castration to save myself, because without you, I will never have the life I wish to lead. Therefore, look at your Beloved and ask yourself what about them is yourself, and which parts of them are you misconstruing in your Love for them, such that you are fulfilling yourself first and them second, such that Love is nothing short of a miracle, in the fact that two different beings could make this mutual exchange with each Other, albeit imperfectly and therefore requiring constant and hard work, because we are always at risk of turning each other into symbols for ourselves and not for each Other.
This is the first point, which is against the solipsistic tendency in Love; the second point is how the symbolic plays in the mediation of love: that this is a waltz of symbolic pairs: the relations of the Father and the Mother, the Phallus and Castration. In other words, there is always something which mediates between you and me, or our intersubjectivity as Others to each Other. In this case, it is the symbolic stand-in for completeness, or the universe, which is recreated in me by your presence in my life, such that once again, I am full in front of the mirror of you—even if I can only imagine this to be true, and if such an image can be broken as fragilely as I imagine it.
This segues into the second half of the seminar, which we will continue into after a short break, where we will deviate from a general description of Love to the courtship of Love, such that the embarrassing behaviours we often find ourselves in, like chasing the symbolic Phallus for both men and women, as well as the phenomena of nice guys and girl-bosses, can find an explanation.
However, before the break, I would like to summarise that Lacan does not have a pessimistic view of Love, even if we can never overcome the split nature of ourselves as Barred Subjects ($), such that we must mediate our attempts at Love through symbols and thus a minimum symbolic distance between each Other. What Lacan presents us is a realistic outlook on Love: in Love, there is always a risk of failing to Love, of mistaking each Other for the wrong symbols, such that Love is war we fight for each Other, and so we cannot rest if we are to continue to Love each other. As human beings, we already live in a world of self-illusions, and yet, out of all these illusions, I have chosen you to be the most significant to me, because I have chosen you, out of everybody else, that you might be the one who could possibly fulfil my Lack and therefore, could give me the universe.
Therefore, I am willing to work with you through this impossible project, because out of all the people in the world, you are the most likely person to be able to complete this impossible project with me; however, Lacan mentions that there is an element of hate in Love, such that I love that part of you which I desire, because it could fulfill me with the universe of myself, but there are other things about you, which I hate, because they take away universe from me. These are things which distract me, annoy me, and yet, I am willing to deal with them because what you give me, even if the chance of you filling my Lack is zero, is more worthwhile to have in my life than not to have you at all.
In other words, I hate the infiltration of the Real in you, or the things which take away the symbolic power of the symbolic stand-ins I have imagined and created in you to and because I love you, such that Lacan calls this dynamic hainamoration, or the fusion of Love and hate as an ever-present ambivalence in Love. These relation can be streamlined by this diagram here: if Love is mediated by the Imaginary and the Symbolic by a symbolic passage, then hatred is mediated by the Symbolic and Real by the failure of the symbolic passage to hide the Real. If it is difficult enough to see oneself, it is even more difficult to see your personal subject in the Gaze of the Other; therefore, this is the caution we must take in Love, to be realistic about the experience, given how meaningful it is to us.
To conclude, we therefore find an explanation for the reported quote by the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, that "If you have reasons to love someone, you don't love them." Given that Žižek is a student of Lacan, we might trust that when he speaks of Love, he has accounted for the Lacanian dimension too; but what does he mean here?
If you have a reason to Love, you do not Love; or rather, that in loving, there should be no reason other than the cause of Love itself, but what is the cause of love? Remember that it is castration—it is the showing of what you Lack to the Other person—but crucially, that this Love is shown without any desire to reclaim the phallus through a reciprocation of Love.
Recall that Love as an event is defined by the exchanging the positions of the Beloved and Lover subjects; if one person is willing to make this exchange, it is a one-sided Love. However, we cannot force the Other person to commit to this exchange, and likewise, it would be uncharacteristic of Love to demand this, such that any expectation of Love reciprocated will destroy what Love is about: self-castration without anxiety.
Therefore, we find an example of this in the Christian concept of Love: that you ought to Love thy Neighbour, even if he does not Love you, and that Jesus Christ died for you, expecting nothing in return, and yet that he gave so willingly everything of himself, castrating himself of divinity to show that he Loved you more.
When we are in Love, we should be in Love, and therefore not make a claim on receiving anything in return from our Beloved; which is to say, if you Love someone, simply Love them.
We will now proceed into the break.
In the second half of the seminar, I would like to talk about the Lacanian concept of the Name-of-the-Father, which explains the notion of castration and why, outside of Love, it is something to so feared, and moreover, that this creates an explanation for why the act of self-castration in Love is so significant.
I remind everyone that it is possible to exchange most of these loaded terms with more neutral terminology, such as the Phallus with Potency; however, Lacan is deliberately invoking these symbolic images for their mythological meanings so as to illustrate a point about the relevance of these ideas, even in our contemporary world, to our current understanding of it, such that the premise of a Phallus, once it has been identified as a phallus, can be intimidating as a symbolic, if only because it may remind you of what you Lack or do you not have, or because it somehow makes you uncomfortable.
In the mythological example, which Lacan derives from Freud and rehabilitates into less of an essentialist concern and into more of a symbolic standard for a phenomena for the origin of desire, the mythical Father does not actually exist, but exists insofar as the symbol has explanative power. It is said that at the beginning of time, there existed a primordial Father, who in this case is also synonymous with the Law, or the governing aspect which qualifies desire to follow along the symbolic order, or that power which regulates every desire towards a socially acceptable way of desiring, such that this primordial Father held the only source of power, and therefore, the only worthwhile Phallus derived from his ownership over power, women and ability to castrate his sons.
It is only by the uprising of the sons against their Father—think of the myth of Cronus castrating his father Uranus, and later his son Zeus, seizing the power of Cronus as part of the Titanomachy—such that the mythological Father is not substantive in the same way that the Phallus is mythological and not substantive; in other words, the Phallus does not exist if it can be taken away, and therefore, the sons stole it from their Father and gave it to themselves, until they began to fight amongst themselves for whoever had it, which reveals the fact that none of them did.
But the mythic function of the Name-of-the-Father, and the stealing of the Phallus and its eventual dispersal amongst the children of men, is the psychological aspect of guilt which it explains, such that there is an anxiety towards castration, and therefore, an effort to place a minimum symbolic distance away from it. Once again, if you can be castrated, then in some sense you never have the Phallus to begin with, but that we find ourselves mimicking its possession by the phenomena of showing the best sides of ourselves to each Other in public, such that men especially are known to accentuate and puff up the best aspects of themselves, so that in the mirror of Others, we might appear to ourselves complete and in possession of what we stole, and which thus always know, can be stolen away from us as part of our primordial sin and retribution.
There is something to be said here about the role of women and the fact that femininity is not associated with the possession of the Phallus, but rather the receiving. But what does it mean, symbolically, to receive the Phallus? We might say that it refers to the receiving of Love, the receiving of desire and likewise the acceptance of Lack that it is the symbolic role of the woman who accepts the Phallus, and therefore femininity is closely-associated with castration, in the aspect that women for a great swathe of recorded history held a paradoxical position of motivating the rise and fall of empires and yet being held in a lesser position as a submissive and inferior side of the human race.
In the reflection of the contemporary phenomena of girl-bossing, such that the attachment of the traditional male role of the boss is now held by the woman, the girl-boss is now implied to have the Phallus, or those conventional aspects of a man who dominates, makes the Other submit to him, and thus gives; in such a case, Lacan remarks that a woman is no longer a woman, for she is no longer a woman who receives but a woman who gives, and therefore, she has become the man.
But once again we return to the fact that this is all mythological; Lacan does not posit this is how things necessarily need to be, but rather, how they currently are, such that these roles are descriptive and not normative; there is less essentialism here and more symbolic explanation for how things are and what we operate to negotiate them. One reads the literature of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler and finds the essential performativity of the feminine, or the becoming-woman aspect of womanhood; in other words, like Lacan, there is no essential feminine mystique, but a created one, which has its own symbolic function and operation. It is not that the girl-boss is really like a man, but that she dominates the symbolic regalia of a man, when in fact, she is more than her symbol as a woman too.
Therefore, there is a liberal aspect to Lacan, insofar as from his position, we can begin to consider the abolition of traditional gender roles inasmuch as their content is mythological and not substantive, and that the psychodynamics of homosexual couples or transgender experiences offer a proof an alternative system of signs and signifiers, or to the Real which rests beneath the city of symbols. In the future, there may be less of a question of who has the Phallus, but instead, a question of who is more the Beloved, and thus, whose turn is it to play this role, not as masculine or feminine, but as human upon human.
It is most obvious in the symbolic development of the woman, or how she has changed as symbol, such that there is another aspect of the Other of woman, which defines less by her femininity and more through her androgyny, or ability to negotiate the symbolic realms of both masculine and feminine, which define more and more her experience as a subject in symbolic space. Therefore, it is more permissible for a woman to be seen as having the Phallus, such that she is able to upstart men, thus reinforcing the premise of the fragility, or the concept of owning of the Phallus, which no one substantively has. And likewise, for men to be more comfortable with symbolic castration, insofar as it has less to do with his paranoia of a vengeful Father returning to claim that which he never had, but more so to acknowledge the inherent femininity of his condition, which he must perform as a role, in the dynamics of Love and the symbolic competitiveness of more women in the arena of the Phallus.
This begs the question of why the Phallus was even created in the first place, either as a cultural artefact borne from biological circumstance, or the other way around, given the trouble it has caused; but Lacan is clear about the potential for escaping some of these mythological trappings, because his fundamental premise is that nothing in the symbolic realm is as substantive as it is mythological, and thus, as real as it is created by ourselves, mediating through this human life together.
To close the second section of the seminar, I will be going through a few miscellaneous trains-of-thought, because the structure of a seminar, unless I were to expand it to several hours long, or to split its subject into two halves, is not always conducive to brevity, but which brevity is necessary if we are going to contain these seminars to some reasonable length for myself too. These reflections came to me while I wrote these seminar notes, so forgive the somewhat unsystematic treatment of them, but I feel that they are important enough to mention, because they either illustrate a crucial point about Love which is not captured in the general exploration of Loving, unless I took an off-road tangent to explain them, or because they apply to a contemporary example which could better bring Lacan into the space of the applicable to our own time.
Firstly, from the nature of the impossible object, or the objet petit a, we find both the explanation and evidence for the existence of a type inasmuch as you can find no problems with a person, and yet, they can be decisively unattractive enough to you. They can be completely handsome, beautiful or cute, and intelligent or dumb, and everything you expect to want out of a lover, but there is something missing. The point that what they are missing is that which you Lack, or more specifically, what you wish or desire for in your life, such that it could make you complete if you had it; this is why, as they say, as you get older, you become less picky about your choices, because you Lack less things, having inculcated them within yourself. This also explains the adage that we must work on ourselves first, and find Love along the way as a companion and not a solution to our problems of Lack, which is especially poignant in light of the notion that Love is doomed to fail as an impossible effort at reaching the silence of satisfying our Lack.
At an older age, you simply have less things to Lack; and you have, in other words, found yourself, and therefore what you need is straightforward, like companionship, trust, and stability, such that you have learnt to live with what you Lack, and therefore, Love is a bonus towards jouissance and not the cause of jouissance itself. Therefore, you no longer need someone to assist you in figuring yourself out, nor do you need someone to save you, and because you do not need someone too extraordinary either, given you no longer lack that aspect of yourself which would need saving. You have, so to speak, found in yourself that which you already have or have experienced at the earlier stages of your life something which allows you to be silent about your Lack, such that you learn to live with it—your insanity—and therefore, you are more willing to settle for so-called less than what you used to.
This is another word for the maturity of desire—the maturity of person—for whom maturation is the process of coming-to-terms with your own desire and thus your own failure to fulfil all of your desires. And when people in their older age have a midlife crisis, or become stricken by a desire to buy a new Porsche or commit to an incidence of infidelity, it is because they have been unable to figure out how to fill the agony of Lack on their own, and therefore, they have to find it elsewhere, instead of the one who they chose and felt that could fulfil their Lack and thus could give them the universe in the throes of their Love.
The second train-of-thought is related to grief, which thus, is related to hatred or the infiltration of the Real into the Symbolic, which is necessarily catastrophic, but which I will speak more of in Seminar III. Here I would like to draw attention to something curious: that when we are in love, we otherwise feel that we must talk about Love or say nothing at all. In other words, we must either express how we feel to Others, such that we speak of our Beloved in great excitement and joy, or say nothing at all because there is no need to speak.
If Lacan says that psychoanalysis is the speaking cure, and that the end result of psychoanalysis is a life without the need for psychoanalysis, and thus without the need to speak, having wrought unconsciousness into barred consciousness via the splitting process of language, then the point of silence about Love is the coming-to-terms with Love, and thus with the limitations to the fulfilling of Lack through Love, which is still wonderful, but what about the happy-speaking of Love?
Finding a similar model in grief, whereby the catastrophic confrontation with the Real—with the impossibility of death as contrasted by the memories, and thus symbolic universe, in the mind of the living loved one—when we need to speak of Love, we are speaking our inability to deal with the Real into consciousness, thus wrapping it as it were in a bundle of signifiers to be able to codify it into the symbolic, away at a minimum symbolic distance, from the Real as part of our Imaginary world, such that the end result is a coming-to-terms with Lack once again, and thus silence. In other words, we praise our Beloved because their existence is too much for us, it fulfils us to the point of jouissance, such that the pleasure is in excess, almost unbearable, and therefore, we have to unload this unconscious excess into consciousness, until we have nothing left to say and simply be, in the symbolic process of living with our Lack and therefore our Love.
Lastly, I would like to speak about the phenomena of the nice guy, because it has relevance to the possession of the Phallus as an auxiliary explanation for toxic masculinity and the phenomena of involuntary celibate males. As mentioned in Seminar I, a symbolic example of phallic-possession can be illustrated by a movie scene, in which a bigger man encroaches upon a smaller man, seeking to make a point about his masculinity and thus his potency and possession of the Phallus, through his aggression, his physical posturing and intimidating physique, against the smaller man, who is essentially being challenged and who can either back down or submit at the risk of being proven to not have it in the former.
In such scenarios, the cliche is for a third man, usually the Hero of middle height, who sternly but successfully tells the bigger man to back down, thus defending the smaller man from castration while castrating the bigger antagonist. It is therefore revealed who really has the Phallus—especially if the Hero is shown to wield a weapon or skilled potency of some kind—and that it is not the bigger man with his bulging masculinity who has the Phallus, who can be castrated just as quickly as the smaller man, but the man who successfully mythologises himself as having the Phallus who actually has it.
The definition of phallic-possession is therefore similar to confidence, or to self-assuredness in the power of oneself, such that the innate capability of a man is enough if he wields it with confidence, such that we might consider how actors of toxic masculinity, or those with hollow displays of masculinity, seek to gesture to their possession of the Phallus with ostentatious displays of indirect potency and instead of subtle and understated actions, for instance, to the point of barring themselves from the action of Love as a necessary move towards castration, having hoisted themselves into a mythological image in the caricature of the primordial Father—something which is brutish and possessive in the most desperate and therefore Lacking ways.
It should be noted, however, that the distinction of real phallic-possession is usually predicated on grace, or sprezzatura, or the veneer of elegance and effortlessness which self-confidence associates with and which brute potency lacks—or perhaps, we have culturally moved towards this image instead of the brutish tyrant of the primordial Father; we therefore find an explanation for the allure of the Sigma Male archetype, or the one who operates on his own rules, irrespective of whether they are disagreed with by Others, even in the case of the Law and therefore the Name-of-the-Father, such that they must have the Phallus, given how they move as if they did against the power of it.
Somewhere aside toxic masculinity is the archetype of the nice guy, or the perfectly ordinary male who, nonetheless, feels that he has the phallus and yet is denied from its benefits. He is nice, agreeable, if a little boring to the point of offensiveness, but he draws attention to the fact that he must have the Phallus—why?—because he is so nice; therefore, his need to speak or protest reveals that which he lacks.
By expounding on what make him desirable, he therefore makes himself undesirable insofar as he reveals that he lacks the Phallus by drawing attention to every reason why everyone should believe he has it; to make him able to feel like a nice guy, he gestures to how nice he is, essentially admitting that he therefore lacks everything else. But this aspect of niceness is not sufficient to satisfy the Lack of someone, inasmuch as there is usually more than a lack of niceness in life.
In the early stages of infatuation or Love, we see the potential that you might satisfy my Lack, and therefore, I consider whether I should take a gamble on you, and begin to Love you, because are you really in possession of the Phallus? Or rather, are you able to satisfy my Lack, and thus give me the universe, such that I am willing to give you a chance? It is reasonable to believe that if everything I need to create the universe is niceness, I am either desperately complete for everything except niceness, or that I am so boring that niceness is the only condition which could fulfil my Lack; in either scenario, niceness is not enough, and neither is the Phallus of the nice guy who, by drawing attention to his possession of it, precisely fails to show that he has it.
On a separate note, it is possible to imagine that the experience of being ghosted is a prelude to an intensification of pleasure, due to the repression of jouissance, and therefore the gnawing of Lack. In other words, I desire your attention, and therefore, your withholding it from me intensifies my Lack of it, almost masochistically, out of frustration, until my desire begins to transfer or defer itself as a metonymy in the signifying chain, such that I substitute you with something else—another signifier— which could give me the universe and thus I no longer desire you, who obviously cannot give it to me.
I hope you have been able to follow me through this process. To close Seminar II, I would like to reiterate that the subject of Love is complex in Lacan, because it involves both an impossible effort and an impossible delusion, and yet an impossible sacrifice of the self for an impossible objective, which does not exist, and yet which we nonetheless strive to meet as part of an impossible part of human experience. In other words, Love is a process-of-becoming, and not an end to becoming, such that we must consciously make the castrating exchange with our Beloved, who we identify, choose and only realise that we love retrospectively, as part of the signifying chain, as our best hope for fulling the objet petit a at the centre of our Lack.
If Love, at its most intense, offers an impossible annihilation of the Beloved and the Lover, an almost infinitely-close oscillation—or exchange—between the two points, we might thus consider how we interact in the less intense sections of Love, or the intentions of Love which we often mediate alone, barred from our Beloved Other through the language of signifiers which we are born into and which bring us into consciousness and therefore into Otherness as subjects, and that we still, in the absence of truly knowing someone else—and thus in spite of hatred—choose to accept them as if they could be completely transparent to us inasmuch as they could give us the universe, and given that we can imagine it to be so, even if symbolically, then we might as well say they do.
Thank you for attending the seminar.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.