Everything Slavoj Zizek Already Knew About Jacques-Alain Miller

Note: The following is a transcription of my debate with Slavoj Zizek which appeared at an event that I inspired and organized. This text was also gently edited by Dr. Wanyoung Kim.

By way of a preface, I’d like to make a quick complimentary remark, which should be taken as admiration of yesterday’s presentations. What did I admire?[1] Well, I admired that nobody removed the page from another person due to time or personal differences, or whatever. Everybody had their space to speak, as Matthew Flisfeder has put it. In fact, instead of doing that, we seemed, mostly, to be thinking in solidarity with one another, committing, in some sense, to the basic ideas put forward by our peers. Of course, I offer solidarity as well, in whatever way I am capable, given the circumstances.

I was even thinking that removing a sheet of paper, scanding, as it were, without knowing what speaks in front of you, can produce devastation. It demonstrates the importance placed, within the clinic, on what are called “preliminary sessions.” Removing the sheet could even be seen by some as a mishandling of the psychoanalytic position. Why? Well, perhaps you have before you, as one analyst did– I went to a clinical presentation a few months ago where this was the case– an adult man who never spoke a word, but who doodled, scribbled, endlessly upon the pages. He always drew the same animal, … something like a fish in this case. And maybe what you discover is that this is an attempt of the man to reach out to the Other who was hitherto missing.

In this case, if you remove the sheet of paper while the man is still in the process of invention, that is, before you are permitted to hold onto it, then you could instigate horrific anxiety for the man. It means that perhaps its best in such circumstances to resist the temptation to occupy the traditional role of the psychoanalyst who thinks he knows the person who is sitting in front of him. You don’t know him. What’s required is perhaps not a psychoanalyst but … a secretary. It is why I wouldn’t take away the page from Slavoj either, suggesting for example, that he is now in the “late” period. No, it’s not yet the late Slavoj, which, perhaps, means that something wonderful in him has already died. He’s not dead. He is living, working, and producing, book after book, and it’s a very nice solution. It is why our bookshelves are lined with the pages that he has written all of these years. I insist upon the fact that he still has many masterpieces to invent, and Surplus Enjoyment is just a small taste of what’s in store for us. So, instead of a psychoanalyst, … a secretary. A good friend. Maybe that is what’s required.

Okay. Let’s see what I will say today.

Whatever it is that I’m going to say today should be taken as a gesture of a new friendship. It is a lonely position. I distinguish it from the fraternal one, which, in my estimation, follows a segregative logic, rendering the social bond internally consistent by spitting out perceived points of opposition. That’s solidarity. While Slavoj’s work can give rise to fraternal effects, it’s not reducible to them, and even provides us with a counterpoint. In any case, my objective is simply to advance a few coordinates that might allow us to twist some of Slavoj’s well-worn ideas into a different register.

I propose … [Duane remains quiet for some time] … that Lacan went to the “end” during his teaching. We are sometimes given the impression that Lacan’s teaching ended after his engagement with the concept of ‘surplus jouissance,’ but it persisted, long after the worst, that is, long after the demise of … what? The father, le pere. It was in the “worst” seminar that he warned us of the rise of fraternities, comrades, thereby outlining a movement from “the decline of the pere” to the ascendency of the peers. In the third seminar he made an interesting point in passing about our psychotic, Schreber, who, according to the other psychotic, Lacan, stabilized himself during an early melancholic phase through identification with his college fraternity, The Brothers of Cassiopeia. In any case, Lacan’s later teaching– the 1970s, with “La Troisieme,” and into the 24th and 25th seminars in particular … these are the pages that he continued to write upon– was marked by an explicit twisting of his prior ideas, resituating them. He repeated earlier phrases: “the unconscious structured like a language,” “the subject represented by a signifier to another signifier,” “the subject supposed to know,” and so on. Yet, he also, we know, took pride in his refusal to say the same thing twice.

You know, he wasn’t in the same place. He returned to the beginning long after he discovered what he named “the Lacanian unconscious,” distinguishing it from the idiotic Freudian one. Yes, he called Freud an idiot. I would have been convinced that it was an insult had he not also continued to call for a “return to Freud.” Freud’s neurotic world was idiotogical,[2] without which we would not have been positioned to discuss any politics of psychoanalysis.’ It doesn’t imply that there are no modalities of idiocy in the Lacanian universe. But Lacan maintained that the field nonetheless remains Freudian. And it was within this context that he made his enigmatic statement: “I do not say that politics is the unconscious but that the uncosncious is politics.” To witness politics from a distance perhaps indicates a decoupling of our friendship with the Freudian unconscious, since it becomes witnessed as a traumatic signifier threatening the consistency of the social bond. There is a refusal of the signifier that would have instigated any “politics of the unconscious.”

It doesn’t mean that the signifier doesn’t return, inevitably, in the real. It is why we can still speak of a return to Freud. In fact, everybody seems triggered by Freud today. The cancellation of the unconscious doesn’t preclude its return through the repetition of this failed encounter with the signifier. It leaves me with a question regarding this expression, “symbolic suicide:” is it an endpoint to be moved toward or did it already happen? I do not believe that it is something we should imagine waiting for us at the end of our analysis, or even in the midst of some profound political act. Perhaps this makes of “the end” a caricature, or a false negativity that perpetuates the fiction that there ever was a world from which to extract ourselves. The rejection of the symbolic world has already happened, and symbolic suicide maybe provides a nice fictional support for the delusion that we still live in a Freudian world. Why? Suicide is always suicide-from a symbolic world, a world that, at the end, you discover wasn’t there from the beginning.

I propose that we imagine two groups … group a and group sigma. Each demonstrates an encounter with the later teachings of Lacan. Group a retreats. Yet, the Other Lacan … pere-severs. Group sigma read Lacan to the end, and, for that reason, are susceptible to isolating themselves inside of a closed loop, detached from the world, repeating Lacan like an addiction. There is gossip that one of Jacques-Alain Miller’s prized students sits away in a room like a monk, reading Lacan from morning until evening, day after day. Miller once even claimed that he himself was addicted to Lacanian psychoanalysis, which reminds me of a wonderful moment, two decades ago, when Slavoj was accused of being dogmatically Lacanian– to which he responded: “I am dogmatically Lacanian!” Although I wonder if anybody would today make the same accusation, it so happens that it was a part of Alain Badiou’s critique: Slavoj is too psychoanalytic. It would be strange for me to therefore claim that he is not psychoanalytic enough. So, that is not exactly my claim.

There is another anecdote that I’d like to share. Slavoj, while watching Lacan speak on television, mocked his gesticulations, suggesting that he embellished his discourse to obscure what were in actuality simple ideas. Here, Slavoj forms a tactical alliance with Noam Chomsky. What I witnessed when I watched the same Lacan on television was a man deeply troubled by … what? Lacan sighs. He remains quiet for extended periods of time. It was not that there were simple ideas that were obscured by complexity and performativity, but rather that even the simple ideas were too much to speak of a real. You know, there was no ready-made knowledge for him to extract from his repository of psychoanalytic knowledge: he did not provide a lecture, he provided a teaching. He held seminars. I wouldn’t claim, then, that Lacan was an idiotogue, when he appeared there on television.

In any case, group sigma detaches themselves from any independent exploration of … Hegel … or Marx. You’ve likely never heard a member of the New Lacanian School proclaim with enthusiasm: “I am Hegelian!” It is possible, but I wouldn’t expect it. They take Lacan’s teaching in a circle, as if without a cut, and they are capable of going around and around in it. But group a presume a cut, even for the sigmas.

Is sigma cut? It is why a device had to be invented in order to keep this circularity from repeating without novelty: the “plus one” of the cartel. We cannot say that sigmas miss something essential in their reading of Lacan because they do nothing but read Lacan, mostly in their cartels. The plus-one was introduced to promote productive misreadings, that is, to keep us from returning to what we already know that we know about Lacan. Miller has said that the plus-one comes with question marks, to make holes in heads. We cannot therefore claim that sigmas miss something that group a have discovered in Lacan, since the problem is quite the opposite: sigmas can too easily slip into non-perplexity … they are dogmatically Lacanian!

It’s why I like the clever subtitle of Slavoj’s latest book: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed. He didn’t write the book for those idiots who don’t know what they know. I wonder nonetheless what device exists, for those in and around the Slovenian School, when the plus-one, whose function is to disrupt group effects that stifle knowledge, to escape the various modalities of idiocy? Provisionally, I would say that we can do without the plus-one provided that Slavoj Zizek continues to work. So, it is not, as many people presume, that Slavoj’s work offers some gentle introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis which can be abandoned once one pursues more serious efforts. Not at all. Slavoj’s work functions like a plus-one, as a guide for the non-perplexed.

Yet, I would nonetheless ask: is it possible that those oriented by the Slovenian School do not know how to make do with this later Lacan, this sigma? I imagine three positions from which a rejection of this Other Lacan might occur. First, perhaps one neglects any sustained encounter with the late teachings while explicitly critiquing those who take their bearings from that period, sigmatizing them as “Millerian,” “anarchist,” “anti-Leftist,” “authoritarian,” “liberal,” and so on. The approach supposes a classical group effect. For the sake of simplicity, I call this position Milleria. Second, perhaps one does notice some similarities among those who follow the later teaching of Lacan and Miller. One can now move from neglect of the late Lacan to a more pointed attack, opposing it to the early-middle period. Maybe the claim is that Lacan turned away from what was truly of value in his teaching, lost his thread, and perhaps also lost his mind. So, great: he became a piece of waste! Is that enough for us to take away the page from him mid-way through his seminars?

Maybe this position extends also into a claim that those who seem to cling to the late period are idiots in search of some “final wisdom” to unlock the deep secrets of psychoanalysis. It seems to me that this supposition can only be sustained from a particular vantage point, one that foregrounds the domain of repressed meaning, the “unknown knowns.” It effectuates a false cut, a false scansion, separating the Other Lacan from the early-middle periods. The third position goes much further than the previous two by recognizing early indications of the problematic later teaching, asking: where did it all go wrong? Yet, still, from this position, there is no sustained investigation of the later Lacan. Ultimately, the strategy is to isolate mysterious moments and do away with them, spitting them out, through secondary revision.

Okay. Going to the end in psychoanalysis implies, among other things, that one continues one’s analysis. It does not end with the much discussed “traversal of the fantasy,” that is, after the screen of fantasy has opened up into a “window upon the Real.” At this point one discovers that the fictions of the symbolic world were always fictions, even from the beginning. One must know how to live in this space, where the stubborn sigma, that bone of the symptom perseveres … that is, after the weight of speech has released its grip upon the real. What is sometimes, though rarely, named a “psychoanalyst” is simply one who has convinced a few people that this has been accomplished. It occurs when one moves beyond the Freudian impasse of the cut, of subjective destitution, and so on. It is why I would say that Slavoj Zizek is something like a psychoanalyst. As for me, it remains a question that compels me to continue working.

Lacan made himself responsible for the consequences of his lonely Founding Act by extending it into and beyond his Proposition. In doing so, he reinvented his relationship to psychoanalysis and to the unconscious. He didn’t merely separate from the fictions of the International Psychoanalytic Association, the IPA. He went further, taking responsibility for the construction of a School. He found that the hierarchical and initiatory social bonds that preceded him in the IPA were a total sham, they were always a total sham. He released the secret. He didn’t propose to replace the IPA with a fraternity of comrades. This would only re-establish the problematic initiatory practices that he dedicated himself to eradicating. He proposed the School, with the cartel as its fundamental organ, as a means through which to avoid initiatory societies that force its qualifications upon members. Thus, after going to the end of his psychoanalytic world, he proposed a new mode of work, friendship, a new mode of relating to the world. It led him to the necessary practical work of developing a School that would neither succumb to mastery nor fraternity, neither exploitation nor segregation, neither hierarchy nor horizontalism.

Anyway, I am led to develop some new vocabulary for myself to get a sense of this end that has already happened. I would say that our situation is really worse today. There are new challenges that we face. For example, there is the production of false negatives, faux-negs, that postpone the traumatic encounter with the signifier. The signifier would have negativized the stubborn jouissance, introducing a hole into the void. I cannot therefore claim that I am interested so much in “constitutive negativity,” because what troubles me is “constitutive positivity”: this “something” of jouissance that remains resolutely positive in the symptom.

Consequently, I would say that we are not at all in a negative period of history. The crises in international politics, wars, ecological or environmental disasters, pandemics, financial and inflation crises, and so on, … all of this indicates to me that we are in a deeply positive moment. It is in this sense that I speak of toxic positivity, and I have the audacity to suggest that our depressing time is one of the production of false negatives. Depression is perhaps ultimately a deeply positive experience. Today’s wars indicate an incredulity toward the signifier, peace treaties, trade agreements, peace talks, and so on.

Maybe you know about Sabina Higgins, actress and wife of the President of Ireland, who I have no trouble defending– in spite of how unfashionable it is to do so — because she was attacked recently for claiming in a letter that there should be a return to dialogue and a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia. Many claimed, including most of the popular Irish radio talk show personalities, that this implicitly denies Russian aggression, since you cannot negotiate with a bully. Some are even now calling her among the “pro Russian left.” It shows us how far removed we are from the days of Immanuel Kant, when, in his essay on Perpetual Peace, he argued, in a really nice way, that war — what in the Freudian field is referred to as thanatos, death drive, and so on — displaces people, but, in doing so, inevitably produces more secure and enduring symbolic ties precisely through trade agreements, peace treaties, various contracts, and so on.

Okay, let me try this argument from a different direction. I am only summarizing some ideas that struck me recently in a seminar I led a few weeks ago.

I am a deep admirer of Alenka Zupancic’s work. In referring to LGBTQIA+ she argued, quite convincingly, that the “plus” is the place of “a difference that makes a difference,” which means that it is the place of constitutive tension. On the contrary, my claim is that the plus is a faux neg, or, rather, a “separation that doesn’t make a separation” … from jouissance. The plus is a mechanism according to which jouissance perseveres against the threatening world: does the plus not stand-in for the negativity of the signifier of the world (which has been refused), and which the chain of equivalences nonetheless confronts, resisting it, endlessly exchanging it for the positivity of its jouissance– its lalangue. It defends against the world that would pierce the chain: the fraternal group pere-severs against the non-du … pierce.

Before concluding, I just want to make two more basic points. You likely already know about Slavoj’s interpretation of Donald Rumsfeld’s justifications for pursuing military interventions in Iraq. According to Rumsfeld, there are known knowns, which consist of what we know we know, known unknowns, which consist of what we know that we don’t know, and, finally, the horrifying unknown unknowns, which consist of what we don’t even know that we don’t know about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The unknown unknowns justified the American intervention in Iraq, and yet it is interesting that they came pre-packaged with a domain of certainty: “… there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” It was at this point that Slavoj imposed what he already knew about Rumsfeld: the unknown knowns, that is, ideology, which was not revealed by way of parapraxis in Rumsfeld’s speech. Simply, its presupposition: its Lacanian ideology at its purest!

Lacan said: “severing is not the same as negating […] there is the One, but that’s all there is. The one dialogues all alone […] It’s the one who knows and not the subject supposed to know.” To pere-sever is not the same as negating. It is a false negation. To demonstrate this difference consider the shift in American gender theory, exemplified in some of the newest social movements. In the early days of queer theory, when Judith Butler gave the popular example of an individual standing in front of the restroom door, doubting their fit within the hegemonic gender paradigm: “am I really this gender that the Other claims me to be?” Today one more often walks briskly into the restroom and encounters threats and insults, even violence, and we can be certain that this does indeed occur.

I even think about Althusser’s theory of ideological interpellation: an adult walking in the street is hailed by a police officer. There is no indication that a prohibition occurred in interpellation. Where is constitutive lack, where is the subject split by the signifier? Perhaps interpellation is simply an initiation into the fraternal order of police. Today’s police officers even seem to occupy two functions: non-du-peers or non-du-pierce, they either get down on one knee with us or else they engage in horrific acts of violence. In some sense, I miss the days when leftists simply imagined police as evil extensions of a repressive apparatus. Are these really the only two options on the table: horrific violence or comrade?

So, we are already living in times of profound destitution. I find it increasingly difficult to locate the idiots. There has been a move from social bonds anchored by universal prohibitions upon jouissance toward the pere-severance of the symptom expressed in the logic of particular affirmations of jouissance. The example I often give is that of the “Citizens Amendment Act,” passed into law under Prime Minister Modi in India a few years ago. It affirms the rights of citizenship for persecuted segments of Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, and Christians. There are no explicit prohibitions here. Yet, it doesn’t mean that they are not felt severely when they are unwritten, because … why not Muslims? As you know, the anti-semetic legislation of the Nazis explicitly prohibited Jews, Homosexuals, Communists, Freemasons, and so on. Fraternal principles of civility are capable of producing similar results. It is why I am tempted to completely abandon these group identifications known as Left or Right, since, for me, there only remains an orientation, and this matters far more than any nostalgia for a Left that lost its thread.

This led me to propose that the Marx we often encounter in the university– which is the Marx of pre-1844–distracts us from what is actually happening in our world today. For example, the problem is not an estrangement within a social world, but rather an estrangement of the social world itself. Heaven itself is in disorder. And we cannot begin with the presupposition that we desperately require an alternative to capitalism because it is clear to me that capitalism is the alternative. Our situation is much worse. It is necessary to invent a social bond–you can call it communism if you want, I don’t care–to which we would finally be willing to submit ourselves, one that would offer the world we never had from the beginning. Maybe the challenge is finally to know how to begin. That requires that we go to the very end.

August 30, 2022

[1] Duane is responding to presentations made during a conference with Slavoj Zizek. In particular, he is referring to remarks made by Gabriel Tupinamba. Tupinamba advanced an argument that one should remove the page from some authors before they finish writing, highlighting the “in between” moments in Slavoj’s work

[2] Sounds like “ideological.”