Excerpts on ‘Generalized Foreclosure’ from Theory Underground Conference 2024

What follows is a transcript of my responses to Todd McGowan and Leon Brenner regarding the topic of ‘generalized foreclosure.’ You can watch the entire video here.

1. … Or Worse!

[…]

Duane: I will just speak for a minute, and then the rest of you will have more time. I don’t have a theory. I like what Leonard Cohen says about poetry. He says poetry is Ash, it is only evidence of life. I sometimes feel that way about theory with respect to psychoanalysis. I do have something that orients me … I think I discovered something by surprise in Lacan’s work. […] It was in Lacan’s seminar “… Or Worse,” where, in my estimation, he is really exploring the consequences of the decline of the name of the father. It’s curious because at the same time there are student uprisings happening in France. And I believe he is thinking these two things at the same time.

You know, the title of the course “… Or Worse,” you hear the sound in French of “Father.” The ellipses are meant to represent the father. So, it’s not exactly that the father is absent. It is just a question of which register we find the father. In the third seminar, on psychosis, we know that Lacan said that what is foreclosed in the symbolic returns in the real. We could say that of fathers, then. But what Lacan says in “… Or Worse,” somewhere toward the end, which I paraphrase: if we are no longer wowed by the father, if the child is no longer wowed by the father, he will be wowed by others (with a lower case ‘o’). I propose that we take that as a concept: the wow of the father. But who are the others?

In sociology, these others are the secondary social groups, outside of the family: the peers, the brothers, the fraternities, as Lacan himself called them. That is where Lacan goes at the end of that seminar. It is a theory of segregation. What is possible in the era of the decline of the father, when the father is not the dominant principle of a social bond, in whatever scale — whether it’s the family, or in geopolitics? Well, you can have social movements, social groups, that segregate from one another.

If, with the principle of the father, you can sustain a theory of exploitation or expropriation, then with the brothers, you can sustain a theory of segregation and tribal certainty. This is a touchstone for what I’ve been working on.

2. From Concept to Structure

Duane: Before I say what I’m thinking, I want to say that it’s actually quite remarkable that we’ve a group of people, each with their own kind of question, or line of work, somehow coming together around a shared theme, even though we are all approaching it differently. It almost feels like a cartel.

Where should I begin? I think Todd and Leon, you’d both be surprised at how much I agree with everything you are saying. I agree that we should not diagnose a whole society. But I would also invert things and say that I hope we could actually be a bit more deaf so that we do not hear what’s not being said. For example, generalized foreclosure doesn’t mean generalized psychosis. What does it mean?

Let’s begin with the idea of the concept. What I heard Leon say about concepts, I quite agree with: you don’t want to find psychosis in the street. But foreclosure, for Lacan, was not a concept. There’s no reason to glue it to the foreclosure of the name of the father. For Lacan, foreclosure was also for neurotics. We know this simply by looking at the dreamwork. There is an area in the dreamwork where interpretation cannot go, and that’s the ‘navel’ of the dream. We can find foreclosure in all of the clinical structures. So, if you take foreclosure as a concept, then it means psychosis.

Let’s move from concept to structure. What we know about structures is precisely that we do find them in the streets. Lacan was not a conceptual thinker in my estimation. You can go anywhere in Lacan’s work and take a concept, or what we think is a concept — lack, foreclosure, whatever you like — and you’ll find another point in his teaching where it’s defined differently: the subject, the unconscious structured like a language, the real, whatever it is. Go through the whole of Lacan’s teaching and you’ll find that he is not thinking conceptually. He is thinking structurally. It’s just a question of what structure?

Why is it also important to move from concept to structure? It is because when you move to structure you can no longer presume that society is out there, as I think I heard Leon say, or that it’s the ‘external world,’ as I think I heard Todd say. It’s not necessarily so conceptual as to presume that for everybody society is ‘out there’ or the ‘external world,’ since we know that this is not the case for some in the clinic. So my question is, from structure, where do we place the world, or society, for each singular being, or each speaking-being, or whatever else?

Generalized foreclosure is, in some sense, precisely, to take what Leon and Todd are saying to its conclusion, which is to say that we generalize foreclosure because it allows us to move from concept to structure, whereby concepts are not static. It allows us to find our position.

Generalized foreclosure is for me a very simple thing: it’s a democratization of madness. It is to say, as Lacan did in his late teaching, that we are all mad. He said: all the world is mad. So, it’s not a generalization of psychosis, which can be diagnosed, not a generalization of a concept, but of madness as such.

This discussion is fruitful, but I think I will leave it here for now.

X: Thank you so much Duane. Can we get one thing? um … I think this would help if you can kind of flesh out this distinction you’re using between thinking conceptually and thinking structurally. The difference between concept and structure, and the way you’re approaching it.

Duane: Yes, I can try.

A concept is something you can put in your pocket. You can carry the concept, like an object, in your pocket with you wherever you go. It shows the madness of a concept: you have your object in your pocket and you can pull it out whenever you like without ever abandoning it: foreclosure always equals this.

When you think structurally, it’s about locating yourself in relation to … what it is that is speaking in front of you. At this point, I think ‘structure,’ for Lacan, was ultimately Borromean. At this point it would take me maybe 20 more minutes to discuss how knot theory and topology equal structure for Lacan.

3. Gadgets and Infinite Worlds

Duane: [in response to Todd McGowan] I’m not sure that I can really respond to this, but I really like the last statement that I heard from Todd. I’ll keep thinking on it.

[…] Lacan introduced this statement, I’m going to have to paraphrase it because I do not remember it verbatim. He said something like: we should rise up to meet the struggles or subjectivity of our time. I’m thinking of Marshall McLuhan, and his ‘rearview mirror’ — trying to avoid the ‘rearview mirror’ approach. I see that the world today is perhaps not what it was pre Reagon, Thatcher, or Xiaoping. It is a question of whether or not there’s a change and of what constitutes a change. I admit that these questions are still in suspense, but one thing that I’ve noticed is that, precisely, the environment in which we have lived does seem to have changed.

I’ll speak anecdotally. George Ritzer coined the phrase ‘prosumer capitalism’ and I quite like it. It gives us a concept that can allow us to deal with something, to speak about something that’s important for us in the moment: the fact that maybe it’s time to speak of changes in capitalism. We used to get products that were already built for us and then along comes Ikea and they make us build our own furniture, and then along comes McDonalds and they make us build our own Big Maxs, and then along comes social media where they are no longer giving us the news but we have to give them the news. It is a cooling effect in the medium.

Think about video games. I used to play Super Mario Brothers as if I was reading a book: it was sequential, unidirectional, and discreet. It was ‘chapter by chapter.’ You go world by world: world 1–1, left to right, then world 1–2, left to right, as if flipping the page. And then chapter two: world 2–1, 2–2, and so on. So, you know, I’m looking at what my patients and my own child is doing with video games today and it’s a bit like they are building Big Macs.

He is thrown into an infinite environment, an infinite universe of pure excess, in some sense. It is a world without limits. You know, he is thrown into this world and he has to invent his own rules, syntax, grammar, and build walls in this world. He must invent a space to play. I first discovered this when he was playing Super Mario Maker: they provide you with the ingredients, scramble them up, like James Joyce did with his language, and he says: ‘yeah, I fucked it up — now go build something with it!’

You must learn to build something for yourself here. So, you engage in these world-building exercises instead of feeling as though you are a being-in-the-world, thrown into the world. […]

I agree with what Leon is saying insofar as we learn about these things from our patients if we are listening and not caught up in the jouissance of the idiot.

As for the gadgets of our time, we already learned about this from Freud. Freud was discussing gadgets. He wasn’t exactly critiquing capitalism, but I think what he was doing — and now I will open a can of worms — was that he was starting to approach an understanding of the influence of the convergence of capitalism and science. He started looking at Leonardo da Vinci and these Renaissance figures at this time, and he was looking at how they’re engaging with science, art, and religion during the early moments of capitalism. He found that da Vinci was starving himself, which is what we today call a ‘new symptom.’ He won’t let himself eat or drink for like 12 hours while he is in front of the canvas. This was what Freud was already writing about, but also into the 1920s when he wrote … The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents.

Freud … he’s talking about science and its impact on civilization. What did he say? Man has become a prosthetic god through his gadgets. He has extended himself — as Marshall McLuhan would also put it — in space-time, and what does Lacan add to this? He asks a simple question: will we ever get to a point when gadgets will not be symptoms? I leave that question without resolving it.

4. On Deleuze, Death, and Negativity

[Duane is asked a question about Deleuze and Guattari, and about schizophrenia and negativity]

Duane: This is sometimes a critique of Miller, who Slavoj confuses me with. He sometimes thinks that I am some puppet of Deleuze … of Miller’s ideas. And Slavoj even says that Miller has become so Deleuzian.

One of the reasons that I edited this book on negativity, which Leon and Todd were so kind to be involved with, was because I was getting thoroughly confused by the concept of ‘negativity.’ I don’t know if that’s a synonym for ‘destruction,’ but you know there is this whole thread of ‘destruction’ in the anarchist tradition. Mikhail Bakunin, was the first to say ‘destruction is also a creative act.’ Maybe it’s even the most creative act… to provoke you a bit. I’m going to treat them a little bit like synonyms, because with this book I wanted to explore what it is that constitutes negativity.

I reached a limit here. I don’t know how to explain it so if you’ll just permit me at least a minute to try and see if I can say it.

I was thinking of the dreamwork. And I was thinking of the way censorship operates in the dreamwork. I was kind of following a trajectory of Freud’s work from dreamwork to symptoms, which come later, and then to an analysis of mythologies (or what Todd Dufresne, a Canadian critic of Freud, calls Freud’s ‘sociological moment’). In this later period, what was contained, let us say the jouissance of interpretation, within the world manifests itself in symptoms that can be interpreted, or not. All of a sudden Freud was looking at the world as a dream. Freud was analyzing mythologies in the same way that he analyzed dreams. He used the same words. So there’s this trajectory of Freud: [a movement toward] witnessing the unconscious outside of himself, seeing the dream out there. The satisfactions that were hitherto contained in this dwelling space that we call the dream-world, while sleeping, were suddenly found in waking life.

This gave rise to people like Roland Barthes and so many others who were doing some sort of interpretive work on cultural material. The question for me was as follows: if in the dreamwork, the censorship was used to keep us from waking up, then censorship is a ‘false negation’ put in the service of the enjoyment, the satisfactions of sleep, then what if all of that goes outside? It leads one, precisely, to where Lacan was led at the end of his teaching when he said that we never wake up, and that the unconscious is precisely the hypothesis that we do not dream only when we are asleep. And even that we wake up only to continue dreaming. Finally, it leaves us with a question: where is negation, where is destruction? I find this in a really obscure text … Slavoj will not be happy that I discovered it because, you know, it has this idea of Lacan whispering into someone’s ear his last wisdom…

[…]

Why couldn’t we use this to go back and return to Lacan, and read everything from the beginning again? It’s in the last issue of the Lacanian Review. How does he put it? “Death is a dream.” So, death drive, theories of death drive, and so on, look at how Lacan reduces all of that to a dream. So where is negativity? I’m led to this idea that destruction, negativity, could it be a dream?

I’ll get to my point. When I hear this statement which you’ve read from Deleuze, I think about how it must have been written. It is an eloquent statement, espousing the virtues of schizophrenia as a type of destruction. Meanwhile, what did Nietzsche say? ‘I fear that as long as we have not yet eradicated grammar we have also not yet killed God.’ I mean, Deleuze is using perfect sentences, with periods and commas. I mean, he is dreaming.

5. The World and Psychoanalysis

Duane: […] I sometimes feel as though I am dangling off the other end of the world. I witnessed in Russia, a social order that would spit people out and have them publicly declare for themselves as ‘foreign agents.’ It felt very American to me … the way American groups spit something out, in ‘cancel culture.’ Rather than having a constitutive tension within the group, the tension would be outside of the group, rubbing up against the group. Lacan said that the group ‘isolates together.’ It was a curious expression, the comrades, he said, ‘isolate together,’ which means that you can have a group that segregates without a father. […]

I’m willing to put it to the test. But I can’t say much beyond that.

Except, a final point. It’s in seminar 24. Lacan talks about the world. And at first he says it is a sphere. And then he says that you could imagine a hole in the world as if man drops from it, … dangling from this hole in the world. It’s a toric world. Here, I think, we can see the extent to which Lacan was not interested in groups that operate either, on the one hand, according to a structuring principle that we can call the Father, the father function the paternal function. Or, on the other hand, a type of group that would organize horizontally.

I think Lacan was engaged in a practical sociology that led him to produce a space where we would be isolated in our singularity as if we’ve dropped from the hole in the world, but in relationship to a cause that’s either worth defending or not. Perhaps the cause is psychoanalysis. Slavoj Zizek has his cause. Or maybe the cause could be psychoanalysis. Lacan build an institution from 1964 into the 1980s that safeguarded that principle: a principle of not ‘isolating together’ but … safeguarded a space of our… let’s it a singular lonely way of relating to the cause of psychoanalysis. And its experience that would not succumb to two problematic group effects that are either hierarchical, based upon exploitation (as in the Master’s discourse), nor horizontal, segregationist. It is a whirlwind, which as far as I can tell in 20 years of revolutionary practice: it is the only space I’ve discovered that has approximated the anarchist ideal of a social group while even critiquing it.

6. The Lonely Place

One more minute. The last thing I will say is that I have found revolutionaries that were interested in this, and I’ve I’ve tried to create a bit of a history. Look at Sergia Nacheav. He said ‘the revolutionary is a doomed man, he has no friends, no family, no name, …’ and he goes on. He started from a lonely place. There was also Max Stirner, and his attack against Marxism and the comrades, but even against the anarchists. He was a nihilist of sorts. Nietzsche apparently stole a lot of his ideas. But he demolished the whole framework of what he calls ‘spooks’ and began from a lonely place.

I think that Lacan began from a lonely place in his relation to a cause. This was his challenge to those who isolate together and either seek fathers or comrades.