Foreclosure, Excess, and Painful Loves
Notes for Psychoanalysis, Pakistan
I’m exploring the topic of “foreclosure” and “painful loves” through a close reading of Patricia’s text.
Lacan extracted and gave value to the word “foreclosure” in Freud’s work in order to provide an orientation on the question of negation and affirmation (bejahung) in relation to madness. In the beginning, he approached it in close relation to the question of psychoses. Yet, it is also clear from Lacan’s writings that he did not leave it there, since foreclosure is operative in all forms of madness and not only in psychosis. For Lacan we can say that foreclosure is not an operation that is exclusive to psychosis, and yet this does not mean that it always operates on the same material. For example, it is clear that foreclosure is operative in neurotic dreams, where the signifier cannot go, in the dream’s navel, where there is an excess that goes beyond meaning and is not at all governed by fantasy.
What Patricia adds is that foreclosure is also operative in love. So, to orient ourselves, we might begin with the presupposition that there is a love that goes beyond the law of the father. Indeed, she reminds us of the “excessive” dimension of love that is apparent within the contemporary clinic and culture: “[painful love] evokes the dramatic [and] suggests a tone of excess in the pain experienced.”
The name of the father is the signifier which functions to regulate jouissance by setting a limit or an extraction of satisfaction. It is on this condition that surplus jouissance is produced, objet petit a. Yet, in painful loves, what is at stake is often a “crossing of unbearable limits.” This quotation could be read in at least two different ways: first, is it ‘the limit itself which is unbearable,’ that is, ‘the function of the name of the father?’ Or, rather, is it ‘what is unbearable is what exists beyond that limit?’ It seems to me that this is not an equivocation since it could easily be resolved that the refusal of the limit, due to it being unbearable, is itself also that which places the speaking-being beyond the limit.
It is important to distinguish, if only conceptually, between jouissance or satisfaction and pleasure. The pleasure principle is another manner of setting a limit-point or extraction-point into jouissance. How? It does so through the principle of time, that is, through delay. The Oedipal fantasy is also capable of functioning through the pleasure-reality principle pairs, though, on the other side of this pair, there is the death drive as that which is “beyond the pleasure principle.” It means that painful loves are perhaps those which cannot accept incorporation into the pleasure principle and so remain situated within the death drive.
Jacques-Alain Miller says somewhere that what Lacan ultimately extracted from the Freudian notion of death drive and libido is “jouissance.” We see that jouissance is also a type of denial which persists through bejahung, that is, foreclosure, or affirmation of satisfaction: it is often denied as a source of satisfaction and experienced as painful. When we speak of jouissance in the clinic we perhaps speak of it as something which we would like to be rid of, without recognizing that it is also a source of profound satisfaction. Or, it could be that one speaks of jouissance as a source of comfort and there is a refusal to recognize the pain that accompanies it.
We turn next to the question of lack. If there is a delay in the pleasure principle, without recourse to the law of the father, then it is because there is also the possibility of a constitutive lack. Patricia does something important by reminding us that ‘lack’ is not a Lacanian “concept.” It is situated differently depending upon one’s relationship to the Other: “what is lacking in one person is not what is lacking in the other.” Hence, we cannot so easily claim that lack is always a lack-in-being, that is, on the side of desire, or a lack-in-the-Other. With foreclosure, we are dealing with the lack of lack itself, which is an abundant lack, showing us quite obviously that lack is also a source of profound abundance, positivity and jouissance.
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Lacan refuses the position of love as that which unites into one, or what Jacques-Alain Miller elsewhere refers to as the “fusional one.” It means that the fusional one is without being, which is why there is the aphorism: “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship.” I quote Patricia, who says this in her own way: “Lacan sweeps away this illusion of love as fusion, based on the ideal form of sphere.” Yet, on the other hand, there is something of the one. Before turning to this notion of the “sphere,” I would like to quote Miller:
“Lacan uttered […] ‘there exists such a thing as One,’ which is the counterpoint to ‘there is no such thing as the sexual relation.’ […] On the one hand, there is this sentence that says what there isn’t, that there is precisely no sexual union, no sexual one […] which supposes two halves that fit together. This One does not exist — the fusional one. […] While the fusional one does not exist, there exists the discrete one. […] one repeats the same element, but it gets detached more and more, […] it becomes fully detached.”
So, we can see a difference: from the existence of the One and the lack of a sexual relation at the level of being, at the level of ‘is.’ So, when there exists an “affective attachment,” as Patricia puts it, in love, it topologizes a sphere, which means that it is a figure without a ‘hole,’ which makes it an imaginary as well as real structure. The sphere, this one, shows us a topology that forecloses castration. It is why Patricia discusses painful loves as operative through a foreclosure of castration.
The sphere, which is obviously without a hole — although Lacan once wondered if it was itself a hole — is the ultimate topology of foreclosure of the hole. At this point, it is not the name of the father that is foreclosed, but the hole. And perhaps we can say that the impact of the name of the father, that is, the signifier, upon the sphere, would have produced a sort of dream world with a hole, that is, with a navel.
What Patricia adds to all of this, since this is actually nothing new, is that love can produce this type of foreclosure: production of an imaginary world without hole. This is why, I think, Patricia resituates Freud’s discussion of love as a sort of narcissism, that is, as an imaginary relation. She then invokes a well-known formula which was first presented by Lacan during his seminar of psychosis: what is rejected in the symbolic returns in the real. It is a nice formula for foreclosure, and it leads me to wonder if this occurs not only in psychosis? Does the neurotic not also reject, in the navel, something which returns, furiously, as the interpretation of dreams, as a sort of real-symbolic — a pseudo-symbolic, or what we can simply call semblance?
Patricia sticks to the topic of love: the rejection of the name of the father returns the father as a monster threatening within the real: always potentially traumatizing or ravaging. I quote Patricia: “Eros, because it has been rejected, reappears in the real in the form of a monster whose effects we know quite well enough in everyday life.” The second part of this is a nested quote, it is Lacan’s words. Hence, Lacan said that a certain type of love, when rejected, returns in the real as a monster. Lacan said: “as I state with every foreclosure, love manifests itself in the real through the most inconvenient and depressing effects.”
So, one of the modalities of this return, a return which refuses castration, is depression, or melancholia. Melancholia was typically linked with psychosis, and here it is perhaps also possible to think of it as a more pervasive trait. We often think of psychosis as without fantasy, or with fantasy situated in another register. Patricia wrote: “love ignores the narcissistic fantasy from which it draws its support […] which indicates the refusal or rejection of unconscious knowledge.” This is the statement that has produced the most confusion in our discussions. It could be read in at least two ways. I hazard to claim that the fantasy is not present, except that it responds to it as a possibility, which is why the trouble starts. What we know of the unconscious is that it is supported by a fundamental fantasy, which forms the basis for the Freudian unconscious as an unknown knowledge. This is the unconscious that would be deciphered or translated as a latent knowledge.
But the rejection of the unconscious as a knowledge introduces us to the Lacanian unconscious, or what Miller has called the ‘real unconscious.’ In fact, it was a phrase already used at least once by Freud. The refusal of unconscious knowledge is a refusal of refusal itself, by which I mean a refusal to relinquish satisfaction. In fact, it is an affirmation of satisfaction. There is a thread of melancholy, since melancholia is, as Russell Grigg once put it, defined by not being without its object. This is perhaps another way to enter into an orientation on Lacan’s statement that depression is a failure in one’s ability to be well-spoken, that is, in one’s ability to navigate oneself amidst the unconscious. A new lack, … Miller calls it “knowledge lack,” which is a lack of unconscious knowledge itself.
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Courtly love is taken up as a “fact of discourse,” which allows, through the establishment of a domain of pleasure, a delay to satisfaction by inventing a space where “it doesn’t work” anymore. This is why it is called an “invention,” since an “invention,” in the Lacanian orientation, refers to a way of instituting pleasure without the traditional pathway of the name of the father. It allows one to live “in the absence of the sexual relationship.” Could we not say that it permits man to drop out of this sphere, as if through a hole in it? Against satisfaction, that is, jouissance, there is a “suspension of carnal pleasure, the negotiation of the detour, and the accessibility of the object […] [which become part of] a discipline of pleasure and non-pleasure.” This is how the troubadours invented a mode of initiation into the pleasure/reality principle, eros, as a defence against thanatos, death drive.
The new horizontal logic of the not-all, which is not governed anymore by fathers, is spherical. Lack takes on a new dimension, since it is overflowing, abundant, or a positivity without limit: a boundless seriality which constitutes the feminine side where fathers become either tyrants or simps. I note with interest that the watchwords of the new painful loves are also words often used by comrades: “control, manipulation, domination, forcing, abuse, …”
We enter into the last period of Lacan’s teaching where love occurs between two speaking-beings who repetitively encounter the possibility of unconscious knowledge, but not without recoiling. The push of these encounters can introduce an “exile from the sexual relationship,” through the establishment of a symbolic that would inaugurate a pleasure against satisfaction without or in place of the father. Hence, there is a new tension: speaking-beings who relate to their partners as symptoms, through jouissance.
What changes or what is possible of love beyond the foreclosure of castration? There is the traumatic mark which one confronts repetitively and which would institute a destinal point toward the impossible relation to others. Yes, against the temptations of sex, today’s young one’s are inventing these spaces for themselves while many of us nonetheless remain within the sex-positive economy. A psychoanalyst holds a place which would allow satisfaction to enter into language. She did not say lalangue, but language. I would say that language is a common space that could only be occupied by one who allows him or herself to know-how to make that illusion work out.
