Totality-Singularities
Georg Lukacs famously claimed that orthodox Marxism should foreground the concept of ‘totality’: “the category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts, is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and brilliantly transformed into the foundations of a wholly new science.”[1] Totality invokes an awareness of the wider set of social relationships which are not only constitutive of the social order but which are also determinative for the subject. Thus, “if the subject wishes to understand itself, it must conceive of the object as a totality.”[2]
In what sense does the subject conceive of the object as a totality?
Take a simple example. A cup of coffee from Starbucks might be understood as an object of exchange. But one can also recognize its place in a differential system of relationships, within which that object appears: workers harvested the beans, transported them, stocked them, and so on. The individual as subject is situated within this wider differential network that is the social whole taken as structure. It is in the crossing of the individual-object by the subject-totality that one is capable of grasping the subject as split by the Other.
We find something similar in the early work of Lacan. For example, the notion of ‘full speech’ reveals the subject’s determination within the symbolic network, such that the subject is split by the crossing of the symbolic through the imaginary. This is visualized also as a crossing within the ‘L Schema.’ There is, therefore, an implicit notion of totality in the earlier Lacan. Within the ‘L Schema’ (diagrammed below in fig. 1.0), the imaginary relationship (we might think of this as the relationship of ideal-ego and ego-ideal) ‘blocks’ access to the latent symbolic relationship of subject and Other. Therefore, the imaginary relationship that one has to oneself and to others takes precedence over the determinative subject-Other relationship.
Incidentally, Marxist sociology was also able to mark this position as fundamental through a concept of the ‘sociological imagination.’ C. Wright Mills wrote:
What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to look beyond them. And the number and variety of such structural changes increase as the institutions within which we live become more embracing and more intricately connected with one another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination.[3]
To summarize this position, which is found in the theory of commodity fetishism, false consciousness, and elsewhere, there is an equivalence of subject-object within the totality of differential elements, characterized, finally, by a splitting of the subject. It is on this basis that a dialectical method grounds itself: “[t]he revolutionary principle inherent in Hegel’s dialectic was able to come to the surface […] because of […] the concept of totality, the subordination of every part to the whole unity. In Marx, the dialectical method aims at understanding society as a whole.”[4]
The concept of ‘totality’ has been retained but taken to its limit in the work of Slavoj Zizek:
I want to defend a category which is absolutely crucial for us today, the category of totality. [It is] the tool which allows us to see how the violation of a notion is a part of the notion itself, this is totality. […] to locate a phenomena in its totality does not mean to see some hidden harmony of the whole, like, things may appear conflictual for us, that everything serves a higher goal, but your gaze was too narrow. On the contrary, for Hegel, to locate a phenomena in its totality means to include in the notion and system all of its distortions, antagonisms, as its integral parts. […] Totality doesn’t mean ‘the whole is the system,’ it means that which negates or destroys the system, threatens the system, is itself its integral part [of that system].[5]
This defense of the concept of totality has led Zizek to base much of his own work on the logic of ‘universal exceptions’:
The ‘universal exception,’ according to Lacan, is the fundamental feature of the symbolic order (the ‘big Other’) as the order of universality: each universality is grounded in its constitutive exception. This feature is to be supplemented with its no less paradoxical obverse, the so-called ‘Not-All’: an order (or rather, a field, a signifying space) with no exception that is eo ipso not-all, and cannot be totalized. These two features — formalized by Lacan in his ‘formulae of sexualition’ — are the two aspects of the inconsistency of the big Other: the symbolic order is by definition antagonistic, thwarted, non-identical-with-itself, marked by a constitutive lack, virtual — or, as Lacan put it, ‘there is no big Other.’[6]
A notion of totality — ‘concrete totality’ — is supported by that of ‘universal exception,’ that is, through a notion of the ‘inconsistency of the Other’ (conflated with ‘the inexistence of the Other’). I refer to this as the limit of the concept of totality, and it is what is most characteristic of an approach that I have named elsewhere (and defended) “dogmatic Marxism.”[7]
What of the symptom that repeats precisely when there is no big Other? What the contemporary psychoanalytic clinic demonstrates is that the symptom can still exist after the fall of the big Other. Therefore, how might we speak about the repetition of a symbolic when the big Other is not only inconsistent but also inexistent?
Those who are loosely oriented by the ‘late Lacan’ have been exploring the topic of ‘singularities.’ Singularities are not universal or constitutive exceptions, since an exception operates only within a space of mortifying signification (where, by ‘mortifying signification,’ we suppose that the signifier to drains jouissance)... They operate despite the fact that ‘there is no big Other.’ Rather, a singularity repeats and refuses to be ‘negativized’ or split by the signifier within the differential system. In 1978, Lacan claimed that the goal of analysis “consists in inciting [one] to pass through the good hole of what is offered to them as singular.”[8]
The singular is a stubborn insistence of jouissance which may be linked to the style of the psychoanalyst after having passed through analysis. Alasdair Duncan promotes a “conception of style […] that brings us back to the style of the sinthome, of the style of jouissance.”[9]
Marie Cristina Aguirre writes that “Lacan’s ambition was to demonstrate that the truth of psychoanalysis allows singularities to hold together linked not by an ideal but by a transference to psychoanalysis, a transference to analytic discourse; this transference is another name for the desire of the analyst.”[10] Thus, whereas ‘totality’ begins with the assumption of a field of the Other within which the subject is split and through which the dialectical method might be put to use, ‘singularity’ concerns what can be done with the symptom when the dialectic freezes (e.g., as in cases of psychosis). In other words, how can a social bond be established when there is no Other?
The split-subject of the differential system is taken in this second dimension as non-negativized (non-exceptional) jouissance, or what Lacan called ‘parletre.’ It is a subject all alone, outside of the totality, not implicated in the social as Other or discourse. Singularities go beyond the traversal implied in Marxist dialectics toward that which brings the dialectic to a halt, freezing the movement of history: from a traversal of the fantasy toward the sinthome as that which excludes meaning. Anne Lysy highlighted what is at stake here in her presentation to the Association of the Freudian Cause titled “The Pass of Fantasy / The Pass of the Sinthome”:
1. “First, the pass of the fantasy and pass of the sinthome are different formalizations that fall under two different regimes of jouissance in Lacan.”
2. “Second […], we have on the one hand, the barred subject, mortified by the signifier, and, on the other hand, the parletre which is the opposite side of the lack of being […] it is the subject plus the enjoying substance.”
3. “Finally, […] the symptom […] and the sinthome, or the object a and the sinthome.”[11]
I conclude from this that the concept of totality falls under a different regime of jouissance than that of singularities. This is perhaps what is at stake in pushing to the limit of the concept of totality in the work of Western Marxism today. It is our task to explore totality-singularities through the following nodes of intervention: ‘traversal of fantasy / identification with sinthome,’ ‘split-subject/parletre,’ ‘objet petit a/jouissance.’ We can therefore distinguish totality from singularity since each operates across a different register (one within the field of the Other and the other outside of that field) while emphasizing that each are important and complimentary approaches (e.g., at the end of an analysis it is important to ‘traverse the fantasy’ but also to know how to live with one’s symptom).
[1] Georg Lukacs. (1923) “The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg,” History and Class Consciousness (Rodney Livingstone, Trans). Merlin Press. Unpaginated. As retrieved on September 20th, 2021 from <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/ch02.htm>
[2] Ibid.
[3] C. Wright Mills. (1959) “The Promise,” The Sociological Imagination. As retrieved on September 20th, 2021 from <https://sites.middlebury.edu/utopias/files/2013/02/The-Promise.pdf>
[4] Georg Lukacs. (1923) “The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg,” History and Class Consciousness (Rodney Livingstone, Trans). Merlin Press. Unpaginated. As retrieved on September 20th, 2021 from <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/ch02.htm>
[5] Slavoj Zizek. (2021) “Zizek on Totality,” As retrieved on September 20th, 2021 from <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DSvuUMUeq0>
[6] Slavoj Zizek. (2014) The Universal Exception. Bloomsbury. p. x
[7] Duane Rousselle. (2021) “Capitalism is the Alternative: Dogmatic Marxism, or Worse! (A Debate with Slavoj Zizek),” The Philosophical Salon. As Retrieved on September 20th, 2021 from <https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/capitalism-is-the-alternative-dogmatic-marxism-or-worse-a-debate-with-slavoj-zizek/>
[8] Jacques Lacan. (1978) “On Pleasure and the Fundamental Rule” (Adrian Price, Trans.), The Lacanian Review, №11: Singularities (Spring, 2021). p. 21.
[9] Alasdair Duncan. (2021) “Style as a Psychoanalytic Concept,” The Lacanian Review, №11: Singularities. (Spring, 2021). p. 229.
[10] Marie Cristina Aguirre. (2021) “Question of the Guarantee in Supervision,” The Lacanian Review, №11: Singularities (Spring, 2021). p. 107.
[11] Ann Lysy. (2021) “The Pass of the Fantasy / The Pass of the Sinthome,” The Lacanian Review, №11: Singularities (Spring, 2021). p. 240.
Duane Rousselle, PhD, is a Professor of Sociology and Psychoanalysis at the School of Advanced Studies, University of Tyumen. His recent books include Real Love: Essays in Psychoanalysis, Religion, Society (Atropos, 2021), Gender, Sexuality, and Subjectivity: A Lacanian Perspective on Identity, Language, and Queer Theory (Routledge, 2020), Jacques Lacan & American Sociology: Be Wary of the Image (Palgrave, 2019), Lacanian Realism: Political and Clinical Psychoanalysis (Bloomsbury, 2018), and Post-Anarchism: A Reader (Pluto Press, 2012).
