From the Small (a) to the Big Pile
Geert Hoornaert
Im-monde, our world? Undoubtedly this was the case in Freud’s time, who noted that this life, if it is to be bearable, requires intoxicants.[1] At the point where we are, it is in the a-world that we reside, not because we would be, like the Heideggerian stone, “deprived” of it, but because we are positively situated in a place that is topologically torn apart by the rise to the zenith of sedatives.
Let us take this a-monde as the world governed by the a – this object about which Freud writes a eulogy at the heart of his Discontents. In affirming that the real in life would be untenable without the object a being placed at the heart of our exile, he resumes his earlier developments.[2] The preservation of life demands that the drives, constant forces in the body, be diverted to the external world. It is in this movement, which “withdraws the stimulated substance from the influence of the stimulus”[3] that the object emerges: it will allow the most intimate in the social to be situated, and for the formation of the terrain where individual and culture will compete for satisfaction. Psychical benefactor for the individual, the object also shapes the Other of culture, from where he will be able to recover, as if it were the megastore of his intimacy, the consoling substitutes of the lost object.
This importance of the object explains the place of production in every society. Economies are grafted onto internal demand, and none does it more astutely than the capitalist market. By removing the obstacle of the Master, its production is directly connected to the will of the subject, which nothing can restrain.[4] The incentive and the demand of the offer then prevail; production galore of objects that the Ego wants to incorporate,[5] but which, far from replacing the “fateful object a,”[6] “spread the lack-of-jouissance over the entire surface of the globe.”[7] This disinhibition of production qualifies a seriously modified discontent compared to the discontent that Freud pivots around repression.[8] It changes from top to bottom the subject’s relationship to the three sources of suffering inventoried by Freud: the body, social relationships, and so-called nature.
A “prosthetic God”[9] already in Freud’s time, man is now a geophysical force, whose planetary impact rivals the forces of nature. A new destiny for object libido! We are no longer in the era of interdiction when it was anxiety which signalled the accumulation of internal excitations. Today, it is nature that gets excited, and that frightens us too.
Freudian anxiety, a signal of “internal” dangers,[10] is thus doubled by a twin correlated with the Real as “the possible par excellence.”[11] Manipulated bacteria, atomic bomb or iPhone… the object has mutated. From a thing resulting from a know-how, it has become a device produced by calculation, which “has the property of propagating the real in a very special way.”[12] Consumed by the clutter of these devices, the world “is no longer made for man precisely to the extent that it is increasingly made by man.”[13] How then can we find our way around? Where should the body slip to when labitat “of the man-turn [l’homme-volte] becomes the labyrinth from which man does not exit”?[14] And where will the subject be able to house the various sorts of his own formations, when science and the market offer no discourse for providing a social bond?
Historically, our “world” never had to worry about the “planet.” Authoritarianism, nativism, the challenges of energy transition, health crises and geostrategic wars, biodiversity loss, water scarcity or excess methane, climate justice and its financial aspects – all these phenomena bear the mark of the intrusion of the “planet” within the polis, and this disorients the politicians. The market sees opportunities, but the community is under tension. A social paranoia emerges, where “footprints” are closely monitored; lifestyle prescriptions border on xenophobia; influencers promote various “brown” or “green” modes of jouissance; populists sell their phobias of all things fluid and their identity politics as a way to restore nature; and the little Egos, tired of the race towards progress,[15] free themselves from the bonds, reinforcing, off the grid,[16] the anomie they denounce; conspiracy, which pushes the new dico towards “I think therefore it is,” cries out at manipulation at the very moment that civilisation without a Master is powerless to regulate anything.
Since the forces of nature are a source of suffering, Freud noted that we would be better off by, “with the help of a technique guided by science, going over to the attack against nature and subjecting her to the human will.”[17] A virus has just reminded us of this. But from this nature transformed into a “potpourri of what is not in the nature of anything,”[18] the protection of technology comes back to us as a boomerang. Is it not because something has been refused that it becomes agitated and heats us up? Freud gives us an indication. “The instinct of destruction, moderated and tamed, and, as it were, inhibited in its aim, must, when it is directed towards objects, provide the ego with the satisfaction of its vital needs and with control over nature.”[19] This Ego went there as if under the influence of a Münchhausen by proxy, and this disinhibition has awakened a third party that interferes in “the contest concerning the distribution of libido.”[20] Speaking in the name of a malaise in its domain, nature claims its share of satisfaction, and by forcing us to “decrease,” it is as if it has installed itself into the seat that has become vacant with the capitalist discourse: the seat of the “obstacle” and the “safeguard,”[21] from which yesterday’s culture subjected satisfaction to temperance.[22]
Decrease, the subject? It suffices to look at the Freudian inventory of sedatives: there is no Zen state of the subject. As long as the lack-of-being incessantly activates the desire to “grow” via the objects that must allow it to repeat its escape from itself, this vital aspiration will continue to mingle seamlessly with the death drive. It is into this driving force – which entirely colours “the relations of human beings to possessions”[23] – that the analyst can insert himself, in order to break it. By condensing on himself the libido that drifts towards the phony objects, he will give the subject the opportunity to construct a freer relation to his primary property, which is lack.
References
[1] Cf. Freud, S. (1930), “Civilization and Its Discontents,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 21, London, Hogarth Press, 1964, p. 78.
[2] Mainly in “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” (1915) and “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914).
[3] Freud, S., “Instincts and their Vicissitudes”, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 14, op. cit., p. 118.
[4] For a clear development, cf. Jacques-Alain Miller’s “Jouer la partie” [Play the Game], La Cause du désir, Issue 105, Paris, Navarin, June 2020, pp. 17-29.
[5] Cf. Freud, S., “Instincts and their Vicissitudes”, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, op. cit. p. 137.
[6] Lacan J., “D’une réforme dans son trou” (1969), La Cause du désir, Issue 98, Paris, Navarin, March 2018, p. 13.
[7] Miller, J.-A., “L’avenir de Mycoplasma laboratorium,” La lettre mensuelle, Issue 267, April 2008, p. 12.
[8] Cf. Miller, J.-A., “The Era of the Man without Qualities,” tr. T. Sowley, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, Issue 16, London, London Society of the NLS, 2007, pp. 7-42.
[9] Freud, S., “Civilization and Its Discontents,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, op. cit., p. 92. With this term, Freud describes man as provided with auxiliary organs, which are the technical tools that are connected to his body to increase its power.
[10] Namely: accumulation of excitations, distress, loss of object, severity of superego, castration.
[11] Cf. Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, tr. D. Porter, London, Routledge, 1992, p. 286.
[12] Miller, J.-A., “The Era of the Man without Qualities,” Psychoanalytical Notebooks, Issue 16, op. cit. p. 31.
[13] Ibid., p. 33.
[14] Lacan, J., “L’étourdit” (1972), Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p. 455. [TN: The French term l’homme-volt is equivocal with the German Umwelt.]
[15] Lacan, J., (1974), “Freud Forever: An Interview with Panorama.” tr. P. Dravers, Hurly-Burly, Issue 12, Paris, NLS, 2015, p. 15.
[16] [TN: In English in the original.]
[17] Freud, S., “Civilization and Its Discontents,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, op. cit., p. 77.
[18] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII, The Sinthome, ed. J.-A. Miller, tr. A. R. Price, Cambridge, Polity, 2016, p. 4. Cf. J.-A. Miller’s elaboration: “Capitalism and science combine, they have combined, to make nature disappear. And what is left by the vanishing of nature, what is left is that which we call the real, that is, a remainder [and, by structure, disordered],” “The Real in the Twenty-First Century,” Hurly Burly, Issue 9, tr. R. Litten, Paris, NLS, 2013, p. 204.
[19] Freud, S., “Civilization and Its Discontents,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, op. cit. p. 121.
[20] Ibid., p. 141.
[21] Miller, J.-A., “Jouer la partie,” La Cause du désir, op. cit., p. 27.
[22] Difference: It will be more complicated to negotiate with this return of the superego in the real than with a Master.
[23] Freud, S., “Civilization and Its Discontents,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, op. cit. p. 143. Let us note that after having rejected every idealist programme – natural ethics, religion, socialist ideology – as a response to the discontent, Freud locates a possible amelioration only in, he adds, “a real change in the relations of human beings to possessions.”