The Cultural Superego or the Demand for Universality
Lieve Billiet
In 1930 Freud, located the source of the discontent in civilization in the tyranny of the superego, which he saw at work at both the cultural and individual levels.
At the cultural level, the superego takes the form of an imperative of universal love: thou shalt love thy neighbor, without distinction, simply because he is a human being. According to Freud, this imperative is unrealizable and unacceptable. It is unrealizable because “human beings are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.”[1] It is unacceptable because “if I love another, he must deserve it in some way. […] He deserves it if he is so like me in important ways that I can love myself in him; and he deserves it if he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in him. Again, I have to love him if he is my friend’s son, since the pain my friend would feel if any harm came to him would be my pain too.”[2] So what I ultimately love in the other is my ideal ego, my ideal of the ego or my lack.
To this Freudian thesis – what I love in the other is myself – Lacan will add that what I hate in the other is also myself: “My neighbor possesses all the evil Freud speaks about, but it is no different from the evil I retreat from in myself.”[3] Indeed, “what is more of a neighbor to me than this heart within which is that of my jouissance and which I don’t dare go near? For as soon as I go near it, […] there rises up the unfathomable aggressivity from which I flee.”[4] Lacan qualifies this close and foreign core as extimacy.[5] “The neighbor, this intolerable imminence of jouissance”[6] which is situated, he says, “in a place that we can designate by the term extimate, conjoining the intimate to radical exteriority.”[7]
In 2023, the subjectivity of the time is no longer that of 1930. The cultural superego no longer takes the form of an imperative of universal love, but presents itself as an imperative of universal rights, a demand for verticality and equality, a universal humanism.[8] Lacan predicted that the tendency towards universalisation, which is an effect of the capitalist discourse and the discourse of science, would give rise to a process of segregation and of increasingly harsh racism. It is jouissance that resists universalization. And that, from being denied or rejected at the level of the universal, it returns in the real. “All are equal” no doubt, but not as far as jouissance is concerned. Contemporary racism aims at the jouissance of the Other.[9] But this jouissance of the Other is ultimately my jouissance. At this opaque point of the real, the distinction between Ego and the Other is effaced. The hatred of the jouissance of the other is the hatred of my own jouissance.
References
[1] Freud, S., “Civilisation and Its Discontents” (1930), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI, London, Hogarth Press, 1964, p. 111.
[2] Ibid. p 109.
[3] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by D. Porter, London, Tavistock/Routledge, 1992, p. 198.
[4] Ibid., p. 186.
[5] Ibid., p. 139.
[6] Lacan J., Le Séminaire, livre xvi, D’un Autre à l’autre, text established by J.-A. Miller, Paris, Seuil, 2006, p. 225, unpublished in English.
[7] Ibid., p. 249.
[8] Miller J.-A., “Les causes obscures du racisme,” Mental, November 2018, No. 38, p. 143.
[9] Ibid., p. 148.