Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis

5. Changing the World

121 5 Changing the World The Modern Critique of Normality If an ethical subjectivity is possible, it would seem that this subjectivity would have positioned itself outside the straitjacket of normality. Normality represents, according to our usual way of thinking about it, a flight away from ethical and political responsibility with an embrace of mass unthinking passivity. Much of the energy of modern thought, art, and politics has been dedicated to the idea that normality is a prison that inhibits societal change or even simply individual flowering. According to this idea, the failure of intellectual, aesthetic, and political revolutions stems from the power that normality has for producing stasis. Capitalist society defeats revolutions and even the revolutionary impulse by producing normal subjects , subjects adjusted to the variegations of capitalist life and therefore not prepared to take up the radical alternative when it presents itself. Any impulse toward an alternative either is immediately suspicious or has its difference eliminated. As Adorno and Horkheimer put it in Dialectic of Enlightenment, within capitalist society where norms rule, “everything must be used, everything must belong to them. The mere existence of the other is a provocation.”1 Normality becomes the tool that suppresses otherness and thereby perpetuates the status quo. The shared critique of the power of normality within modern society binds diverse lines of thought—Heidegger and Adorno, Sartre and Derrida, Foucault and Irigaray. Whatever their differences, each thinker wants to liberate some form of difference from the hegemony of the normal within modernity. To become a normal subject is to sacrifice one’s difference for the 122 Subjectivity sake of the functioning of capitalist society, and the project of thought—or political action—thus becomes one of finding a way to allow difference to survive. For Heidegger, this is accomplished through the experience of authentic being-toward-death; for Adorno, it arrives through the activity of critical thinking; for Sartre, it involves the subject recognizing its own nothingness; for Derrida, it emerges through the play of différance within signification. Though the normal seems all-encompassing and destined for dominance, each thinker imagines a mode of resistance to it, even if she/he thinks that this resistance represents a losing battle. The modern political imperative, if there is one, involves not allowing oneself to be subsumed within normality. Though all would not put it this way, what most modern thinkers see in normality is reification, a process by which subjective activity takes on an objective status. In this sense, Heidegger and Georg Lukács represent the points of departure for the modern critique of normality. From a phenomenological and a Marxist perspective, they inaugurate the philosophical analysis of reification or some similar process. Reification renders everything the same by effacing the labor (and exploitation) that creates commodities and thereby endowing commodities with what Lukács calls “a ‘phantom objectivity,’ an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature.”2 Through reification, the normal glazes over its own becoming and in this way presents itself as permanent and not subject to questioning. Normal subjectivity appears to be a stable and already achieved identity, not a process requiring constant reconstruction. The fundamental lie of normality is this appearance of stability . Combating it means exposing the fissures that this appearance belies.3 This identification of normality and a stultifying world of pure objectivity becomes most evident in the thought of Alain Badiou. According to Badiou, the situation, which is his term for the realm in which normality predominates, renders would-be subjects into objects and prevents their emergence as subjects. From the perspective of the situation, one cannot recognize the site of the event, and the event marks the key to both politics and subjectivity. The event is a rupture with the stasis of the status quo; it provides an occasion for subjects to emerge through their fidelity to its rupture. As he puts it in Being and Event, “The paradox of an evental-site is that it can only be recognized on the basis of what it does not present in the 123 Changing the World situation in which it is presented.”4 Recognizing the event and becoming a subject require that one grasp what the normal situation militates against grasping. Normality is for Badiou a stabilizing force, which is why one must constantly remain on one’s guard against it.5...