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

11. The Case of the Missing Signifier

263 11 The Case of the Missing Signifier The Political Deadlock Perhaps the most important political problem of the last century concerns lifting repression. Even more than the obstacle of religious belief, repression represents a rigid barrier that has often been the focus of emancipatory politics . But as the history especially of the last half of the twentieth century has shown, lifting repression doesn’t necessarily lead to political liberation. It can even, as the main thesis of the Frankfurt School has it, become the vehicle for further decreasing the freedom of the subject in the face of ideological control. As societies eliminate varieties of repression, some fundamental deadlock remains recalcitrant and stands as a political stumbling block.1 If the political project of lifting repression inevitably goes awry, then this confronts the project of emancipation with the question of what it can do. This is where the intervention of psychoanalytic thought makes itself felt. Psychoanalysis has historically functioned as a tool for the struggle against repression, but if the attempt to fight repression inevitably fails or even backfires, the engagement of psychoanalytic thought with politics today requires a new attitude. The key to the political project of psychoanalysis lies in the unexpected twist that it gives to the fight against repression. According to this project, one must reenvision the deadlock that limits the political project of lifting repression. Rather than seeing the deadlock that projects for emancipation encounter as purely a stumbling block to be negotiated, one might embrace the deadlock as itself a political position. A properly psychoanalytic politics would transform it from an obstacle into a point of identification. By identifying with the symbolic deadlock that 264 Society impedes liberation, one can transform the cause of past political failures into a source of success. But the cost of this transformation is a redefinition of success as clarifying and embracing a limit rather than transcending it. The ultimate contribution of psychoanalytic thought to politics is its ability to provide a basis for an emancipatory politics of the limit.2 Thefundamentalsymbolicdeadlock—therootofthedisorderthatplagues every signifying system—involves the binary signifier, or the signifier of the feminine. The absence of this signifier prevents the operations of the social order from running smoothly (and, as the previous chapter showed, prompts the belief in God). Nothing necessitates, of course, that the missing signifier had to be the signifier of femininity, as it is in patriarchal society: one can envisage a different structure with a different binary signifier, but we cannot conceive of a successfully completed signifying structure or a structure without a missing binary signifier.3 There will always be a missing signifier, though it won’t always be the signifier of the feminine.4 The subtraction of this signifier marks the founding moment of the social order as such and thus is impossible for us to experience. It is, instead, a condition for the possibility of experience. One can’t restore this missing signifier through analysis or political activity . It marks a point of impossibility within the social structure, and thus it poses a political question for psychoanalysis. Most psychoanalytic thinkers envision a politics that merely respects and sustains the gap marked by the missing signifier. As one prominent Lacanian theorist notes, “The aim of psychoanalysis is best described as negative: it ought not to deteriorate into a system which presents itself as an answer to the lack of a signifier.”5 The problem with this purely negative psychoanalytic politics lies in its failure to appreciate the ontological status of the gap and to come to terms with the pervasive desire to fill it. The appeal of codes, cryptograms, crossword puzzles, and so on derives from the absence of the binary signifier. Even though most people tend to think of them as merely private amusements, these are fundamentally political activities because they concern the gap within the signifying order. In working these word puzzles, one seeks the missing signifier that would complete the system of signification itself, but finishing the puzzle provides only a momentary completion, opening up to another puzzle and another and another. The infinite nature of the word puzzle attests to 265 The Case of the Missing Signifier the impossibility of overcoming the problem of the missing signifier once and for all. There will always be another puzzle because whatever signifier one uncovers, whatever binary signifier one finds, will always be a piece of knowledge rather than...