Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society

Verhaeghe, Paul. Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive. New York: Other P, 2001.

Paul Verhaeghe's collection of essays on Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis is unified by an underlying thesis: psychoanalysis is not about "sexuality," construed in either a narrow or wide sense. Strains of vulgar Freudianism mindlessly set the complexities of cognition to the monotonous refrain of "pee-pee, caca." More sophisticated readers of Freud seek to save the master by pursuing a defensive strategy whereby it is conceded that Freud does indeed place sexuality at the center of psychical life, but that what Freud means by sexuality is much broader than is usually acknowledged. Many Lacanian interpreters of the Freudian legacy pursue just such a strategy, transforming Lacan, in turn, into a theorist obsessed with the (non-existent) sexual relationship. Thanks to an unspoken general consensus, doubts about whether or not sexuality really is the dominant motif in the unconscious are effectively stifled. The genuine merit of Verhaeghe's book lies in his total break with the viewpoint that the psyche is organized exclusively around sexuality. Verhaeghe rejects this cherished analytic assumption by unambiguously relegating the "sexualized" formations of the unconscious to a residual, secondary position. What then, for Verhaeghe, is sexuality secondary to within psychical life?

Verhaeghe answers this query in several ways. However, the foundation of his approach resides in Lacan's register theory. Verhaeghe's reconsideration of the role of sexuality in psychoanalysis is executed vis-à-vis establishing a series of aligned distinctions rooted in the Lacanian distinction between, on one side, the Real, [End Page 177] and, on the other side, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. For example, Verhaeghe shows how the late Lacan's dichotomy between two types of jouissance ("other jouissance" and "phallic jouissance") is a translation of Freud's foundational division between the primary and secondary processes. But this is a translation that leads to an important shift: the other jouissance of the primary processes is not "sexual" in any sense whatsoever. All sexual meanings and connotations connected with the mobile distributions of libidinal investments is a result of the secondary processes channeling this primordial jouissance through the imprinting, representational defiles of sexual (i.e., "phallic") symbolism (according to Verhaeghe, this stamping of sexuality onto a non-sexual Real is what Freud means by "binding" [Bindung]). After the fact of this binding of other jouissance, of translating the primary processes into the "language" of phallic sexuality, the pre-/non-sexual Real is retroactively distorted by being rendered exclusively in the shape of sexuality as manifest at the level of the Imaginary and the Symbolic.

Furthermore, Verhaeghe asserts that the principle feature of the Real is not only that it is inappropriately portrayed within an interpretive scheme constructed around sexual motifs, but that it is intrinsically antithetical to any form of representation whatsoever. This amounts to a restatement of Lacan's famous tuché-automaton distinction from the eleventh seminar (a distinction that Verhaeghe frequently employs): the Real cause (tuché) is the origin or catalyst (a chance occurrence, an unpredictable "traumatic" event) for the Symbolically articulated structures of the signifying unconscious (automaton). But, this cause cannot be adequately rendered or digested by the "signifiers" of the unconscious which it itself is, in large part, responsible for shaping and setting in motion. The Real is, for Lacan, the unrepresentable ground of representation, the necessarily absent origin of the play of unconscious formations. Verhaeghe struggles to thoroughly think through the multiple psychoanalytic and philosophical implications of this basic dynamic.

In the first chapter, "The Riddle of Castration Anxiety," Verhaeghe asserts that "the idea of castration is in the first place a defense against anxiety, and in that sense it is a secondary formation" (10). Freud, in his 1937 "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," pessimistically concludes that castration is an immovable, un-analyzable "rock," a deadlock against which analytic interpretation runs aground with respect to both sexes. Thus, castration is some type of irreducible kernel that simply must be recognized (but cannot be further decomposed) by the analyst. Verhaeghe believes that Lacanian theory advances beyond the resignation of this conclusion. The claim is that the Real of anxiety is not originally linked to castration. Instead, the primordial kind of anxiety experienced by the individual arises from the situation of being passive with respect to the enigmatic, unpredictable desire of an Other.

Although this first essay is brief, one can easily reverse engineer the steps in Verhaeghe's reasoning. The infant, in its state of pre-maturational helplessness, is utterly dependent on others for the satisfaction of its needs and wants; without this vital assistance, the infant is exposed both to increasing tension arising from unmet somatic requirements as well as, ultimately, to the risk of death. Since the maternal figure is usually the first, primary "Other" responsible for the life-and-death matter of nurturing the child, the young individual experiences a great deal of anxiety in trying to figure out what this mysterious and powerful Other desires from him/her in order to guarantee protection from the suffering connected with his/her corporeal condition. The anxiety associated with this passive situation is domesticated by being cast in the mold of castration. The "lack" of passive helplessness is concealed in being interpreted by the subject as the "lack" of the phallus—namely, the non-possession of whatever objects or signifiers are latched onto by the child as answers to the question of what the (m)Other wants. The various symbolizations of castration operate to bind and contain anxiety, rather than being the primordial source of this negative affect. Put differently, this is the process whereby the indeterminate anxiety of passivity is transformed into the determinate fear of castration, indicating that castration anxiety isn't anxiety in [End Page 178] the strictly psychoanalytic sense, but a form of fear qua defense against anxiety.

Verhaeghe's fourth essay, "Trauma and Psychopathology in Freud and Lacan," presents a case for rigorously distinguishing between trauma as a haphazard occurrence that gratuitously inflicts pain upon the person ("accidental trauma") and trauma as a necessary feature situated at the origin of subjectivity proper ("structural trauma"). What does Verhaeghe view as the structural trauma lying at the root of the unconscious? Once again, the tension between the unrepresentable Real and the representational domains of Lacan's other two registers is invoked: in particular, Verhaeghe advances the idea that the unavoidable failure involved in trying to locate suitable representatives for Trieb is precisely the trauma which all individuals are pre-destined to undergo by virtue of their metapsychological constitution. Structural trauma is an effect of the impossibility of an Imaginary-Symbolic re-transcription of the Real.

Apropos of two key concepts—drive and the Real—certain subtle inconsistencies can be detected on Verhaeghe's part. As regards drive, Verhaeghe vacillates between three claims that often sound identical, but that are, in fact, significantly different from each other: one, drive itself is internally split between the unrepresentable (i.e., the Real) and the represented (i.e., the Imaginary and the Symbolic); two, drive itself is the unrepresentable Real impinging upon the secondary orders of the Imaginary-Symbolic axis (as the signifiers of the phallic jouissance of the sexual field); three, drives are divided into two types, involving a conflict between Erosqua phallic jouissance and Todestrieb qua other jouissance. The second claim risks backsliding into a vitalism—Verhaeghe is frequently eager to show that Lacan is not a vitalist of any stripe—dressed up in new terminological clothing, namely, a presentation of Trieb as a mysterious force welling up from an embodied source. Apropos of the third claim, more work would be required to show how a renewed appeal to the Eros-Todestrieb dichotomy of the second topography avoids encountering all of the old problems surrounding this difficult knot of concepts and metaphors in Freud. That said, what about the first claim, the assertion that each and every drive is internally divided?

Verhaeghe's talk of a divided drive is fully consistent with Freud's 1915 definition of drive in "Drives and Their Vicissitudes" (as well as Lacan's description of Trieb as a "montage" or "collage"). Freud states that all drives, by definition, consist of a "source," "pressure," "aim," and "object"; he also famously remarks there that drives lie on the frontier "between soma and psyche." The source and pressure are closely associated with the corporeal forces of the libidinal economy, while the aims and objects are established as ideational representations and mnemic traces operative within a psychical system of inscriptions. Furthermore, in his metapsychological essays, Freud stipulates that drives are known or encountered only via their representatives. It can now be seen that Verhaeghe's oscillation between sometimes speaking of the drives as unrepresentable and, at other times, referring to them as internally bifurcated is not a trifling, unimportant detail. In the Freudian metapsychological system, drives are not simply obscure undercurrents incapable of being represented. On the contrary, Trieb as such doesn't exist independently of its representational mediators; in fact, such mediation is inscribed in the very heart of its own architecture. In Lacanian terms, portraying drives as purely unrepresentable, as the Real alone, is to misrecognize their properly "extimate" character, the fact that their status is heterogeneous (i.e., simultaneously Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic). Thus, to say that drive per se is opposed to being rendered by representational structures is to miss the paradoxical, borderline status that is one of the novel hallmarks of the psychoanalytic concept of Trieb. What's more, Verhaeghe never really provides an explanation for why the drives cannot be represented (a claim that sounds contrary to Freud's position that drives operate in the psyche and are recognizable by the observer exclusively through the fashion in which they are intertwined with ideational representatives).

Similarly, with the Real, Verhaeghe sometimes sounds caught in a state of indecision. On the one hand, the Real is treated as anterior [End Page 179] or external to the Symbolic. On the other hand, due to worries that such a description risks reducing Lacan to a kind of developmental vitalist, Verhaeghe occasionally insists that the Real is strictly internal to the Symbolic. The Real doesn't pre-exist the Symbolic, but is produced immanently out of the internal impasses of the symbolic order (this should lead to some skepticism about the notion of the Real being utterly unrepresentable). Given just how heavily Verhaeghe relies upon this particular Lacanian register for explanatory purposes, sorting out its nuances is crucial for this text.

The fifth and sixth essays, "Subject and Body" and "Mind your Body," seek to shed light on a Lacanian theory of embodiment. What is the position of the body in Lacan's thought? "Subject and Body" does a nice job of charting the course of Lacan's engagement with the notion of embodiment as it evolves over the course of his teaching. Verhaeghe unveils some surprising consistencies connecting the early period of the "mirror stage" and the later seminars of the 1970s. In "Mind your Body," Verhaeghe argues that the late Lacan aims at overcoming Descartes, at superseding the dualisms associated with the modern subject. Verhaeghe claims that Lacan dispenses with dualism. This sixth essay is a bit disappointing in two ways. First, it pays absolutely no attention to the myriad references in Lacan's work to Descartes. Verhaeghe is silent as regards Lacan's meticulous examinations of the (often positive) relation between the Cogito and his own theory of subjectivity. Second, isn't the fundamental opposition between the Real and the Symbolic a dichotomy of sorts? Verhaeghe, while maintaining that a Lacanian stance rejects dualistic models, doesn't explain why his own arguments are not themselves reliant upon just such models.

In terms of style and presentation, Verhaeghe's English is awkward at times, and the text is rife with grammatical errors and misspellings. Also, parts of the book are repetitive. For example, the second essay ("From Impossibility to Inability") duplicates a discussion contained in Does the Woman Exist?. Another symptom of repetitiveness is that Verhaeghe cites the same few passages from Lacan's work again and again.

Nonetheless, Verhaeghe displays an impressive mastery of Lacan's corpus. Furthermore, he deserves to be praised for the boldness and cogency of his departure from the hackneyed and questionable appeal to sexuality as the inexplicable substratum of the unconscious. Beyond Gender is definitely representative of the current state of the art in Lacanian theory.

 

Adrian Johnston

Adrian Johnston is presently an interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. His published work focuses on Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, the history of philosophy, and contemporary theory. In addition, he has recently completed two book manuscripts, one on temporality and drive, and the other on conceptions of ethical autonomy in psychoanalysis and philosophy.