The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within

Notes

217 Notes Introduction 1. Žižek (1989), Fink (1997), and Harari (2002) all provide a useful delineation of the different stages of Lacan’s thinking. 2. Strictly speaking, Santner (2001) makes this statement in the context of talking about Roland Barthes’s distinction between the studium and the punctum in Camera Lucida (1982).To be exact, Santner posits that it is the punctum that represents “a rising to consciousness of a non-symbolizable surplus.” I am linking Santner’s statement to the singular self because the purpose of his discussion of Barthes is to draw a parallel between the punctum and what is most distinctive about the subject. 3. In this context, it is worth noting that the stakes of letting one’s singularity loose vary from subject position to subject position, as well as from social setting to social setting, so that the repercussions of rocking the boat are far from uniform across different individuals. 1.The Singularity of Being 1. Lacan writes:“If analysis has a meaning, desire is nothing other than that which supports an unconscious theme, the very articulation of that which roots us in a particular destiny, and that destiny demands insistently that the debt be paid, and desire keeps coming back, keeps returning, and situates us once again in a given track, the track of something that is specifically our business” (1960, 319). I will return to this statement in chapter 7. 2. The “primordial” nature of this deprivation has to do with the fact that it is the signifier’s formative intrusion into the bodily real—the very intrusion that gives birth to the subject as a creature of symbolization and intersubjectivity—that causes the Thing to appear as a lost object. 3. As Lacan posits,“If the Thing were not fundamentally veiled, we wouldn’t be in the kind of relationship to it that obliges us, as the whole of psychic life is obliged, to encircle it or bypass it in order to conceive it.”The 218 Notes to pages 17–24 Thing is, in other words, by its very nature always “represented by something else” (1960, 118). I will return to these statements in greater detail in chapter 6, where I explain why this is not as big an existential tragedy as it may at first appear. 4. As Lacan asserts,“In the beginning was the Word, which is to say, the signifier.Without the signifier at the beginning, it is impossible for the drive to be articulated as historical” (1960, 213). 5. This implies that the ultimate aim of the repetition compulsion is invariably das Ding. The particularity of the compulsion arises from the fact that each subject experiences the loss of das Ding differently. 6. Lacan also explains,“But it is not the Law itself that bars the subject’s access to jouissance—it simply makes a barred subject out of an almost natural barrier. For it is pleasure that sets limits to jouissance, pleasure as what binds incoherent life together” (1966, 696). 7. Žižek writes:“The trouble with jouissance is not that it is unattainable, that it always eludes our grasp, but, rather, that one can never get rid of it, that its stain drags along for ever—therein resides the point of Lacan’s concept of surplus-enjoyment: the very renunciation of jouissance brings about a remainder /surplus of jouissance” (1996, 93). Zupančič, in turn, maintains that the trouble with jouissance is less that we cannot reach it than that “it is found everywhere” (2000, 242). 8. It should be noted that Lacan questions the validity of the Freudian death drive as a “destruction drive,” implying that it is a quasi-mythological construction rather than a scientifically justifiable discovery.Yet he finds it conceptually helpful:“I simply want to say that the articulation of the death drive in Freud is neither true nor false. It is suspect; that’s all I affirm. But it suffices for Freud that it was necessary” (1960, 213). 9. Lacan supports this reading when he remarks that the real is that dimension of the other with which we cannot “enter into a human relationship ” (1960, 279). 10. Lacan elucidates the distinction between the lack caused by the signifier and the lack of the real as follows:“Two lacks overlap.The first emerges from the central defect around which the dialectic of the advent of the subject to his own being in the relation to the Other turns—by...