Heft - Institut für Theorie ith

Mladen
Dollar
87
One
Splits
into
Two
There is a problem which has haunted
the whole history of psychoanalysis,
namely whether the goal of analysis
should ultimately be the integration
into the symbolic of what is recalcitrant
to it, thus the integration of the unconscious,
censured chapter of one’s history
into the universe of meaning, in
order to make sense of it and eventually
do away with it. For to interpret means
to endow with meaning that which has
defied meaning as an alien body, to
arrive at the point where we are able to
understand what the unconscious tries
to say, to state in a straightforward
manner what it was saying in a roundabout
way; which would amount to
remove it as the discourse of the Other,
and hopefully live happily ever after.
The second di≠erence of ineradicable
alterity would thus be incorporated
into the first di≠erence and would stop
haunting us or determining us behind
our back. Let’s make the unconscious
conscious? Let’s integrate the two back
into one? Is the aim of psychoanalysis
to do away with its object and thus to
make the analyst superfluous, to strive
for his / her unemployment? To do
away with the Other and reconcile it
with One? To lift one’s alienation in a
self-reflexive appropriation of the selfproduced
and self-inflicted Other? But
all this comes to nothing, for the basic
tenet of psychoanalysis is rather that no
such lifting is possible, and that the
very notion of subjectivity pertains precisely
to the impossibility of such selfappropriation.
The subject is premised
on “two.” One becomes the subject precisely
in relation to an alien kernel
within the symbolic order that cannot
be symbolically sublated. This makes
the subject of the unconscious of a
di≠erent nature than the ego. There is
the Other which constitutes the inherent
split of the two, the two not to be
merged back into one. Although the otherness
of the Other has no ontological
7 - Lacan takes up “la coche” as
the elementary function of the
signifier, the mark, the cut,
made by the primitive hunter
to count the killed animals.
He deals with this at length in
the unpublished seminar on
Identification (1961–1962).
8 - See Sigmund Freud, “Massenpsychologie
und Ich-Analyse,”
in: id., Studienausgabe, 10 vol.,
Alexander Mitscherlich u. a.
(Hgg.), Frankfurt a. M.
1969–1974, vol. 9, p. 100.
9 - Jacques Lacan, Encore, Paris
1975, p. 40.
10 - Ibid., p. 65.
11 - Ibid., p. 75.
consistency, it nevertheless persists. It
does not establish a separate Other of
the Other, it persists solely within the
Other. So the bottom line would be:
there is an irreducible two, an irreducible
gap between the One and the Other,
and the unconscious, at its minimal,
presents the figure of the two, not to be
sublated or fused into one. The problem
here that remains is that, well, the
Other does not exist.
Where does this leave us with our question
of counting? The symbolic, with its
minimal signifying element which is
counted for one, can always be submitted
to a count, and it proceeds metonymically.
Its mathematical formula
could be (n + 1): for every signifier there
is a (+ 1) signifier, always to be extended
and continued. But the Other, which
constitutes the two, as opposed to (n +
1), cannot be counted. There is rather a
(n – 1), a subtraction from the battery of
signifiers which leaves like a hole in the
system, a lack, a missing signifier, but
which is always presentified by an
excess, a surplus, but a surplus which is
not of the order of (+ 1), not a numerical
addition, a surplus which makes for the
two which cannot be seen as another
one. To put it another way: it is the signifier
that enables counting, that makes
possible that something can be counted
for one. 7 It is the mark of the unitary
trait Freud has called “ein einziger
Zug.” 8 The signifying slip, however, is
not countable, it is not in the register of
the unitary trait, it points to the Other
of counting and thus makes for the two.
Yet the figure of the Other as the Other
of language, structure, code, the symbolic
order, is but one face of the Other.
In Lacan we can read the following,
which seems to confront us with a very
di≠erent agenda: “The Other, in my
parlance, cannot be anything else but
the Other sex.” / “L’Autre, dans mon
langage, cela ne peut donc être que
l’Autre sexe.” 9 “The Other, if it may be
one, must certainly have a relation to
what appears as the other sex.” 10 “The
Woman must be related to the signifier
of this Other insofar as, as the Other, it
can only remain always the Other.” 11 It
appears now that the other face of the
Other may well be the face of the woman,
and that the Other is inherently and
at the same time the Other of sex, of sex
as the Other, sex under the auspices of
the irreducible two. But not the two of
count.
If in the first instance it seemed that the
Other is a highly disembodied entity,
which has to do with signifiers and
structures, then in this other aspect it
an Other which sticks to the body, most
intimately, and presents its rift. Not the
rift of language, but the rift of our natural
bodily being. This implies that the
sexual di≠erence, if this is the name of
this rift, is not a di≠erence that could be
encompassed or covered or accounted
for in terms of the signifying di≠erence,
the di≠erence of Saussurean di≠erentiality,
that is, in terms of One, its replication
and its split. It does not present the
two of counting, based on counting for
one and then extending this count, it
pertains to the “other” di≠erence which
cannot be counted and stops at two,
that is, at the di≠erence of the one and
the Other. But according to the other
part of our Lacanian antinomy, the
Other lacks, it does not exist, it has no
ontological consistency on its own, it
rather marks the persistence of a di≠erence
which eludes the series of signifying
di≠erences and cannot be captured
by them. Consequently, it would follow
that the Other, as “the Other sex,” does
not exist either, and this is indeed the
consequence drawn by Lacan’s notorious
dictum, which caused so much havoc,
that “the Woman doesn’t exist”. If
the Other is the Other sex, this conclusion
inevitably follows – but the trouble
is that the non-existence does not make
it vanish.
There is an enigma which sticks to the
very discovery of psychoanalysis. In his
inaugurational three books Freud presented
the unconscious as the new
object of the new science, something
that can be summed up by the Lacanian
dictum “the unconscious structured
like a language,” that is, like a derailment
of language, its constant slippage.
Then in 1905 he published the Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, a
surprising work in respect of the first
three books. For the focus of this new
book is not the language and its vicissitudes
– there is rather an astounding
absence of any linguistic considerations
–, but the body and its vicissitudes, its
deviations from natural needs and from
natural maturation. It is not the body of
firm substance and natural causality,
the physiological body, Freud analyzes
but a body haunted by a cut, and it is
this cut into the physiological causality
that conditions and produces the drives.
It is both an epistemological cut, sorting
out the inside / outside divide and
the transition between the two, and at