It’s very easy for us to question the possibility of experiencing a lasting happiness.
Can we really find it?
Is it something that we can hold onto for prolonged periods of time?
The answer is likely ‘yes’. Indeed there are many who have dedicated their entire lives to cultivating it, even creating retreats and seminars designed to help others realize it.
However, in psychoanalysis there is a price to pay for happiness: the fundamental compromise of your desire. The more that happiness pervades ones life, the more that individual becomes estranged from their unspeakable passion.
In this way, people like Zizek refer to happiness as the category of the fool. It is the pursuit undertaken by one who would rather avoid confronting the contradictions and antagonisms that lie within them. Contenting themselves instead with a peace that is opposed to chaos, rather than a peace that is hard won via tarrying the chaos.
In this pop-up seminar I’ll be exploring the chasm that lies between happiness and desire via reference to an ancient Jewish parable and the Lacanian notion of the barred subject.
Against Happiness
by Peter Rollins
Streamed live on Dec 8, 2020
Comment: Peter. I was wondering if you could do a talk on the damage done to mental health of kids, and still when these kids are adults, by extreme fundamentalists, especially Calvinists. Here in Northern Ireland it would be churches like Free Presbyterians, Independent Methodists, Reformed Baptists, Brethren. I had to attend a Free P school and I, and others, are still mentally affected. My father was moderator of the Free P church, so I have significant inside knowledge if you need details privately. There are a huge number of people struggling as as a result of their upbringing. Many thanks.
Lacan devised numerous quasi-mathematical diagrams to represent the structure of the unconscious and its points of contact with empirical and mental reality. He adapted figures from the field of topology in order to represent the Freudian view of the mind as embodying a 'double inscription' (which could be defined as the ultimate inseparability of unconscious motivations from conscious ones).
Graph
The graph of desire was first proposed in a 1960 colloquium, and was later published in the Ecrits. It depends on ideas developed originally in Lacan's Schema R, a graph in which fundamental organising structures of the human mind are shown in a schematic relationship to the domains or 'orders' which in turn structure human reality: the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real.
The graph of desire is a 'flattened' representation of a signifying chain as it crosses a pathway Lacan called a vector of desire. It appears as two curved lines which cross one another at two separate points. Each line has a symbolic meaning.
Elements of the graph
The signifying chain begins in a linguistic sign (S) and progresses to a signification (S'), or a linguistic meaning. It can be expressed sententially and has a duration.
The vector of desire is a representation of the volition and will of the split or barred subject ($). Unlike the signifying chain, the vector of desire is expressed metaphorically, and has no duration.
It is necessary to bear in mind the special conception of the subject Lacan means by the $ symbol. The barred subject is the internally conflicted result of the processes of individuation that begin in infancy. In Lacan's account of individuation, the infant must respond to the loss of symbiosis with the mother by creating a symbol of this lack. In doing so the infant is constrained by the always-already present structures of a natural language. There is a certain relief in the summoning of a symbolically present 'mother', but the experience of the mother who returns to the infant as someone-signified-by-the-word-'mother' is nevertheless one of absolute, irremediable loss. Mother — and the world — is now mediated by the Symbolic order and the exigencies of language.
With this in mind, the crossing of the two pathways in the graph of desire can be understood to connote interference and constraint. Desire for the primordial object is not fulfilled except through the constraints of the signifying chain. The vector of desire is metaphorical, substituting various objects for the absolutely lost primordial one, and irrupting into language without regard for the passage of time, or for the particular human relationship through which the vector moves.
Finally, the points at which the vector of desire and the signifying chain cross can be seen as instances of Freudian double inscription. The 'conscious and unconscious' significance of an act or utterance are one and the same, and each constrains the other.
Lacan developed his graph of desire in four stages – you find them below. The graphs and the theory behind it can be found in the 1960 essay “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious.”
In: Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W.Norton &Company, 2006), p. 435.
or, the Meaningfulness of Opposition
and Contradiction
Abridged Notes by R.E. Slater
December 10, 2020
Optimized Therapies help one
become happy whereas Productive Maladaptation Psychoanalysis confronts
the contradictions of one’s self whereby one may (mal)adapt to find a less
conflicted sense of purpose, meaning, contentment again.
In the parable God interrupts two
rabbis who have been arguing about a subject for twenty years. Growing weary of
the conflict God goes to tell them what the topic of their division means but as
soon as God introduces Himself the two rabbis ask God to bugger off so that
they may continue arguing about their differences.
What is the meaning of this Jewish
parable? First, God is the incoming of happiness which neither want. They want
the struggle to discover who they are, not the answer to their difference.
Second, the rabbis represent the Torah which presents the interpretive struggle
of their context. Without the struggle there can be no discovered meaning which
might significantly change their being. And lastly, the removal of God’s Self
from the argument is the pleasure of God in allowing freewill beings to gather
meaning in order to garner resolve and productive movement into and through
their lives.
In Lacanian terms we would
deconstruct our idea of happiness against our desire for happiness knowing that
it is in the contradiction to happiness that we might find in the struggle of one’s
self "that which we are and which we want."
In religious terms God is the One
who brings wholeness and peace into our lives. Conversely, the Torah is seen to represent
the signifying chain which are a set of meanings or words which convey a
form of communication between one to the other. But not exactly in the same ideations but in close
approximation of meaningful ideations. (Cf. Signifying chain by Jacques Lacan. Also see, Lacanianism in Wikipedia)
Along this signifying chain, or line
of personal meaning, is the process of discovery where we start at one place and end up
at another. However, without the process of discovery, of struggle, of opposition, there can be no
meaningful or significant “end” of discussion, or change of being, should the process be
denied, interrupted, or mediated in less oppositional terms.
It also can mean that once we
arrive at a meaningful discovery or deconstruction point in our lives, then by looking back on
our past, or on some aspect of meaning we had held as significant, that all those self-placement
points of meaning will have now shifted to become either more meaningful or less
meaningful in the personal reconstruction process. It is in this way which Lacan is seen in post-structural terms of postmodernism.
Hence, the signifying chain of one’s
being is both a process moment of forward activity as well as a retroactive moment
of letting go of the past process that was becoming us. Though Pete doesn’t say
this, Lacan has identified what the Process Logician Alfred North Whitehead would call a
very process moment of “being and becoming.” (Cf. Process and Reality by Whitehead)
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Addendum
While listening to Pete's discussion to the vain pursuit of happiness I thought I might twist it a bit to show how Lacan may easily fit in with Whitehead's philosophy of process. As an integral theory, Whiteheadian thought is by its nature inclusive to any and all parts of academic and biblical discussions. No longer may other 'isms rule such as Plato or Neo-Platonism nor any biblical theologies based upon Hellenised Platonisms (or Scholasticisms, or Modernisms). Process thought is best expressed through postmodern post-structuralism and should continue to be an integrating force far beyond the 21st Century. But it was first best expressed in postmodernism. And so, while we struggle with fear and uncertainty, we must also know that in the bible, in Israelite societies and all societies coming after them, that fear and uncertainty is a constant in human survival. Process thought says to allow it be, learn from it, and build better societies from there. In biblical terms this means we replace fear of life with trust in God's presence in our lives. That we replace division of society because of uncertainty to trust with one another to work together towards a better unity. And that at the last, having gone through common struggles of survival with one another we might also have formed tighter bonds of fidelity and wellbeing with one another. It is vain to pursue happiness when in the very pursuit we deny to ourselves the process of being and becoming which is the very thing we are attempting to artificially create but cannot against the reality of disallowing deconstruction, contradiction, and opposition to shape us towards a more meaning personal identity held with the bounds of societal togetherness. - res
