Psychoanalysis k – Sam Franz – rks seniors Cover Letter
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Psychoanalysis K - Sam - Wake 2016 RKS
Robinson30.Robinson misunderstands our interpretation of the realMatheson ’15 (Calum, Assistant Professor of Comm. @ U. of Pitt., “Desired Ground Zeroes: Nuclear Imagination and the Death Drive,” 2015, pp. 69-70) This implied structure is important. Psychoanalysis has been criticized by critics such as Andrew Robinson who have argued that contemporary psychoanalysis scholarship reasserts an unjustifiable division between representation and reality, ultimately “rigging the game” by positing an agential Real that guarantees the failure of mediation and authorizes claims about the subject’s “lack” which flow from the assertion of a category rather than fine-grained analysis of context. The unearned theoretical benefits of this dualism are several: having declared in advance that mediation fails, it is an easy task to make claims about the subject based on that failure. If the Real cannot be assimilated into representation, then the concept provides a convenient means to explain away discrepancies and failures of psychoanalysis itself while still providing what is ultimately a deterministic, structuralist explanation for the world—an active Real that accounts for perceived reality through a set of automatic operations that compose an invisible “deep structure.” Finally, to posit a “beyond” of mediation insulates one from criticism since the Real cannot be discussed directly, what Robinson calls (after Judith Butler) a “theological” project (Robinson). Robinson’s argument should caution us against a reading of the Real as the “deep structure” of reality that determines it in its entirety. An understanding of the Real as the contingent eruption of non-human reality into a Symbolic order that creates the illusion of a human-centered reality avoids this critique. The Real is not deep structure with a set of laws that determine society—or, if indeed it does have a set of laws, they cannot be determined by us, because they cease to be the Real the moment this happens. The Real is what is inaccessible. It does impact our world, but it does so through distortion and disruption, not determination. The interplay of the Symbolic and the Real is essentially one of structure versus contingency. The ceaseless work of automaton scripting order over tuché, mentioned in the Introduction and explained further in the next chapter, creates a set of rules that might provide predictable order, but they only appear to be inevitable and natural. Beneath them is not a deep structure, but an endless void. It is worth noting that the Symbolic need not have a permanent structure either. Constellations of tropes are made durable, but not permanent, by what Lundberg calls “affective labor” and I have generally referred to as cathexis. That the belief in determinism persists in some quarters should not discredit the Real or the drive for unmediated experience (i.e., the death drive). Instead, it should highlight our tendency to mistake the durable but artificial structures of the Symbolic for some metaphysical truth of the Real, just as the Bomb is conflated with God. This is also why Lacanian psychoanalysis is consistent with the emerging set of ideas grouped together as speculative realism. Humanity mistakes its reality for the Real, and is only shocked into perspective when the latter is revealed by the inadequacy of the former. As Lacan wrote, To be a psychoanalyst is simply to open your eyes to the evident fact that nothing malfunctions more than human reality...nothing is more stupid than human destiny, that is, that one is always being fooled. Even when one does do something successfully, it is precisely not what one wanted to do. (Psychoses 82) Download 169.86 Kb. Share with your friends:
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