Psychoanalysis at the Time of the Posthuman: Insisting on the Outside-Sense VRONIQUE VORUZ

Abstract: This article diagnoses the discourse of posthumanism as a contemporary symptom, and thus as a mode of the social link that attempts to deal with the real of the human condition as, precisely, non-natural. In order to then interpret this posthuman symptom, the article outlines the psychoanalytic notion of interpretation itself, not as the laying bare of a latent meaning, but as the inducement of truth-effects which are distinct from scientic understandings of truth premised upon identity and non-contradiction. Lacans Seminar XVII is then utilized both as an example of the psychoanalytic interpretation of contemporary life, and as a resource for thinking through the reication of science and technological lathouses that underpins the posthuman era. The article concludes with a strong defence of the capacity of psychoanalysis to hold open a space for the outside-sense, or what evades capture by the (scientic) signier. It is argued that this outside-sense is what truly constitutes the human insofar as humans are speaking beings. Keywords: alethosophere, cognitivism, fantasy, four discourses, posthuman, psychoanalysis, science, symptom

Introduction

At the 1953 Rome Congress, Lacan addressed the following admonition to his audience of analysts: Let him [the analyst] be well acquainted with the whorl into which his era draws him in the ongoing enterprise of Babel, and let him be aware of his function as
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an interpreter in the strife of languages.1 Both Freud and Lacan and Millers work on interpreting modernity over the past decade or so is remarkable share the rare capacity of being able to recongure psychoanalytic theory each time they encounter resistance in the treatment of the symptoms of their contemporaries.2 Repetitioncompulsion is the best-known example in Freuds case.3 And for the thirty years that his teaching lasted, Lacan did little else than try to keep up, rstly, with the decline of the paternal imago,4 secondly, with the marginalization of the Oedipus complex his invention of the concept of object a is destined to replace the Freudian Oedipus as a clinical compass for interpretation thirdly, with the insufciency of object a to account for jouissance, and lastly, with the topological erasure of the place of exception in the constitution of contemporary subjectivities.5 The Schools that inscribe themselves in the Lacanian orientation have continued this elaboration, most recently with the concept of ordinary psychosis6 as the tentative nomination of a subjective structure congruent with two traits of our modernity: the reduction of the master-signier to the number,7 and the substitution of globalization for universalism as matrix of the social bond (S XX; IM2).8 The rst trait signals the privileging of counting over sense in uses of the signier modelled on scientic language. It entails a reduction of the ideal to an inscription in the plump part of the Gaussian curve. The second trait indexes a shift in our topological modalities of subjective organization. Universalism is a structure in which the Law or jouissance prohibition is valid for all men ( pour tout homme) because it nds its origin in an exception (albeit fantasmatic, as is Freuds Dead Father) to the set. In this modality, the set of all men is constituted as nite though incomplete by virtue of an exception to itself that also acts as a limit. Broadly speaking, this is the Oedipal unconscious, operative in Freudian societies. There the libidinal economy is organized by the play of prohibition, repression and sublimation. Satisfaction is obtained in mediated, deferred forms. It is the age of the Name-of-the-Father, also the structure of modern democracy.9 By contrast, in our hypermodern or posthuman times, a set is a series developing without either limit or totalization (IM2, 18); it suffers no exception. In the age of globalization, or the social not-all (IM2, 18), subjects struggle to nd an operative limit (to jouissance) within an inconsistent set since the inside/outside organization of universalism is near defunct. Prohibition has openly mutated into what both Freud (SE XIX, 15572) and Lacan

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(E, 64568) had already revealed as its truth: a will-to-jouissance, a push-to-enjoy, to consume. Sublimation seems old-fashioned, tedious, its eventual fruits pale before the instant gratication we can reap from staging ourselves for the networked eyes of others. We identify with our images, complete with myriad technological avatars of the driveobjects, and with silicon enhancements. Globalization is the age of the market, but addiction is the natural law of the market.10 And this is something that psychoanalysts have to deal with, even if it means forsaking the once-hallowed conceptual tools devised by Freud, and inventing new ones.

Psychoanalysis and the Posthuman

What, then, is the position of psychoanalysis with regards to the posthuman? It shares a fundamental premiss with ideas of the posthuman: that the subject is rst and foremost produced as an object of discourse. But with a twist: for psychoanalysis, to be produced as object also entails, in and of itself, an ultimate identication with the objects perennial value: that of refuse.11 This enduring status as refuse the human condition implies that human life is best endured by becoming a subject. The divergence between the posthuman world and that of psychoanalysis is nicely illustrated by French art critic and psychoanalyst Grard Wajcman in LOeil absolu. In his clear-sighted tales of our civilization of the gaze, Wajcman analyses among other cultural productions the Jason Bourne trilogy (OA, 16180). Jason Bourne, played by Matt Damon, is a black ops agent whose mind has been wiped clean and imprinted with the programmes necessary to a awless killing machine. He is the perfect posthuman product, a pure product of science whose humanity appears to have been digitally mastered, by technology. Yet his true value as reject is revealed in the opening scene, in which Jason Bourne surfaces as otsam, cast adrift in the sea, nameless, without identity, complete with grafted chip on the hip. The trilogy unfolds against the backdrop of the fantasy of posthuman science: that biotechnologies could act directly on jouissance, without the mediation of addressed speech. The thinly veiled objective is that of controlling the obscure share present in each subject,12 eradicating the aws of the human programme a programme of jouissance, and not of science.13 Sciences dream would be to turn man into a wholly predictable machine or to eradicate

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the symptom. But Jason Bourne turns out to be dysfunctional. The dysfunction of this 30-million dollar weapon, this government property, unveils the anxiety that our contemporary fascination with science seeks to keep at bay. This anxiety, attendant upon the weakening of our social structures (nothing is in a xed place), has to do with the non-governability, the unpredictability of the human. Yet Jason Bourne, born of science, desperately seeks to re-inscribe himself in his human lineage, that of David Webb. To do so, as Wajcman points out in a masterful reading of a scene in Waterloo station in which Bourne seeks a covert meeting with a Guardian journalist to expose his story, the sole avenue remains that of exploiting the technological aws of the posthuman environment (of CCTV coverage, of mobile phone traceability). To remain human, Jason Bourne has to hide in plain sight, to slip through the technological web cast by science. Through the mythical tale of Jason Bourne we discern a fundamental truth that humans are not, cannot be, merely the products of science.14 They are also the products of the symbolico-imaginary bonds that determine their emergence as subjects: of love, of desire, of jouissance. This is what Lacan already insisted upon in 1969 in his Note on the Child:
The function of the residue that the conjugal family supports (and by the same token maintains) in the evolution of society, highlights the irreducible of a transmission which is of a different order from life as satisfaction of needs that is rather of a subjective constitution, involving the relation to a desire that is not anonymous.15

Why this insistence of psychoanalysis on a non-anonymous desire at the expense of the wonderful dream of a fully predictable, a-symptomatic human product? For two reasons that are intrinsic to the psychoanalytic dispositif: because the human experience cannot be mastered through a knowledge that would be xed once and for all (in Lacan-speak, it is impossible to re-absorb all of jouissance in the signier), and because its primary premiss is the irreducible singularity of each subject, the very premiss which some versions of science seek to dispose of. To be clear, psychoanalysis does not postulate this singularity in a humanist gesture, humbled by the supposedly ineffable essence of man. There is nothing of the divine, of the sublime, of the aggrandizing of the human in psychoanalysis. If psychoanalysis insists on singularity it is because, to quote Eric Laurent, the current president of the World Association of Psychoanalysis: the living upon which the

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symbolic system is connected like a parasite produces an impossible to represent.16 So singularity refers to the inaugural experience of every subject as one of perplexity in the encounter with language, a system which is parasitic upon the living; to recall what is perhaps a more familiar formulation, much commentated by Lacan in Seminar I when he was dialoguing with the Hegelians, the Word is the murder of the Thing.17 This inaugural perplexity initiates the interpretative process which produces our narratives about ourselves we can think here of Freuds family romances (SE IX, 23541). To put it bluntly, for psychoanalysis the human species is a malfunctioning hybrid ab initio, as it were and the drive, its a-cephalic demand for satisfaction that can devastate the bodies that are its unwitting hosts, is a product of that hybridization.18 It is in this sense that psychoanalysis is radically opposed to cognitivism, which presupposes an adequacy of the body to the subject, that all psychical activity would address the needs of the living body.19 By contrast, in Lacans words, the speaking being is a sick animal sick with symptoms that are yet also solutions.20 So no one is perhaps less humanistic, more materialist, less naive than Lacan. To defend psychoanalysis is not to partake in reactionary attempts at the conservation of a beautiful, pre-scientic being, soon to be extinct and replaced by transgenetic superbeings. To defend psychoanalysis is to recognize that there is not, and never has been, anything natural about being human. And it may be this still scandalous truth that generates such hostility to psychoanalysis a hostility manifest in the current attempts to regulate the mental health professions in many European countries. It is rooted in a desire to do away with the drive, with the obscure share of ourselves that makes us human. So far I have talked about posthumanism as a cultural fantasy, shared by a version of science a fantasy to perfect the human and rid humanity of what makes it dysfunctional. That such an extreme position is alive and well can be amply substantiated by a recent conference at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts by neuroscientist David Eagleman. There Eagleman spoke lyrically of the untapped potential of neuroscience in reconditioning the brains of criminals a perfect solution to the problem of crime, rational sentencing at last. Talking about his experiments with the reconditioning of smokers neural pathways, he added, to the audiences peals of laughter: if this works (. . . ) were going straight for criminals. Eaglemans opening line was that for neuroscience, you are

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your brain. Any possible resemblance to Clockwork Orange is implicitly dispelled because for Eagleman, his project is about helping somebody to help themselves. And it is self-evident that criminals dont want to commit crime when you speak to criminals they say: I do not want to be doing that sort of behaviour (. . . ). I cant stop myself. There is no need to recall our track record in bettering humanity through science. Sufce it to say that equating the brain with the subject is a reduction of being to biology, in the name of mastery.21 A more sympathetic understanding of posthumanism would see it as a symptom in the psychoanalytic sense, which is to say an attempted treatment of the non-naturalness implicit in being human. What are the specicities of posthumanism as symptom? What insights does it share with psychoanalysis? Can psychoanalysis tell us anything about the real that it names?
Posthumanism as Symptom and so as Social Bond
The symptom is not yet exactly the real. It is the manifestation of the real at our level as living beings. As living beings, we are ordered, bitten by the symptom. We are sick, thats all there is to it. The speaking being is a sick animal. In the beginning was the Word says the same thing. (TR, 93, my translation)

If we take matters at the level of content and not structure, posthumanism ranges from cognitive and neuroscience to technology, from critiques of anthropocentrism to animal rights, from postcolonial readings of race to new modalities of constructing a body. There is a huge diversity between the different positions that rally around the label of posthumanism. This diversity echoes Laurents preface to his recent book, Lost in Cognition, in which he critically addresses cognitivism from the perspective of psychoanalysis. In his preface Laurent says of the discourse of cognitivism that it creates a newspeak:
In the academic cognitivist discourse, synonymies are dominant, in the same way that [Paul] Valry said civilizations are produced by great vague ideas. They are the only ones to allow a sufcient synonymy to produce, in Lacanian terms, a misunderstanding. Great vague ideas produce the common bond that a civilization is, where the misunderstanding ends up being as broad, as expansive as possible. This very extension allows us to speak amongst ourselves. When there is need for a precision, science appears. The latter also creates a language, but it does not target the social bond. What is essential about this newspeak is that it avails itself of synonymies, as broad as possible, which enable a conversation

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between former Chomskyans, neurologists, biologists, academics, a conversation which gives the impression that they are talking among themselves of something which they have in common, whereas they on the contrary speak of things which are rather different. This conversation that takes place in the name of science is a pure social bond, a semblant of science. (LC, 9, my translation)

In this passage Laurent makes two crucial points: rstly, science is not the same thing as the discourses that unfold in the name of science, and speaking in the name of science does not confer the virtues of scientic validity upon a discourse. To put it crudely, to speak about science does not, ipso facto, entail the neutrality of the speaker. Second, a discourse is not a language. These two points are central to Lacans Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. So posthumanism is a discourse that brings people together in a conversation where nobody knows what the other is saying, but everybody believes they understand each other to a sufcient degree for a conversation to take place. It is in this sense that we can take posthumanism as a symptom, insofar as it organizes a social bond. It is above all a discursive phenomenon. But if the symptom is always a modality for the treatment of the real, what then is the real beneath the discourse, or what is it that the signier posthuman tries to name?
On Interpretation

In approaching this question my rst reex was to turn to Lacans Seminar XVII. Re-reading it, it struck me that this seminar was an interpretation, and this may be why Lacan also elucidates there what makes an analytic interpretation operative. As interpretation is psychoanalysiss only modality of intervention, I would like to be very precise about this deceptively simple concept, and about what differentiates it from cultural interpretations. An analytic interpretation is not the revealing of a latent content, but an orientation given to a discourse by adding something that gives it sense: For [the analyst] the latent content is the interpretation that he is going to give, insofar as it is, not this knowledge that we discover in the subject, but what is added on to give it a sense.22 This denition of interpretation is related to what Lacan said earlier in the same lecture: In short, half-saying is the internal law of every species of enunciation of the truth. (S XVII, 110) This statement itself is to be read with an earlier one: The only sense is the sense of desire, (. . . ) the only truth is the truth of what the said desire hides of its lack, so as to make light of

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what it does nd (61, translation modied). Putting these fragments together, we can see that truth has to do with the sense one chooses to give to something, and that this sense has to do with ones desire. Thus truth is not of the signier, and it can only be half-said because more than one sense can be true for one statement desire is therefore at the core of interpretation, or as Lacan said in Seminar VI, desire is its interpretation.23 For example, a patient may come in to complain about the very real suffering he has experienced at the hands of others. The analyst can either commiserate or choose to steer clear of the narrative of suffering. Both senses will be true, but the effect will be entirely different. The rst attitude is a response to the demand of the subject that saturates his lack with a deleterious satisfaction, conrming his identication with a pathologized position.24 The second attitude, by contrast, can help the subject recognize that he plays a part in the ills he complains of. This is why we have to be very careful when we interpret, because when we choose to highlight a possible sense of what is being said, by the same token we cast another sense into the shadow. And this is why Lacan attached such importance to the desire of the analyst. If the analyst wants the patient to like him, or the patient to get better, then he will be tempted to give the patient the satisfaction he demands, or to shore up his perceived weaknesses. But if the analysts desire is for the possibility of desire in the patient, then he has to take the risk of not satisfying this demand, of fragilizing the analysands defences. What Lacan says of truth as half-saying is to be read together with the Freudian observation that the principle of contradiction does not exist in the unconscious: one thing and its opposite can both be true, as we have all experienced wishing the death of a loved one, ruining the one relationship we desire, and so forth. So the unconscious may be an apparatus, but it is not a machine because it is an inconsistent system that is, a system within which everything and its opposite can be demonstrated. So if the analysis cannot orient itself on truth as deductive process grounded upon the principle of contradiction in the same way as science, for which truth is demonstrated by the fact that a signier signies itself (A = A, so A is not B etc.) then it has to orient itself on truth as affect the points of xation (. . . ) that emerge as organizing around them the gravitation of elements that repeat themselves.25 So the truth of the unconscious is not the formalized truth of scientic knowledge in the sense that something which is true once will be true always. It is a gravitational truth, which means that sense revolves around the points at which a given

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signier affected the body, but this sense is amenable to dialectization through the vector of transference. In the same way that the unconscious does not abide by the principle of non-contradiction, interpretations themselves can be valid even if they are contradictory. The only way to judge an interpretation is through its effect, as Freud acknowledged in his text Constructions in Analysis [1937] (SE XXIII, 265). This tallies with the recognition by both Freud and Lacan that the after-effect, Freuds Nachtrglichkeit, is a dimension constitutive of subjectivity (receiving your message in an inverted form, the subject being an effect of language, etc.): The effects of language are retroactive (S XVII, 181). So, if we take the four discourses, the tables of sexuation and borromean topology to be successive Lacanian interpretations of the social bond, it does not mean that one supersedes or invalidates the other. It means that they can be used to different effects, that each interpretation will illuminate a distinct aspect of truth whilst casting another into the shadow. Thus the four discourses highlight the agent of discourse, the tables of sexuation counterpoise universalism to globalization as two distinct modalities of the unconscious, and borromean topology emphasizes the singularity of each subjective solution to make the three heterogeneous registers of human experience, RSI, function as one. Finally, psychoanalytic interpretation is a consequence of the binary knowledge/truth: knowledge is a series of networked signiers (signifying chains) that produce enjoyed-meant [joui-sens] and is linked to meaning. Truth is correlated to the structure which produces effects of language, and to affect: truth produces effects of subject. The analysts interpretation should not aim to produce sense, which is metonymical and thus of the same, but a truth-effect. These truth-effects allow the subject to glimpse his own position in what he says of himself, and eventually he will be able to discern his own fantasmatic position or how he positions himself as object for the other.

Modalities of Interpretation

In the analytic discourse, understood broadly here and not in the precise sense Lacan gave it in Seminar XVII, there are three modalities of interpretation. Here I am relying on Millers classication in his annual public lecture series for the year 20078: the interpretations the analyst makes in the analytic session, the interpretations teaching analysts make of psychoanalysis, and the interpretations analysts make

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of the social bond. The last two modalities are the basis on which the interpretations in the analytic session take place.26 In his lectures of 20078 Miller illustrated his argument with the following example. Soon after Freuds death, the post-Freudians resorted to analysing the mechanisms of defence of the ego because the Freudian method for the deciphering of the unconscious failed to cure patients. Deciphering the unconscious as interpretative method was grounded on Freuds interpretation of psychoanalysis, namely that neurosis was caused by repression. The rapid failure of psychoanalysis to continue lifting symptoms by deciphering the unconscious can be explained by the effect that psychoanalytic interpretations have on the unconscious: if the rst psychoanalytic interpretations were effective, it was because they operated by lifting a corner of the veil of repression. Today there is little that remains veiled, and psychoanalysis has played an important part in this.27 Here we can recall what Lacan points to in his Seminar XVII, namely that truth is constituted by concealment (187). So the interpretation of psychoanalysis is a function of the effects and consequences of the practice of psychoanalysis on psychoanalysis (OL, 19 March 2008). This means that the practice of psychoanalysis has effects on the unconscious. Todays unconscious has little to do with the Freudian unconscious. And the attendant vulgarization of psychology misses the mainsprings of subjective change.28 In this perspective, Lacans invention of the object a is an interpretation of psychoanalysis insofar as after the invention of this concept, analysts started to slant their interpretation to object a. In other words, analysts stopped deciphering the unconscious, and started to target the construction of the fantasy with their interpretations. The construction of the fantasy refers to the reduction of an analysands multiple fantasies to an axiom that subtends them all this is what Lacan does with Sade in his essay Kant with Sade, producing the maxim I have a right to enjoy your body, anyone can say to me, and I will exercise this right without any limit to the capriciousness of the exactions I may wish to satiate with your body (E, 648).29 Lacans interpretation of psychoanalysis, of the closure of the unconscious produced by its deciphering, with the invention of object a, takes account of the impossibility of reduc[ing] libido to the being of sense.30 The other major interpretation Lacan made of psychoanalysis is the pass (AE, 24359; OL, 19 March 2008). The pass is a dispositif invented by Lacan to elucidate what the end of an analysis entailed for a given

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subject. With the invention of the pass emerges the idea that an analysis is terminable, which is a considerable shift with regards to the Freudian doxa. The end of analysis does not mean that jouissance is reduced to sense, all-interpreted, but that the non-analysable, the experience of perplexity each one of us makes in our singular, inaugural experience of the fundamental xenopathy of language, can be circumscribed. It then becomes possible for a subject to position himself with regards to an opacity that determines him unbeknownst to him. Lacans invention of the pass as an interpretation of the interminability of psychoanalysis preserves a space for the outside-sense in the analytic experience. With this interpretation Lacan takes stock, not only of the xenopathy of language, but also of the increasing foreclosure of the outside-sense in contemporary discourses. The outside-sense is what remains of the real for each singular being, resisting both symbolization (the play of ciphering/deciphering of the symbolic unconscious which converts jouissance into sense) and imaginarization (the veiling of the real). The outside-sense is the grain of sand that derails the all-seeing machines of contemporary science, a modality of science animated as never before by a will to render the human transparent to the all-seeing eyes of modern technologies. And psychoanalysis refuses the conceit according to which the signier could absorb all of jouissance, this being the operative concern of what, loosely speaking here, we call the discourse of the master, or the discourse that makes everything work in a given civilization. This is why Lacan denes the discourse of the master through its impossibility: rst, the signier cannot reabsorb jouissance because it is its very cause, as he says in Seminar XX, and second, it is the dialectic of jouissance with knowledge that allows the production of knowledge, as Lacan states of Hegels Phenomenology:
Its just that what I am calling the hysteria of this discourse stems precisely from the fact that the discourse eludes the distinction that would enable one to perceive the fact that if this historical machine, which is in fact only the progress of the schools and nothing more, ever did culminate in absolute knowledge, it would only be to mark the annulment, the failure, the disappearance at the conclusion of the only thing that motivates the function of knowledge its dialectic with jouissance. (S XVII, 35)

So the two interpretations Lacan makes of psychoanalysis, the invention of object a and that of the pass, are political interventions in the sense that they have a structuring effect on the real world, securing a place for the outside-sense, for the singularity of each subjects

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inaugural perplexity upon his advent in a world of language that pre-exists him. This is why psychoanalysis is not primarily therapeutic, though it does have what we refer to as incidental therapeutic effects, that can also be unwittingly normalizing or adaptive.
Interpreting the Social Bond

The third modality of interpretation is the interpretation analysts make of the social bond, and in Seminar XX we nd an example of such an interpretation by Freud:
Freud fortunately gave us a necessary interpretation it does not stop being written, as I dene the necessary of the murder of the son as founding the religion of grace. He didnt say it quite like that, but he clearly noted that this murder was a mode of negation (dngation) that constitutes a possible form of the avowal of truth. (108)

The Freudian interpretation of the social bond had tremendous consequences for the sense of civilization, inuencing our vision of religion, authority, guilt, law, sin, desire, the social contract and so forth. To state things clearly, it is because our world is structured by discourse that an interpretation, in turn, has structuring consequences on the real world. This is what Lacan illustrates in Seminar XVII with the example of law: If this isnt what law is, if we cannot grasp how discourse structures the real world here, then where can we? (18). Like the Freudian myth of the father, Seminar XVII is an analytic interpretation of the social bond that produces effects by illuminating a previously concealed aspect of truth. And if an interpretation always aims at a symptom, what symptom does Seminar XVII seek to interpret? As I will argue, Seminar XVII is an interpretation of a modality of the social bond that increasingly produces us as objects, and this interpretation seeks to preserve a place for truth beyond scientic truth or knowledge. Lacan grounds this interpretation on a radically novel theory of discourse:
the discourses in question are nothing other than the signifying articulations, the apparatus whose presence, whose existing status alone dominates and governs anything that at any given moment is capable of emerging as speech. They are discourses without speech, which subsequently comes and lodges itself within them. (166)

A discourse is a structure that produces effects of subject, of truth, of jouissance, of speech. To say it otherwise, a discourses function in

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making sense is secondary to the satisfaction that it produces. More simply, sense is above all a vector of satisfaction, a mode of organizing satisfaction in civilization. This is perhaps clearer than ever today, when so many discourses endure in the face of their refutation, such as the discourse of crime prevention for example.31 They endure, not because they are true or even effective, but because they provide ways for a given civilization to curb the jouissance of its subjects, to channel it through the networks of signication they generate.
Knowledge at the Command of Civilization

More specically, Seminar XVII interprets the mutation of the discourse of the master into the discourse of the university, or the fact that at a certain point in time (Lacan situates this with Hegel) knowledge became the agent of discourse, that the university discourse became the masters discourse:
To be sure, the present one [the masters discourse] does not have the structure of the old, in the sense in which the old is installed in the place of the left, the one capped by the U. . . What occupies the place there, which we will provisionally call dominant, is this S2 , which is specied as being, not knowledge of everything (savoir de tout) weve not got to that point yet but all-knowing (tout-savoir). (31)32

As a result of the discourse of the university operating as the new masters discourse, we are subjected to what Lacan calls the new tyranny of knowledge (32). Lacan develops his insight by arguing that the discourse of the university today takes on the form of the discourse of science. For science, truth has no function because in the place designated as that of truth by Lacan is the S1 , reduced to the function of a sheer command, an injunction:
The master was satised with this little tithe, this surplus jouissance, such that, after all, there is no indication that in himself the slave was unhappy to be giving it. The case is quite different with respect to what is found, on the horizon of the rise of the master subject, in a truth which asserts itself on the basis of his equality with himself, on the basis of this I-cracy I once spoke of, and which is, it seems, the essence of every afrmation in [a] culture that has seen this masters discourse ourish over all others. [translation modied] (7980)

What effect does Lacan hope to produce with this interpretation? To posit psychoanalysis, the other side of the discourse of the master, as a dispositive that operates with the truth foreclosed from the discourse of

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science, which leaves no place to man (147). The discourse of science is the formalization of a knowledge that renders all truth problematic (79), whereas with psychoanalysis we have an opportunity for it to make sense to question knowledge in terms of truth (1089). So with this interpretation Lacan aims to extract truth from knowledge, detaching it from the place ascribed to it by the scientic discourse of an I-cracy (or injunction to self-identity).

The Real of Posthumanity

The masters discourse has become the discourse of the university, itself modelled on science. The rst specicity of science identied by Lacan is that it relies on self-identity that A equals A in mathematical language and so implies a foreclosure of the subject of the unconscious, which is consistently dened by Lacan in the following terms: a subject is represented by a signier for another signier (or S is an effect of S1 and S2 ). This denition implies that the very structure of the unconscious prevents self-identity. Yet, with scientic knowledge in the position of agent of the social bond, the effects of subject produced by the discourse of the master are what Lacan calls master-subject, I-cracy, or the conceit according to which we could be transparent to ourselves, know ourselves, x ourselves, and bypass the unconscious.

The Alethosphere

The second effect of the discourse of science functioning as discourse of the master is to produce the environment Lacan names with the neologism alethosphere. In Seminar XVII, Lacan presented our environment as the product of the now unchallenged hegemony of the capitalists discourse, with its curious copulation with science (110). What is so specic about this environment? In Chapter XI Lacan said that the characteristic of our science not of science but of our science , is not to have introduced a better and more extensive knowledge of the world but to have brought into existence, in the world, things that did not in any way exist at the level of our perception (158). These proliferating objects created by science are what Lacan called the lathouses: the world is increasingly populated by lathouses (162).33

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The space in which the creations of science unfold is the space of in-substance, the a-thing, lachose with an apostrophe a fact that entirely changes the meaning of our materialism (159). In other words, the achose (a-thing to be heard here as no-thing) is a thing whose existence stems only from its logical truth, from a combinatory of signiers: In so far as science only refers to an articulation that only takes form in the signifying order, it is constructed out of something where there was nothing beforehand. (160) Such a purely logical use of the signier, instrumentalized in formal combinations dissociated from the laws of nature, from representations (the imaginary), results in the severing of the link between signier and signied. It is in that sense perhaps that we can hear what the name posthuman seeks to capture the human now exists outside the laws of nature as model for making sense of humanity, essentially sexual sense. So the a-thing is a space without imaginary law, and the alethosphere from the Greek word althia is a space lled with creations, effects of a formalized truth. Lacans precise formulation indicates that our science exceeds by far the effects of knowledge and understanding that it may also have; its specicity is to produce objects that do not t with our previous environment, an environment that was organized by the imaginary, the laws of nature. Thus, for example, Lacan refers to the male and female principles as principles of the organization of the world the complementarity of yin/yang for instance and of perception, including the image, representation.34 The term alethosphere signals the connection between modern science and the kind of truth it produces. This version of science as a set of purely signifying combinations dis-indexed from the imaginary induces a mutation in the status of the symbolic itself, restoring the symbolic to its primary effect: that of effecting death on the living. For as Lacan consistently argued throughout his teaching, pure symbolic is death, the murder of the thing. Furthermore, although the subject is an effect of the signier according to Lacans own classic denition according to which a signier represents a subject for another signier the subject is produced as subject insofar as it is precipitated as signied of the Other. The subject qua effect of a formal combinatory of signiers is more of an object and less of a subject: in this fundamental chapter, Lacan suggests that the effect of our science is that each one of us is initially determined as object small a (160). So the world has changed, the fundamental object produced by our civilization is waste and we are evermore encumbered with the

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lathouses we produce.35 The more we shape the world to suit our every need, wish or whim, starting from the illusion that we were natural beings, the more we seek to escape our creation hence the thirst for the authentic, the vacation spots no ones been to, the exoticism with which we veil the abject poverty of the worlds majority or even, as in Avatar, for a new, better species. It is not up to analysts to say whether the world is a worse or better place, nor to wish for a return to the past, nor to egg on science to produce humans in the manner of machines, or machines that resemble humans. From our vantage point, the neuroses of the twentieth century, with their intricate patterns of repression, morality and transgression, seem perfectly mad and certainly do not represent a time to be yearned for. On the other hand, modern-day symptoms have little to endear themselves to us, as we witness the devastation caused by unlimited relations to the drive.

Conclusion

There would be much more to say on the questions raised here than I can do justice to in this paper, so I will conclude with a working hypothesis for further reections on our modernity. Our democracy, situated as it is in an environment produced by the unprecedented conjunction of science and capitalism, entails a primary determination of subjects as objects, and the attendant social bond is aptly characterized in terms of the management of subjects qua objects objects to be managed according to the logic of concentration, or the distribution of subjects-objects according to the properties which the signifying articulations of the modern master identify as operative (good health, time-keeping, efciency, productivity, dangerousness. . . ). Our current discourses of crime control, research assessment, mental health management, risk-prevention, performanceevaluation, evidence-based practices, target-setting and so on t squarely within such a perspective. Such a diagnosis leaves us with a fundamental question: what forms of subversion can be expected of the modern subject, reduced as it is to its formal measurements, its purely signifying determinants? And what can psychoanalysis offer subjects produced by the alethosphere, by a real of science no longer cloaked by the laws of the imaginary? For Lacan, the real that psychoanalysis is confronted with is one that cannot be written by science, it is the real of the non-sexual

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relation, of the fact that science will never be able to write an equation for the sexual relation between a man and a woman. Psychoanalysis operates on this other real, not the real of science but the real of the non-sexual relation, for it is this real which continues to produce us as subjects, not as objects. It is a political choice to target this outside-sense that eschews the articulation of a subjects destiny by substituting the limit of castration for the limitless injunction of the superegoic injunction ciphered in the fantasy always act in such a way as to maximize your jouissance.36 An unprecedented desire may come to the fore for the subject, freed from his destiny if not from his jouissance, permitting the active operation of singularities in the social bond. Why does it matter? I think of a comment made in passing by Eric Laurent in his joint seminar with Miller in 1996 on the inexistence of the Other: The future depends on the way each one of us interprets his or her symptoms.37 In seeking to desperately lodge ones jouissance under the multiplying signiers obligingly provided by the masters discourse, such as depression, oniomania, social phobia, addiction, etc., the subject is re-absorbed in the generality of a discourse that leaves him defenceless against the singularity of his own inaugural experience of jouissance, or at best, with the meagre defence of a monosymptomatic identication (groups centred around symptoms like AA, Hearing Voices, pro-ana, etc.). Because limitlessness structures the contemporary social bond, there are few in-built barriers to the devastating push-to-jouissance we are witness to. The contemporary era of globalization suffers no exception: we are all included within the set of humans catalogued according to our degree of divergence from, or convergence with, a growing number of norms (weight, size, health, performance, proclivities, and so forth). In this all-inclusive set, no longer limited by the exception to itself characteristic of universalism, what remains outside-discourse is the only point that allows for the expression of the invariant occurrence of the singularity of each and every subject. If the analytic discourse enables those that want to to undertake this discovery, the interpretations analysts make of the social bond also permits the formation of communities of interpretation united by a desire to know something about it, distinct from the lethal combination of a masters discourse seeking to domesticate the living through the signier and the death that it transmits, and the injunction to enjoy without limit exponentially strengthened by the social not-all as matrix of civilization.

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NOTES
1 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, The First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink in collaboration with Hlose Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 264; henceforth E. 2 This is how we can understand Lacans contention, developed in Seminar I, that resistance is always on the side of the analyst. 3 See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey and others, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 19531974), XVIII, 164; henceforth SE. See also subsequent texts such as The Ego and the Id [1923], XIX, 159 and The Economic Problem of Masochism [1924], XIX, 15572. For a critical account of Freuds theory of the dualism of the drives see Vronique Voruz, That which in life might prefer death. . . From the Death Drive to the Desire of the Analyst, in Law and Evil: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis, edited by Ari Hirvonen and Janne Portiviki (London: Routledge, 2010), 26085. 4 See Jacques Lacan, Les complexes familiaux [1938] in Autres crits (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 2384. This led Lacan to emphasize the symbolic as the modality of the treatment of the imaginary in the rst tier of his teaching. 5 This erasure of the place of exception can be read in the tables of sexuation. The left side congures subjective modalities organized by way of an exception to the set; it is because there is one that is not subjected to the phallic function that all others are. See Marie-Hlne Brousse, Ordinary Psychosis in the Light of Lacans Theory of Discourse, translated by Adrian Price, Psychoanalytical Notebooks 19: Ordinary Psychosis, edited by Natalie Wulng (2009), 719. The right side maps the time of globalization or social not-all. See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge 19721973, translated by Bruce Fink (NewYork: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), henceforth S XX; Jacques-Alain Miller, Intuitions milanaises [2], in Mental 12 (mai 2003), 926 (18), henceforth IM2. 6 Jacques-Alain Miller, Ordinary Psychosis Revisited, translated by Adrian Price, Psychoanalytical Notebooks 19: Ordinary Psychosis, edited by Natalie Wulng (2009), 13967. 7 Jacques-Alain Miller, The Era of the Man Without Qualities, translated by Thelma Sowley, Psychoanalytical Notebooks 16: Regulation and Evaluation, edited by Philip Dravers (2007), 742. 8 See Jacques-Alain Miller, Intuitions milanaises [1], in Mental 11 (December 2002), 921. 9 Vronique Voruz, The Logic of Exception, Law, Culture and the Humanities 2:2 (June 2006), 16278.

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10 See Grard Wajcman, LOeil absolu (Paris: Denol, 2010), 149; henceforth OA. 11 Many of todays ready-made complaints are protably understood in light of the melancholic or abject core of subjectivity: depression, low self-esteem, social phobia. Hence the importance of agalmatization of ones objectposition. 12 Elizabeth Roudinesco, La Part obscure de nous-mmes : une histoire des pervers (Paris: Albin Michel, 2007). 13 Eric Laurent, The Jouissance Programme is Not Virtual, translated by Asuncion Alvarez, Lacanian Ink 35 (2010), 98108. 14 Along similar lines we can think of Joss Whedons most recent series, Dollhouse, in which characters rent their bodies out to a corporate venture named the Dollhouse to be imprinted with the skills, memories and personalities required for specic missions (ranging from incarnating someones perfect sexual fantasy to solving particularly tricky situations). Of course the heroine, a doll, played by Eliza Dushku and ttingly named Echo, soon begins to piece things together, becoming more human as the series unfolds. 15 Jacques Lacan, Note on the Child, in Psychoanalytical Notebooks 20: Object a and the Semblant (2010), 78. 16 Eric Laurent, Usages des neuro-sciences pour la psychanalyse, Ornicar? Digital 312 (11 July 2008), 4. 17 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freuds Papers on Technique [19534], translated by John Forrester (New York & London: Norton, 1988), 174. 18 Eating disorders and other addictions are the most obvious examples, but Lacan also talked about the destructive modality of love he called ravage in his Seminar XXIII, more specically concerning women. Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire Livre XXII: Le Sinthome [19756] (Paris: Seuil, 2005). 19 Eric Laurent, Lost in Cognition: Psychanalyse et sciences cognitives (Nantes: Ccile Defaut, 2008), 5; henceforth LC. 20 Jacques Lacan, Le Triomphe de la religion (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 93; henceforth TR. 21 David Eagleman, Conference at the RSA: The Brain and the Law, http:// www.thersa.org/events/vision-videos/david-eagleman-21-april-2009, consulted 21 April 2009. It is interesting to contrast Eaglemans views with Lacans innitely more sophisticated position on crime in his 1951 intervention A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology (E, 10222), on which I have recently given a commentary for a criminological audience. See Vronique Voruz, Reading Criminology with Psychoanalysis: the Case for Singularity, in New Directions for

442 Paragraph Criminology: Notes from Outside the Field, edited by Ronnie Lippens and Patrick Van Calster (Antwerp: Maklu, 2010), 99118. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, translated by Russell Grigg (New York and London: Norton, 2007), 113; henceforth S XVII. Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire VI: Le Dsir et son interprtation. Unpublished. This is how we can understand the denition that Lacan gives of psychology in Seminar XX: The aim of my teaching, insofar as it pursues what can be said and enunciated on the basis of the analytic discourse, is to dissociate a and A by reducing the rst to what is related to the imaginary and the other to what is related to the symbolic. It is indubitable that the symbolic is the basis of what was made into God. It is certain that the imaginary is based on the reection of one semblable in another. And yet, a has lent itself to be confused with S( ) (. . . ), and it has done so by means of the function of being. It is here that a scission or detachment remains to be effectuated. It is in this respect that psychoanalysis is something other than a psychology. For psychology is this uneffectuated scission (S XX, 83). Session of 3 December 2008. Jacques-Alain Miller, Choses de nesse en psychanalyse: Lorientation lacanienne, unpublished. Jacques-Alain Miller, LOrientation lacanienne (20078) unpublished; henceforth OL. In Freuds time the discontents of civilization were produced by the excessive repression of desire of a more puritanical era. There is little doubt that psychoanalysis has played its part in weakening the forces of repression. See also Jacques-Alain Miller, A Discussion of Lacans Kant with Sade, in Reading Seminars I and II, edited by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 21240. Here we can think of the misguided use of responsibilization by many therapists: the injunction to take responsibility for ones life bears no relationship to the psychoanalytic idea that one should answer for ones action. One is injunctive, the other seeks to circumscribe what remains opaque in the determination of our actions. Only once that opacity has been glimpsed by the subject can responsibility truly occur. The reduction of a subjects myriad fantasies to a simple formula, axiom of their jouissance, can be linked to the second stage of the beating fantasy, A Child is Being Beaten [1919], which Freud says is never conscious but has to be constructed in analysis (SE XVII, 175204). The latter chimes with Lacans anyone can say to me, in that in both the unconscious stage of the beating fantasy and in the Sadean formulation, there is no other subject than the subject of the fantasy himself. This exposes the fantasy as a mode of enjoyment rather than as the passive position which the Other putatively imposes on the subject. It is this revelation that is sometimes referred to as the traversing of the fantasy (AE, 24359).

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30 Jacques-Alain Miller, Interpretation in Reverse, in The Later Lacan, edited by Vronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 39 (6). 31 For an apt refutation, see Bernard Harcourt, Against Prediction (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006). 32 More recently Miller developed the striking thesis that the current discourse of the master was structured like the analysts discourse in that object a is the agent of our social bond. In other words we as subjects of posthumanity are driven by the dictatorship of surplus-jouissance, best exemplied in the push-to-enjoyment embodied by mass consumption. See Jacques-Alain Miller, Une fantaisie, in Mental 15 (fvrier 2005), 927 (19). 33 A lathouse is an object produced by science which functions partly like a drive-object in that it absorbs jouissance, but is separable from the body the most obvious examples are networked voice and gaze objects. The early twentieth century saw the earth criss-crossed by voice-transmission technology, the late twentieth century witnessed the proliferation of technological eyes (CCTV, webcams, mobile phones, digital cameras). Key to the distinction between a classic object a and a lathouse is that the latter does not lend consistency to an Other this is instrumental in the narcissism of our cultures. See also OA, 2603. 34 We can think here of the new possibilities for human reproduction which extend far beyond what the natural model allowed for. 35 Eric Laurent, Nous avons transform le corps humain en nouveau Dieu, La Nacin, 9 July 2008. 36 Jacques-Alain Miller, LOs du problme, in Lakant, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Collection rue Huysmans/Navarin-Seuil, 2003), 5866 (64). 37 Jacques-Alain Miller and Eric Laurent, LAutre qui nexiste pas et ses comits dthique Lorientation lacanienne, unpublished seminar (19967).

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