Self and Emotional Life

by Adrian Johnston

  In short, the position Lacan labels the discourse of the hysteric, unlike that of the master, is essentially characterized by uncertainty. However, what, if anything, does all of this have to do with the topic of affect? There are several connections. To begin with, another possible line of questioning speaking subjects hystericized through analyses inevitably will be prompted to pursue on a number of occasions is: “How do I truly feel?” “Do I honestly feel the way that I feel that I feel?” Not only is the figure of the master certain of being equivalent to what he/she says and how he/she identifies and is identified sociosymbolically; the parlêtre pretending to occupy a position of masterful agency (in Lacan’s discourse theory, agency itself, in any of the four discourses, is invariably a “semblance” [semblant] beneath which lies the obfuscated “truth” [vérité] of this agent-position)91 is also certain of how he/she feels: “I know exactly how I feel”; “When I feel ‘x,’ that’s how I really feel.” Hystericization undermines confident sureness as regards affects just as much as regards anything else—and this insofar as, within the subjective structures of speaking beings, affective phenomena, like everything else, are inextricably intertwined with sociosymbolic mediators.92 Moreover, in an effective analysis worthy of the name, doubts arise about the seeming obviousness and trustworthiness of feelings.93 The analyst can and should guide the analysand to realizations that affects aren’t always directly related to what they appear to be related to in conscious experience (thanks to displacement, transference, and so on) and that given feelings can work to conceal other emotions and their associated thoughts (such as, to take one common example, affection or love masking aggression or hate and vice versa). Soler claims that “affects have for the affected the force of immediate evidence, of a pseudo-evidence.”94 Although this is generally true for nearly everybody, including analysands in earlier stages of their analyses, a good analysis dispels this illusory immediacy qua self-evidence, bringing to light its “pseudo” status.

  Lacan’s neologisms senti-ment (a neologism linking sentiments to lying)95 and affectuation (a neologism linking affects to affecting qua putting on a false display)96 both point to the analytic thesis that, as Žižek bluntly and straightforwardly puts it, “emotions lie.”97 But, whereas Lacanians often explicitly assert or implicitly assume that the unconscious “truths” masked by the “lies” of conscious emotions (as felt feelings [Empfindungen]) are nonaffective entities (i.e., signifiers, structures, and so on), the preceding parsings of Lacan’s inadequately elaborated metapsychology of affect indicate that behind the façade of misleading felt feelings might be other, misfelt feelings (rather than phenomena of a fundamentally nonaffective nature). As will be seen later (chapters 12 and 13), the breakthroughs of contemporary research in affective neuroscience are indispensable for any effort to clarify and develop further what is suggested in this context with regard to human emotional life.

  In his seminar in 1971–1972 on Le savoir du psychanalyste, Lacan introduces the neologism lalangue.98 This neologism is formed through collapsing the space between the definite article and the noun in the French la langue (which could be translated as “the tongue” or “the natural language”). One could say that a nonsense word is created through skipping over the spacing so crucial to the syntactical and grammatical structures of recognizably meaningful (uses of) natural languages. Moreover, the sound of the word lalangue recalls, through its first two repeating sounds (lala), the murmurings of infants before mastering their “mother tongue” (la langue maternelle) as a transparent medium of socially comprehensible communication. An infant’s babbling, prior to his/her acquisition of and accession to la langue as a system of signifying signs employed in exchanges of ideas, frequently involves playing with phonemic elements of his/her auditory milieu as meaningless materials to be enjoyed for the sensations they produce in the libidinally charged orifices of the mouth (when vocalized) or the ears (when heard). The nonsense neologism lalangue is coined by Lacan to designate, among other things, the nonsense uttered by babbling infants joyfully and idiotically reveling in the bodily pleasures of pure, senseless sounds.99

  But, in line with Freud’s crucial psychoanalytic thesis according to which ontogenetic development doesn’t entail the effacing, superseding replacement of previous “stages” by subsequent ones—the earlier subsists side by side with the later in the temporally emergent organizations of the psychical apparatus—Lacan’s lalangue lingers on in the linguistic productions of more mature speaking subjects100 (albeit in forms pruned and modified by being folded into successive sheathes of la langue). In his final seminars of the mid-to-late 1970s, it becomes apparent that Lacan accords lalangue an absolutely central place in clinical analysis. From Freud to the present, one of the few statements able to elicit near-universal assent from among the diverse array of psychoanalytic traditions and orientations—the psychoanalytic field as a (non)whole is marked by disagreement and bickering among its various constituents and parties—is the claim that the practice of analysis ultimately is based on the “fundamental rule” requiring of analysands that they freely associate. The very acoustic or graphic materiality of the language with(in) which patients on the couch freely associate inevitably results in the derailment of consciously intended meanings through the sounds and images of asignificant language matter generating consciously unintended slips, homophonies, equivocations, and so on. When language, as la langue, does this, it momentarily operates as lalangue.101 These unintended productions of the analysand reveal the, so to speak, private language of his/her unconscious. Like the nonsense-murmuring infant, the unconscious plays with the mother tongue heedless of whether or not the products of this playful process “make sense.” The opening session of Lacan’s twenty-fifth seminar (Le moment de conclure [1977–1978]) is entitled Une practique de bavardage; analysis, based as it is on free association, is “a babbling practice.”102 The analysand is asked to “babble,” to lie there in the consulting room and mutter on for a time, vocalizing whatever happens to cross his/her mind with as little concern as possible for whether what comes out of his/her mouth is meaningful, significant, or even readily comprehensible to him-/herself or the listening analyst. One of the results of this activity is the surfacing of residual elements of the idiosyncratic-yet-interpretable lalangue spoken by the speaking subject’s unconscious.103 These elements are keys to unlocking and decoding the unconscious.104

  On a more general metapsychological plane, Lacan’s contrast between lalangue and la langue can be aligned precisely with Freud’s distinction between primary and secondary processes, respectively.105 Freud depicts secondary process conscious cognition as a specific style of chaining together interlinked ideational contents. Whereas this style of cognition is unfree insofar as it is restricted by concerns about whether the connections it makes between ideational contents are logical or meaningful according to shared conventions, primary process mentation disregards such concerns and the accompanying restrictions they dictate. This other style of thinking, a comparatively less restricted style characteristic of the unconscious as revealed by dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue, literary and musical engagements with language, and free associations, forges links between Vorstellungen in unconventional fashions, sometimes exhibiting a surprising degree of creativity and inventiveness. Likewise, for Lacan, la langue (as akin to Freudian secondary processes) establishes rules and boundaries fixing the slippery, runny overflowing of surplus meanings and nonsense supported by the materiality of lalangue (as akin to Freudian primary processes), a materiality underpinning and mixed in with any and every instance of language qua la langue.106

  To take an additional Lacanian step, one could argue that lalangue lingers on in la langue as jouis-sens (another, related neologism introduced in the seminar running parallel to Le savoir du psychanalyste [in which the neologism lalangue is coined], the nineteenth seminar entitled “… ou pire” [1971–1972]).107 The best possible translation into English of this French neologism, wh
ich is homophonous with jouissance (enjoyment), is “enjoy-meant.”108 The link between the two neologisms lalangue and jouis-sens is evident in Lacan’s televised interview of 1973. Therein, soon after discussing lalangue as closely related to what Freud designates when referring to primary process unconscious thinking, Lacan observes: “What Freud discovers in the unconscious—here I’ve only been able to invite you to take a look at his writings to see if I speak truly—is something utterly different from realizing that broadly speaking one can give a sexual meaning to everything one knows, for the reason that knowing has always been open to the famous metaphor (the side of meaning Jung exploited). It is the real that permits the effective unknotting of what makes the symptom hold together, namely a knot of signifiers. Where here knotting and unknotting are not metaphors, but are really to be taken as those knots that in fact are built up through developing chains of the signifying material.”109 He immediately adds: “For these chains are not of meaning but of enjoy-meant [jouis-sens] which you can write as you wish, as is implied by the punning that constitutes the law of the signifier.”110

  Jouis-sens is jouissance entwined with and mediated by language not as la langue (i.e., an intersubjective and transsubjective system of meaningful signs, as signifiers stitched to signifieds, employed in exchanges between conscious communicators), but as lalangue (i.e., the not-yet-meaningful or meaningless signifiers-apart-from-signifieds whose acoustic and graphic materialities facilitate associative enchainings of psychical contents in excess of the circumscribed sphere of shared, consensus-reality “sense”). Echoing his recurrent insistence that he doesn’t employ the word material metaphorically when referring to the acoustic and graphic elements of symbolic orders,111 Lacan here indicates that the symptomatic formations of concern to analysis consist of literal “knots of signifiers,” namely, bundles of auditory and visual traces inscribed in the psychical apparatus and associatively woven together, via primary process patterns (as “the law of the signifier” insofar as the pure signifier is substantial rather than significant), into tangles of interconnected relations producing certain effects in the speaking being. Moreover, as will be explored further subsequently, the concept-term jouis-sens suggests an interest on Lacan’s part in problematizing and complicating the crude, simplistic, black-and-white distinction between, as it were, energy (as libidinal or affective forces related to the body [jouis]), on the one hand, and structure (as representational or ideational factors related to the subject [sens]), on the other hand. Following this suggestion alluded to by Lacan’s neologism, it might be feasible to outline a neuro-psychoanalytic account of affective life, bringing together the odd couple of empirical studies of the emotional brain and Lacanian metapsychological theory, a coupling from which both partners, it is hoped, will benefit in terms of increased accuracy and sophistication.

  The preceding discussion of lalangue à la Lacan sets the stage for productively examining a moment in the famous twentieth seminar where lalangue is said to generate affective repercussions. At the (self-)conscious level of language use, a level neglecting the material signifier in its focus on the meaningful sign (with the former treated as nothing more than a transparent medium for intended significations), the parlêtre remains largely oblivious to its own unknown knowledge in the form of a speaking unconscious entangled with the jouissance-saturated meanderings of lalangue as something “in la langue more than la langue itself.” Lacan explains: “The unconscious evinces knowledge that, for the most part, escapes the speaking being. That being provides the occasion to realize just how far the effects of llanguage go, in that it presents all sorts of affects that remain enigmatic. Those affects are what result from the presence of llanguage insofar as it articulates things by way of knowledge (de savoir) that go much further than what the speaking being sustains (supporte) by way of enunciated knowledge.”112 Fink translates lalangue as “llanguage.” Lacan continues: “Language is, no doubt, made up of llanguage. It is knowledge’s hare-brained lucubration (élucubration) about llanguage. But the unconscious is knowledge, a knowing how to do things (savoir-faire) with llanguage. And what we know how to do with llanguage goes well beyond what we can account for under the heading of language.”113 This is promptly brought back to bear on the topic of affect: “Llanguage affects us first of all by everything it brings with it by way of effects that are affects. If we can say that the unconscious is structured like a language, it is in the sense that the effects of llanguage, already there qua knowledge, go well beyond anything the being who speaks is capable of enunciating.”114

  From the perspective of secondary process conscious cognition, fixated as it is on the recognizably logical and meaningful dimensions of la langue, the (apparently) illogical and meaningless “false connections” between multiple pieces of psychical content made by the primary process styles of thinking, styles of thinking characteristic of an unconscious that thinks in and through lalangue, usually go unnoticed. But, these consciously unnoticed associative cross resonances of a lalangue mixed in with la langue spoken by the parlêtre are not without their effects for all that. Among other consequences, these chains and knots of sounds and images generate affective reverberations.115 When someone experiences his/her affects as mysterious or puzzling (i.e., “enigmatic”), as apparently without rhyme or reason, Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis hypothesizes that there is indeed, nonetheless, a rhyme or reason at play (sometimes even a literal rhyme). However, standard (nonanalytic) protocols of narration and explanation, governed by the semantic and syntactic restrictions imposed by normal, ordinary uses of natural language as a communicative conveyor of sensible significations, are unable to discern and comprehend the seemingly irrational and nonsensical free associations between Vorstellungen responsible for catalyzing certain emotions and feelings. As a result, such emotions and feelings thus catalyzed cannot but manifest themselves as strange and inexplicable to “rational” conscious cognition.

  For Lacan, enigmatic affects aren’t the exception—they’re the rule. That is to say, instead of treating emotions and feelings as typically transparent and self-evident phenomena, with perplexing affective experiences being relatively infrequent anomalies or pathological aberrations, Lacan considers most consciously felt affects to be unreliable, dissembling indicators of things other than themselves—and this even when the awareness registering these experiences doesn’t experience them as such (many emotions and feelings regarded as straightforwardly unenigmatic by self-consciousness might not be what it takes them to be). As noted earlier, he neologistically designates affective phenomena as a matter of senti-ment and affectuation. Additionally, his well-known characterization of anxiety as the one affect that doesn’t deceive obviously indicates that all other affects are, at least potentially if not actually, deceptive.116 Similarly, a less well-known aside by Lacan, in the eighteenth seminar (D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant [1971]), mentions hate as “the only lucid sentiment” (le seul sentiment lucide).117 Hence, by implication, all other sentiments are senti-ments, namely, dark and cloudy sensations that always can be doubted as to whether they mean what they seem to mean, whether they, so to speak, tell the truth about themselves. Apart from anxiety and hate, affects, in the Lacanian view, are generally misleading and opaque. And, the preceding also implies that anxiety can be nondeceptive yet nonlucid (as in superficially mysterious anxiety of the free-floating or phobic types, which, in either case, reliably signals the presence or proximity of elements and entities central to the desiring unconscious) and that hate can be lucid yet deceptive (when one vividly feels intense hatred, one undoubtedly really feels hatred as such, although this might be transferentially displaced from one object onto another or be the flip side of passionate love). Anyhow, if, as Lacan tacitly alleges, all other affects are both deceptive and nonlucid, this entails that they can and should be placed under a cloud of suspicions: “Do I truly feel ‘x?’”; “Do I truly feel ‘x’ in relation to ‘y?’”; “Is feeling ‘x’ related
to ‘z’ rather than ‘y?’”; “Does feeling ‘x’ hide or code for different feelings?” and so on. Furthermore, if, according to Lacan, the jouis-sens of lalangue is responsible for enigmatic affects, then, despite Lacan’s prevailing tendency to posit nonaffective signifier-structures as the unconscious truths distorted by the phenomenal lies of conscious emotions, behind the façades of feelings might be defensively occluded psychical factors having as much to do with the passions of the enjoying body (jouis) as with the calculations of symbolic constellations (sens).

  It is time to return to a sentence from the seventeenth seminar quoted quite a while ago: “In effect, from the perspective of this discourse, there is only one affect, which is, namely, the product of the speaking being’s capture in a discourse, where this discourse determines its status as object.”118 Again, “this discourse” refers to the discourse of the analyst depicted during this particular period of Lacan’s teachings. Additionally, it must be recalled that the analyst’s discourse strives to interrupt the discourse of the master (as the mastery of discourse, namely, the semblance of intentional conscious control over speech, meaning, and so on) and, in so doing, to hystericize he/she who formerly spoke from a posturing position of masterful agency. As I’ve argued here, such hystericization amounts not only to someone becoming uncomfortably skeptical about whether he/she is what he/she took him-/herself to be at the level of sociosymbolic identities (i.e., egos and selves mediated by the images and words of surrounding intersubjective and transsubjective environments), but also to losing any firm, stable certainties at the level of his/her affective life. Through this loss, feelings are deprived of a previously taken-for-granted reflexive self-identity in which one can be sure that one’s feelings really feel the way that they apparently feel (i.e., in which there are no non-self-identical affective phenomena in the form of unfelt or misfelt feelings). However, two features of this quotation from 1970, features related to each other, have yet to be adequately explicated: first, the issue of there being “only one affect” for Lacanian psychoanalysis and, second, exactly what is involved with the parlêtre’s “status as object” in this context.