Self and Emotional Life

by Adrian Johnston

  For anyone familiar with Lacan’s discussions of affects, the assertion of there being solely a single affect is a familiar one: Based, in part, on specific observations made by Freud, he maintains that anxiety alone is the key affective phenomenon of concern for psychoanalysis.119 Elsewhere in the seventeenth seminar, Lacan describes anxiety as “the central affect, the one around which everything is organized,” as “the fundamental affect.”120 The Freudian-Lacanian justifications for this thesis are too numerous and complex to go into at present. What’s more, it will be necessary in what follows eventually to turn to the task of articulating conceptual definitions of affects, emotions, and feelings as related-but-distinct metapsychological categories. For now, suffice it to say that, as Lacan sees it, anxiety (the “one affect”) is intimately linked to “the speaking being’s capture in a discourse, where this discourse determines its status as object.” To cut a long story short, the objectification of the parlêtre mentioned on this occasion is tantamount to the hystericization described earlier. Anxiety arises from various uncertainties that themselves can become sources of tangible disturbances exclusively for a being whose relations with itself (via intrasubjective self-objectification) and others (via inter- or transsubjective objectification) are routed through and modulated by ensembles of sociosymbolic configurations (i.e., “discourses”). Thanks to discourses and everything they bring with them, the subject “captured” by the signifier can come anxiously to ask what it is, as an object (especially an object of desire), for both others and itself; and, also thanks to immersion in the worlds of signifiers, such inquiring subjectivity never will alight upon definitive, final answers to its questions granting unshakeable certainty.121 If anxiety is not only the one-and-only affect for psychoanalysis but also the sole affect that doesn’t deceive, then all other affects (as emotions and feelings) can become causes for anxiety (as an affect proper) insofar as their deceptiveness, a deceptiveness engendered by their sociosymbolic mediation, invariably allows for casting them into doubt. As a sociosymbolic being (i.e., a parlêtre), one always can wonder warily, in a gesture of self-objectification, whether one honestly feels what one seemingly feels (in addition to whether others honestly feel what they indicate they feel). What could be more anxiety-inducing than feeling that one cannot trust one’s feelings, that one’s heart and soul might tell half-truths or utter falsehoods?

  To borrow the title of one of Laplanche’s books (La révolution copernicienne inachevée), there is another “unfinished” aspect to the Copernican revolution of psychoanalysis. As I’ve observed already (in chapter 8), Lacan, apropos Freud’s references to Copernicus, emphasizes the analytic dissolution of the illusion of knowledge’s inherent reflexivity that is transparent to itself; the (subject of the) unconscious subverts the notion of the self-conscious subject that supposedly, when it knows, necessarily knows that it knows. In the Lacanian account, what remains unfinished in the Freudian Copernican revolution is the thinking-through of the full extent of the subversion of knowing subjectivity brought about by the psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious as a knowledge that doesn’t know itself, a subversion partially obfuscated by Freud’s manner of interpreting his own invocation of Copernicus. (As explained previously, the pain of the blow to humanity’s self-image by the earth’s celestial decentering is mitigated and compensated for by narcissistic pride at having achieved knowledge of this decentering.) Along these lines, Lacan positions himself with respect to Freud as extending to their consequent logical ends certain crucial revolutionary trajectories that, although not followed through to their ultimate conclusions by his predecessor, manifestly originate in the foundations provided by this predecessor’s work. Lacan’s “return to Freud” could be depicted as an analytic-dialectical retrieval and deployment of the “unknown knowns” of the Freudian oeuvre (as Heidegger would phrase it, Lacan “thinks the unthought” of Freud). Whereas Lacan’s finishing of unfinished Freudian business generally focuses on thinking and knowing, with the thinking that doesn’t think that it thinks and the knowing that doesn’t know that it knows both being dynamics and structures of a fundamentally conceptual-intellectual-linguistic-representational nature, my finishing of unfinished Lacanian business focuses on feeling as being not transparent to itself. Additionally, unlike the many critical readings of Lacan that see nothing in his teachings doing real justice to things not of a conceptual-intellectual-linguistic-representational nature, I acknowledge that, although underemphasized and in need of further elaboration, a number of resources indeed are to be found in the Lacanian corpus for the development of a richer, more subtle metapsychology of affective life that is able to be interfaced productively with the findings of the contemporary neuroscience of the emotional brain. Even though Lacan repeatedly denies the existence of unconscious affects, considering the very phrase “unconscious affects” to be self-contradictory (as Freud too sometimes does), his scattered reflections on affects nonetheless hint that subjects can be “strangers to themselves” at the level of feeling as well as at the levels (not unrelated to feeling) of thinking and knowing. But, a “return to Lacan” modeled on Lacan’s return to Freud is required if these resources and hints are to be extracted and extrapolated in new directions that are neither simply Lacanian nor non-Lacanian.

  12.

  EMOTIONAL LIFE AFTER LACAN

  FROM PSYCHOANALYSIS TO THE NEUROSCIENCES

  Among those readers of Lacan not inclined immediately to denounce his version of psychoanalysis as entirely devoid of any serious and sustained treatment of affective life—Lacanian psychoanalysis is all too frequently caricatured as a disembodied, formalist structuralism neglecting everything apart from static symbolic-linguistic systems—much attention has been paid to his tenth seminar. As noted, Lacan himself appeals to this particular seminar, with its focus on anxiety, as exculpatory evidence against accusations that he mishandles or ignores affects (accusations coming from a number of quarters: phenomenologies, poststructuralisms, deconstructionisms, feminisms, non-Lacanian psychoanalytic orientations, and so on). Various exegetes sympathetic to Lacan, taking their lead from this appeal, attempt to derive a broader Lacanian metapsychology of affect from his discussions of anxiety in 1962–1963.

  But, one already might ask at this point: given the undeniable existence of numerous phenomena that are identifiable as “affective,” how can a mere one-academic-year-out-of-twenty-seven examination of anxiety alone be presented as an adequately thorough psychoanalytic theorization of affects? Preemptively anticipating one likely Lacanian response among others to this question, one might pose another query that seems appropriate: what justifies asserting that anxiety is the single, sole affect recognized as such by psychoanalysis, when so many other affects appear to be important and relevant in both clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis? For Lacan, if becoming a speaking being (the precise sort of being who ends up babbling on analysts’ couches) entails, as one of many consequences, estrangement from one’s emotions and feelings as self-evident, self-transparent conscious experiences—in other words, as a parlêtre, one is deprived of the guarantee of certainty that, when one feels a feeling, one feels that one feels this feeling as such—then anxiety is the uniquely human affect. Why? Only human beings become subjects qua speaking beings ($); and, one of the results of such subjectification is, by virtue of the mediation of signifiers, a loss of any (pre)supposed immediacy at the level of affective experience. The subject’s ensuing uncertainties about its emotions and feelings, uncertainties deliberately aggravated and intensified in analysands by the analytic process, generate any number of sensations that can span the negative emotional-sensational spectrum, ranging from subtle, low-burn discomfort to acute, all-consuming angst, from being vaguely ill at ease to being frantic with panic (the latter state sometimes precipitating rash behaviors of the sort referred to by all analytic orientations as instances of “acting-out”).1 Every point along this range arguably involves anxiety, itself arguably distinct from any
similar states of sensation (such as fear) apparently common to both humans and animals.

  Thus, on this interpretation, Lacan isn’t saying that anxiety is the one-and-only emotion or feeling of interest and pertinence to psychoanalysis. Rather, his partially outlined metapsychology of affective life proposes a tacit distinction between, on the one hand, affect and, on the other hand, emotion and feeling (one ought to recall the earlier unearthing and extensions of the Affekt-Gefühl-Empfindung triad buried in Freud’s original German texts and, somewhat surprisingly, passed over without remark by Lacan). Hence, countless emotions and feelings could be taken into account by a Lacanian analysis. But, with respect to these passions and sentiments, if analytic attention should be paid principally to those moments when doubts of various sorts can and do arise regarding conscious emotions and feelings, then anxiety, as the affective accompaniment of such doubts, is indeed, as Lacan contends, the “central” and “fundamental” affect, at least as far as analyses of the unconscious dimensions of speaking beings qua split subjects of signifiers are concerned.

  However, to be perfectly exact before proceeding further, the Lacan of the tenth seminar doesn’t claim, as these previous articulations are at risk of suggesting, that doubts (as intellectual causes) give rise to anxiety (as an affective effect). Quite the contrary: one of Lacan’s theses on anxiety, stated during the year of le Séminaire devoted to it, is that “anxiety is the cause of doubt.”2 Anxiety is a “pre-sentiment,” “that which is before the birth of a sentiment,”3 namely, a vague premonition of the bursting-forth of new, unexpected affective or libidinal intensities indicative of that which has been unconscious. These statements are made with reference to phenomena familiar in the clinical treatment of obsessional neurosis: When anxiety arises in obsessionals—and, for Lacan, this agitating presentiment doesn’t deceive insofar as it can be trusted as a signal that objects closely associated with unconscious desires are lurking somewhere in the contextual vicinity—they try to fend it off, tamp it down, and fool themselves about it. Obsessional neurotics attempt this mainly through intellectualizations and rationalizations taking the form of a proliferation of hesitant, tentative self-interpretations creating feelings of uncertainty (i.e., doubt) about feelings. How they feel is thereby buried in a hodgepodge haystack of conflicting, incompatible speculations. As Lacan puts it, “Doubt … is made for nothing else but combating anxiety, and this precisely by its lures.”4 When this type of neurotic anxiety surfaces as an advance indication that defended-against emotions and desires are threatening to irrupt into the scene of consciousness, a verbal swarm of confusing pseudoexplanations is conjured up to create deceptions allowing for skepticism as to whether any affective disturbance really is occurring. This skepticism struggles to sustain the illusion that nothing deviating from the narrow parameters of what the obsessional deems normal and manageable actually is in danger of transpiring.

  So, do Lacan’s stipulations in 1962 to the effect that affective anxiety is the cause of intellectual doubt, as glossed in the previous paragraph, invalidate preceding discussions here in which it’s hypothesized that the doubt-anxiety relation can operate in the opposite causal direction too? The answer is a definite “No!” for several reasons. First of all, at a very basic and broad level, one might simply (and not without justification) disagree with Lacan about the dynamics of interaction between the affective and the intellectual, dynamics he tends not to delineate in a sufficiently dialectical fashion. The approach adopted by me in this project is most certainly not one governed by a mindless, rigid presumption that Lacan is infallible. Second, whether Lacan’s indications regarding the role of doubt specifically in obsessional neurotic defenses against anxiety generally apply across the board to any and every psychical subject in an overarching metapsychological model is quite questionable. As should be apparent from my prior citations of other assertions made by Lacan in the course of my arguing for the view that anxiety is related to a hystericization particularly vis-à-vis emotions, passions, sentiments, and the like, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Lacan elsewhere admits the existence of an anxiety generated by doubts about the feel of feelings, worries about the specters of misfelt feelings (if not unfelt feelings). Third, the preceding analysis of affective hystericization relies primarily on seminars given by Lacan beginning at the end of the 1960s, several years after the seminar on l’angoisse in which obsessional doubt is said to be triggered by anxiety (instead of vice versa). Debates undoubtedly could be had about whether and to what extent Lacan’s comments on affects starting in the seventeenth seminar are consistent with those situated in earlier contexts (such as the tenth seminar). Fourth and finally, as regards doubt, Lacan talks about it along different lines the following year, in his famous eleventh seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (as well as on a number of other occasions too). In addition to the doubts of obsessional neurotics, one might wonder about the functions and significance of doubt in nonobsessional analysand-subjects; one also might wonder about doubts on the side of the listening analyst apart from those on the side of the speaking analysand. All I need to point out in the current setting is that Lacan’s multifaceted characterizations of doubt subsequent to the tenth seminar are far from pigeonholing it as nothing more than a defense against anxiety mounted exclusively by obsessional neurotics in analysis.5

  As seen, my excavation of the rudiments of a Lacan-inspired metapsychology of affects—this metapsychology of affects is both centered on the thesis that, like knowing and thinking according to psychoanalysis, feeling also is non-self-reflexive and a theoretical framework potentially compatible with the neurosciences—derives many of its findings from the seventeenth seminar. And, as I mentioned a while ago (in chapter 8), this seminar recently has attracted a lot of attention from Lacanians interested in exploring Lacan’s discourse on affect and, in so doing, providing additional testimony to the effect that Lacan isn’t guilty, as regularly and recurrently charged by a chorus of critics, of an unpardonable silence on this psychoanalytically unavoidable subject matter. However, these contemporary Lacanian scholars don’t address those parts of the seventeenth seminar scrutinized earlier here; instead, they share an exclusive preoccupation with a few passing observations Lacan utters about shame at the opening and closing moments of the final seminar session (June 17, 1970) of this academic year.6 Jacques-Alain Miller and others argue that, in surrounding collective atmospheres infused with the lingering scents of Paris’s May ’68 and everything of which this convulsive outburst was a symptom, Lacan sees fit to make his audience aware of the historically unprecedented shamelessness so widespread in the crass, materialistic world of consumerist mass-media late capitalism7 (a vulgar, exhibitionistic shamelessness on display among some of the provocative agitators in the audience when Lacan spoke at Vincennes in 1969).8 The lines of inquiry drawn by these interesting and suggestive sociocultural readings of shame in Lacanian psychoanalysis, critically summarized by me elsewhere,9 will not be directly pursued further in what follows. Instead, my reflections will zero in on the implications of Lacan’s few scant-but-allusive comments on the topic of shame for a psychoanalytic theory of affective life whose relevance isn’t confined to a postmodern era of cheap plastic toys and television reality shows. As with his renowned recasting of the superego in the twentieth seminar,10 Lacan’s perspectives on shame are situated in two registers simultaneously: one more historical and contextual, the other more structural and transcontextual (i.e., metapsychological).

  Joan Copjec is among those notable Lacanian scholars who highlight Lacan’s calls for a bit more shame at the last meeting of the seventeenth seminar. In particular, her essay “May ’68, The Emotional Month” is a careful, sophisticated historical contextualization of this academic year, an academic year situated in an unsettled cultural and political climate palpably perturbed by the aftershocks of France’s mass uprisings of students and workers alike. Copjec’s meticulous, thoughtful exploration of Lac
anian shame gets well and truly underway thus: “In response to May ’68, a very emotional month, he ends his seminar, his long warning against the rampant and misguided emotionalism of the university students, with an impassioned plea for a display of shame. Curb your impudence, your shamelessness, he exhorts, cautioning: you should be ashamed! What effrontery! What a provocation is this seminar! But then: what are we to make of it? Because the reference to shame appears so abruptly only in the final session and without elaboration, this is not an easy question to answer.”11 Like other recent readers of Lacan’s appeals to shame in 1970, Copjec seems to adopt an angle of exegetical approach privileging the sociohistorical motivations behind and resonance of these appeals. And yet, Copjec’s ensuing efforts to answer her opening question regarding shame (“what are we to make of it?”) reveal a convergence of interests between her endeavors in this essay and the project I’m pursuing here. In both cases, the seventeenth seminar, admittedly situated as it is in such intensely determinative cultural and institutional circumstances, is interpreted as saying things about affect that go well beyond the limits of its proximity to the event of May ’68. Of course, Lacan does intervene in manners intended to address those of his auditors gripped by the passions of their specific time and place; these interventions indeed speak to a peculiar late-capitalist Zeitgeist differing in important respects from the era enveloping Freud. But, apropos affects and their delineation in psychoanalysis (not to mention a number of other topics too), the Lacan of 1969–1970 remains just as committed as always to carrying forward faithfully Freud’s theoretical framework as he simultaneously becomes, in this academic year especially, concerned with revising and refining Freudian metapsychology by putting this conceptual apparatus into a dialectical rapport with the evident facts of new widespread phenomena unknown to and unforeseen by Freud.12 Again, a transcontextual metapsychology of affects can and should appropriate resources from the Lacan of this event-conditioned context of post–May ’68 Paris.