However, despite some overlap at the level of aims and approaches, I part company from Copjec with respect to two key matters: the question of unconscious affect in general and the understanding of the significance of the words affect and shame in Lacan’s texts in particular. To begin with the first of these differences, Copjec reiterates several times the Lacanian assertion, supposedly resting on firm Freudian foundations, that, in terms of being repressed, “affect never is.”13 Invoking “Freud’s critical assertion that only ideas are ever repressed,” she maintains: “Affect remains on the surface. This does not mean that repression has no effect on affect [jouissance]; it means, rather, that this effect is something other than the removal of affect from consciousness. The specific effect of repression on affect is displacement. Affect is always displaced, or: always out of place.”14 Copjec takes Lacan’s word that affects, according to Freud, cannot succumb to the psychical vicissitude of repression insofar as they are feelings. This is problematic for several reasons: Not only does this claim ignore the different terms Freud employs when discussing affective life (i.e., Affekt, Gefühl, and Empfindung), but it also wrongly alleges that Freud consistently and categorically denies the existence of emotional phenomena below the superficial threshold of explicit conscious awareness. As shown previously, there are a plethora of instances, starting as early as 1907, in which Freud ponders the possibility of unconscious affect. But, what’s more, the place in which Freud purportedly issues the decisive decree stating that affects can only ever be displaced within consciousness instead of repressed into unconsciousness—the place in question, regularly cited by Lacan and those sympathetic to his views on this point, is the third section (“Unconscious Emotions”) of the metapsychological paper on “The Unconscious” (1915)—is far from decisive. As revealed by my earlier detailed examination of Freud’s German, Freud wavers in relation to this topic even within the span of this single three-page section. And, as will be seen shortly, what his hesitations and oscillations therein (ignored by Lacan and Copjec, as well as many others) reveal has consequences for the Lacanian handling of shame as an affect.
Another limitation to Copjec’s reading of Lacan’s seventeenth seminar is its relative neglect of the nuances and subtleties of the remarks regarding affect (remarks unpacked at length in chapter 11) in all but the final session of that academic year. Like a handful of other Lacanians, she devotes most of her attention to shame as it appears in that year’s last meeting. However, like Alenka Zupančič,15 Copjec rightly observes that this annual seminar involves, among other things, Lacan reworking his long-standing black-and-white dichotomy between the signifier (as the intellectual-representational) and jouissance (as the affective-libidinal).16 Jouis-sens, with its muddied shades of gray, begins to crystallize at this moment. And yet, none of this leads to questioning skeptically the old story, erroneously imputed to the authority of Freud, about affects as nothing more than mobile lumps in the carpet of consciousness set in motion by being pushed about (i.e., displaced) as a secondary result of the effects of defense mechanisms (repression first and foremost) operating exclusively on ideational and mnemic materials. Although both Freud and Lacan sometimes articulate conceptions of affects along these lines, a comprehensive survey of their various and varying pronouncements bearing upon matters of passions renders such a clear-cut, straightforward depiction of affect in Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis (as never repressed, as always displaced) suspect. Furthermore, when this survey takes into account the precise German and French phrasings of these pronouncements, the picture gets even more complex.
Sometimes sounding audibly frustrated and contemptuous, Lacan tirelessly pleads with his audience to acquaint themselves with Freud’s texts in their original tongue, insisting that fundamental conceptual understandings and misunderstandings hinge on whether or not one gains adequate access to the syntax and semantics of the German language in which the founding documents of psychoanalysis are written. The devil resides in the details not only in the clinical setting of the analyst’s consulting room. Although Lacan’s neglect of the translation and interpretation difficulties posed by the German words Freud employs in his discussions of affective life is a notably rare and uncharacteristic exception to the former’s own rule—this exception indeed proves the rule insofar as these strangely neglected German concept-terms arguably come back to haunt Lacan’s own analytic understanding and handling of affects—a return to Lacan interested in affect must scrutinize the French used by the “French Freud.” When it comes to affect-language of all sorts, the distinctions between connotations of words for affective phenomena in various natural languages are crucial to observe for at least two reasons: first, different natural languages splice up and organize fluid emotional spectrums differently; second, these differing linguistic renditions of shaded affective hues are not without real and direct repercussions for the affective lives of the speaking beings whose visceral emotions and feelings are mediated by the very languages that they speak. In fact, particularly when it comes to an English-language exegesis of a French-language discourse on shame, this sensitivity to linguistic precision is especially crucial.
Copjec contends that Lacan’s talk of shame in 1970 is far from unprecedented in his teachings, citing, among other references, his famous seventh seminar of a decade prior.17 This is where certain problems begin to arise. The French word translated as “shame” at the end of the seventeenth seminar is honte,18 and this final session of that academic year is one of only three occasions on which Lacan speaks, briefly and in passing, of honte in le Séminaire (the other two occur in seminars eight and eleven,19 with Copjec citing the latter but not the former). A different French word, pudeur (also translated as “shame”), is used by Lacan in the majority of those contexts referenced or alluded to by Copjec as precursors of his post–May ’68 revival of shame. But, how do honte and pudeur differ from each other? Moreover, what difference does recognizing this English-elided terminological distinction make? Why is this important, particularly as regards a psychoanalytic metapsychology of affect?
The contrast between honte and pudeur consists in the former word referring to an affect as a felt feeling (i.e., as a consciously registered sensation tangibly experienced) and the latter word referring to a predisposition toward being capable of feeling certain feelings. Simply put: “Honte is shame as an excruciatingly uncomfortable, embarrassed feeling actually felt (as in ‘I feel ashamed right now’). By contrast, pudeur is the potential capacity for or susceptibility to experiencing honte, a capacity/susceptibility that, in the form of the ethico-moral self-restraints of what is sometimes called ‘modesty’ or ‘tact,’ keeps one from crossing lines or transgressing those boundaries that would produce an actually felt upsurge of negative affect (as in, apropos a person lacking this tactful modesty, ‘Have you no shame?’).”20 Interestingly, this French semantic difference can be correlated with Freud’s previously traced German distinction between Empfindung (feeling) and Affektbildung (affective structure or formation): Honte designates a felt feeling qua Empfindung, whereas pudeur designates a potential to feel qua Affektbildung (rather than a feeling felt in actuality); indeed, German allows for a distinction between Scham and Schamgefühl (as per the title of a book by Max Scheler) corresponding to that between pudeur and honte, respectively. Accordingly, honte, as an Empfindung, is a conscious experience involving a specific set of sensations; by contrast, pudeur, as an Affektbildung, involves chains of ideational representations that can be either conscious or unconscious (as in the Freudian superego, a conscience not all of which is conscious). To say that honte and pudeur both mean “shame” in the same sense and are both words for an “affect” in the same sense would be inaccurate and misleading.
In fact, if one identifies pudeur qua Affektbildung as an affect, then, contra the Lacanian line adhered to by Copjec, one concedes the existence of unconscious affects, unless one is willing to contradict Freud’s well-supported and explanatorily invaluable conte
ntion that much of the superego, itself responsible for intrapsychically enforcing modest, tactful restraint (pudeur), is unconscious. In her analyses of shame in Lacan’s teachings, Copjec’s lovely, polished English, usually so deft and illuminating, reveals a tendency to conflate the two senses of shame as honte and pudeur. While addressing shame (as honte) in the seventeenth seminar, she claims this to be a continuation of preceding Lacanian reflections on shame (generally as pudeur), proceeding to present all of these scattered instances in Lacan’s seminars as occasions on which Lacan tackles the problem of affect (with no mention made of crucial distinctions such as those between Empfindung and Affektbildung, actual and potential affects, and so on).21
Admittedly, Lacan, once in a while permitting himself a more relaxed relationship to his native French tongue, sometimes lapses into an indistinction between honte and pudeur allowed for in nontechnical quotidian speech. In the sixth seminar, when describing the blush of a miser provoked by another’s gaze glimpsing the unveiled secret treasure of one of his hoarded “intimate objects,” Lacan employs pudeur as synonymous with honte to designate the felt feeling of embarrassment.22 In the eighth seminar, honte and pudeur are used in close proximity to each other.23 However, these few aberrant and casual equivocations between honte and pudeur aside (not to mention the rare references to honte alone in the eleventh and seventeenth seminars), the rest of Lacan’s interlinked, cross-resonating remarks on “shame” (pudeur) implicitly but clearly pertain not to shame as an affect (i.e., honte qua Empfindung, an excruciating, burning affective state of consciousness), but to affective structures or formations (Affektbildungen) enforcing a limiting restraint, in the forms of modesty and tact (whether consciously or unconsciously respected), through the potential to produce the feelings of embarrassment, humiliation, and so on.
Starting in the fifth seminar and the contemporaneous écrit “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan repeatedly summons the “demon of shame” (le démon de la Pudeur).24 This invocation occurs with reference to the picture of “the terrified woman” from the frescos of the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii (the image-scene depicting this recoiling female figure adorns the cover of the French edition of Lacan’s Télévision published in 1973).25 Lacan interprets this painted ancient woman, at the threshold of a katabasis-type passage, as horrified precisely by the sudden unveiling of the phallus; she is said to embody the shame qua modesty (i.e., pudeur) that is integrally complicit in sustaining the apparent potency of this symbolic entity through refusing to tear aside the layers of cloth beneath which it normally remains hidden.26 Among other things, the Lacanian phallus signifies a potent wholeness and vital fullness (“by virtue of its turgidity … the image of the vital flow as it is transmitted in generation”) both inaccessible and unattainable for speaking subjects; as such, this illusory x effectively functions as a lure solely when its presence is hinted at indirectly through screens and disguises (“it can play its role only when veiled”).27 According to the general Lacanian logic of the curtain or veil, coverings sustain the sense that there is something being covered, a substantial thing concealed behind the barrier of a façade. Through this effect, curtains or veils, such as those covering phallic entities, even can create the illusion of something where there is nothing.28 Alluring avatars and promises of phallic power and completion retain their seductive aura solely insofar as respectful restraint (again, pudeur) stays the hand that might otherwise, in aiming to seize such phalli directly, inadvertently tear away masks hiding nothing, thus disrupting the masquerade by calling its bluff (and ending up empty-handed in the process). Immodestly and tactlessly tossing aside the crowns of kings and the gavels of judges reveals the near nothingness of mere mortals, of miserable, fragile animal bodies. Those who are shameless (sans pudeur, sans vergogne), like children who have yet to know shame, are prone to blurt out such disturbing truths as that the phallic emperor is naked, that emperor-phallus is nothing more than a sagging, wrinkled bit of spent flesh (and not, as it appears when veiled, an eternally erect font of an indestructible life force). Like both Freud’s “little Hans” and his curious young fetishist-to-be, those who peer behind the ornamental coverings of clothes see—oh! horror of horrors—gaping absence where eager anticipation expected full, protruding presence. When the limits maintained by pudeur are disrespected and violated, honte and disgust tend to arise.29 These affects (as felt feelings, as Empfindungen) are symptomatic of subjectivity itself as constituted partially on the basis of restraining barriers and borders,30 of limiting constraints of which pudeur qua Affektbildung (sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious) is an instance (“the dimension of shame, a dimension that is proper only to the subject as such”).31
The seventh seminar, turned to by Copjec in her commentary on shame à la Lacan,32 enriches and extends these observations regarding pudeur. Lacan’s contemplations therein bearing on beauty play a key role in this vein: “The true barrier that holds the subject back in front of the unspeakable field of radical desire that is the field of absolute destruction, of destruction beyond putrefaction, is properly speaking the aesthetic phenomenon where it is identified with the experience of beauty—beauty in all its shining radiance, beauty that has been called the splendor of truth. It is obviously because truth is not pretty to look at that beauty is, if not its splendor, then at least its envelope.”33 In terms of Lacan’s preceding discussions of pudeur apropos the phallus, the ugly truth concealed by material and not-so-material veils is (symbolic) castration, the fact that there is nothing equal to the phallic façade, nothing measuring up to this impossible standard. The curtains covering this bitter, distasteful deficiency can use the ruses of aesthetic appeal, of decorative adornments, to hide or dress up any small, hairy disappointments, whoever or whatever they may be. Later on in the seventh seminar, Lacan links the “limit” of beauty as the barrier, curtain, envelope, or veil of truth to the specter of death:34 “I wanted to show you how the function of the signifier in permitting the subject’s access to his relationship to death might be made more concrete than is possible through a connotation. That is why I have tried to have you recognize it in our recent meetings in an aesthetic form, namely, that of the beautiful—it being precisely the function of the beautiful to reveal to us the site of man’s relationship to his own death, and to reveal it to us only in a blinding flash.”35
Coming quickly on the heels of his commentary on Sophocles’s Antigone, one example of a “blinding flash” of beauty Lacan undoubtedly has in mind here is the fascinating dramatic-tragic figure of “Antigone in her unbearable splendor.”36 Another example that may be suitable in this context is the depiction of Christ as a fetishized martyr associated with certain styles of Catholicism in particular, a depiction lingering with obscene, jouissance-laden relish over every detail of his wounded bare body. In both cases, an aesthetic sublation or sublimation of suffering unto death covers over doomed-to-rot sexed skin in the gleaming sheen of art’s mercifully distracting, cathartic pleasures.
Lacan proceeds to draw parallels between beauty and shame. He begins this by noting: “I should like to introduce here, as a parallel to the function of the beautiful, another function. I have named it on a number of occasions without emphasizing it particularly, but it seems to me essential to refer to it here. It is with your permission what I shall call Αίδώς or, in other words, a sense of shame. The omission of this barrier, which prevents the direct experience of that which is to be found at the center of sexual union, seems to me to be at the origin of all kinds of questions that cannot be answered.”37 The shame at stake here is again pudeur.38 At first, one might think that, for Lacan, shame is to sex what beauty is to death: just as beauty shields the mortal subject from the blunt, unmitigated experiential effects (or affects) of facing the ugly truth of its own unglorious mortality with no fantasmatic embellishments and illusions, so too is shame something that “prevents the direct experience of that which is to be found at the center of sexual union” (or, as La
can later puts it, pudeur as a modest restraint shields one from the truth that “il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel.”)39 But, additional remarks in both the seventh seminar and subsequent contexts indicate that Lacan, in good Freudian fashion, refuses to partition sex and death as two cleanly distinct topics, thus problematizing the neat separation of when they are correlated to shame and beauty, respectively.
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