I once read that philosophy is a work of creative non-fiction. Writing suffers by its own, by its own modes of production and the arts by which it achieves its succession. That is to say, it is affected by the things it uses to represent itself, or the things it uses to represent itself affect it. It is wounded by an object and the wound is cured by the object of the wounding.
We are used to, almost conditioned to a certain distinction or correlation
between the real and the imaginary. All of our thought maintains a dialectical
play between these two notions. Even when classical philosophy speaks of pure
intelligence or understanding, it is still a matter of a faculty defined by its apti-
tude to grasp the depths of the real (le reel en son fond), the real "in truth," the
real as such, in opposition to, but also in relation to the power of imagination.
These are the guys trying to limit video games, limit who can be a citizen, redefining what the word rape means, making it illegal for a patient and a doctor to decide the best medical procedure for themselves, letting oil companies and banks dictate policy, trying to ban freedom on the internet for individuals (but not corporations) and tell us that people in far off lands are our enemies. It’s this guy and all the other hypocrite Republican yesmen. These guys. Read this, say you’re proud of the party of NO.
but also father-images. And all our dramas occurred in the strained relations
of the real and the imaginary. Jacques Lacan discovers a third, more funda-
mental father, a symbolic father or Name-of-the-Father. Not just the real and
the imaginary, but their relations, and the disturbances of these relations,
must be thought as the limit of a process in which they constitute themselves
in relation to the symbolic.
A shirtless photo? That’s it? Who cares? It’s not like he pulled “a Berlusconi” or anything. Must be more to the story than just this. He should get hired by an NFL team where pictures above the waistline are perfectly fine.
As symbolic, it must be for itself its own symbol, and eternally lack its other half that would be likely to come and occupy it. (This void is, however, not a non-being; or at least this non-being is not the being of the negative, but rather the positive being of the “problematic”, the objective being of a problem and of a question.) This is why Foucault can say: “It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency; it does not constitute a lacuna that must be filled in. It is nothing more and nothing less than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think.”
Nevertheless, if the empty square is not filled by a term, it is nevertheless accompanied by an eminently symbolic instance which follows all of its displacements, accompanied without being occupied or filled. And the two, the instance and the place, do not cease to lack each other, and to accompany each other in this manner. The subject is precisely the agency [instance] which follows the empty place: as Lacan says, it is less subject than subjected – subjected to the empty square, subjected to the phallus and to its displacements. Its agility is peerless, or should be. Thus, the subject is essentially intersubjective. To announce the death of God, or even the death of man is nothing.
What counts is how. Nietzsche showed already that God dies in several ways; and that the gods die, but from laughter, upon hearing one god say the he is the Only One. Structuralism is not at all a form of thought that suppresses the subject, but one that breaks it up and distributes it systematically, that contests the identity of the subject, that dissipates it and makes it shift from place to place, and always nomad subject, made of individuations, but impersonal ones, or of singularities, but pre-individual ones. This is the sense in which Foucault speaks of “dispersion”; and Levi-Strauss can only define a subjective agency depending on the Object conditions under which the system of truth become convertible and, thus, “simultaneously receivable to several different subjects.”
[…]
Henceforth, a set of complex problems are posed for structuralism, concerning structural “mutations” (Foucault) or “forms of transition” from one structure to another (Althusser). It is always as a function of the empty square that the differential relations are open to new values or variations, and the singularities capable of new distributions, constitutive of another structure. The contradictions must yet be “resolved”, that is, the empty place must be rid of the symbolic events that eclipse it or fill it, and be given over to the subject which must accompany it on new paths, without occupying or deserting it.
Thus, there is a structuralist hero: neither God nor man, neither personal nor universal, it is without an identity, made of non-personal individuations and pre-individual singularities. It assures the break-up [l’eclatement] of a structure affected by excess or deficiency; it opposes its own ideal event to the ideal events that we have just described. For a new structure not to pursue adventures that again are analogous to those of the old structure, not to cause fatal contradictions to be reborn, depends on the resistant and creative force of this hero, on its agility in following and safeguarding the displacements, on its power to cause relations to vary and to redistribute singularities, always casting another throw of the dice. This mutation point precisely defines a praxis, or rather the very site where praxis must take hold. For structuralism is not only inseparable from the works that it creates, but also from a practice in relation to the products that it interprets. Whether this practice is therapeutic or political, it designates a point of permanent revolution, or of permanent transfer.
There is a structure of the unconscious only to the extent that the unconscious speaks and is language. In fact, language is the only thing that can properly be said to have structure, be it an esoteric or even non-verbal language.
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