‘The Root of Segregation’ by Jorge Assef
Lacanian Review Online (LRO 138) :
27th March 2019
Published at http://www.thelacanianreviews.com/the-root-of-segregation/
Or with notes on references at www.LacanianWorks.org /5 Other Authors A-Z (Assef)
References
[1] Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVIII, Unpublished.
[2] Lacan, Jacques. Écrits, The first Complete Edition in English, W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.
Access to the References
[1] From Assef : There are many references in Lacan —mainly during the 70’s— where segregation is linked to power struggle, to history, to the capitalist pseudo-discourse and to science. However, in Seminar XVIII, Lacan claims: “It should be said that there is no need for (…) ideology for racism to be constituted. All that is needed is a surplus jouissance that is recognized as such.”[1] Footnote [1] 20th January 1971. See Seminar XVIII, On a discourse that might not be a semblance [semblant] (1970-1971) : from 13th January 1971 : Jacques Lacan at www.LacanianWorks.org /4 Jacques Lacan (19710113)
pII 8-9 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation (www.LacaninIreland.com ) : That which, in a discourse, is addressed to the Other as a Thou, gives rise to an identification to something that one can call the human idol. If l spoke the last time about red blood as being the blood that is most useless to propel against the semblance, it is indeed because, as you have seen, one cannot advance and overthrow the idol without immediately afterwards taking its place, and we know that this is what has happened to a certain type of martyr! It is indeed in the measure that something in every discourse that appeals to the Thou provokes a camouflaged, secret identification, which is only one to this enigmatic object that may seem to be nothing, the tiny little surplus enjoying of Hitler, that went no further perhaps than his moustache, this was enough to crystallise people who….who had nothing mystical about them! Who were the most committed to the process of the discourse of the capitalist, with what that involves in terms of a questioning of surplus enjoying in its form of surplus value. It was a matter of seeing whether, at a certain level, one would still have one’s little bit (son petit bout) and indeed this was enough to provoke this effect of identification. It is amusing simply that this should have taken the form of idealisation of the race, namely, of the thing which on that occasion was least involved. But one can find where this character of fiction comes from, one can find it. What must be simply said, is that there is no need for this ideology for a racism to be constituted, and that all that is needed is a surplus enjoying that recognises itself as such. And that whoever is a little bit interested in what may happen would do well to tell himself that every form of racism, in so far as a surplus enjoying is very well capable of supporting it, is now what is on the agenda. This is what is in store for us in the years to come.
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[2] From Assef : It is here that we can retroactively think the scope of another of his écrits, one from his early teaching, going back twenty years in his work to the point when, during his research on paranoia, Lacan states; “… when he attempts to show that it is precisely the kakon of his own being that the madman tries to get at in the object he strikes…”[2]
Here, in fact, we find the seed of all segregation: since it is one’s own jouissance that remains misrecognised; it is when something of this jouissance returns from the other that the most fundamental denial sets a drive into motion in order to attack it. Footnote [2] Presentation on Psychical Causality : 28th September 1946 (Bonneval Hospital, Paris ) : Jacques Lacan. See www.LacanianWorks.org /4 Jacques Lacan (19460928). Also in Écrits : 1966 : Jacques Lacan.
P141-143 of Bruce Fink’s translation, p175-176 of de Seuil (October 1966), I believe that the question does not concern Philinte’s wisdom, and the solution would perhaps shock these gentlemen, for the fact is that Alceste is mad and that Moliere demonstrates that he is—precisely insofar as Alceste, in his ‘beautiful soul’, does not recognize that he himself contributes to the havoc he revolts against.
I specify that he is mad, not because he loves a woman who is flirtatious and betrays him—which is something the learned analysts I mentioned earlier would no doubt attribute to his failure to adapt to life—but because he is caught, under Love’s banner, by the very feeling that directs this art of mirages at which the beautiful Célimène excels: namely, the narcissism of the idle rich that defines the psychological structure of “high society” [ “monde “] in all eras, which is doubled here by the other narcissism that is especially manifest in certain eras in the collective idealization of the feeling of being in love.
…
With this lovely wish and the taste he has for the song “J’aime mieux ma mie,” why doesn’t he court a salesgirl at his local flower shop? He would not be able to “show to all” his love for such a girl, and this is the true key to the feeling he expresses here: it is the passion to demonstrate his unicity to everyone, even if only in the form of the isolation of a victim, an isolation in which he finds bitter, jubilatory satisfaction in the final act of the play.
As for the mainspring of his twists and turns, it lies in a mechanism that I would relate not to the self-punishment but rather to the suicidal aggression of narcissism,
For what infuriates Alceste upon hearing Oronte ‘s sonnet is that he recognizes his own situation in it, depicted all too precisely in its ridiculousness, and the imbecile who is his rival appears to him as his own mirror image. The words of mad fury to which he then gives vent blatantly betray the fact that he seeks to lash out at himself. And whenever one of the repercussions of his words shows him that he has managed to do so, he delights in suffering its effect.
Here we can note an odd defect in Ey’s conception: it diverts him from the signification of the delusional act, leaving him to take it as the contingent effect of a lack of control, whereas the problem of this act’s signification is constantly brought to our attention by the medical and legal exigencies that are essential to the phenomenology of our experience.
Someone like Guiraud, who is a mechanist, again goes much farther in his article, “Meurtres immotives” (“Unexplained Murders”),[10] when he attempts to show that it is precisely the kakon of his own being that the madman tries to get at in the object he strikes.
Let us take one last look at Alceste who has victimized no one but himself …
Footnote 10 p158, In ‘Évolution psychiatrique’, 2 (March 1931), 25-34. See also P. Guiraud and B. Cailleux, “Le meurtre immotivé, reaction libératrice de la maladie chez les hébéfrènes,” ‘Annales Médico-psychiatrique 2 (November 1928): 352-60. This may be available at this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Guiraud)
P782 Bruce Fink’s translator’s end-notes, (175.3) Kakon means “bad (object)” in Greek.