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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Theory Redux
- Sprache: Englisch
This book argues that the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal best renders the structure underlying our contemporary social response to traumatic and disturbing events, from climate change to unsettling tectonic shifts in our social tissue. Unlike denialism and negation, disavowal functions by fully acknowledging what we disavow. Zupancic contends that disavowal, which sustains some belief by means of ardently proclaiming the knowledge of the opposite, is becoming a predominant feature of our social and political life. She also shows how the libidinal economy of disavowal is a key element of capitalist economy.
The concept of fetishistic disavowal already exposes the objectified side of the mechanism of the disavowal, which follows the general formula: I know well, but all the same, the object-fetish allows me to disregard this knowledge. Zupancic adds another twist by showing how, in the prevailing structure of disavowal today, the mere act of declaring that we know becomes itself an object-fetish by which we intercept the reality of that very knowledge. This perverse deployment of knowledge deprives it of any reality.
This structure of disavowal can be found not only in the more extreme and dramatic cases of conspiracy theories and re-emerging magical thinking, but even more so in the supposedly sober continuation of business as usual, combined with the call to adapt to the new reality. To disrupt this social embedding of disavowal, it is not enough to change the way we think: things need to change, and hence the way they think for us.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introductory Remarks
Notes
1. Exposition: Father, Can’t You See I’m Burning?
Notes
2. Conceptual Niceties
Belief Starts with Knowledge
Science or Authority?
Psychoanalysis and Science
Cogito: An Escape to Being?
Knowledge as Fetish
Casanova: Castration and its Use Value
Notes
3. What about Conspiracy Theories?
The Subject Supposed to Deceive (Us)
The Delirium of Interpretation
Belief becomes Knowledge
Notes
4. Conclusion
Note
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introductory Remarks
Begin Reading
End User License Agreement
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Theory Redux series
Series editor: Laurent de Sutter
Published Titles
Mark Alizart, Cryptocommunism
Armen Avanessian, Future Metaphysics
Franco Berardi, The Second Coming
Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld
Laurent de Sutter, Narcocapitalism
Diedrich Diederichsen, Aesthetics of Pop Music
Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things
Boris Groys, Becoming an Artwork
Graham Harman, Immaterialism
Helen Hester, Xenofeminism
Srećko Horvat, The Radicality of Love
Lorenzo Marsili, Planetary Politics
Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction
Eloy Fernández Porta, Nomography
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism
Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism
Grafton Tanner, Foreverism
Oxana Timofeeva, Solar Politics
Alenka Zupančič, Disavowal
Disavowal
Alenka Zupančič
polity
Copyright © Alenka Zupančič 2024
The right of Alenka Zupančič to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6121-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023950628
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
This monograph is a result of the research programme P6-0014 ‘Conditions and Problems of Contemporary Philosophy’ and two research projects: N6-0286 ‘Reality, Illusion, Fiction, Truth: A Preliminary Study’ and J6-4623 ‘Conceptualizing the End: its Temporality, Dialectics, and Affective Dimension’, which are funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency.
Introductory Remarks
A man says to his wife: ‘If one of us dies, I shall move to Paris.’
Freud cites this joke in his text ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, first published in 1915. He uses it to illustrate his argument that we do not believe in our own death (this is true particularly of our unconscious mind) and that it is impossible to imagine our own death, for even when we do imagine it we are still there, present as spectators, not really dead. We know of course that death exists, and we also ‘experience’ it with others, with the pain and irreversibility that come when people close to us die. But this knowledge of death, and the capacity to talk rationally about death as natural, undeniable, and unavoidable, changes nothing about the fact that, ‘in reality, however, … we behave as if it were otherwise.’1 This formulation is the template for the notion of disavowal (Verleugnung), which Freud develops in a later essay on fetishism,2 and for which Octave Mannoni has provided the most concise formula: ‘I know well, but all the same….’3 As is clear from this formula, disavowal differs from denial; it doesn’t deny facts but gladly announces knowing all about them, and then it goes on as before. It is the contention of this essay that (perverse) disavowal, which sustains some belief by means of ardently proclaiming the knowledge of the opposite, is becoming a predominant feature of our social and political life and goes well beyond personal psychology.
It seems we often wonder how it is possible that the project of enlightenment could end with a triumph of obscurantism – the rise of all sorts of strange beliefs, mistrust in science, populism that relies on anything but rational argumentation … Lacanian psychoanalysis offers an answer: it is not because dark forces and obscure drives have overpowered reason and won over knowledge and its evidence, but because reason and knowledge have never been without their own obscure and ‘unreasonable’ side. The contemporary social modality of disavowal is a perverse form of reason, of knowledge itself, and not a return of some archaic and obscure drive. The appeals to reason and to science tend to forget or ignore precisely that; mostly they end up in outraged frustration or else in arrogance, amazed and amused by the ‘stupidity of people’. These appeals operate with a clear distinction between knowledge and belief and ignore the role that knowledge can play in sustaining the most obscure beliefs – which is precisely what the concept of disavowal helps us to understand.
At the same time, we should not fail to see to what extent the profound entanglement of science with contemporary forms of capitalism, with its progress and ‘growth’, induces a mistrust in science. ‘Irrational’ mistrust in science often has a displaced rationale; it appears as a displaced mistrust of capitalism, a denunciation of capitalism by proxy. And this is particularly the case when people are convinced that capitalism is the best or the only possible organization of social economy (and abhor all mention of something such as communism) yet at the same time live and experience the brutal and traumatic reality of this same social order.
The concept of disavowal describes our general social state of mind more accurately than, say, denial, which is the term we otherwise prefer to use to describe our non-confrontation with certain traumatic aspects of reality. Denial also exists, of course, and we will discuss its specificity as well as its connection to disavowal in the chapter on conspiracy theories. (Perverse) disavowal is far less extravagant, more reasonable. It claims to be ‘well aware of the problem’ and is indistinguishably fused with what we like to call the ‘liberal mainstream’, starting with its economic and political centres of power. Indeed, politically speaking, we seem to be caught in a macabre dance in which denial (often associated with ‘populism’), on the one hand, and perverse disavowal (associated with the business-as-usual mainstream), on the other, constitute two principal and competing political options, each fuelling the other with their respective pathologies, responding mostly to each other rather than to any social reality.
This essay examines various facets of the concept of disavowal. It takes its conceptual starting point in Mannoni’s seminal text and then ventures to articulate some of the important modifications that the functioning of disavowal undergoes in our contemporary social context. It also relates this discussion to some other concepts, such as certainty, anxiety, and deception, and explores the deeply ambiguous social role of conspiracy theories. The entire book is in dialogue with some of the key problems that corrode our present and does not shy away from attempting a rigorous conceptualization of what is at stake in these problems. The conceptual arc grows denser in the middle of the book, while the first and last parts have a looser texture.
Notes
1.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
, Vol. XIV (London: Vintage Books, 2001), p. 289.
2.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’, in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
, Vol. XXI (London: Vintage Books, 2001).
3.
Octave Mannoni, ‘I Know Well, but All the Same …’, in
Perversion and the Social Relation
, ed. Molly Anne Rotenberg, Dennis Foster, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
1Exposition: Father, Can’t You See I’m Burning?
One of the tropes or master signifiers that keeps emerging in the recent onslaught of various crises – which now already constitute something of a ‘serial crisis’ – is nightmare. This word, which was present particularly during the Covid pandemics, seems to lend itself well not only to other crises (economic crises, the Ukraine war, the energy crisis, the Middle East crisis, the climate crisis and its related extreme weather events …) but even more to their seriality, to the way they are hitting us one after another, faster than we can keep up. Gérard Wajcman made this point very nicely in his book on series:1 the series form or format is not just an aesthetic or artistic phenomenon. Rather, it is the language of the world such as it is: a world in crisis. Series is a form of crisis.
If ‘nightmare’ seems affectively to capture this series-as-crisis, it is also a good place to start our discussion. There is a dream – a nightmare – that Freud discusses very briefly in The Interpretation of Dreams, and which gained more deserved attention and fame because of Lacan’s reading of it in his Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. It seems that its structural logic could hardly be more timely. Here is Freud’s rendering of the dream and of its circumstances:
A father had been watching beside his child’s sickbed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which his child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing round it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours’ sleep the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’ He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child’s dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them.2
The key question is, of course, where to situate the real that woke the father up. Strangely, Freud discusses this dream only very briefly, and just as an example of how a dream can satisfy the need to prolong sleep. The fire (in reality) should wake the father up, but the exhaustion made him incorporate fire in the content of his dreams so that he was able to continue to sleep. But then another, extraordinary thing happens, which Freud doesn’t discuss in his account: something appears, takes place within this fire dream itself, something the violence and pain of which nevertheless wakes the father up, namely his son’s words: Father, don’t you see I’m burning?
As Lacan puts it in his commentary on this dream, ‘this sentence is itself a firebrand – of itself it brings fire where it falls – and one cannot see what is burning, for the flames blind us to the fact that the fire bears on the Unterlegt, on the Untertragen, on the real.’3
What wakes the father up is not simply the reality of fire but what this reality is able to trigger, to represent, to smuggle into the dream as the burning real of his son’s death, and of the father’s inability to do anything about it, to perhaps prevent it. It is this other real that ultimately wakes the father up, the real that possibly includes many other difficult facets of their father–son relationship. And if up to a certain point the dream may indeed be said to satisfy the need to prolong sleep, the configuration changes at this point, and dramatically so. The dream comes up with something traumatic enough to achieve what the real fire was not able to do: to wake the father up. The situation is thus reversed. It is no longer that the fire is incorporated in the dream so that the father is able to continue to sleep; rather, what takes place in the dream wakes the father up, so that he can go on dreaming. Namely, and as also provocatively suggested by Lacan, it often happens with dreams that we wake up so as to go on dreaming. This is particularly true for nightmares, and generally true for the dreams in which a real appears that is more real, more traumatic and shattering than our everyday reality. So, in response we wake up (to reality), and proclaim to be awake, in order to be able to continue to dream – that is, to continue to exist more or less untouched, unscathed by the real that has just appeared. Which is why the real nightmare is precisely one from which we cannot wake up. A nightmare is defined not only, or not simply, by its traumatic content but by the fact that we cannot wake up (and escape to reality). The traumatic real is there, and it should make us wake up so as to escape it, but for some reason(s) this is prevented from happening: we are stuck with it.
Could we not say that many of the current crises have the same structure as the dream discussed above? Not just because we experience them as painful and ‘nightmarish’ but for two much more precise and specific reasons:
They confront us with something more than just the immediate crisis (the fire we need to put out), with something profoundly disturbing and disturbed in our social, ecological, political way of being. In other words, they point to another fire within the fire, which we would also need to consider and confront. (Devastating fires that are taking place more and more often all across the globe, from Canada to Greece, Hawaii and California, to take just a few recent examples, are both a very direct and very metaphorical rendering of this: apart from the fire that needs to be extinguished in each case, there is yet another fire – climate change – that keeps on burning.)
