シニカルな快楽主義的ラカン派の政治性欠如？

以下資料。

ジジェクのジャック＝アラン・ミレール批判＝吟味。かつての師であり、強い語調は見られないが、ミレールのシニカルな享楽主義的考えMiller’s cynical-hedonist ideaへの批判。この考え方だと政治的には無力であることには間違いない。

いままで別の書でなされてきたジジェク文脈の「騙されない人は彷徨うLes non-dupes errent」のミレール視点との齟齬も書かれている。あるいはまたサントームsinthome.概念の吟味をも読むことができるかもしれない。

もっともジジェクの議論は、ここからいつものように資本主義批判→共産主義しかないという議論に向かう。

◆ 『LESS THAN NOTHING』の最終章「The Political Suspension of the Ethical」より、原文のまま抜き書きメモ（もうしばし待てば邦訳が出るはず）。

For the earlier Lacan, both the ethics of symbolic realization and the ethics of confronting the Real Thing call for the heroic stance of pushing things to the limit in order to leave behind our everyday Verfallenheit, our fallen existence (one must “subjectivize one’s own death” by casting off the wealth of imaginary identifications, thereby attaining the limit-position of a pure subject without an ego; one must violently transgress the very limit of the symbolic order, heroically confronting the dangerous Beyond of the Real Thing). Renouncing this radicalism, the later Lacan re-conceives psychoanalytic treatment in a much more modest way: “one does not need to learn all of the truth. A little bit is sufficient.”4 Here the very idea of psychoanalysis as a radical “limit experience” is rejected: “One should not push an analysis too far. When the patient thinks he is happy to live, it is enough.”5 How far we are here from Antigone’s heroic attempt to attain the “pure desire” by entering the prohibited domain of ate! Psychoanalytic treatment is now no longer a radical transformation of subjectivity, but a local patching-up which does not even leave any long-term traces. (Along these lines, Lacan draws attention to the neglected fact that, when Freud met the Rat-man again, years after his treatment, the latter had totally forgotten about his analysis.) This more modest approach was fully articulated in Jacques-Alain Miller’s reading which focuses on late Lacan: in his last seminars, Lacan leaves behind the notion of “traversing the fantasy” as the concluding moment of the psychoanalytic process; in its place he introduces the opposite gesture of accepting the ultimate non-analyzable obstacle called the sinthome. If the symptom is a formation of the unconscious to be dissolved through interpretation, the sinthome is the “indivisible remainder” which resists interpretation and interpretive dissolution, a minimal figure or node which condenses the subject’s unique mode of enjoyment. The goal of analysis is thus reformulated as “identification with the symptom”: instead of dissolving his unique sinthome, the subject should become aware of it and learn how to use it, how to deal with it, instead of allowing the sinthome to determine him behind his back:
The analytic experience enables us to re-appropriate our desire. In the best case, one can thus hope to arrive at “wanting what one desires” and “desiring what one wants.” If the experience is brought to its conclusion, it allows us to identify ourselves with our “incurable”: not only to find oneself in it, but to make use of it.6
 
Through this identification, the opposition of meaning and enjoyment is also overcome in their “synthesis,” that of jouis-sens (enjoy-meant, enjoying the sense): the subject is not reduced to an idiotic autistic enjoyment, s/he continues to speak, but his/her talk now functions as a play with semblances, as an empty blah-blah-blah which generates enjoyment. This would be Lacan’s version of eppur si muove: even after we have seen through imaginary and symbolic semblances, the game goes on in the guise of the circulation of jouis-sens, the subject is not dissolved in the abyss of the Real.
 Relying on this new notion of the final moment of the analytic process, Miller deploys a simplified version of the “critique of instrumental reason,” establishing a link between democratic culture and racism: our era privileges the universalizing scientific rationality which admits only mathematically quantified statements whose truth-value does not depend on an idiosyncratic subjective position; in this sense, both universalism and egalitarian-democratic passion are the results of the hegemony of the scientific discourse. But if we extend the validity of scientific reason into the social field, the results are dangerous: universalizing passion pushes us to search for a universal mode of enjoyment that will be best for all, so those who resist it are disqualified as “barbarians”: “Due to the progress of science, racism has thus a bright future. The more refined discriminations provided by science we have, the more segregation in society we get.”7 This is why psychoanalysis is under such attack today: it focuses on the uniqueness of each subject’s mode of enjoyment, a uniqueness which resists scientific universalization as well as democratic egalitarianism: “Democratic leveling may be very nice, but it doesn’t replace the eroticism of exception.”8
 
One has to concede that Miller has fearlessly spelt out the political implications of this insistence on the uniqueness of the subject’s mode of enjoyment: psychoanalysis “reveals social ideals in their nature of semblances, and we can add, of semblances with regard to a real which is the real of enjoyment. This is the cynical position, which resides in saying that enjoyment is the only thing that is true.”9 What this means is that a psychoanalyst occupies the position of an ironist who takes care not to intervene into the political field. He acts so that semblances remain at their places while making sure that the subjects under his care do not take them as real … one should somehow bring oneself to remain taken in by them (fooled by them). Lacan could say that “those who are not taken in err”: if one doesn’t act as if semblances are real, if one doesn’t leave their efficacy undisturbed, things take a turn for the worse. Those who think that all signs of power are mere semblances and rely on the arbitrariness of the discourse of the master are the bad boys: they are even more alienated.10
 
In relation to politics then, a psychoanalyst thus “doesn’t propose projects, he cannot propose them, he can only mock the projects of others, which limits the scope of his statements. The ironist has no great design, he waits for the other to speak first and then brings about his fall as fast as possible … Let us say this is political wisdom, nothing more.”11 The axiom of this “wisdom” is that one should protect the semblances of power for the good reason that one should be able to continue to enjoy. The point is not to attach oneself to the semblances of the existing power, but to consider them necessary. “This defines a cynicism in the mode of Voltaire who let it be understood that God is our invention which is necessary to maintain people in a proper decorum.” Society is kept together only by semblances, “which means: there is no society without repression, without identification, and above all without routine. Routine is essential.”12

The result is thus a kind of cynical liberal conservatism: in order to maintain stability, one has to respect and follow routines established by a choice which is always arbitrary and authoritarian. “There is no progressivism which holds,” but rather a particular kind of hedonism called “liberalism of enjoyment.” One has to maintain intact the routine of the cité, its laws and traditions, and accept that a kind of obscurantism is necessary in order to maintain social order. “There are questions one shouldn’t ask. If you turn the social turtle on its back, you will never succeed in turning it back onto its paws.”13

Against Miller’s cynical-hedonist idea of a subject who, while admitting the necessity of symbolic semblances (ideals, Master-Signifiers, without which any society would fall apart), relates to them at a distance, aware that they are semblances and that the only Real is that of bodily jouissance, we should emphasize that such a stance of “enjoy and let others enjoy” would be possible only in a new communist order which has opened up the field for authentic idiosyncrasies:
a Utopia of misfits and oddballs, in which the constraints for uniformization and conformity have been removed, and human beings grow wild like plants in a state of nature … no longer fettered by the constraints of a now oppressive sociality, [they] blossom into the neurotics, compulsives, obsessives, paranoids and schizophrenics, whom our society considers sick but who, in a world of true freedom, may make up the flora and fauna of “human nature” itself.14
 
As we have seen, Miller is of course critical of the standardization of enjoyment demanded by the market to sell commodities, but his objection remains at the level of standard cultural critique; moreover, he ignores the specific socio-symbolic conditions for such a thriving of idiosyncrasies. As was noted long ago, capitalism is marked by a contradiction between ideological individualism (the interpellation of individuals as subjects free to follow their unique desires) and the leveling pressures of the market, imposing standardized modes of enjoyment as a condition of the commodification of mass consumption (while we are encouraged to indulge in our idiosyncrasies, the media bombard us with ideals and paradigms of how to do this). Communism is in this sense not a further leveled down “socialization” which curtails individual idiosyncrasies, but a social reconstruction which creates the space for their free deployment. Traces of this are found even in literary and Hollywood utopias of a social space subtracted from commodification, from the houses in which a group of eccentrics dwell in some of Dickens’s novels, to the crazy large family house in Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It with You whose inhabitants include Essie Carmichael (who makes candy as a hobby and dreams of being a ballerina), Paul Sycamore (a tinkerer who manufactures fireworks in the basement), Mr. DePina (who visited to speak to Paul eight years previously and has never left), Ed Carmichael (an amateur printer who prints anything that sounds good to him, including dinner menus for his family and little quotes that he places in the boxes of Essie’s candy), and Boris Kolenkhov (a Russian very concerned with world politics; he is opinionated and often loudly declares that something “stinks”).
 
At a more theoretical level, we should problematize Miller’s (and, maybe, if one accepts his reading, the late Lacan’s) rather crude nominalist opposition between the singularity of the Real of jouissance and the envelope of symbolic semblances. What gets lost here is the great insight of Lacan’s Seminar XX (Encore): that the status of jouissance itself is in a way that of a redoubled semblance, a semblance within semblance. Jouissance does not exist in itself, it simply insists as a remainder or product of the symbolic process, of its immanent inconsistencies and antagonisms; in other words, symbolic semblances are not semblances with regard to some firm substantial Real-in-itself, this Real is (as Lacan himself formulated it) discernible only through impasses of symbolization.
 From this perspective, an entirely different reading of Lacan’s les non-dupes errent imposes itself. If we follow Miller’s reading based on the opposition between symbolic semblances and the Real of enjoyment, les non-dupes errent amounts the cynical old saw that, although our values, ideals, rules, etc., are just semblances, we should not undermine them but act as if they were real in order to prevent the social fabric from disintegrating. But from a properly Lacanian standpoint, les non-dupes errent means almost the exact opposite: the true illusion consists not in taking symbolic semblances as real, but in substantializing the Real itself, in taking the Real as a substantial In-itself and reducing the symbolic to a mere texture of semblances. In other words, those who err are precisely those cynics who dismiss the symbolic texture as a mere semblance and are blind to its efficacy, to the way the symbolic affects the Real, to the way we can intervene into the Real through the symbolic. Ideology does not reside primarily in taking seriously the network of symbolic semblances which encircle the hard core of jouissance; at a more fundamental level, ideology is the cynical dismissal of these semblances as “mere semblances” with regard to the Real of jouissance.

他にも、たとえば、by Jacques-Alain Miller　IV Congress of the WAP - 2004 でのミレールの発言は文明論、三つの無意識の指摘などとても面白いが、不案内なわたくしには、いささかやけくそ気味のようにも読めてしまう。

There you have what my fantasy leads up to. I cannot do otherwise but follow it, which makes me think that the hypermodern discourse has the structure of the analyst’s discourse! It is an extremely surprising result.