ABSTRACT
In a 2008 lecture entitled ‘Beyond the False Promises of Security’, JacquesAlain Miller, one of the central heirs to Lacanian psychoanalysis, pointed out that the experience of psychosis is one that concerns the scope and range of meaning itself. For the psychotic, at the onset of psychosis, he explained, everything has meaning. There is, in other words, not a deficit of capacity for interpreting and understanding the empirical world, but rather a surplus. While for non-psychotics, only a certain fraction of the empirical world functions as semiotic signs, for the psychotic there is what a semiotician would call a ‘dysfunctional semiosis’. This has immediate consequences, says Miller, for the notion of security.1 Psychosis has two primary characteristics. On the one hand, it is surcharge
of signification or an over-interpretation of the signification of objects. It is a failure to access the ‘healthy’ experience of the arbitrary, of contingency, of the existence and persistence of things devoid of any meaning whatsoever. On the other hand, it is a multiplication of threat. Not only do all experienced objects have meaning, but this meaning is also threatening. Signification itself, its generation and circulation, becomes a matter of menace and danger. The psychotic is thus the ultimate subject of security. In this context the basic principles of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory
draw on the link we discussed earlier between security and epistemology. The link between the unknown and what is dangerous about the unknown per se, that which, regardless of what the unknown actually is, lies at the core of Lacan’s work on the theory of the subject and constitutes a fundamental dimension of the recent strategies for conceptualizing security and insecurity (cf. our discussion of the ‘unkown unkowns’ in Chapter 9). At the risk of adopting the psychotic discourse ourselves, we might suggest that the link between the new rationality of security and the logic of psychosis is revealing: in the security logic of the unknown no object is banal or meaninglessness, nothing is arbitrary or random, all objects have inherent meaning. This hidden or unattainable meaning is, in our time, most often associated with threat. The undisclosed significance of ordinary objects, by virtue of their hidden secrets, is the foundation of the threat they implicitly correlate and the source of the legitimacy they mobilize.
