ABSTRACT
Key Concepts: apparatuses of jouissance and the psychical apparatus, two types of masters, and three types of jouissance, desire and jouissance, the language of the One and the language of the Other, a new understanding of the primary and secondary process.
The ‘apparatus of jouissance’ is an interesting concept, because I do not know if there is such a thing as an ‘apparatus’ of jouissance, a word that Freud used to describe the psychical apparatus. This was not one of Lacan’s happiest expressions, because it makes jouissance sound very apparatchik or bureaucratic. In Freud, it refers to the structure of the psyche which has to do with the functioning of repression and desire in mental formations. This is what is described as an apparatus, but how is it applied to jouissance?
Language then is an apparatus of jouissance, but language is also tied to the existence of repression. Repression is necessary for psychical structure. This is an ambiguity present in Freud’s theory, because for Freud repression is both good and bad. Without repression, you have no apparatus. I would rather say “structure” than “apparatus”. Yet, repression, at least in the first theory, was considered the main reason for suffering, and therefore repression had to be undone. So, on the one hand, repression is necessary; on the other hand, it needs to be undone. However, when you undo repression in analysis, you do not undo primary repression, which is what creates a structure. Primary repression is associated to the Name of the Father and the function of metaphor in language. Language represents things that are absent. Things can be absent because they are not present, or because they are repressed.
What remains is the mark and the usage of the marks, and then the marks turn into numbers and letters and so on. But the fact that the mark originally arose as a mark of the deed of the killing of an animal gets repressed and lost. In the same way, the fact that repression arose out of the equation comprised of the Name of the Father and the Desire of the Mother is also forgotten or lost. The mother’s desire is signified with the resources of language or becomes substituted for the Name as a metaphor.
What is the difference between desire and jouissance? Lacan initially conceived jouissance as something inconvenient and a kind of excess, leading to overt agitation and anxiety. Such jouissance is derived from how the relationship with the mother becomes problematic and needs to be stopped or transformed in some way. Lacan says the first jouissance, the jouissance of the Other, needs to be stopped and sublated through the inverted ladder of the Law of desire. Jouissance needs to be transformed into a more neurotic way of handling desire through the Law. In addition, desire itself is a limit on jouissance. Desire is personal, in the sense that you desire and have romantic feelings and sexual feelings toward somebody in particular – an object of desire. This object is also a substitute, but it is still one person as opposed to an impersonal jouissance with anybody in general.
Most people think jouissance refers to the unstructured and unbound. Why is Lacan using the concept of a jouissance apparatus? How do desire and jouissance function differently within language? The easy way to resolve this is to say that desire refers to the language of the Other, the battery of signifiers. Jouissance instead refers to lalangue, which is the language of the ‘One’ rather than the language of the Other.
The ‘apparatus of jouissance’ is used to express the jouissance of the Other – the jouissance that the mother has with the child. Eventually, lalangue or the language of the One will have to be replaced by the language of the Other. Just like in development, the mother presides over the development of the child in the first year of life, and then the child moves more in the direction of the Other and the father. Therefore, the language of the Other replaces the language of the One. These two always remain linked in ways we may not yet fully understand.
Free association is a kind of primary process, because if it were a secondary process, then you would have a patient telling you ‘stories’ about themselves and the world, as people often do. But that kind of secondary process is not essential for analysis. Free association, as the word indicates, requires a modicum of stability and normality. Both the primary or secondary process can be productive or unproductive. Both Bion and Lacan understood the ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ processes in a more flexible way than Freud. This is the difference between the archaic and the ancient. When people speak about ‘antiquity’, they think of cultural things that are obsolete, ‘long gone’, or something archaic no longer relevant for scientific modernity.
We have a twofold notion of the master. When we talk about the master in social and political contexts, the master has a negative connotation, and the master is typically a despot or an autocrat. However, when Freud talked about the task of mastering the trauma of the repetition compulsion, that mastery refers to something healthy and necessary.
The dilemma between these two types of ‘master’ is replicated in how nowadays people talk about ‘spiritual masters’ and whether to think about a spiritual teacher as a master. A master can be a teacher but not every teacher is a master. People are often perplexed, not knowing which master they are dealing with, the good or the bad one!
Rhetoric is an art of discourse, wherein a writer or speaker strives to inform, persuade, or motivate audiences in specific situations. Its best-known definition comes from Aristotle, who considers it a counterpart in both logic and politics and calls it ‘the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion’. Rhetoric typically provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for situations, such as Aristotle’s three persuasive audience appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos. The five canons of rhetoric which trace the traditional tasks of designing persuasive speech were first codified in classical Rome as invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery, grammar, and logic.
It is difficult to dissociate rhetoric from the ‘master’s discourse’ or the art of governing. Words are used to govern well or to be able to persuade the people. We do not know if the universe is a flower of rhetoric, as Lacan says, but the least we can say is that the universe is a poetical artifact or a literary invention.
