Who Needs Yalom When We Have Žižek?
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Hegel’s Monarch
As was said above, the signifying chain or symbolic order (Žižek’s ‘big Other’) is organized around a constitutive lack due to a primordially repressed signifier. What is meant by ‘constitutive’ is that the very failure of symbolization (symbolization being the goal of the symbolic order, to symbolize ‘reality’ completely, to leave no stone unturned) opens up the void within which the process of symbolization takes place. In other words, the traumatic Thing which makes the big Other non-all is a hole, a gap, a void around which symbolization turns, the cause of its failure, but at the same time it is the very space of symbolization, its condition of possibility. This is critical to understand: ‘every symbolic structure is decentered, organized around a void, which it itself occupies in surplus’ (Contingency, 125) and the ‘it itself’ qua surplus is precisely the objet a. So the conditions of impossibility (of a complete symbolization) are the conditions of possibility of symbolization itself. Thus the group, in attempting to symbolize it all, to ‘say it all’ about itself is doomed because of the void of the Thing, the missing binary signifier which would complete the system and allow everything to be said. And this void is simultaneously the very framework of the group process.
This may become clearer if we think of what Hegel means by a ‘notion.’ Žižek writes that ‘Notion is the form of thought, form in the strict dialectical sense of the “formal aspect” qua truth of the content: the “unthought” of a thought is not some transcendent content eluding its grasp, but its form itself.’ (For They, 164) In simple terms, I can think about everything and all, except for the very form that my thinking takes when I do so – there is always the very form of my thought that is excluded from my thinking, but at the same time that form is constitutive of my ability to think. And in the course of the dialectical process, those ‘thinkable’ thoughts come to be seen as that paradoxical object which materializes its impossible form. Likewise, the void around which the group process turns and within which it does its turning is embodied as well in its own paradoxical object, without which there would be no void, although strictly speaking the void is logically a priori to any entity that gives it body.11
Žižek aids us in comprehending this in his reading of Hegel’s Monarch. The proper determinate reflection of subjects of the state involves reflecting or presupposing their subjective freedom in advance into the substantial Other of the state, as its own reflective determination. (Sublime, 230) The condition of our freedom, of our existence as persons not only subject to political rule but as freely positing agents instigating our own activity, is to presuppose that the substantial State is already itself a subject who takes the form of the head of that State, the Monarch. The Monarch is the One, the individual who takes upon himself the empty gesture of subjectivization, adding to the substantial content the form of subjectivity. (Sublime, 229) In a word, without his gesture, the condition of our subjective freedom could not be met.
As was noted above, the therapist’s gesture of beginning and being present throughout the length of the session is the condition of the group being a self-positing group. That is, the group could not freely do what it does without his bodily presence, even though it most certainly is not experienced in that way by the members. Yalom cites many examples of group members who view the therapist not as a condition of their freedom within the group but rather as the very obstacle that prevents their freedom. (e.g., Yalom, 316) In the language of psychoanalysis, what such ‘neurotic’ group members (‘normal,’ sexually repressed subjects) overlook is the key role played by the therapist qua cause of their own and the group’s desire. They just see him as a secondary obstacle that prevents their direct access to the Thing.12
However, such neurotic group members are more in tune with the truth of the group, in that they are at least focused on the exceptional seat occupied by the therapist, than a group member such as the one Yalom cites as saying : ‘It’s as though the group is sitting on my shoulder, watching me. I’m forever asking, “what would the group say about this or that?” ’ (Yalom, 57) This is a more common attitude toward the group, one that views it in surplus over the individual subject, as expressed by another member, quoted by Yalom: ‘this group works well, but I’m not part of it.’ (55) What such subjects perceive, however, in their perception of the group as a substantial entity (the big Other) in excess to the individual subject, is their very perception of their ‘own egotistic, self-centered attitude towards this same reality in an “objectivized,” ‘‘reified” form.’ (Indivisible, 68) In other words, ‘the surplus of Society over the individual (Society as unattainable, mysterious Thing-in-itself) is nothing but the inverted form of appearance of its lack, of the fact that Society itself does not yet correspond to its notion, but remains an external “mechanical” network linking individuals.’ (For They, 107, italics in original) This would be a Žižekian criticism of Yalom’s approach: the more the group members are encouraged to entertain their own egoistic, self-centered agendas and the more they are urged to pursue their own self-posited goals in the group, the more the group will oppose and disrupt their individual projects and appear to them as a hostile, alienating force.13
If the group is ‘naturally’ or at least, at first, perceived in excess, over and above the individual subject and the therapist is that member whose seat is unique to every group in the same manner, is there a way to think these two concepts together? Yes, and that is precisely what Hegel’s speculative judgment is all about. Žižek provides us with a generalized form of Hegel’s ‘Spirit is a bone’ and ‘State is Monarch’ in a Lacanian ‘A is a.’ (Indivisible, 143) ‘A’ stands for the big Other (l’Autre) and ‘a’ is the objet a and their equation is an attempt to render visible their ‘speculative identity’ via the juxtaposition of two terms which seem at first incompatible. But if we keep in mind that ‘A’ is inherently barred, turning around the void of a central impossibility and at the same time this falling short of its notion is its very condition of possibility, this makes sense. We must already find ourselves in a symbolic order, for only at this point can an object coincide with its empty place. That is, to conceive of the void, you must have already abstracted it from its place and objet a is precisely the paradoxical object which embodies or materializes this impossibility. (Indivisible, 143)
To realize this speculative identity, the big Other must be conceived as Subject and no longer simply as Substance. (For They 105) The Monarch, as was said, accomplishes this. How he does this is by functioning as a pure signifier, one without a signified. His authority over the State – and that of the therapist over the group – ‘consists in his Name and it is precisely for this reason that his physical reality is wholly arbitrary and could be left to the biological contingency of lineage.’ (For They, 82) One therapist is as good as another for the purposes of subjectivizing the group and transforming a contingent multitude of individuals into an All-set formed on a rational basis. As far as the group is concerned, the therapist is the One, the Exception14 – not just a symbol, but the member who occupies the performative point of pure authority of the signifier and is nature’s last positive remainder of contingency. That is, he is the immediate actuality of his own notion while all other subjects never fully correspond to their notion but must struggle to achieve it as non-therapist members of the group. (For They, 84) This means that as soon as a group begins, subjects are at once split in their own (group) notion of themselves. In practical terms, they are subjects whose notion is perhaps ‘Those with interpersonal skill deficiencies’ and who must therefore struggle to create themselves more fully; that is presumably why they joined the group in the first place. The therapist, however, is One with his notion, perhaps ‘The One who is interpersonally skilful,’ and thus does not have need to self-create. He is what he is. The crucial point here is that the universal Notion for the group members ‘arrives at its being-for-itself, it is posited as Notion, only when, in the very domain of particularity, it reflects itself in the form of its opposite (in some element which negates the very fundamental feature of its notional universality).’ (For They, 124)
This is Hegel’s ‘negative self-relationship of the Notion’ that Žižek speaks of, and should sound familiar after our discussion above of the dialectical logic of reflection and of the signifier. The notion of what it means to be a group member for the subjects in the group only comes to be as such when it is embodied in the therapist in the form of its opposite, opposite not only in the sense of the opposite notion (‘deficient’ versus ‘expert’ interpersonal skills) but opposite in the sense that the universal notion of the group (say, a ‘workshop for subjects with interpersonal deficiencies’) only comes to be when reflected into the particularity of just one group member, the therapist. Hence, we see again the elementary dialectical inversion, which consists ‘precisely in… a reversal of transcendence into immanence’ (For They, 107) for what was once a transcendent Notion of what the group is, with all its accompanying mystery & frustration, now reveals itself to be immanent to the particularity of the group itself. In short, the group does not struggle to achieve some correspondence to an external ideal; the truth is achieved when there is accordance of the group with its own notion. Thus, in this sense, no group can ever be ‘true,’ no group can ever bridge the gap between itself and its own notion. This is so because the ‘discord is a positive condition of the object’s ontological consistency… because Notion itself partakes of the dialectical movement.’ (For They, 68)
If the therapist/monarch not only lends his name or title so that the group/state becomes Subject and not only Substance, but is also ‘the object… as a pure excrement, a remainder appended to the Name,’ (For They, 84) so that he is that group member/individual who appears as the embodiment of Group-Member/Man in general, how exactly should he act? Against the common sense notion that leaders should be wise and experienced, Hegel dispels the fascinating charismatic power of the leader by carrying out a separation between his two ‘functions,’ that of S1 (his Name) and a, his body. (For They, 84) That is, to effectively maintain his authority and the coherency of the group, the therapist would do best by minding not to stray too far from his mandate, by remaining as firmly in his seat as possible. An example of a therapist not doing so would be if he, at the beginning of the session, spoke as another group member might speak, requesting ‘time’ that night because of some issues he would like to work out with the other group members. The results would be disastrous, as could well be imagined, even if the therapist prefaced his request by saying he was doing so to ‘lead by example’; perhaps even more so then. Yalom provides an example of two neophyte therapists who were overzealous with their dedication to what he calls ‘transparency,’ openly expressing their self-doubts and personal anxieties to the group they led. The result was that ‘the majority of the members dropped out of the group within the first six sessions.’ (Yalom 227) In such an ‘excessive transparency’ case, the therapist’s seat would be revealed as vacant, the performative nature of that seat would cease to function and the group as such would effectively break up. Apropos to this logic, Žižek points out the example of Ronald Reagan’s presidency: the more he reigned in a king-like fashion, making empty gestures and not quite grasping what was going on, his popularity was assured. (For They, 94) And this is exactly Žižek’s point, that it is more desirous to effectively have an idiot in power than one with visible ambitions for the betterment of his charge. As far as the therapist functions as a psychoanalyst, perhaps Roudinesco, a biographer of Lacan, can provide a guideline for group leadership behavior: ‘If a man speaks because symbols have made him a man, the analyst is only a “supposed master,” acting as an amanuensis.’ (Roudinesco, 217) The job of the therapist should at most be one of punctuation of group activity rather than providing technical and demonstrative expertise in the ways of interpersonal relations.
To sum up this discussion, the group operates essentially as any self-organized system (and everything that has been said of the group is only sensible within the logic of this group as just such a system) which generates that very otherness to which it self-referentially refers and disturbs, so that it ultimately only ever speaks of itself. The therapist qua objet a is that material left-over of this self-referential motion of signifier activity. The therapist’s body embodies that motion, so that ultimately the group is the therapist (that is, A is a). Another way of saying the same thing is that the therapist qua object a is the point of overlap or intersection between the group as Other and the group as Subject. (Metastases, 178) This strikes at the Hegelian conception of tautology as the highest contradiction, where a tautology (such as ‘Group is Group’) ‘gives form to the radical antagonism between the two appearances of the same term.’ (Indivisible, 101) The group’s identity is sustained by that foreign body in its very midst, its condition of impossibility, that void which destabilizes and splits the One, the Whole from within. So by saying ‘Group is Group,’ we are providing the positive universal genus of ‘Group is...’ with a negative species ‘...Group’ which excludes all predicates, so that what we end up with is some initial moment which comes across its own absence. (For They, 36) What Kant fails to realize is that the Thing ultimately reveals itself to be a phantasm which fills out the empty shell of his transcendental object (that is, in Lacanian terms, objet petit a) since all that exists is the field of phenomena and its limitation. (Tarrying, 37) Likewise, any substantial images we subjects have of the big Other or of the Other of the Other are an external reflection which reveal themselves to be phantasms as well. The elementary matrix is thus: any universal notion (‘Group’) immediately redoubles itself into both encompassing and exclusive categories as soon as it is confronted with its particular content (all of those particular expressions of ‘Group’), at which point it retroactively reorders itself as pure, self-relating negativity. (For They, 42) Here is the potentially liberating aspect of Žižek’s project, for once the Group is revealed to be a social order whose very positivity gives body to radical negativity – and by realizing that the therapist functions as the ultimate guarantee of the stability of the Group by acting as the place-holder of that negativity which lies at the base of the group’s activity (and which threatens to erupt and engulf the group at any time) – that Group is no longer alienating and the necessity of the Group as such vanishes, revealing its radical contingency.15
Lacanian-themed puzzles
