Ed Pluth, Mladen Dolar, Lorenzo Chiesa, Marc De Kesel, Russell Grigg
— conference organized by Aaron Schuster, financially supported by the City of Maastricht
— auditorium
This one day conference explores the impact of psychoanalysis on the conception of human freedom in twentieth and twenty-first century thought.
Psychoanalysis is notorious for its deterministic view of human existence: is not the unconscious the ultimate ‘puppeteer’ manipulating the dramas and sundry affairs of our lives behind our backs? Are human beings, from the Freudian perspective, not the unwitting servants of desires and impulses that they barely understand let alone control? At the very least, the word “freedom” is not one typically associated with psychoanalysis. Freud himself denounced the “illusion of Free Will” as a product of wishful fantasies and frustrated desires, and sought to uncover a causal logic operating in even the most seemingly arbitrary of mental processes (dreams, slips of the tongue, memory gaps, etc.). The famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan similarly stated that “I have never spoken of freedom,” letting it be understood that he considered such talk to be no more than naïve humanist ideology, in conflict with the subject’s radical dependence on the Other.
Critics have taken this dismissive attitude as indicative of psychoanalysis’s despotic bearings, pointing out the discipline’s alliance with modern technologies of control (as Adam Curtis documents in Century of the Self, Freud’s work lies behind the invention of ‘public relations’ and mass propaganda techniques via his nephew Edward Bernays). Others have explicitly enlisted psychoanalysis in the service of emancipatory politics, as a theory able to pinpoint the fault lines in contemporary arrangements of power and show the way to effective resistance. It is the contention of this conference that the time is ripe for examining the possibility of a properly psychoanalytic conception of freedom, that is, a notion of freedom after the unconscious. Despite the relative neglect of freedom in psychoanalytic theory, its presence would appear to be presumed in its very praxis: is not the aim of analytic therapy to create a ‘freer’ relation to those desires and fantasies that move one from the inside? Yet in what could this freedom be said to consist, once the idea of the autonomous ego has been exposed as an illusion in light of the drives and their ineluctable destinies? Resources for thinking freedom from within a psychoanalytic framework are to be found in concepts like the act and therapeutic action, the analytic notions of cause and causality, theories of cultural conflict and social determination, and the problem of nature and dis-adaptation, among others. Such a reflection promises not only to bring psychoanalysis into dialogue with some of the major currents of contemporary philosophy—thinkers from Merleau-Ponty and Sartre to Arendt have struggled to think freedom together with a certain kind of passivity—but also to provide a renewed base from which to explore the continuing social and political relevance of psychoanalytic theory.
The title of Luis Bunuel’s masterwork of surrealist cinema, The Phantom of Liberty, refers at once to the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto—the specter haunting Europe—, the bitterly ironic slogan of the anti-Napoleon Spanish patriots, “Long live our chains!,” and the idea of artistic freedom which Bunuel provocatively claimed was just as chimerical as political freedom. The mocking indetermination of this phrase—liberty may well be an illusion, but it nevertheless continues to haunt us—seems well suited to challenge the consensual thinking of our times. What kind of liberty might exist for a non-egological, ‘decentered’ subject? Or, to turn around Bunuel’s phrase, what is the liberty of a phantom?
Psychoanalysis and freedom, a brief history
— introduction
Lacanian anti-humanism and freedom
— lecture
— respondent
Liberty: the shadow of the Ego fallen on the subject
— lecture
— respondent
lunch
'Wounds and Testimony' and 'Martyrs of the Unconscious':
Pasolini and Lacan conta the discourse of freedom
— lecture
— respondent
Between liberty and liberticide: psychoanalysis's economic view on freedom
— lecture
— respondent
break
Freedom of/as the object
— lecture
— respondent
drinks
No registration required. Admission free.
All sessions will take place in the auditorium of the Jan van Eyck Academie.
Lacan claimed that psychoanalysis provides a new theory of the subject, but what it is doing with the subject and why is not always clear. My presentation will explore how a central component of Lacan’s work on the subject is the thesis that the humanist tradition—which puts a high premium on individual autonomy—covers up something very important about who we are, and overlooks another, perhaps more essential and fundamental type of agency. This “other agency” raises questions of its own. How and under what conditions does this agency appear? And can its occurrence be promoted by some kind of practice? Can there be an ethic of the act? The position I will be taking on these questions is informed by a return to the much-maligned notion of full speech. If this early model for the ethic of psychoanalysis is looked at more closely, it provides us with a portrait of anti- or post-humanist freedom and agency. The question remains whether freedom and agency in Lacan’s work represents a change in the very model of freedom, or whether it is still a classical understanding of freedom simply given to a different source—not to the subject, but something else. My conclusion will explore whether Lacan’s position involves the same kinds of problem found in Heidegger’s work: a kind of mystical quietism.
The discourse of freedom is the discourse of the ego. It is a delusional discourse, always present, both personal and common. This discourse of freedom is essential to modern subjects, structured as they are by a certain conception of their own autonomy. On these grounds psychoanalysis has no place for this discourse of freedom. And yet psychoanalysis is also about the assumption of desire and an ethics of responsibility. In this paper I will discuss how these competing views might be reconciled.
In this paper I will analyse Pasolini’s and Lacan’s critique of the discourse of freedom—which they both conceive in terms of martyrdom—as a fundamentally psychotic discourse that should be opposed to any progressive notion of liberation—which Pasolini understands in terms of charity. I will also argue that the primarily scopic dimension of the process of liberation should be considered as a “lotta continua” in which the logic of fantasy is both traversed and reinstated.
According to psychoanalytical theory, human mental life is a matter of economy, more precisely a pleasure economy. That is why, despite its bad reputation in the field of contemporary sciences, this theory fits remarkably well with today’s late capitalist condition. The economic paradigm guiding our daily capitalistic life is at the same time the one guiding our inner ‘psychic apparatus’. A psychoanalytical theory of modern freedom has to proceed from this paradigm. It might not be able to find solutions for the aporias of modern freedom, but it is certainly able to acquire a sharper view them. It will particularly be able to get in touch with the ‘liberticide’ side of liberty.
Traditional philosophy treated the problem of freedom under two headings: on the side of the subject, there was the question of free will, the freedom of choice and its vicissitudes etc.; on the ‘objective’ side there was the question of determinism and the possible leeway in the tight network of causality. Lacan's objet a stands at the intersection of the two—as a glitch of causality (‘il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche) and as a ‘hard kernel’ of subjectivation. So if the object seems to provide a space of ‘freedom’ as a paradox of causality, what does this mean for the subject’s freedom? The question should be asked in different terms.