Reinventing the Soul by Mari Ruti

Author:Mari Ruti [Ruti, Mari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2020-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

3

Lack

The psychoanalytic experience…manipulates the poetic function of language to give to [man’s] desire its symbolic mediation. May that experience enable you to understand at last that it is in the gift of speech that all the reality of its effects resides; for it is by way of this gift that all reality has come to man and it is by his continued act that he maintains it.

Jacques Lacan, Écrits

LACAN’S GIFT OF SPEECH

I have chosen in this book to honor the posthumanist insight that at the core of human subjectivity there is no enduring substance, but rather a lack or nothingness. I have done so not only because I think that it would be a mistake to revert to a reassuring notion of inner totality, but also because the idea of constitutive lack provides a means of positing a certain kind of profundity at the very inception of psychic life. It is, after all, difficult to envision psychic wounding as purely a surface phenomenon; the very idea of a wound steers us toward a vertical rather than a horizontal model of subjective reality. At the same time, it must be recognized that placing lack at the center of subjectivity all too easily conjures up images of abjection and disempowerment. It is in part for this reason—to resist the intuitive alignment of lack with a paucity of psychic resources—that I have begun to suggest that the subject’s lack-in-being should not be read exclusively as a site of alienation. The loss of secure existential foundations may be an indispensable dimension of posthumanist thought, yet this decentering of the self should not be equated with the impossibility of honoring the creative capabilities of the psyche.

In this chapter, I would like to take a closer look at the Lacanian notion of lack in an attempt to discover how we might be able to read lack affirmatively, as what gives rise to the subject’s innovative capacities, and what consequently allows it to actualize itself as a being of psychic potentiality. What Lacan understood so well is that it is only as a creature of lack that the subject possesses the power to generate meaning. In Chapter 1, I argued that Foucault envisions power as that which enables the subject to produce new discourses about the self even as it limits the terrain of discursive possibility. Similarly, Lacan shows us that the signifier bestows upon the subject the gift of meaning even as it renders it alienated by drawing it into a symbolic system that it cannot control. Indeed, if my search for a restorative theory of psychic life—for a compelling means of capturing the elusive contours of the posthumanist soul, if you will—draws on Lacanian theory, it is because Lacan is so centrally interested in the signifier’s ability to grant meaning even as it dispossesses the subject of its fantasies of omnipotence and ontological wholeness.

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, I would like to show that if we are able to extract from Lacanian

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