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Title: Post-Anarchism and Psychoanalysis
Author: Duane Rousselle
Date: 2022
Language: en
Topics: post-anarchism, postanarchy, psychoanalysis
Notes: The following text consists of a transcription of a series of free seminars conducted by Duane Rousselle in the early part of 2022.

Duane Rousselle

Post-Anarchism and Psychoanalysis

The Revolutionary Impulse of Melancholia

I’d like to begin with a statement that I made a few months ago while

nearing the end of a seminar for some students in Russia. You know, when

I speak, I frequently surprise myself. This happens because I permit

myself every opportunity to ramble. Maybe that’s not exactly what you

might call ‘teaching,’ but it certainly has its pedagogical effects.

When I speak as a teacher it is as if I am involved in a psychoanalytic

session. I am surprised--as typically happens in an analysis--by my own

speech. This was an important aspect of undergoing psychoanalysis for

Freud. He named it the ‘parapraxis.’ And in his work on dreams he also

discussed the ‘latent’ content, discoverable through interpretation of

the ‘manifest content.’ Lacan even made a distinction like that in his

earlier teaching between ‘empty’ and ‘full’ speech. The latter invokes a

meaning that is susceptible to psychoanalytic interpretation. In any

case, what I said to those Russian students was surprising but it didn’t

imply that there was some deeper meaning to be interpreted inside of it.

I remain committed to the statement that surprised me. What I said was

that there are no genuine revolutionaries without melancholia. I’m sure

that this statement will irritate some clinicians. For many of them,

melancholia is a very serious condition that involves, among other

things, suicidal ideation. I respect that it is important to have what

is called a ‘differential clinic.’ So I’m not intended to challenge this

position by playing loose with the definition. In any case, I don’t want

to repeat all of the heavy lifting that brought me to make that claim.

But what is melancholia? Put simply, it exists, not, as one might

expect, when one discovers that the world has collapsed, but rather when

one realizes that one never existed in the world from the very

beginning. In such circumstances, in some sense, there is nothing but

‘world.’ It is a world of profound subjective destitution, to put it

mildly. The melancholic cannot seem to conquer a place for itself in the

world. (I am here repurposing Lacan’s statement on psychosis.)

I would even claim that the melancholic experience is one of only

‘revolution.’ Lacan once reminded his students that the word

‘revolution’ means ‘to return to the same.’ Hence, in the 1970s, he

said: “this term ‘revolution’ in the use made of it in the mechanics of

heavenly bodies, means a return to the state.” He added: “the master’s

discourse accomplishes its own revolution in the sense of doing a

complete circle.” How should we read this? I take it to imply that there

was something ‘real’ at stake in his conception of revolution. I am

surprised, therefore, to discover that Lacan was actually quite

interested in revolutions. The concept of the ‘real’ was for him

pivotal. And perhaps you already know that he once gave a definition of

the ‘real’ as that which ‘always returns to its place.’ His example was

precisely the movement of heavenly bodies. It would therefore seem as

though the concept of the ‘real’ and that of ‘revolution’ are in some

ways homologous. There is a ‘real’ at stake in melancholia that is

revolutionary and that forces us to reflect also upon the concepts of

repetition, circularity, and even fixation. The melancholic is therefore

the one for whom there is most certainly a revolution, but without there

being any place for herself in the world.

This is what differentiates the melancholic from the hysteric. The

latter, in the first instance, confronts a world. The hysterical subject

situates her revolutionary aspirations in some relation to the world. It

doesn’t imply that it works out well for her. But she demands something

from the world. She demands that there be a transgression of the laws

which sustain it. She is not necessarily the instrument of the world, as

in perversion, but she does aim to expose the world’s inadequacies and

to force it to take stock. Yet, for all of that, to put it simply, she

remains subjected to that world. For example, the hysteric will come

inside of the walls of your world for no other reason than to demand

that you go outside of the world. In fact, this is what one

revolutionary student did during one of Lacan’s seminars. The student

interrupted Lacan in order to demand that he stop teaching, that he stop

speaking. The demand was for him to go outside of speech. I’ll quote the

incident:

Student: If we are to overthrow the University, it will be from the

outside, with others who are on the outside.

Intervention: So why are you inside?

Student: I am inside, comrade, because if I want people to leave, I have

to come inside to tell them.

Lacan: Ah! You see... Everything is there, my friend. In order to get

them to go out, you come in.

It is a rather interesting dialogue. Perhaps the hysteric goes inside so

that she can preach the gospel of going outside. Yet, this is not true

of the melancholic. The melancholic experiences revolution without a

place for herself in the world and without aspirations. The concept of

revolution is therefore a real pivot between hysteria and melancholia.

This is what will eventually lead us toward some real surprises. For

example, Lacan once said to the revolutionary students: “as

revolutionaries, what you aspire to is a master.” After all the years

since I first read this statement, it continues to lead me to be

surprised. In fact, I was surprised yet again, just last night, when one

of you provided me with another reading of the statement. Hugh know who

you are! In any case, it is likely that the statement also surprised

Lacan since he didn’t plan on saying what he said. The point is that

hysteria is precisely that: a big surprise! But, for whom is it a

surprise? On the one hand, it is a surprise for those who attempt to

relate to the hysteric. I wouldn’t recommend that. On the other hand, it

is a surprise, precisely, for the hysteric herself.

It was a point made many years ago by Jacques-Alain Miller. He said,

quite simply: ‘hysteria is the surprise package!’ It doesn’t work out

well for partners who do not like surprises. Truthfully, there are many

people today who don’t like to be surprised. It is probably a part of

our contemporary condition. My concern is that anarchists stopped being

surprised by the world as well. In any case, Miller went on to remind us

that the hysteric is never where her partner expects her to be, based

upon what he believes he knows about her. It was a fundamental point. A

clear point. It helped to orient me on the question of the hysteric’s

truth. However, it didn’t make things understood. It only leads me

toward more confusion. This expression -- the hysteric’s truth -- … I’m

not sure if Lacan ever said it quite like that. It was Ellie Ragland who

put it clearly like that in an essay of the same title. She’s never

where you expect her to be because she is not entirely captured by the

world of meaning, by speech.

There can be no psychoanalysis without surprises. Psychoanalysis has

been fundamentally oriented by surprises of all sorts. It is why we

might claim that psychoanalysis really began as an outcome of the

hysterical revolution. And psychoanalysts attempted to make the surprise

a motor of their discourse, the ‘analytic discourse,’ by beginning with

what is called the objet petit a. That is what Lacan called it: the

objet petit a. It is a confusing concept because it took different

shapes during different periods of his teaching. To get a sense of some

of these shifts you might read Miller’s “Six Paradigms of Jouissance.”

At around the time of the impromptu session with the revolutionary

students, not long after the uprisings began in France, the objet petit

a was resituated to account for a renewed interest in the relationship

of the unconscious to what is called the drives or what today I will

simply call, and it is not quite correct, the impulse. It is not long

after this that the objet petit a became understood as a ‘void,’ which

means that it was something missing from within the symbolic order. Put

another way, it was related to that which resists being inscripted

within the symbolic world. That was what happened to the little object

‘cause’ of desire. So, I say that the hysterical subject is the one for

whom jouissance is resolutely and inescapably enigmatic from the

standpoint of the world.

It’s not exactly clear to me. I’m not sure where I am going with all of

this. But something nonetheless has become cleared away. Incidentally, I

quite like the word ‘clear.’ I like it because one of you told me

yesterday in Dublin that it is one of the Cartesian virtues. I didn’t

know about that. I like it, but, nonetheless, nothing is really clear to

me yet with regard to the point of this lecture. I’m confused in-Clare,

unclear. In any case, what I’ve mentioned so far does nonetheless

produce a clearing away of knowledge from jouissance. There is a

disjuncture of knowledge, the sort of knowledge that might be

interpreted in terms of meaning, and jouissance. Maybe what I’m saying

is not altogether virtuous but perhaps I can learn to speak-well of it

as the course proceeds. I’m working on it. For now, I’ll continue

rambling.

I was thinking that it would be difficult for psychoanalysis to continue

if not for the fact that they like surprises. There are even some

psychoanalysts on facebook who really enjoy them. You will find them

endlessly playing with language, making jokes, producing double

entendres, and so on. For them, there is nothing but the playfulness of

language. That is not my way. However, this point about the disjuncture

of knowledge and jouissance allows us to advance a little further than

some ‘so-called anarchists’ (which sounds a lot like ‘psycho-analysts,’

doesn’t it?). They offered readings of psychoanalysis and revolution by

focusing on hysteria and desire without at all plunging into the

darkness of the drives, the revolutionary impulses, and enigmatic

jouissance. Some of them have claimed that they’ve isolated the basic

ontological presuppositions of classical anarchism and that they have

revealed an uncritical ‘essentialist position’ with respect to human

nature.

This led them toward a claim that classical anarchists had a simplistic

or reductive account of political revolution: if human nature is

essentially good and creative, and if the master is essentially

repressive, then one just has to get rid of the master and we can all

hold hands and join a communist fraternity. What I find interesting

about this moment in anarchist thinking was that it nonetheless produced

an initial surprise among anarchists around the world. They were

surprised by what we revealed to them about what they were saying. So,

suddenly, when the post-anarchist critique of classical anarchist

ontology and epistemology occurred, there was a jolt of surprise among

anarchists. It was perhaps most surprising, though, because the

post-anarchists were anarchists who defined themselves, their

orientation, precisely in fidelity to that surprise. It was most

surprising for the anarchists themselves! And just like that most

anarchists began to work hard to demonstrate that there was already this

other ‘scene’ within anarchist theory.

They busied themselves to show us that the classical texts are not at

all homogeneous like many of the post-anarchists seemed to be claiming.

They aimed to show us that there was always another reading of the

anarchist theory of power, subjectivity, and so on. It was already there

within the classical tradition. It means that the post-anarchists and

the anarchists were fighting with each other but nonetheless both

pursuing the consequences of the same surprising moment. It was an

engagement with the unconscious, truthfully. What mattered at that

moment wasn’t about who had the correct reading of anarchist texts but

rather the fact that we were all surprised by what he had already been

saying within the anarchist tradition. I wonder if today there are any

of such surprises left for anarchists.

Not much has been said about the incompatibility or the non-rapport of

jouissance and the world. The mystery of hysteria was thought to be

mastered by many of the post-anarchists. I propose to you that we

instead begin to move backward from mastery to mystery, from meaningful

knowledge back to the enigma. You know, the word ‘surprise’ carries two

meanings: first, it means to be captured or mastered, and, second, it

means that you are astonished by something unexpected. On the one hand,

you could say that you are mastered by the symbolic unconscious. So,

when some post-anarchists wrote about hysteria and revolution they

focused only on the unacknowledged dependence upon the world of mastery.

For example, it was the position of Saul Newman in his exploration of

the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment and ‘slave morality.’ It was

also the position of Richard J. F. Day, in a way, when he discussed what

he called the ‘loopback structure’ of ‘reform and revolution’ within

counter-hegemonic social movements. For him, these movements were

captured by what he named the circular ‘politics of demand.’ For Lacan,

it is only the analyst’s discourse that offers a revolution without the

world of mastery.

The big secret of hysteria is that she is ultimately not entirely in the

world. This is why Lacan seemed to retain a link among hysteria and

femininity. This will probably upset those of you who are not in favor

of surprises: he located a link among hysteria and the essence of the

feminine position and it was in a logic of the ‘not-all’ (pas-toute).

The ‘not-all’ highlights an exception to the laws of the world. It is

not a universal position, since that would make it an ‘All.’ The

‘not-all’ remains enigmatic. Marie-Helene Brousse pointed out that in

hysteria it is important to think not only about a revolutionary

response to the world of mastery. Hysteria is also a response to the

‘real.’ In other words, hysteria is also a defense against revolution.

Put differently, hysteria is a response to the master just as much as

the mystery. In both cases there is something like a ravage.

Psychoanalysts often mitsake hysterical and melancholic or psychotic

ravage. The key difference, I think, is that the hysteric makes

victimization the point of departure upon which to launch her

interrogation of the master, while the melancholic remains within the

mystery. There are no secrets or surprises.

You get my point? What is at stake in hysteria? Ultimately, it concerns

this enigmatic and unspeakable jouissance. It is a jouissance that is

anarchic and revolutionary. It is a jouissance uncoupled from the world.

The melancholic understands the big secret, the hysteric’s truth: the

world is radically without foundation. The melancholic knows very well

about the profound violence of the world and of speech. For the

melancholic, the secret is truly out. This is why knowing the big secret

doesn’t make life any easier. You know, I am currently in Ireland, and I

was reminded recently that in Catholicism there is the ‘mystery of

faith.’ I remember hearing it every Sunday while I was in the church:

“let us proclaim the mystery of faith.” What is the mystery of faith?

Quite simply, it is the secret as such, something radically without

meaning. The mystery of faith is not some meaning to be solved, it is

just that: a pure enigma. However, there was some theosopher, I don’t

know his name, who claimed that he found a way to grasp the mystery of

faith and it was in the pure writing of the tetragrammaton. In any case,

I digress.

None of this stops the melancholic from engaging in what seems to be

self-sabotaging behavior. However, that happens along a different track

than what we see in hysteria. The hysteric sabotages her desire in order

to sustain the very space within which her subjectivity has been split

in relation to the world. It is a possible solution. However, the

melancholic, as you know, sabotages this very split of subjectivity. The

cut that should have occurred from the world into jouissance didn’t

happen, and so it sometimes happens instead with a razor blade or with a

pill. In such cases, the revolution overcomes her. I imagine those monks

who sit out in the streets in protest and burn themselves to death. It

is definitely a type of ‘revolutionary’ activity. In this case, the

molotov cocktail isn’t thrown at the world but is thrown at oneself.

Lacan once defined jouissance in the following way: ‘it begins with a

tickle and ends in a blaze of petrol.’ Lacan reminded us that this

behavior has been popular among Buddhists for a while, and he related it

to the melancholic position. However, this is a revolution that outlives

the subject.

This is why it is important to understand that there are revolutionary

aspirations but also revolutions of jouissance, or what we might call

the revolutionary activity of death drive. What the melancholic

demonstrates is that there is a revolution of jouissance which burns

away at the subject. It reveals that the subject is refused in this

world and that the world can easily go on about its business without him

or her. The subject is revealed as this refuse, this piece of trash. The

melancholic subject will state this quite clearly. I was thinking that

it is an interesting position to imagine oneself since that is what the

psychoanalyst ultimately becomes for a patient in psychoanalysis: cast

off, rejected, refused at the end of analysis. The analyst is also a

piece of trash, truth be told.

Maybe there are just a few more things that I would like to say.

There is a possible reading of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. I

hope you know something about this narrative. What Orpheus learned upon

losing Eurydice in the underworld was that he needed to lose her

precisely to convince himself that he ever had her from the beginning.

He was trying to trick himself, I think. He wanted to be duped. He

wanted to forget that he already knew the big secret. In the end, after

losing her, he realized, I think, that he never had her from the

beginning. He sat all alone, beneath a tree, like the Buddha, absolutely

dedicated to her long after she vanished. This is what we are often

told: his dedication to her never waned, long after she was gone. He

nonetheless refused all possible relationships to others. He could not

substitute her. I will quote Ovid: “he abstained from the love of women

[...]. Yet, many felt a desire to be joined with him, and many grieved

at being rejected.” What happened in the end? Precisely, the world tore

him to pieces, limb by limb. It wasn’t petrol but it had the same

effect.

Perhaps another reading exists, one which thinks that he was a

melancholic. He could not separate from Eurydice, he could not find a

position from which to properly mourn her. The paradox was that she was

all the more proximate precisely after her vanishing. It is perhaps also

a way to read the lesson of Antigone. Many people believe that Antigone

was a hysteric who performed a truly ethical act. Judith Butler noted

that she couldn’t have been hysterical. She agreed with Julia Kristeva

in claiming that she must have been melancholic. Kristeva advanced this

point a bit further: Antigone was melancholic because she could not

separate from the familial bond with her brother. She was closer to him

precisely in his absence. She nonetheless seemed like a revolutionary

figure, ungovernable by the laws of the world. But what kind of

revolution was that? The revolution went on without them.

Hence, I really like how clearly Russell Grigg put the matter several

years ago. He said something like: in melancholic psychosis, it is not a

process of mourning the loss of an object/person that is at stake. It is

not a process of mourning. Rather, melancholia is about the unbearable

presence of the object/person. He referred to the ‘unabandoned object.’

Let’s return to our thread after this long detour. I want to return to

this moment when Lacan was speaking to the revolutionary students of

France. Lacan’s statement really did surprise me. I’ll explain why.

First of all, it occurred during an impromptu session. Lacan frequently

permitted himself the freedom to ramble. But at that time his students

challenged that space. They challenged the very space within which

rambling could have occurred. On the one hand, they demanded that he

respond to their provocations and accusations; and, on the other hand,

they interrupted him, and, in fact, spoke for him. When he did find a

moment to speak it was clear that they only heard what they were already

prepared to hear. They already knew all of the answers to the questions

that they were asking. Perhaps that offers us another way to understand

what it means to work at an ‘impossible profession.’ (That’s what Freud

called them, impossible professions: teaching, politics, and

psychoanalysis.) Perhaps teaching is an ‘impossible profession’ because

there never was a world within which the teacher could have possibly

been permitted to ramble. Lacan probably knew this better than most

since there was always a question of where it was that he would speak.

But that didn’t stop him from speaking and from saying things that

continue to astonish us.

As for Antigone, she was not able to make use of a world after hers

clearly disappeared. There is something ethically wrong, I would say, in

claiming that Antigone’s action was revolutionary and that tragedy is at

the heart of what psychoanalysis and anarchism can offer the world. We

might think it is courageous when she says: “I will bury him myself even

if I die in the act, that death will be a blory. I will sleep with the

one I love and be loved by him.” You know what is interesting -- I will

have to go back to the ethics seminar to confirm this -- Lacan described

Antigone as having the ‘true secret.’ She possessed the mystery. Yet,

for Lacan, she was also ‘inflexible,’ which means, quite fixated, stuck.

At one point Lacan even claims that it might be the case that she was a

fascist. She goes beyond the limits of the world. It was an act of

rebellion and transgression. However, when did the transgression happen?

Well, it didn’t happen suddenly, because of an injustice. She said

somewhere that “her soul died a long time ago.” She didn’t say that the

world died but rather that her soul died. In the same seminar, before

discussing Antigone, Lacan spoke of another melancholic woman who acted

in relation to an overly proximate object, her brother-in-law. It shows

that he had something of melancholia in mind when speaking of Antigone.

The melancholic doesn’t know how to find a place for herself in relation

to the world. And it has something to do with the fact that she has a

strange access to the hysteric’s truth. I made a distinction last week

when speaking about something else: idiot, moron, and stupid person.

When one does not see the way in which one is implicated in the world of

mastery, we can speak about a person who is duped as if they are an

idiot. The hysteric is clearly an idiot. The idiot is always determined

by the world. I call that idiot-ology, which means that one remains

trapped within the field of mastery. This is a different position than

that of living without a world. Those who live without a world are

morons. We might claim that the moron is an elevated idiot. The moron

isn’t duped at all. But can’t live properly without being duped. The

psychoanalyst is interested in a revolution that is neither moronic nor

idiotic. I think that it says something about our ‘stupidity.’ Perhaps

it is about not being without a world, which means making use of a

world. The stupid person really likes surprises, it stunned him. I want

to quote Natalie Wulfing, who I think put it exceptionally well:

[For the melancholic, there is] nothing to be gained from the World.

Freud in fact thought that the melancholic had an uncharacteristic

access to the truth [...] It would cast him as a non-dupe [in other

words, a moron].

It is a terrible thing to say because I advise you to never call a

melancholic a moron. It will have catastrophic consequences. I would

conclude only by reminding you that some anarchists knew about the big

secret. I admire them very much. Take Max Stirner who wrote that

‘revolutions aim at new arrangements, but insurrections lead us to no

longer allow ourselves to be arranged by the social order.’ You know,

when you look at the painting that Engels drew of the young Hegelians,

stirner was always off to the side, at a distance from the world.

Stirner wasn’t essentially aiming to provoke a master. He was

confronting the world as such. His books and essays basically say the

following: ‘I resolve to speak of revolutions without the need of a

world.’ He finds himself, therefore, all alone. He is this void, this

piece of waste. For example, how does Stirner open his famous book The

Ego and Its Own? He writes: “All things are nothing to me.” He

continues:

What is not supposed to be my thing! First and foremost, the Good thing,

then God’s thing, the thing of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of

humanity, of justice; further, the thing of my people, my prince, my

fatherland; finally even the thing of Mind, and a thousand other things.

Only my cause, my thing, is never to be my concern.

I take from this that there is a fundamental rejection of the world, of

the entire field of ‘world.’ There is nothing left except the pure

revolutionary impulse. He destroys all objects. This is how he put it in

a small essay on art and religion: ‘art makes the Object, and religion

lives only in its many ties to that Object.’ He continues to explain

that he ‘clearly sets himself apart from both [...]. Neither enmeshed

with an Object, as religion, nor making one, as in art, but rather [he]

places his pulverizing hand upon all the business of making Objects as

well as the whole of objectivity itself, and so breathes the air of

freedom.’ Finally, it is a rejection of the world, and hence, a

rejection of himself as being represented in that world. He resists

being an object of the world. So, where does that leave him? Precisely

with the truth!

His solution was to produce a self-enclosed circuit of autistic

jouissance. He is ‘nothing.’ Yet, when he says he is nothing, it is not

as ‘lack,’ as something missing. He is not nothing in the sense of

emptiness, as he puts it, but rather as a creative nothing. He is this

void of an anarchic jouissance which is overflowing, lawless, and

enigmatic. The ‘nothing’ was an enigma and not an object. It gives us a

reason to presume that there has always been something like a

revolutionary impulse in the anarchist tradition. But these melancholics

do not know how to live without a world. It was why so many melancholics

of history left us too soon. Yet, there have been attempts to form a

social bond, however paradoxical, from the melancholic position. Stirner

spoke of the ‘union of egoists,’ but never gave it any meaning. A

particularly good example comes from Sergey Nechayev, a young companion

of Mikhail Bakunin. Nechayev claimed to have built a very large

revolutionary secret society.

Three is no evidence that he did do that. But his manifesto highlighted

what was at stake. I quote from the Revolutionary Catechism:

The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no

business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name.

Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the

single passion for revolution.

The revolutionary knows that in the very depths of his being, not only

in words but also in deeds, he has broken all the bonds which tie him to

the social order and the civilized world with all its laws, moralities,

and customs, and with all its generally accepted conventions. He is

their implacable enemy, and if he continues to live with them it is only

in order to destroy them more speedily.

And then he proceeded to discuss justifications for the muder of whole

groups of society. But, more importantly, the revolutionary subject, he

insisted, must be prepared to end his own life as a part of the

revolutionary process. The revolution is a pure consequence, even if it

means the loss of space of subjectivity.

Well, I’m not sure I agree with anything that I’ve said today. But what

I really wanted to do was simply to set the stage for another

discussion. Next week I want to focus not on hysteria, necessarily; nor

on melancholy, or the improper ways in which I’ve discussed it today. I

am interested in the world that an anarchist might make use of, or in,

rather, what sort of social bond is at stake for anarchists. It is clear

to me that revolutionaries cannot be without a world. Hence, if the

hysteric’s world was governed by what Lacan called the ‘name of the

father,’ said ‘non-du-pere,’ then the revolutionary anarchist might be

governed by a principle of ‘auto-non-me,’ which is another strange

homophony since it bridges the French and English. Auto-non-me, it is

another way to ‘say no to the subject,’ to make use of the non-du-pere

precisely when it has gone missing. Maybe auto-non-me can help us clear

a path forward for those of us who want to live beyond the consequences

of the revolutionary impulse.

I’ll stop here.

I ask you for this week to write your questions and comments into the

chat for the Facebook group. I will look at them and see what can be

made from them for next week.

Revolutions of the One

I am no more prepared this week than I was last week. However, this time

I find myself oriented by some of our confusions. I also discovered a

title for last week’s lecture, which I quite like: “The Revolutionary

Impulse of Melancholia.” In any case, I want to thank you again for

being here. It is because you are here that I have a position from which

to speak. And that’s not nothing. It’s what I call a world. I didn’t say

that it is the world because that would imply something more definite,

something more predictable. One should really not be without a world,

one should not be without a place from which to speak. Perhaps it also

provides an opportunity for speaking-well. Incidentally, when we speak

about the ethics of psychoanalysis, as we did last week with Antigone,

we should remember that the real statement on psychoanalytic ethics

didn’t come from Lacan’s ethics seminar. I think that it was described

in his later teaching, for example in Television: it concerns a duty to

be well-spoken. And he claimed that depression, melancholy, occurs when

one fails in one’s ethical duty of speaking-well.

I am oriented by the question of melancholy, anarchism, and the social

bond. However I am led toward a discussion, today, of the moronic One,

that is, the One who is without a world; or who has, paradoxically,

become nothing in the world. It is an important point because the

collapse of the world, or rather, the realization of the inexistence of

the world, as is the case for melancholics, can lead one to feel

surrounded by the world. When taken to its extreme, the world shifts

into a different register. It is a movement from the symbolic world of

meaning toward a ‘real’ world, the mystery. It is possible in such

circumstances that the space of the subject becomes eclipsed. You know,

perhaps the beautiful soul retreats from the world, into four walls,

disappearing even in her attempt to produce a space for herself, like

Julian of Norwich. It means, finally, that there are revolutions of the

One. The revolution of the One is not-at-all what was foregrounded

during the modern revolutionary aspirations of anarchists. It’s why I

made a distinction last week between revolutionary impulses and

revolutionary aspirations. The One can be detached from the Other, from

the world. In fact, the direction toward which all revolutionary

aspirations lead, as hysteria shows, is a decoupling of the One and

World.

This was precisely the case with Antigone. I begin my rambling for today

with Antigone. I didn’t say that I will begin against Antigone. In fact,

I am with the revolutionary melancholics, the depressed revolutionaries:

melancholics without a world, unite! However, to be clear, Antigone

wasn’t much of a rambler. She preferred to solicit the ramblings of the

world. I imagine that it could be a soul-crushing position from which to

engage with the world. Perhaps what Antigone died of was ‘soul muder.’

That was the expression used by Schreber, the most cited psychotic in

the Freudian field. It was always a matter of her silence, and prolonged

silence is, I discovered, an essential ingredient in Greek tragedy. I

was just reading about this in some idiotic literature journal:

Antigone’s silence demonstrated a stubborn refusal of speech -- ‘full

speech’ -- in relation to the world. It was a stubborn defiance of the

world’s determinations. Prolonged silence indicates that the subject is

not situated within idiot-ology, and that’s why I call her a moron.

It is also why I would claim that she doesn’t deliver us the ethics of

psychoanalysis. She was a figure of profound silence, but this does not

mean that she didn’t experience the soul-murdering ramblings of the

world. The world always went on rambling without any need of her; in

fact, she solicited the world to speak in her place. Yet, to be fair,

that’s what speaking is, anyway. In this case, though, the signifier

fills in the place of the subject, a void, a place that should have

remained ‘empty.’ You know, for the earlier Lacan, the subject is split

by one signifier for another signifier. This is because, ultimately, the

subject is not entirely there in language except through her

representation by a signifier, which, in of itself, never touches the

real. The signifier never at the real but only at another signifier.

Antigone’s was a different position than the one demonstrated by the

interjections of revolutionary students toward Lacan. Those students

attempted to speak in Lacan’s place. Whereas Antigone preferred that the

world speak in her place, the students preferred to speak in Lacan’s

place.

Polynieces pleaded with Antigone. He requested that Antigone speak with

his father, a father who had gone silent. For her part, Antigone

stubbornly refused to speak to the father. She preferred, in fact, to be

left alone. Yet, at the same time, she provided Polynieces precise

instructions about how to solicit speech in the father, that is, how to

make him speak using an ‘abundance of words.’ That’s her expression:

‘abundance of words.’ I imagine, when there is an ‘abundance of words’

coming at you from the world, that most of you would prefer the world to

just shut up. It wasn’t Antigone’s way. Antigone preferred for the world

to simply go on rambling without her. We can call this Antigone’s

jouissance. It’s not a molotov cocktail tossed onto a burning monk but

it has the same effect. Antigone even preferred that others discuss her

marital prospects. She preferred to have no say in these matters.

What’s more is that she confessed that it would be better for the world

to focus on their own concerns. You will remember that this was also

Stirner’s conviction: ‘what is not supposed to be my concern?’ Stirner,

like Antigone, felt the demands of the world on his shoulders. She

likewise asked, why should these be her concerns? In the end, it is a

similar question. The solution for both was simply to let them concern

themselves with themselves, the world should concern itself with the

world. It is a decoupling of the One from the world. Antigone and

Stirner decoupled themselves from all of that, preferring to have no

part for themselves in the world. The word we have for that process is

foreclosure. It would have been different had the world determined them

without them even realizing it, which presumes that there is a position

of the subject within the totality of his or her signifying relations.

In such circumstances, we could discuss ideas like the ‘sociological

imagination’ or ‘ideological critique.’ This can only occur when one is

inside of the world.

And Antigone had no intention to go inside of the world. She really

preferred at all times to remain on the outside; outside of the walls of

the city, outside of the world. In fact, this position ran in her

family. It is the feminine way, and it is the melancholic way. If I am

being honest with you, I believe that we are now in a feminine world. It

means that the world has shifted into another register, and we have

moved from the ‘All’ to that of the ‘Not-All’ as the governing function.

The contemporary world is no longer one that would give rise to modern

revolutionary aspirations. Rather, we are in a world of revolutionary

impulses that are capable of outliving the subject, threatening the

subject: it is a world of particular affirmations of jouissance. The

problem is not therefore ‘how do we instigate a revolution?,’ ‘how can

we overthrow the world of mastery?,’ but rather: ‘how can we sustain a

space for ourselves in a world without burning ourselves alive?’ It is

why I claim that the psychoanalyst is not exclusively a product of

revolutionary aspirations nor of revolutionary impulses. The revolution

that is at stake in the formation of a psychoanalyst is something

different.

Shortly after concluding our seminar last week I reread an important

passage from a pivotal text by Jacques-Alain Miller, titled “The Turin

Theory of the Subject of the School.” I wasn’t looking for anything in

particular. But a sentence jumped out at me. Maybe it’s better to say

that it floated above the page like a bubble. I don’t have the quotation

with me, but what I remember was that he pointed at Antigone’s ‘act.’ He

reminded us that she was ultimately situated beyond the laws of the

world. And then he claimed that at some point she must have met up with

the object ‘cause’ of her desire, objet petit a. Beyond the world of

mastery, she meets up with the truth, the hysteric’s truth; and, in that

place, she would have found out that she was not-at-all made for the

world. Or, rather, the world was not the place for her. Hence, in this

case, Antigone, the ‘beautiful soul’ of Greek tragedy, who is also often

thought to be the exemplary subject of hysteria, went beyond the bar of

her truth. For Lacan, at one point, he constructed a formula of

hysteria, the ‘hysteric’s discourse:’

There is a barrier between the objet petit a, which is in the position

of unconscious truth, and the agent of her discourse, her own

victimization, s-barred, $. So, for Antigone (it is a really technical

point) the s-barred, $, meets up with the truth, objet petit a. It means

that the truth of the hysteric’s discourse is, in a word: the real,

jouissance. We could write it out like this: $-->a. That makes it look a

bit like the ‘matheme of fantasy,’ which, for Lacan, was {body}lt;>a. This is

precisely what the hysteric would have surpassed in her act: the

fantasy, which is a separation from the real of jouissance. This

traversal of the fundamental fantasy is, for many Lacanians, an

important and revolutionary moment because it involves a transgression

beyond the governing fantasmatic frame that sustains the position of the

hysteric. There was even a time when psychoanalysts believed that this

revolution would lead the hysteric toward the analyst’s position. Some

people still believe that psychoanalyst’s believe this. It is not my

position. A traversal of the fantasy is no guarantee that there is

before you a psychoanalyst. A different revolution is at stake. However,

the point is that the hysteric’s crossing beyond the bar, into the

position of her truth, implies a passage toward objet petit a. This

could mean that it is a passage to the position of the real, that is,

either as waste or as One, which means, as a bubble floating above the

pages of the world.

I’m sorry for all of the technical details today. I’m doing it so that I

can try to clear away some of the noise that keeps me from orienting

myself on this question of the melancholic’s revolutionary impulse (as

opposed to the hysteric’s revolutionary aspirations). However, now, it

seems to me, there is also a third term: the revolution of

psychoanalysis, which is the revolution that makes One a psychoanalyst.

So, I need to turn my attention to the technical concepts that were

tripping us up last week. I realize that we tend to use these concepts

interchangeably. There is even a good reason for it: in Lacan’s late

teaching, many of these concepts were similar, perhaps grouped under the

heading of semblant. Semblant was a concept that meant ‘stand-in’ or

‘substitute object.’ Russell Grigg reminded us a few years ago that

during Lacna’s late teaching the concept of semblant meant almost

anything. For Grigg this was a problem. I’m less convinced that it’s a

problem. I see it as a clearing. What it demonstrates is that the Other,

as such, became much more important, in relation to the One. Semblant,

then, was what would be there as a means of forming a couple with the

Other. Hence, in using the concept, quickly, we deprioritize the

concepts of objet petit a, lack, nothing, and so many other concepts --

even phallus and non-du-pere.

So, it serves a function. It produces a clearing. And every now and then

that’s what we need to do so that these concepts do not get routinized

and reified; so that we can continue to think about the contemporary

condition with fresh attention, which means, with the attitude of a

stupid person. However, this point won’t keep me, today, from wasting a

lot of your time by saying some words about these concepts that tripped

us up. It is my way of addressing the discussion that happened last

week, particularly between Volkan and Mark. The concepts that tripped us

up a bit were lack, hole, nothing, void, and objet petit a. Why don’t we

begin with the most well-known concept: lack. Already I can sense the

relief that some of you feel now that you’ve heard this concept, lack.

It is odd when ‘lack’ is viewed as a comfort, but that’s how it is

sometimes. Some people have presumed that its the central concept in

Lacan’s teaching, even going on to pronounce, as if it were clever,

lack-on. It doesn’t surprise me. For my part, I think that Lacan was

more of a con, or la-con, which, in French, means ‘the cunt.’ In any

case, people feel attuned to this concept, ‘lack,’ even those at the

outermost peripherals of psychoanalytic circles. It’s especially true

for those in the university. There was even a popular article, as well

as an edited collection, that was making it rounds several years ago,

which introduced--no, presupposed--a distinction between what they named

‘philosophies of immanence or abundance,’ to which we might include the

exemplary work of Deleuze, Bataille, Spinoza, and others, and, on the

other hand, ‘philosophies of lack or constitutive lack,’ which includes

Lacan, as alone as he ever was.

It’s a moronic distinction. It’s not clear to me that beginning from

within the philosophical position orients us very well in Lacan’s

teaching. It is also not clear to me that ‘lack’ is a foundational

concept of psychoanalysis for Lacan. If we return to the seminar titled

“The Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis” then we can see what the

four fundamental concepts were: the unconscious, desire, repetition, and

transference. Lack was not one of the fundamental concepts. However,

there is the unconscious, which, from the French, might even be

pronounced une-conscious, the One, unsubscribed from the unconscious.

It’s not all word play, don’t worry. When it comes to matters of the One

there can be no funny business! In any case, this seminar, on the

fundamental concepts, also serves as a reminder that ‘repetition’ and

‘transference’ were conceptually distinct. Transference was not a

particularly revolutionary category for Lacan. Repetition wasn’t meant

to be the key for thinking about the transference. Rather, repetition is

at stake in the drive. It implies a revolution of the One, without

transference.

For some reason I opened up the question of the objet petit a and the

void last week. Maybe it was a mistake. Because now we are in the middle

of some very technical stuff. Maybe it won’t be of interest to those of

you who expect more talk of what you think you know about anarchism. But

I can promise you that it’s relevant to you. Miller made a point to

distinguish between void and nothing, and so did Lacan. Yet Miller

seemed a bit confused by the distinction. He opened the question up to

his audience: ‘what is the difference between void and nothing?’ This is

what he asked them. What he gathered from it was that the void has no

limits. So, void is limitless, and yet the ‘nothing’ is limited by its

place. For ‘nothing,’ the limit is the place within which it is

situated. So, nothing is limited by its place. Hence, the ‘nothing’ was

for Lacan one of the objet petit a, one of the objects, since the objet

petit a, as semblant, is limited by the world. Unless, of course, we

transgress those laws. An example of this ‘nothing’ can be found in

Lacan’s Ecrits. He invites us to suppose ourselves to be looking for a

book at the library. It is in the library catalog, it hasn’t been

checked out, and yet there is nothing in its place on the shelf where we

expect to know it to be. That’s nothing.

The void is something different, since it is not limited by its place.

Suppose for the moment that you expect to find Max Stirner in the world.

Well, you won’t find him there, except as nothing, as missing from that

world. He is not in the library of the world, he is not in the books, he

is not on the pages of the books. That is why we can claim that Stirner

is nothing within the world. Perhaps you expect to find Sergey

Nechayev’s secret society or revolutionary ‘man’ in the world. Both are

absent. So they are not in the place we might expect to know them to be

found. It’s a surprise when that happens. As for the void, it is on the

side of jouissance. It means that it is on the side of the revolutionary

impulse. There is something in the concept of the nothing that

nonetheless connects us to the void. Stirner wrote: “I am not nothing in

the sense of emptiness, which means ‘lack,’ but the creative nothing out

of which I myself as creator create everything [world].” Lacan actually

said something very similar: “the nothing, a hole in the Real, from

which the Signifier, creates the world.” And then Lacan added: “It is

the place of deadly jouissance.” The void is on the side of this deadly

jouissance, this revolutionary impulse. The revolutionary impulses are

linked to the void, then; and, with thanks to ‘nothing,’ a ‘hole’ can be

produced into that deadly jouissance.

This is where the three terms come together. There is a lot of work to

do on these three terms. I won’t be able to do it today. I have a

different agenda. For now, though, we can say that the ‘nothing,’ as an

object, produces a hole in the void of jouissance. The ‘nothing’

produces a ‘hole’ in the real, such that, as semblant, nothing functions

as if it were a non-du-pere. Miller made this very clear for me: “the

name-of-the-father is an instrument, a semblance. It is a signifier as a

semblant that has the advantage of allowing us to find ourselves in

relation to signifiers and signifieds.” So we can say that without the

non-du-pere, there is no hole in the real, and hence, the void becomes

limitless and revolutionary. We can therefore situate the place of

Stirner’s ‘limitless creativity of jouissance,’ the jouissance out of

which he as creator creates a world: it is the revolution of the One,

the revolution of the Ego and Its Own, all alone. It is a bit much for

some of you to follow, but nothing stops us from going a bit further for

today. Miller discussed the void and nothing in relation to hysteria.

His claim was that in hysteria there is ‘a passage from void to

nothing.’ I really like this expression. It highlights the point that

hysteria is also a defense against the real. But Miller did not claim

that the passage from ‘void to nothing’ in hysteria is a transgression

because that would imply that one goes in the opposite direction: from

‘nothing to void,’ that is, from semblant to real. Put another way, it

would imply that one moves beyond the limits of the world of mastery.

It’s a key difference.

Hysteria is a defense against the real. So, it is a solution against the

revolution of the One. The solution never works out well for the

hysteric. This is even how psychoanalysis learned about hysteria in the

clinic: through the solution not working out. We can learn about this

other movement, from ‘nothing to void,’ according to Miller, when

hysteric’s experience what is called ‘depersonalization.’ It is a moment

when she becomes Other to herself, but in an extreme sense. It happens,

then, when she is more-than surprised, that is, when she is shocked! It

is not a comfortable feeling when you are surprised too-much. I would

say that shock is ‘too-much’ surprise. While there are some who can’t

get enough surprises, and so they go in search of them, there are others

who get too many surprises in life. In any case, the movement from

nothing to void is difficult to visualize at the conceptual level. This

is why Lacan favored topology. In his ‘ethics seminar,’ he discussed --

like Heidegger before him -- the simple topology of a vase.

For Lacan, the vase was perhaps the first signifier. It was a signifier

fabricated in such a way as to construct a space missing. Lacan said

that the vase “introduces the possibility of filling it.” It led him to

claim that “it is on the basis of the fabricated signifier, this vase,

that emptiness and fullness as such enter the world.” You can even, if

you like, exchange the words “empty” and “full” for “inside” and

“outside.” The hysteric goes “inside” only to demand that you go

“outside.” That’s what the hysterics demanded of Lacan, after 1968. But

it was also what we heard as demands from those who stormed the American

White House with their confederate flags not so long ago. It serves as a

reminder that those who occupy this position are not only anarchists,

and that revolutionaries are diverse, the revolutionary aspiration

offers no guarantee of the world you might imagine for yourself. Lacan

went on: “if the vase may be filled, it is because in the first place,

in its essence, it is empty. And it is exactly in the same sense that

speech may be full or empty.” It forces a return to what I said at the

beginning, last week, about empty and full speech. You cannot be

surprised enough unless you have a vase, and with it, a world.

Incidentally, the person who writes so well about melancholia, the one

who introduced this expression ‘depressive realism,’ as well as its

theory, long before I began to think about it, namely Julie Reshe,

recently found some flowers outside. To me they looked a bit morbid.

They are nonetheless beautiful, in their way. Especially when they are

placed inside of the nice little vase that she found for them. She

always seems to find a vase for her dark flowers and colorless plants.

Some of these flowers populate the sides of the roads in Ireland. They

are called “speedwells,” I learned. It sounds almost like ‘speak-well.’

I suppose that it’s not that far from it, in fact. However, I prefer my

coffee mug to a vase, because, topologically speaking, a coffee mug has

a hole, whereas a vase, from the standpoint of topology, doesn’t. The

coffee mug has a hole, and you can place your finger through it like a

wedding ring. But the vase does not have a hole. Anyway, look at the

time: I’ll continue forward just a bit more.

What I wanted to say today is simply that when we speak of the One, we

are speaking of that part of jouissance that has not been subjected to

the non-du-pere. This means that it is the part of jouissance which was

not prohibited by the signifier. Furthermore, it means that it is the

part of jouissance that is not-all to the world, and which, because of

that, may also be taken on its own, independent of that world and any of

the laws that might attempt to govern or master it. Hence, to summarize

this long detour that brought me to these final thoughts for today, I

would say the following: revolutionary aspirations have to do with the

world of mastery, and the attempt to transgress beyond those laws. It is

a world of jouissance that has been negativized by the signifier, so

that the subject can emerge along the differential network of signifiers

as s-barred. In such cases, the subject is split: the subject is

represented by a signifier for another signifier. Okay, but

revolutionary impulses have to do with what subsists, without

negatization by any non-du-pere, that is, what repeats, as a bubble, as

One, of jouissance.

Finally, we can say that we are ultimately interested in the One and

World. If we are to advance any further as post-anarchists then we

should concern ourselves with the revolutions of the One. The revolution

of the One exists under the thesis of ‘generalized foreclosure.’ We can

say that where the world ceases to exist there is One. This is precisely

how Lacan put it in his seminar “... Or Worse,” whose title could be

read as: “the Master … or Worse.” He said that where the ‘world,’ that

is, the big Other, ceases to exist, there exists, instead, the One. And

there really is a difficult revolution at stake here. I quote Miller:

“[T]he repetition of the One commemorates an unforgettable irruption of

jouissance. The subject finds himself bound to a cycle of repetitions

[...]. This repetition of jouissance takes place outside of meaning, and

we complain about it.”

When we speak of revolutions of the One there is no reason to discuss

lack, because, quite precisely, lack is lacking. There is a question of

semblances, finally. The semblant is auto-non-mous from the real, and it

involves, for the speaking-being, a modality of dupery. In relation to

‘semblant,’ one can be an idiot or a moron. However, I choose stupidity.

I’ll stop.

Singularities, Fraternities, and the Newest Social Movements

I hope that I won’t disappoint you too much today. I know that some of

you have been participating in these seminars because you’ve been

expecting a more explicit (and perhaps pointed) discussion about

anarchism. In fact, I have a plan for today that involves speaking more

directly on the topic. However, I want to first provide you with a broad

overview of some of the discoveries that I’ve made during the last two

sessions. I began the first day by claiming that there is some

melancholia in each one of us. However, ‘some’ is already ‘too-much.’ We

cannot seem to relinquish this ‘too-muchness.’ It led to a further claim

that there is another revolution at stake in melancholia, other than the

one frequently discussed within modern anarchist discourses.

Incidentally, if I have been defending this concept of ‘revolution’ then

it is because, quite precisely, it is a Lacanian concept. Perhaps it is

even one of the fundamental concepts, since it implies a logic of

‘repetition.’ What I discovered was that Lacan’s definition of

‘revolution’ was synonymous at one time with his definition of the

‘real,’ namely ‘that which always returns to its place.’

I was led to think about a revolution that does not have its point of

departure within the world of mastery. When we speak of these sorts of

revolutions we are in essence returning to the Freudian theory of ‘death

drive.’ Moreover, we are broaching it as a logic of ‘repetition’ and

‘fixation,’ the latter being another term for ‘stubbornness.’ Hence,

we’ve spoken of the stubbornness of Antigone and Stirner. It permitted

me to separate ‘revolutionary aspirations’ from ‘revolutionary

impulses.’ Anarchists haven’t spoken very well about ‘revolutionary

impulses’ within anarchism because, frankly, they’ve always been

enigmatic to the anarchists themselves. Put simply, the enigmatic

impulses demonstrate that revolutions can outlive the subject. Moreover,

they show us that it is not necessary, at this level, to raise questions

about ‘representation.’ Although modern anarchists were concerned with

epistemic and political representation, revolutionary impulses open us

up to another problem: there are revolutions which repeat without any

representation.

It was a different point of departure than those of the ‘revolutionary

aspirations,’ which seek to transgress the laws of the world of mastery

and to challenge its modes of epistemic and political representation. We

see it clearly with the hysteric’s discourse: the split-subject stages a

confrontation with the master signifier, the anchoring principle of the

world. Lacan’s claim was that the signifier represents the subject for

another signifier. The agent of the hysteric’s discourse, the split or

barred subject -- I did not say the ‘buried subject,’ because that would

bring us back to melancholia -- is symbolically torn by signifiers. The

impulses do not partake in this logic because the subject is not-at-all

split by a master signifier at that level; so there are no pitfalls of

representation. It’s a worse situation!: the subject is set ablaze by

the cold flame, a black flame, of revolution: jouissance. Lacan said:

“the flame is the real [and it] sets fire to everything. But it’s a cold

flame. There is no limit to the high temperatures one may imagine.” It

reminds me of a point made by Russell Grigg: the real trauma of

jouissance occurs as a consequence of enigmatic status; an enigma

outside of the pitfalls of representation.

There is a shift: from a subject torn at either end by signifiers toward

One which is not torn by signifiers. The One is a bubble, a bubble of

jouissance, not barred by any signifier. Put simply: there is, on the

one hand, a split-subject, and there is, on the other hand, a subject

without splitting. It implies that there are different subjects at stake

in the ‘aspirations’ and in the ‘impulses.’ On the one hand, there is

the subject split by signifiers whose truth might be revealed as being

implicated in the totality of the signifying system, and, on the other

hand, there is the speaking-being taken outside of that totality, what

Lacan named the parletre. The parletre is a being who speaks, yes, but

with its jouissance. She is not torn apart from within by signifiers of

the symbolic, which doesn’t mean that there isn’t a traumatic encounter

with the signifier. The point is that our point of departure changes: we

no longer begin from the victimized or split subject of representation

but rather from the tragically triumphant subject of enjoyment, the

parletre. It is also a movement from suffering to trauma. I make a

distinction then: the split-subject suffers but the parletre is

traumatized.

It is why I have found that a vase is a much more interesting object

than a coffee cup. There is something quite remarkable about the

practice of placing dead flowers into a vase. Maybe every psychoanalyst

should have dead flowers in a vase placed onto the bookshelves or desks

in their consulting rooms to remind them of this point. For every

consulting room, as for every home, a vase. Why? Well, remember that a

vase is not a coffee cup. That really makes a difference. When the

subject is not split then it means that there is no home for that

subject as a speaking-being in the world. It doesn’t mean that it cannot

be without a home, since not being without a home is quite different

from being homeless as well as having a home. Julie reminded us last

week that the unheimlich, variously translated as ‘uncanny’ or

‘unhomely,’ for Freud, but also for Heidegger, is, basically, a

topological device. She said that the vase is like a home. It is

brilliant. It is why I would claim that Julie is a vase to me. In any

case, during this commentary she reminded us that a home has holes. I

find it interesting because today there are more vases than homes in the

world. But from the standpoint of topology a vase does not have any

holes. This is why the vase is closer to the Buenaventura Hotel than a

home; remember that Fredric Jameson described the hotel in his essay on

postmodern ideology. In any case, with the Beneventura Hotel, like the

vase, you do not know if it is possible to enter the space, or leave it.

Where is the inside and where is the outside? Is the distinction

traceable at the level of structure? It is fascinating to me, because,

for example, we are told that postmodern architecture is produced in

such a way that it reflects the world back at itself. On a sunny day, or

even during the evening, you cannot see the hotel because it reflects

the world back at you. Finally, there is only the world, which overtakes

the hotel, such that there is only ‘world.’ I can imagine that the

Buenaventura Hotel disappears into the world like Antigone disappeared

into the world: that is why, ultimately, it is a piece of melancholic

architecture. In any case, if you play with the surface of a vase,

melting down the surfaces while retaining all ‘thru-holes,’ it becomes

reducible to a disc or a sphere. Finally, it becomes a ball: a surface

without a hole, One. It is not like my coffee cup because there is a

little space for your finger on the side and this means that it can be

reduced to a donut or a torus, which has a hole. That is the difference

between a vase and a coffee cup: ‘no-hole’ and ‘hole.’ It is also the

difference between, on the one hand, my childhood home, which has a

front door that can bring you, without any obstructions, right out the

back door, and, on the other hand, the Buenaventura Hotel.

I apologize for the tangent, but I have something else to say about

melancholic architecture. While working in Russia as a professor at the

School of Advanced Studies, University of Tyumen, I remember having

dreams about being trapped inside of the campus building. I’m not sure

that it was a dream. In fact, it was a nightmare, which means,

precisely, that I wasn’t dreaming. Most of the people who worked there

felt the same way. We would talk privately about how we would each wake

up in the middle of the night and check our emails and text messages to

be sure that we didn’t miss a request from the institution. So, it was a

nightmare. The building was designed in such a way that you never really

feel outside of it, and yet, upon entering it, you feel endlessly

reflected back outside: you are not wanted by this building or by this

school. We couldn’t leave the fucking place, even though it took a

grueling few weeks of proving oneself in initiations, “project design

sessions,” as they called them, which are really just hazing rituals,

just to get ‘inside,’ to get hired. Even when we left, tried to go

outside, due to the war, fleeing Russia because of the war, the building

and some of its people followed us around like a bad nightmare: taunting

us, provoking my family on social media, and so on. Well, I learned that

the building design was inspired by another one, from Moscow City, a

part of the infamous Skokovo campus, named ‘the hypercube.’ Perhaps it

was designed by the same architect. Anyway, if you are Canadian then you

no doubt recognize this word ‘hypercube’ because it was also the name of

a popular horror film franchise.

The film is about the horror of getting outside of the cube once you are

found mysteriously inside of it. You can’t seem to find a way out. The

students at the aforementioned university have even given wonderful

presentations showcasing the similarities between the ‘hypercube’ of the

film and the actual world of the School of Advanced Studies, University

of Tyumen. What fascinated me was that one could only ever find a way

outside of the hypercube, in the film, through mathematics, through

formulae, and so on. It is a way to break through the verbosity of

knowledge in order to arrive at a hard kernel, what Lacan called the

‘letter.’ It is a point of convergence between the real and the

symbolic; a pact, something like a quilting point against the terror of

not having an ‘inside’ or an ‘outside.’ It is a point that we can

explore another time. For now, the point is simply that when there is no

hole you experience the world as if it were a vase rather than a torus.

Finally, when you live in that sort of nightmare you might have a vase

but that doesn’t mean that you have a home.

As I see it, one of the fundamental problems in the West began several

decades ago, roughly corresponding with a transitional moment in its

social history, has been radical homelessness. There is even a dimension

of radical homelessness at play in Freud’s essay on the unheimlich. It

seems to me that the ‘double’ appears there often as something in the

real that was foreclosed in the symbolic. Hence, the dolls whose eyes

feel threatening to children, the sandman delusions, and so on, occur

when the signifier does not castrate, but the real does. In any case,

there are more than enough vases in the world today. I am reminded,

suddenly, that you can find some vases inside of the Kabbah in Mecca,

God’s home, giving the impression that the congregations there, the

umma, are circumambulating not around the home but rather around the

vases. The vases are nested inside of the Kabbah, and the revolutions

there keep you spinning, returning to the same place. In any case, a

nightmare is a disc, or a navel of the dream-house, and it goes on and

on. You wake up only to find yourself repeating the nightmare again.

I would say that it is only by permitting yourself to be a dupe, by

believing in the semblant, or in what Stirner named a ‘spook,’ that you

are capable of producing a hole in jouissance. Otherwise the hole turns

on the symbolic such that a hole occurs on the very space that would

have housed the signifier, in which case one wouldn’t have a home with

holes but a hole in the place of a home. So, it is a vase without a

home. The revolutions of the One, which involve repetitions not-at-all

in the world, are revolutions that occur without a home. So the key

question is this: how can one speak when there is a housing crisis?

Anarchists might propose that you squat the homes of oligarchs and

masters but it will not solve the problem. You only move into the space

of mastery, demonstrating, for the time being, that you can pretend to

be the king of the castle. I begin from a different perspective, with

the presumption that we all have some homelessness within ourselves. And

even some homelessness is ‘too-much.’ Therefore, even a king who

believes that he has a castle is homeless.

I said something last week that made some of you uncomfortable. I’m not

necessarily concerned. You know, I can’t exactly be ‘canceled’ because

Russia already canceled me. I take this very clever point from Julie who

said in a recent interview that Russia has been trying to ‘cancel’

Ukraine. However, I’ve already been ‘canceled.’ It is why I am giving

this lecture to you from a bedroom that is not my own. I am in a period

of homelessness. Yet, for all that I would claim that I am not without a

home. I do have access to this bedroom, and access to this home, which

provides me with certain luxuries, despite the circumstances. Anyway,

the uncomfortable claim that I made was that we moved from the

‘all-world’ to the ‘not-all world,’ which are two different governing

principles. Finally, it is a shift into a feminine world. It’s not

exactly good news. It means, for example, that our social movements have

become like bubbles disjointed from the world. This is why it is

necessary to speak of anarchist social movements.

Lacan had a name for these ‘newest social movements:’ ‘fraternities.’ A

few weeks ago I gave a lecture to a different audience where I tried to

convince some people that Althusser’s logic of ideological

interpellation was actually a way of ‘fraternizing’ with police

officers, rather than subjection to a symbolic master, splitting the

subject. It helped me to explain Althusser’s melancholia. In any case,

Lacan was, in fact, a bit of a sociologist, perhaps more sociological

than sociologists themselves, and he was even a scholar of the newest

social movements. What he named ‘fraternities’ were a group orientation.

Psychoanalysts have always been suspicious of groups, but that doesn’t

mean that we are incapable of working alongside one another -- even if

it proves difficult. After all, the group is also a subject.

Psychoanalysts have a different orientation to the group, a position

closer to Max Stirner’s ‘union of egoists’ but not reducible to it. It

is close also to the anarchist logic of the ‘affinity group.’ Except

Lacan called his ‘affinity group’ a ‘cartel.’ However, there are key

differences between an ‘affinity group’ and a ‘cartel.’

The ‘cartel’ does not pretend to eradicate the place of power. Rather,

it effects a separation of knowledge and power. We can see this clearly

in the function of the ‘plus one’ in the psychoanalytic cartel. The

‘plus one’ is not a place of representation. Quite the opposite. The

‘plus one’ of the psychoanalytic ‘cartel’ is a place of

‘hystericization,’ a place that functions to disrupt the group effects

that lead us toward either ‘hierarchy’ or else ‘fraternity.’ This is how

I read the cartel as a group. The cartel, which is an ‘organ’ of the

psychoanalytic School,’ was capable of producing what anarchists have

never been capable of producing: a group that is anti-authoritarian,

anti-representation, but also anti-fraternity, and yet, for all that,

without killing the world or the space that would house the loneliness

of the subject. The cartel is an answer to the question: ‘how can we

live with the consequences of the revolutionary impulses’ without in the

process producing a device that would bury the subject in his or her own

revolutionary impulses. In any case, there is more to say about these

‘newest social movements,’ which are not at all the stuff of

psychoanalytic ‘groups.’

I have named these newest social movements, these fraternities,

‘singularities.’ We can trace a history of the emergence of

singularities in the Western world. Many have done so, in each their own

way and with each their own assessment of the consequences. Most have

claimed that the transition began in the last part of the 1960s or in

the early 1970s. Slavoj Zizek took his bearings from Lacan and described

the transition as a being characterized by a ‘decline of symbolic

efficiency.’ It means that the function of the name-of-the-father, as

master signifier, weakened, no longer being the lynchpin of Western

social bonds. There have been an assortment of names to describe this

new logic: ‘post-patriarchal,’ ‘neoliberal,’ ‘postmodern, ‘postmodern

capitalism,’ ‘liquid modernity,’ ‘risk society,’ ‘the society of the

spectacle,’ ‘prosumer capitalism,’ and so on. Each position constructs a

narrative for itself concerning the mortification of the master

signifier as the lynchpin of the social bond. In other words, these

narratives concern the mortification of the place of power, which is the

signifier. The traditional way of thinking about this was to claim that

a master signifier would have prohibited jouissance, which means that it

would have negated jouissance. Admittedly, Lacanians discovered that

there was always this bit of surplus jouissance, this residue of

positive jouissance that could not be negated.

Finally, not-all of it would have been negated. We can say that

jouissance is therefore the source of a certain toxic positivity. There

is a positivity to jouissance because at its root it refuses to be

relinquished, negated. The subject, by accepting the prohibition of

jouissance, would have emerged split from within the totality of its

social relations, split from its cause. For example, the subject would

have been split off from other workers, other women, and so on. This was

even the foundation upon which much of the earlier Marxist criticism

aimed, particularly before the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.

The subject was thought to be split from the totality of its symbolic

relationships. In a word, the subject was represented by one-signifier

for another signifier, and this was the price of admission into the

Western social order. Freud named ‘neurosis’ that condition resulting

from not accepting the prior mortification of jouissance. Neurosis is

the inability to live with the consequences of the part that was

not-at-all made for civilization.

Neurotics suffered because they cannot live with the consequences of

having paid the price, so they went to psychoanalysts to find reprieve

from their symptoms. However, singularities have not paid the price from

the beginning and therefore have no need of psychoanalysts. They are not

in search of any surprises because they already have too-much. But it

doesn’t stop singularities from forming groups, fraternizing with one

another. What some anarchists have referred to as the ‘newest social

movements’ are precisely these singularities: bubbles without

castration.

The revolutionary aspirations of modern anarchism have led to a

proliferation of relatively autonomous social movements whose

confrontation with the master became postponed, or, at the extreme,

abandoned. Raymond Williams would have described it as a ‘long

revolution.’ But all revolutions are ‘long’ when you begin from the

position of the slave’s aspirations. The slave postpones a confrontation

with the master out of fear of death, about which he is certain. This is

what begins the long revolution from the standpoint of the slave’s

revolutionary aspirations. Autonomous social movements demonstrate a

problem that exists beyond political representation and the long

revolution: jouissance. The key problem of these singularities is not

‘how can we live without a master’ but rather ‘how can we live within

the mystery?’ And in his ethics seminar, Lacan reminded us that ‘the

thing,’ the ‘cause,’ is the real secret. When you make the thing your

cause, when you make the cause your own, you become the secret, the

enigma, the mystery. But how to live with this unbearable mystery of

jouissance?

A Canadian anarchist professor named Richard J. F. Day wrote an

incredible book titled Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest

Social Movements. It was an important book for me before I discovered

clinical psychoanalysis. I left my hometown and traveled to the other

side of Canada to study with him. His work showcases attempts to live

beyond revolutionary aspirations. What he named ‘the logic of hegemony’

is in our language the world of the ‘all.’ For him, it is a logic whose

political tendencies are oriented by either ‘reform’ or ‘revolution.’

These twin tendencies are traps because they remain within a totalizing

principle, the ‘all.’ It is clear to me that the book discovered a

secret: how to locate the spaces of the ‘not-all.’ However, it did not

offer a way to sustain that space. I can imagine these as melancholic

communities, spaces of suicidal ideation. His claim, put simply, was

that anarchists discovered an alternative political logic not-at-all

trapped within the logic of hegemony. What was his logic? It was a logic

beyond the determinations of the world of mastery.

It is a logic of ‘autonomy’ or ‘singularity.’ Those are the words he

used. His idea was that the future world could be experienced today,

here and now. It was also the position of some of the more peripheral

anarchists, including Gustav Landeaur and Hakim Bey. It is a call to

experience the future today and to ‘render redundant,’ as he put it, the

world of mastery. I never quite understood what it meant to ‘render

redundant’ the world … until I saw the Beneventura Hotel. It is as if

the world of mastery would defeat itself if only you allowed it to go on

living without you, to go on rambling without you. It is an uncoupling

of oneself from the world, the displacement of the subject from the

world into the autonomous zones of the ones-all-all. These singular

communities are described as ‘the coming communities,’ a phrase borrowed

from Giorgio Agamben. How are these ones-all-alone organized? He used

the anarchist and autonomous Marxist language of ‘affinity,’ ‘network,’

and ‘voluntary association.’

This latter phrase -- ‘voluntary association’ -- has been very important

for some anarchists, particularly those in the United States of America,

but also those in the United Kingdom. It was also an important concept

for Benjamin Tucker, Emma Goldman, and who knows how many of the earlier

classical anarchists. They insisted upon principles of voluntary

associations, voluntary social bonds formed of one’s own free

motivation. It is different from the alienation described by Marx: where

one is forced into social bonds at the workplace not of one’s own

choosing. It seems to presume, then, a social bond entirely independent

of the world of mastery. So: either it is a goal to be achieved and

hence an aspiration or else we must presume that it is to be achieved

here and now, spontaneously. This raises some problems. If we cannot

have a voluntary association until we are prepared for it, that is,

until we are capable of forming fair and equal bonds with one another

without various strata of mastery or ideology, then it is a

revolutionary aspiration. But if you think you can begin in the here and

now then you must presume that there are no systems of mastery already

in place for those subjects.

Take, for example, the related psychoanalytic concept of ‘free

association,’ one of the golden rules of traditional psychoanalysis. You

are told by your psychoanalyst to speak freely in your analytic work

with your psychoanalyst. But then, after months or decades you begin to

recognize that you had certain unconscious presuppositions that had been

motivating all of your speech, and that hadn’t yet been interrogated.

So, you move into ‘full speech,’ as Lacan once called it. In the final

instance, it is an aspiration, it is based upon free association which,

like free speech, is governed by the contours of your linguistic world.

It is why I maintain that revolutionary impulses are neither reducible

to aspirations toward the future nor are they merely in the ‘here and

now.’ Rather, they come to us from the future. Melancholia is a view

from the future. I gave a lecture on this a few weeks ago so I won’t

repeat all of my reasoning today. However, I will add that revolutionary

aspirations are a view toward an impossible future. In any case, I

return to my thread. Autonomous organizations are meant to exist outside

of the logic of totality, outside of the ‘all,’ and hence, as a view

from the future. Anarchists pride themselves often on suggesting that

they have at least one foot in the future. They prefigure the future

they would like to see, here and now.

What is also surprising to me is that Richard J. F. Day described his

autonomous logic as being a ‘revolutionary impulse.’ It is just a

coincidence, but a convenient one. I'll share a quote from his book:

“[t]he radical impulse of post-1968 French theory [was] the impulse to

create alternatives to the state and corporate forms rather than just

work within them.” Once again, it is not a call to go outside but rather

a call from the outside. It is for this reason that I claim that

autonomy is the work of radical homelessness. How can the autonomous

movement grow in influence if not without finding a means to not be

without a world, that is, to write a book or enter a lecture hall to

remind everybody that they must go outside. It is only during moments of

particular lucidity that these ‘alternatives’ presume themselves to be

independent of the world of mastery. The problem is that the

contemporary world is also increasingly independent of the world of

mastery, which doesn’t mean that this world is inhabitable.

It also doesn’t mean that fascism and tyranny do not exist, or that we

do not have in our midst dangerous new forms of radical authoritarianism

across all corners of the globe. It just means that they function

according to a different, more singular, and hence more cunning, logic.

Perhaps, to provoke you, I will claim that the logic of ‘autonomy’ has

become the dominant principle of our world. Lacan warned us about this

when he spoke about the rise of ‘fraternities,’ which are societies of

‘brothers’ and ‘comrades.’ They come after the weakening of the paternal

metaphor, the weakening of the organizational capacity of the

‘name-of-the-father.’ This rise of the logic of autonomy, voluntary

association, characteristic of the newest social movements can be quite

accurately described as being predicated upon a more primordial logic of

‘segregation.’ I remember it quite clearly, when I was at Queen’s

University organizing with the revolutionary anarchist students. These

were fraternal activities. The principle of ‘voluntary association’ was

taken very seriously by most of them, and used, precisely, as a means of

‘segregation.’

I even remember pointing out to them that it seemed to be an easy way to

justify segregation from ‘people of color.’ I was quite moronic at the

time. So I said: ‘what stops you from voluntarily associating only with

men, implicitly excluding women?’ You could say, simply: ‘voluntary

association, it is freedom! I’m not excluding anybody, I’m just freely

choosing who to include.’ Of course, racism has a very particular

meaning, but for Lacan it took on a characteristic logic of our time. We

can call it ‘Lacanian racism,’ or, as Eric Laurent put it: ‘racism 2.0.’

It is not ‘reverse racism’ but rather a logic of ‘segregation’ that

inevitably occurs among singularities. When they spit out antagonisms,

ruptures, fissures, constitutive lack, and so on, so that nothing is

lacking from within the group, there is a segregation from the world.

The singularity segregates itself from the world, and from other

singularities whose jouissance is insulting or traumatizing to them.

When castration is not accepted, when foreclosure is generalized, the

split which would have made internal relations difficult and produced

aspirations of overcoming them, gets rejected. It returns with a

vengeance from without, outside of the singularity, from the real.

Suddenly, because castration shifts into the real, one experiences the

world as a truly threatening place. The signifier no longer represents

the group but rather triggers the group.

This was Lacan’s early definition of foreclosure, taken from his third

seminar: what gets rejected from the symbolic, namely castration,

returns in the real. It came from Freud’s discussion of psychosis: what

is rejected returns from without. What is outside of the singularity

becomes quite precisely a potential source of trauma or insult for

everything inside the singularity. This is what the principle of

fraternity entials (I will quote Lacan):

Fraternity is founded on segregation. No fraternity is conceivable, has

even the slightest foundation [...] except through the fact that people

are isolated together, isolated from the rest [...].

We could have said: ‘... isolated from the world.’ This quotation comes

from the later teaching of Lacan, but, already in the third seminar

there was an interest in the concept of fraternity among the psychotic

figure of Schreber, whose earliest manifestation of psychosis was

perhaps melancholic. Lacan focused on Schreber’s ‘soul murder,’ citing a

‘soul fragment,’ which might have later been referred to as a semblant,

or, why not, a ‘spook.’ The semblant was established by Schreber by way

of a fraternity named “The brother’s of Cassiopeia.” I will quote a long

passage from Lacan’s third seminar:

A soul fragment thus ties itself on somewhere. Cassiopeia, the brothers

of Cassiopeia, play a major role here. [...] It is the name of a student

confederation from the time of Schreber’s studies. An attachment to such

a fraternity, whose narcissitic, even homosexual, character is brought

out in the analysis, is moreover a characteristic mark of Schreber’s

imaginary antecedents. It is suggestive to see how this network, which

is symbolic by nature and maintains the image in a degree of stability

in interhuman relationships, is necessary so that everything doesn’t

suddenly reduce to nothing, so that the entire veil of the imaginary

relation does not suddenly draw back and disappear in the yawning

blackness that Scrhreber was not so very far away from at the outside.

It goes to show you that the future teachings of Lacan have their way of

producing effects precisely in his past teaching.

Let me be straightforward: we used to doubt our knowledge. Consequently,

we supposed that there were ‘experts’ out there (e.g., doctors, police

officers, judges, presidents, professors, psychoanalysts). Today there

is a general incredulity toward meta-narratives. That is how Lyotard put

it. It means that there is an intense suspicion of the world of mastery

and of the knowledge generated by constituents of that world.

Singularities do not overthrow that world but rather find themselves

uncoupled from it. This produces the paradoxical result of an ever more

cruel, disgusting, and insulting world. The problem shifts into another

suggest today; rather, we have displaced the ‘symbolic patriarchy’ into

a ‘real patriarchy.’ This is worse! We got out of patriarchy only to

experience it in a much more devastating way. Moreover, we have not

actually conquered our doubts, we have merely replaced them with

certainties and discovered that it is the world that doubts us.

It is a fundamental change. Today, more than ever, the voices that are

foregrounded in political and social commentary begin with

presuppositions regarding their singular group. It belies a fear of

falling into the depths of uncertainty, of losing the space within which

we are capable of speaking. The problem is that the world doubts our

presuppositions, our certainty. Hence, the world becomes threatening to

the integrity of the singularity. So, we attempt to defend, at all

costs, the certainty of a semblant that sustains our fraternal group and

that threatens to take away the space of our speech, leaving us,

essentially, destitute, homeless. Hence the stubbornness of today’s

newest social movements testifies more generally to the cancellation of

the dwelling space of language and speech. It leads us to a problem: the

newest social movements, by practicing tactical political philosophy,

cannot seem to escape the pitfalls of the revolution of the One. This

expression ‘tactical political philosophy’ comes out of the

post-anarchist political philosophy of Todd May. I should bring our

discussion to a close today by speaking a bit about his political

framework.

Todd May is against psychoanalysis, as well as the Lacanian tradition.

He sees it as being too focused on the individual rather than the

collective, which amounts to, I would say, the fraternity. The problem

is quite the opposite: the fraternity leaves no space for the subject.

It is the fraternity which is in-dividual, without division. In any

case, May famously distinguished between three types of political

philosophies: ‘formal,’ ‘strategic,’ and, his brand, ‘tactical.’ In a

word, according to him, formal political philosophy cleaves stubborning

either to what is or else to what should be. It is a stubborn position

because it refuses the tension between what is and what should be, and

therefore refuses work in the tension of is or ought. For example: you

can focus on preserving the political order as it currently is without

concerning oneself at all with what ought to be. Or, perhaps you could

go the other way: focus on the political order that ought to exist

without recognizing that you must, nonetheless, relate oneself to the

world as it actually is. This is how Todd May plots formal politics, in

a nutshell.

Strategic political philosophy was thought to be an advancement because

there is a concern with the tension between the is and the ought. The

problem is that it remains tethered to what he names a ‘unitary analysis

of power.’ In other words, there is a concern with what Saul Newman,

whose work to which I am much more closely aligned, refers to as ‘the

place of power.’ It is a central idea in modern revolutionary political

philosophy that there is a ‘place of power,’ and that the abolition of

this ‘unitary’ place, produces an effect of liberation. The revolution

is therefore against the place of power. Hence, overcoming the ‘place of

power’ implies that one can live in the great totality of signifying

relations: workers join hands with workers, and so on. So, strategic

political philosophy has a central agenda around which all political

aspirations lead: it is the ‘unit’ or the ‘object,’ or what we would

call a master signifier, or signifier-One. The problem is manifold:

first, it is clear that the anarchists complicated the Marxist

conception of power. It is a point that Saul Newman once made very

clearly: if it were only about removing the place of power then we must

have presumed something about the ‘real’ that is hiding outside of

power. In other words, we must rely upon presuppositions, certainties,

that the real subject is basically good, social, creative, and so on.

The anarchist challenge to Marxism was at a very early time to suggest

that there are multiple ‘registers of power.’ This was how Todd May put

it: multiple nodes or registers of power. It means that there is not a

‘unitary analysis,’ since that would imply a centralization of the power

within the master. Anarchists demonstrated very early that power is not

centralized in one location or object (e.g., the state, or the economy).

There is also patriarchy, racism, the ideological manipulation of the

church, and so on. Finally, we recognize that there are multiple

registers of power. At this point we are led toward what Todd May called

‘tactical political philosophy,’ which is informed by post-structuralism

and anarchism. It is a politics oriented by the multiplicitous registers

of power rather than one particular location of power. What is

interesting to me is that it means that there can always be one more

place of power. This is what Todd May’s challenge leads us to consider.

It means that no matter how many places of power are registered … there

can always be one more. There is always another possible site of capture

for the subject. We can call this the ‘plus one,’ if you like: it is the

infinity of registers of power that tactical political philosophy

demonstrates.

Finally, we confront what is beyond the places of power: the real. It

can be discussed in many ways. Perhaps we could say -- some people

thought they were clever in their critique of Foucault by saying this --

‘if power is everywhere, then power is nowhere and nothing.’ But that

was, precisely, Stirner’s point: the ‘nothing’ is the only ‘semblant’

that can still hold it all together, a last defense against the ‘real.’

An overlooked point with Todd May’s analysis is that he believes that

the proliferation of networks of power, the constant reinvention of

power in different nodal points, conglomerations of power, implies that

there is an infinitely constituted space of resistance and revolution.

The revolution becomes infinite, or, as Simon Critchley once put it, one

of the subject’s ‘infinite demands to power.’ In other words, we end up

precisely in the surprising place of the ‘plus one:’ power is never

where ‘we expect to know it’ to be. In this conception, power is a

surprise package. And from the future possibilities of power, there is

an endless resistance, an endless revolution. Put another way, power

continuously changes, domineering within certain registers, and then

receding, inventing new unforeseen registers, and so on. Saul Newman

recognized this, briefly, when he said that there is a ‘shopping list’

of oppressions which anarchists are supposed to pay homage to - and

there is always a new one we didn’t see coming.

Revolution therefore becomes transformed into the repetition of an

encounter with mastery, without end: it becomes the revolution of the

One.

At this point I think it is fruitful to adopt a topological approach.

The strategic approach is akin to hysterical revolutions. Yet, the

post-structuralist anarchist approach, it seems to me, surprises us by

discovering the space of singularity and the revolutions of the One. It

is an approach of singularity because there is no single master. Rather,

there exists a series, a repetition, of encounters with the master, that

is, with the signifier: each one is traumatic and triggering. Todd May

wrote:

[F]or tactical political philosophy, there is no center within which

power is to be located. Otherwise put, power, and consequently politics,

are irreducible. There are many different sites from which it arises,

and there is an interplay among these various sites in the creation of

the social world.

It is clear that the movement away from the ‘unitary analysis’ (which is

an analysis of a confrontation with the master signifier, that is, the

name-of-the-father) transforms into a tactical confrontation without a

name-of-the-father, that is, without the master signifier. At this

point, one confronts the world as such, never knowing when or where

power might next launch its attack. This is why I caution against the

approach which begins from a celebration of the newest social movements,

as well as the approaches that have hitherto been classified as formal,

strategic, and/or tactical political philosophy. It seems to me that we

need to invent another position.

This is what psychoanalytic anarchism opens us up into: if

post-anarchism is to continue to be relevant today then it should be

taken as a moment of surprise for anarchism and not as a

post-structuralist position. It must find itself surprised by what

anarchism has become, by what we’ve been saying and doing within our

social movements. Finally, it should be prepared to invent an anarchism

that is not without a world. It is this point that I hope to develop and

conclude with, in a more concise way, next week. I hope that you will

all join me for that final session.

Three Plus One: The Lawless Real

[Mark Gerard Murphy introduces Duane]

Thank you Mark, for your spark.

I want to begin with a joke. It was told to me by a friend named

Zuleykha, and I’ll repeat it here in my own way. A man goes to the

grocery store and asks the clerk for 1000 eggs. It is a small shop, so

the clerk informed the customer that he only had a few dozen eggs in

stock. The customer seemed disappointed, and left the store. But he

returned the next day and asked again: ‘do you have 1000 eggs?’ The

clerk, even more surprised, gave the same response: ‘I’m sorry, we only

have a few dozen eggs in stock.’ This continued day after day for months

until, finally, the clerk realized that he was missing out on an

important business opportunity. He collects together 1000 eggs to sell

to the man. The man returns to the shop the next morning and asks, ‘do

you have 1000 eggs?’ The clerk responds: ‘yes, as a matter of fact, we

do have 1000 eggs.’ The customer smiles and says: ‘Okay, will you sell

me one of them?’

It is clear that the customer would have kept returning, day after day.

There was a repetition at stake in the joke. Yet, precisely when the

clerk thought he found a way to benefit from the repetition, to put an

end to it, he discovered that there was behind all of that a

stubbornness to continue.

I cannot promise that today’s lecture will be altogether easy to follow.

I’ll be developing and perhaps even summarizing thoughts that were

introduced in prior lectures. If you feel a bit lost then you might at

some point return to watch those lectures, which are available on

YouTube. Today I am offering a final lecture for this series on

“post-anarchism and psychoanalysis.” That makes this lecture a

particularly serious one. Anyway, that’s precisely what I provided, a

lecture series. And today I will attempt to circumscribe what it was

within this lecture series that was most serious. The first seminar was

framed by a discussion of ‘revolutionary melancholia,’ and it led me to

introduce a distinction between ‘revolutionary aspirations’ and

‘revolutionary impulses.’ Post-anarchists have written already about the

former, the aspirations. For example, there was an excellent essay by

Saul Newman that you might go and read on The Anarchist Library titled

“Interrogating the Master.” These aspirations operate along the pathways

of desire, and they are exemplified by those hysterics who interrogated

Jacques Lacan during the French uprisings of the late 1960s. You already

know his response: “... as revolutionaries, what you aspire to is a

master. You will get it.”

Okay, I don’t think it was a threat. He wasn’t threatening them. It was

a prophecy. In fact, I do believe that prophets ‘exist’ (which is to say

nothing about their ‘being,’ but that is a discussion for another

lecture). Perhaps it is one that Mark and I might have one day: ‘what is

a prophecy?’ In any case, what those revolutionaries demonstrated was

that their desires were supported by the world. In his way, Lacan

proposed that they remained fundamentally committed to the world, which

was, truth be told, a world of mastery. So much for the revolutionary

aspirations, there are also revolutionary impulses, which operate along

the circuit of the drive. It is a movement from ‘desire’ toward what

Freud called the ‘drive.’ These impulses operate outside of the symbolic

and imaginary coordinates of the world, and this is why we can claim

that they are lawless. Lawlessness occurs when there is a more

fundamental resistance to the world, when, in the final instance, one

resists incorporation into the world. Incidentally, for a very long time

there have been critical debates, mostly originating within Lacanian

circles, about the proper translation of Freud’s various words:

‘drives,’ ‘instincts,’ ‘impulses.’ The thought occurred to them that the

standard translation conflated these concepts, and so it is important to

effect a separation of concepts. I don’t see why we can’t maintain the

conflation, since impulses have a non-discursive, almost biological,

locus.

In any case, I stumbled upon a point that really fascinated me. I even

wondered why nobody else noticed it. Why hasn’t Daniel Colson, when he

was researching for his paper on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Jacques

Lacan, noticed the homology within Lacan’s teaching on the concept of

‘revolution’ and ‘real.’ It is a point within Lacan’s teaching: he

provided the same definition for both concepts. It’s remarkable. It

means that Lacan was in fact a bit of a revolutionary, since he

committed to the concept of the ‘real’ and to the ‘revolution’ that

would not return the subject back into the world of mastery. What was at

stake in each concept? In both cases, we are told to take the rotations

of the heavenly bodies as our example, as in, for example, early

science: a ‘real’ which revolves. These heavenly bodies always return to

their place. The ‘real’ and ‘revolution’ are synonymous concepts which

target a logic of ‘returning to its place’ and ‘resisting the symbolic.’

Well, it points toward what Freud named ‘fixation.’ At this point, we

reach something that is quite stubborn.

This fixation at the core of the ‘real’ of ‘revolution’ forces us to be

very serious, stubborn, perhaps even stern. We also find this in a

psychoanalytic session: as the time passes--month after month, year

after year--there are therapeutic effects, but still, in the final

instance, something of our suffering or enjoyment, our ‘jouissance,’

remains, persists. It is stubborn, fixed. And the sessions go on like

that, demonstrating that we only ever become more and more stern, …

sterner. For us, it necessitates a theory of repetition and fixation

concerning the revolutionary impulses: what is it that repeats in these

impulses? The stubborn fixation we take as ‘one,’ and it is the ‘one’ of

an enigmatic jouissance. This ‘one’ of enigmatic jouissance, which we

can isolate from the series of repetitions, as Lacan did in his later

teaching, it localizes something of trauma. There is a trauma at the

core of any law, representation, meaning, or image. Perhaps we can be

led to believe that there is even a ‘political’ jouissance that bears

some relation to this stubborn ‘one.’ It was a point under-developed in

the work of Slavoj Zizek, who, in the 1990s, was among the first, though

it was still long after Jacques Lacan and Jacques-Alain Miller, to argue

that enjoyment, or jouissance, is a political factor.

Ultimately, I follow Slavoj in this direction. But I do it in my own

way. He was always fond of saying: ‘we should be willing to go to the

end!’ Slavoj, who always supports my work and who is a friend, should

nonetheless be asked: well, why didn’t you go to the end of your

analysis with Miller? It is a discussion concerning the end of analysis,

and, indeed, the end of the world. If there is a political trauma that

we might isolate in the domain of politics then what those

revolutionaries demonstrated was that their hysteria was a mode of

defense against that trauma. In the end, hysterics prefer to maintain

their relationship to the world, and to the master. The hysteric is not

entirely willing to go to the end! It is perhaps why there are so very

few who have in fact gone to the end of their analysis, and even those

who do, they often return again. The goal of analysis is quite simply to

transform the hysteric into an analyst, that is, into one who does go

beyond the end of analysis. In any case, the anarchist is the one for

whom politics also consists of contingent encounters with what exists

outside of the world of mastery. So, there are really two anarchist

traditions, and they do not necessarily operate in isolation from one

another.

What I want to convince you of today is that it’s not exactly progress

when the anarchist overcomes the world of mastery. The situation can

become much worse: the world itself can become a cruel master, the

master becomes real. It is a movement from a world that was

characterized by internal problems and inconsistencies toward a world

that is fundamentally suffering: a trauma without a world to house it.

So: from suffering to trauma, which is not progress. It’s worse. And it

was why Lacan’s seminar, which occurred during a period of uprisings,

was titled “... Or Worse.” We all know that it was supposed to be called

“the father, or worse.” Yet, the father is missing from the seminar

title, missing from that symbolic place. So you just have to imagine

that the father is there, which is precisely what we seem to be doing.

It was a point that led me to provide a third lecture on the topic of

what precisely is worse today. So, I spoke about ‘singularities.’ That’s

what I call them. And I examined their logic, with particular attention

to the ‘newest social movements.’

I turned to the work of Todd May and Richard J. F. Day to show how

post-anarchist theory succumbed to the temptation to remain complicit

with the contemporary political world: a world of weakening

prohibitions. It’s not a discovery that I’m happy to report. I was

inspired by the work of May and Day, but now it is June and it is Night:

May Day is over. Things have changed in the years that have passed: the

world has gone dark. It is surprising to me. Again, I don’t mind being

surprised. However, it is clear to me that many people don’t like to

feel surprised anymore. I have even claimed that what was so essential

about post-anarchist theory was that it surprised anarchists. We became

surprised by what it was that we have been saying for over 150 years.

Anarchism was also at one time a surprise to the modern world,

especially to the Marxists who they were often provoking. What was most

important about post-anarchist was that it surprised us. It’s a

fundamental point because post-anarchism surprised us by demonstrating

that the modern or classical anarchist tradition was a defense against

our revolution impulses: we preferred to remain within the world of

mastery. Learning that was surprising to us.

Some of our critics described these theories as a joke. It might even

surprise you to learn that I prefer that it be understood as a joke.

Freud showed us where a joke leads: toward the unconscious. Today, of

course, it is very difficult to tell a joke. And it is why we must learn

how to be surprised again. But singularities are too serious for jokes:

there is nothing to laugh about. The joke can only exist in a world

within which one aspires toward liberation. However, we seemed to

witness the comedians move from aspiration toward perspiration, sweating

on stage rather than laughing. When you are outside of the world, jokes

might become insulting to you. I know that it doesn’t make any of this

easier for you to accept but I am not trying to insult any of you: my

feeling is that we are in the worst of times. It is not that we are

approaching some apocalypse-to-come but rather that the apocalypse has

already happened. Maybe I’m holding my lantern today, whispering to you

that the world is already dead, that you have killed it. We have already

lost our world. Consequently, I would say, our social bonds are

increasingly structured according to a logic of segregation.

The newest social movements have demonstrated this point very well. They

are not alone in showing it to us. These are fraternal social bonds,

singularities. When the paternal function weakens, when there is, as

Slavoj Zizek has put it, ‘a decline in symbolic or paternal efficiency,’

we can begin to see the real cunning of the father, of the master. The

pere [father] becomes the peer, or pair. The organizing principle of the

non-dup-pere is replaced by the principle of ‘auto-non-me,’ which

institutes a new lonely mode of traumatic unspeakable suffering. The

fraternal function replaces the paternal function: oppression and

exploitation operate less explicitly and more implicitly, through a

logic of segregation. And Lacan insisted upon the fact that

psychoanalysis is the only counterpoint to the world of mastery,

patriarchy. And why? It is because psychoanalysis disrupts the tendency

toward hierarchy and fraternity.

I risk the claim that our problem today is not at all what some notable

psychologists seem to be lamenting: the end of patriarchy. I don’t care

much about the fact that hierarchies might exist in nature, as Jordan

Peterson has maintained, because it really doesn’t get to what is truly

at stake: patriarchy has become worse. It has shifted from the symbolic

into the real. On the one hand, there are ‘vertical’ social bonds, which

make up the ‘symbolic’ patriarchy; and, on the other hand, there is

something of the father which exists outside of this vertical world: a

real father. It is a father whose presence is felt more severely.

Perhaps we might claim that the father becomes the world, and it is from

this world-father that the subject stages her retreat. Patriarchy can

therefore continue to exist according to the horizontal principle of

fraternity. I don’t see why we can’t claim that class functions

according to a fraternal logic as well. In any case, the fraternity

without a master exists outside of the world. When the symbolic

prohibition against jouissance becomes ineffective, the cut perhaps

comes from the real: not the signifier but the razor blade or the

insult.

Paradoxically, one feels prohibitions even more. The fraternal group

really feels the weight of the world. The internal consistency and

integrity of the group is secured not by prohibitions but also by

segregations: the group segregates together, in isolation from the

world. That’s how Lacan put it: “isolates, together.” It is a lonely

segregation of ‘ones.’ How is it possible, then, that it is when

patriarchy is most under attack that fathers also seem to be felt as

more tyrannical? In any case, this other mode of social organization led

me toward a discussion of the psychoanalytic cartel. I hope you know

this word, cartel. The word emerged, long before Lacan picked it up, in

the context of war. As formulated by Lacan, the cartel was meant to be a

social bond that would not be predicated upon the principles of

prohibition or affirmation: neither hierarchy nor fraternity, neither

exploitation nor segregation. Many people assume that a cartel is simply

a Lacanian reading group, but what it really elaborates, and this is its

politics, is the necessity of a ‘non-hierarchical’ and

‘non-fraternizing’ social bond. I might claim that the cartel is a post-

anarchist mode of social organization. It goes further than the

anarchists themselves were often willing to go: to the end. Lacan began

to formulate the basic coordinates of the ‘cartel’ very early in his

teaching. There was even a great essay by Eric Laurent about this which

was published some twenty years ago, titled “The Real and the Group.”

Lacan’s report, presented in 1947, titled “British Psychiatry and the

War,” examined the formation of small groups of soldiers during the

second world war whose direction was ensured by psychiatrists and

inspired by psychoanalysis. We might imagine that the cartel is roughly

homologous with the anarchist ‘affinity group’ or ‘collective.’ Why not?

Murray Bookchin, who I met many years ago in Vermont, reasoned,

persuasively, that the anarchist affinity group model was transported

into American anarchist practice from idealistic militants fighting

within the Spanish Civil War. There is something about the war--the

trauma that it reveals, and the subsequent dissolution of the social

bond--that necessitates social inventions of these sorts. I’m not

without realizing it myself, having now fled Russia, and finding myself

in small groups such as this one. The war led Freud to conceptualize a

notion of ‘death drive,’ Lacan to develop the basic coordinates of the

‘cartel,’ and, as for the anarchists, the development of an ‘affinity

group’ model. Finally, Stirner, who wrote about the ‘union of egoists,’

as we shall see, thought of this during a moment when the German social

bond began to erode, shortly before the revolutions of the 1840s.

I would like to quote Bookchin on the affinity group:

The term ‘affinity group’ is the English translation of the Spanish grup

de afinidad, which was the name of an organizational form devised [...]

as the basis of the [...] Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI). [...] [It]

could easily be regarded as a new type of extended family, in which

kinship ties are replaced by deeply empathetic human relationships

[...]. Long before the word ‘tribe’ gained popularity in the American

counterculture, the Spanish anarchists called their congresses

‘assemblies of the tribes.’ Each affinity group is deliberately kept

small to allow for the greatest degree of intimacy between those who

compose it. Autonomous, communal, and directly democratic, the group

combines revolution theory with revolutionary lifestyle [and] creates a

free space in which revolutionaries can remake themselves individually,

and also as social beings.

There are clear differences between the affinity group model and the

cartel. Both are small and intimate social groups, arranged according to

some work or cause, and developed, from the beginning, within times of

war. But the affinity group operates in much closer proximity to the

horizontal principle of fraternity: it is auto-non-mous. From the

beginning, it does not propose to eradicate the internal inclinations

toward group identification, nor does it eliminate the principle of

segregation. The cartel functions according to a fundamentally different

point of departure. It retains the ‘place of power.’ I quite like this

expression, which I’ve extracted from Saul Newman’s book From Bakunin to

Lacan: place of power. The cartel retains the place of power, but

empties it of its potency. The place of power remains, but its function

serves a different cause. Rather than affirming the segregation of the

group, the ‘plus one’ functions to produce, as Laurent Dupont has put

it: a certain function of desire, which is a draining of the jouissance

at play in the affirmative impulses. It is why the ‘plus one’ is neither

a master nor a care-taker, but rather an agent provocateur. This is how

Miller has put it. I quote him:

The plus-one must come with question marks [...] and make holes in

heads. This implies that he refuses to be a master who puts to work; to

be the one who knows; to be an analyst in the cartel; and this in order

to be that agent provocateur from where there is a teaching.

You know, Miller was only interested, at this time, in the 1980s, with

the cartel in terms of producing knowledge. That’s not my interest. My

interest is in the invention of the cartel, which is, in times of war,

an invention of a social link. In any case, the ‘plus one’ of a cartel

occupies the supposed ‘place of power’ but serves the cause of

disrupting the hierarchical aspirations and fraternal impulses, thereby

returning each member back into the loneliness of their relation to

their revolutionary cause: it isolates the fixation in the impulses. I

claim that Miller highlighted this later in his teaching of the School,

in 2000.

And it is why Max Stirner’s proposal, which he called the ‘union of

egoists,’ has been an extremely important intervention within the

history of anarchism. You’ll find that even Friedrich Engels and Karl

Marx were surprised by his intervention. I happen to like surprises.

Stirner offered a fundamental challenge not only to the communist

tradition but also to the anarchist tradition. And not everybody likes

surprises, so the anarchists still do not know what to do about Stirner:

they call him an ‘individualist anarchist.’ It’s not a charitable

designation because there is in fact nothing more in-dividual than a

singularity, a fraternity … a social bond or group. It is clear that

Stirner did not offer us a blueprint for the ‘union of egoists.’ It is a

point that commentators on his work never fail to mention. He offered a

concept, but he left it empty. The union of egoists is an empty space

reserved for a social link still possible after the annihilation of the

world.

That’s already quite a bit, though, because it implies that he emptied

the social bond of its fraternal relations, thereby insisting that each

member pursue their own singular cause, unshackled from oppressive

hierarchies and moralistic fraternities. Allan Antliff, a friend of

mine, reminded me not so long ago that Stirner’s ‘union of egoists’ was

supposed to be made up of insurrectionaries or insurgents who ‘no longer

let themselves be arranged by the world.’ It could mean that they

fundamentally refuse the determinations of their world: a refusal of

surprises. It is a foreclosure of the world, a rejection of any

constitution. That makes it quite a bit different from the social order

proposed by Sergei Nacheyev in his “Catechisms of a Revolutionary,”

which established precisely that: a constitution for the union of

egoists, point by point, as a condition of membership into his secret

society. Now, here is the big secret: it has been said that his

fraternity had no members except for himself. It was a fraternity, but a

strange one because its constitution had only one function: to empty out

all of the meaning that makes up a world. The revolutionary is a doomed

man: he has no religion, identity, name, friends, morality, father, …

nothing. Ultimately, he is without a world. His only cause is

‘revolution,’ which means, finally: his revolutionary impulses. His

conviction is certainly a stubborn one.

It is interesting to think about all of this in relation to a passage

that I’ve extracted from Jacques-Alain Miller’s “Turin Theory of the

Subject of the School,” which I will read now:

Lacan returns each one to his loneliness as a subject, to the relation

that each one has with the master-signifier of the Ideal beneath which

he places himself. In the very moment when Lacan institutes a collective

formation, his first words are to dissociate, and bring forward

subjective loneliness.

It was the same with Stirner’s ‘union of egoists,’ because the aim was

to dissociate from fixed ideas, from what Stirner called ‘spooks,’

which, for him, structured the entire world. Hence, Stirner’s first

suggestion, when instituting a social link, was to dissociate. It was

therefore a principle of dissolution.

Okay, I’ve lost my thread.

You know, it has been a month or two since this lecture series ended,

and here we are again. As Lacan put it: encore! You should think of

today’s lecture as an encore! It would seem that I’ve only reestablished

the series, returned to the same place, perpetuating the repetition. But

I am not offering you four lectures. I’m offering three, … plus one. I

thereby isolate this final lecture from the series, and I take it all by

itself, alone. This stubborn one should therefore receive more serious

attention. As you know, Stirner was also a very serious thinker, which

is why, perhaps, he was given the nickname “Stirner.” Okay: I’ve asked

my friend, Roman Aslamov, to speak for 2-3 minutes about Stirner. I’ve

asked him for an important reason which he will not perhaps realize

today. But, anyway, hopefully he can quickly, in 2-3 minutes, tell us

what he believes to be Stirner’s significance, and, moreover, what we

should know about Stirner’s reading of the young Hegelian Ludwig

Feuerbach. After he speaks, for 2 minutes, we will return to our thread

and try to bring the lecture to a conclusion.

[Roman Speaks]

Ah! Perhaps Stirner discovered something that we’ve been overlooking,

namely a repetition that was occurring within the history of ideas. It

is a question -- one perhaps we could pursue another day -- of the

difference between dialectics and repetition. In any case, a repetition,

and he underlined it in the dialectical philosophy of the Left Hegelian

Ludwig Feuerbach. Within Ludwig Feuerbach’s dialectical work there was

nonetheless a repetition. Stirner was very clear about it when he wrote:

What [Feuerbach] took from God has been superadded to Man, and the power

of humanity grew greater in proportion to the degree of piety that was

lost: ‘Man’ is the God of today, and fear of Man has taken the place of

the old fear of God.

It was perhaps by underlining this repetition that was at stake in the

dialectic that he was able to move from repetition to fixation. Stirner

isolated something outside of the ‘dialectics of desire’ which can be

found inside of the ‘repetition compulsion,’ which was, to put it in

Freudian terms: a fixation. I quote Alexander Stevens concerning this

repetition compulsion: “it is repetition compulsion that, according to

Freud, puts us on the trail of the death drive on the basis of the

repetition of the traumatic element.” What Stirner demonstrated was that

Feuerbach only exchanged a religious conception of ‘God,’ which

pre-existed his work, for a humanistic conception of ‘Man.’ In fact,

it’s not exactly progress. It returns us back to the same place, and

that’s what makes it revolutionary: ‘Man’ increases the potency of the

‘place of power,’ but it does not evacuate it--clear it--of jouissance.

Not only does the ‘place of power’ remain intact but its function

improves, it becomes more cunning. The situation becomes worse with the

category of ‘man.’ So we move from God, the father, to man, or men, the

brothers.

Today’s social movements effectuate a similar effect: through

cancellation, do they not place the ‘un-human’ outside of their social

bond, to further consolidate the internal consistency of their own

group: ‘moralistic human.’ Eric Laurent, in his short piece “Racism

2.0,” reminds us that, I quote him: “[w]hen Lacan constructed the logic

of the social bond, he does not begin with the [vertical] identification

with the leader.” He continues by claiming that the logic proceeds in

the following way:

1. “A man knows what is not a man.

2. Men recognize themselves among themselves.

3. I declare myself to be a man for fear of being convinced by men that

I am not a man.”

In other words, it begins from segregation: isolation from the ‘hole’

that one confronts in the place of the Other. In any case, Stirner

located within this repetition an enigmatic and stubborn point of

fixation. He was that stubborn fixation within the Hegelian movement.

If, for example, God’s cause is his own, a country’s cause is its own,

and so on, then each presents an ‘auto-erotic’ fixation. Stirner saw

singularities, ‘islands of jouissance,’ of self-enclosure and

self-interest. And he resolved to dissociate against the fixed ideas,

spooks, and so on. In the end, the problem with Stirner is that he

simply has nothing to believe in. He gives up on all fictions: fiction

not fixation. There is a deflation of desire. He retains the fixation

but dismisses all fictions. Unfortunately, he did not have a ‘plus one.’

As for me, I believe in psychoanalysis. And it was anarchism and my

revolutionary aspirations that led me to it. So, I brought myself, and

now all of you, to the end. What you do beyond the end is up to you. To

go to the end, I would claim that the cartel is a type of post-

anarchist politics. So, what can I still say about anarchism, after the

end? It might surprise you to learn that post-anarchism persists when

you go to the end. But it is up to each of you, one by one, all alone,

to find your way with it. I hope that you will make something of what

I’ve presented in these four lectures. But I hope you do it in your own

way.

I’ll stop here.