Notions of political progress mistake contingent changes for fundamental change creating fantasy that inevitably reproduces violence

[Lee Edelman, prof of english at tufts university, December 5, 2022, “Bad Education Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Ch. 5, Duke University Press]//owen

Consider, as a minor—and far from disinterested—example of such distrust, a response to No Future by Merrill Cole, a critic whose his essay’s title announces what he purports to expose and resist: “The Queer Repression of Jacques Lacan.” After describing No Future as “the most controversial attempt to bring Lacan into queer theory” since Tim Dean’s Beyond Sexuality, Cole writes, “Queerness, for Edelman, should involve not ‘an oppositional political identity,’ but ‘opposition to politics as the governing fantasy’ of imaginary closure. It is perhaps only from a privileged social position that one could dismiss politics as fantasy for however unreal politics may seem, it directly affects people’s lives and well-being. Rather than holding itself aloof, I argue that queerness should engage in the struggle to change people’s lives for the better.”9 Leaving aside the vacuity of that final “political” appeal—“changing people’s lives for the better,” after all, is the radically empty program that everyone from Adolf Hitler to Mahatma Gandhi, from Maximilien Robespierre to Martin Luther King Jr., can readily get behind—I would note Cole’s strange response to Edelman’s characterization of politics. For it requires no “privileged social position” to identify (which is hardly the same as to “dismiss”) the structure of politics as a fantasy, only a Lacanian one. “Fantasy dominates the whole reality of desire, which is to say, the Law,” Lacan observes in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. 10 Rather than something “unreal,” as Cole puts it, fantasy, Lacan maintains, “gives reality its frame.”11 Lacan lays out, moreover, the specific shape this political fantasy takes, evoking it as the Imaginarization of what refuses Imaginary totality: It’s an idea . . . that knowledge could produce a totality, which, if I can put it this way, is immanent, immanent in politics as such. The Imaginary idea of the whole, such as it is given by the body, is part of the political preaching based on the good form of satisfaction, on that which makes a sphere; taken to its limit, what is more beautiful, but also what is less open, what more closely resembles the self-enclosure of satisfaction? The collusion of this image with the idea of satisfaction: that’s the thing we run into every time we encounter something knotted in this work [i.e., psychoanalysis] that entails bringing something to light by the paths of the unconscious.12 This “political” idea, associated with the coherence of a totalized enclosure that expresses “the good form of satisfaction”—where “good” is no simple term of praise but rather an acknowledgment of the complicity between moral discourse and Imaginarization—impedes the analytic labor that undoes such fantasmatic consistency.13 The resistance to analysis, like the resistance to negativity, springs from the “satisfaction” afforded by the image “of the whole,” which Lacan identifies, or—to borrow Cole’s term—dismisses, as political “preaching.”14 Cole’s argument, directly correlated with his own indulgence in such preaching (“queerness should engage in the struggle to change people’s lives for the better”), becomes more interesting and more telling when he concedes, after correlating politics with a reality not to be confused with fantasy (“however unreal politics may seem”), that fantasy, in Lacanian theory, structures reality after all. Referring to an essay by Chris Coffman, he writes, “Traversing the final fantasy is the endpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis, where we dispossess ourselves of the unconscious fantasies structuring our reality, an evacuation that, as Coffman argues, ‘clears the ground for a future that could be lived otherwise.’ Clinical Lacanian analysis aims at radical change: ‘traversing the fantasy’ is futurally oriented” (emphasis mine).15 Attempting to make “traversing the fantasy,” a concept popular in Lacanian circles though barely theorized by Lacan, coincide with the sort of “satisfaction” Lacan mocks as “immanent” in politics (the satisfaction promised by some “radical change” toward “a future that could be lived otherwise”), Cole turns traversing the fantasy into the very fantasy it’s supposed to traverse. He imbues it with the heroism of a “struggle to change people’s lives for the better” without interrogating whose desire is at stake or who determines what makes those lives “better.”16 So fully “Americanized” a version of Lacan, in which analysis secures a “better” future by traversing a fantasy that Lacan invokes as “radical” (le fantasme radical) or “fundamental” (cette expérience du fantasme fondamental) and not, as Cole says, “final” (as if it were the ultimate veil beneath which, at last, we encounter the truth), bears little relation to Lacan’s own texts.17 Coffman, on whose work Cole’s essay leans, may identify “traversing the fantasy” with an opening onto “a future that could be lived otherwise,” but Lacan says no such thing. In his seminar of June 24, 1964, the only time he refers to (and even then only once) traversing the radical fantasy (or, more precisely, to having traversed it), he does so by questioning how one lives, or how one lives on, in its aftermath. “What becomes of someone who has passed [or who has undergone the pass] by way of this experience concerning the relation, utterly opaque at its origin, to the drive? How can it be lived, by a subject who has traversed the radical fantasy, how, from that point on, is the drive lived?”18 Instead of a futural orientation or an assurance of change for the better, Lacan lingers here in uncertainty before the question of survival: “This is the beyond of analysis, and it has never been approached. It has only, to the present moment, been approachable at the level of the analyst, insofar as it would be required of the analyst precisely to have traversed in its totality the cycle of the analytic experience.”19 The claim that this beyond has been approachable only “at the level of the analyst” refers to the moment in the training analysis (“la psychanalyse didactique”) when analysts-in-training, no longer mistaking the analyst for the subject supposed to know, still desire to occupy the analyst’s place, now perceived as “the place of nonbeing” (la place du dèsêtre).20 If the fantasy of the subject supposed to know, of the one who has what the analysand seeks, makes “the logic of the analyst . . . the agalma which integrates itself into the radical fantasy that the analysand constructs,” then the dissolving of that fantasy reduces the analyst to the status of any signifier whatsoever (“au signifiant quelconque”).21 Far from producing the promise of “a future that could be lived otherwise,” this divestiture of the analyst’s agalma coincides with the analysand’s “subjective destitution,” an emptying-out sufficient, Lacan maintains, “to sow panic, horror, curses, even attacks.”22Lacan goes further. Whoever, at the end of the training analysis, would assume the analyst’s nonbeing (“dèsêtre”) “roots himself in what most radically opposes everything by which it is necessary and sufficient to be recognized in order to ‘be’: respectability, for example.”23 Having confronted the lack in the Other and no longer pursuing, therefore, the Other’s recognition or good opinion, such a person embraces, according to Lacan, “the true import of the constitutive negation that infamy signifies.”24 By linking this “constitutive negation” to “infamy,” the opposite of those communal values (i.e., respectability or honor) that earn recognition in the realm of being, Lacan implicitly opposes it to pedag-archivalization and posits its centrality to the movement into the “beyond of psychoanalysis.”25 Underscoring its importance, he calls this negation bound up with infamy “a connotation it is very much necessary to restore to psychoanalysis.”26 No one could fault Cole or Coffman for refusing the negativity of this negation or for trying to keep themselves far removed from the infamy it bestows. But for just that reason no one should confuse their arguments with Lacan’s. Their refusal coincides with the fantasy of achieving the unity, the aesthetic coherence, inseparable from the subject of desire and inseparable, therefore, from the fantasy in which everyone believes, whether they know they believe it or not. But Cole and Coffman align their refusal with a progressive political engagement founded on a diluted version of Deleuze’s positivization of nonbeing, taking every variation in the status quo as indexical of “becoming.” In doing so they mistake transformations in the contingent expressions of Symbolic law for fundamental transformations of Symbolic law as such. Nor are they alone in this regard.