Introduction: War and Psychoanalysis
This issue of Contemporary Heretic contains – and invites – interventions on psychoanalysis and war. Why war? Albert Einstein famously asked this question of Freud in 1932.1 After Freud and Lacan, what can psychoanalysis say about war today, particularly the conflagrations now convulsing the world?
There is no war without the master’s discourse, and vice versa
However fundamental aggressivity might be to humanity, along with other animal species, there is nothing natural about war. As Marie-Hélène Brousse writes, war “always involves a logic of discourse … no war without master signifiers”.2 Correlatively, it is no doubt also the case that there are no master signifiers [S1] without war. Or at least those that really matter, those S1s for which we would risk our life. As such these signifiers negate the given reality of our existence even as they grant our being, through that immanent death, a singular value that transcends the universal that lends this reality its social substance.
If the master’s discourse is war-like, is it also the case for the other discourses, including psychoanalytic discourse? After all, the mythical relation between war and the subject is foundational in both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis from the murder of the primal father, and those rites wherein the incision of the Name of the Father creates the jouissant flesh of the body as an effect of the Symbolic Order, to the Oedipus of the heroic era of ancient Greece. Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic, similarly, in which desire necessitates a life-and-death struggle for recognition, is indispensable to Lacan”s imaginary register and indeed the theory of the four discourses.3
For Lacan, according to Jacques-Alain Miller, psychoanalysis is not possible without the war that founds the master’s discourse [dM]. “The meaning of this practice”, he writes, “is not thinkable if the other side of psychoanalysis is not functioning, this other side that is the master’s discourse and the master signifier established in its place.”4 There is no psychoanalysis, then, without a fully-functioning S1 to mark the singular death of each subject and thus it is possible there is no psychoanalysis without war – even if it is located on “the other side”, the reverse side, of the dM. What might be the “other” or “reverse” side of war? As Freud clearly stated, it is certainly not peace: the “Pax Romana” of the master maintained by the force of law and inscribed in state institutions and repressive apparatuses. But Freud didn’t see any solution to war other than a supreme authority that drew from the same force that is integral to war, but that would take the form of “the expression of culture” – by which he meant knowledge based in reason allied to the superego.5 Freud’s disquisition on war, which he addressed to Einstein on the occasion of the founding of the League of Nations, occurred at the point in the twentieth century when it had become evident that the future of war was tied to mechanisation and technological innovation generally. Along with “man’s cultural disposition”, Freud hoped that “a well-founded dread of the form that future wars will take may serve to put an end to war in the near future.”6 It hasn’t so far.
The shame(lessness) of University discourse
General Sir Michael Howard of the British Army has reflected,
What conclusions are we to draw from this melancholy story of the efforts of good men to abolish war but only succeeding thereby in making war more terrible.7
One of the ironies of Freud’s “fear of the future means of war” is that the attempt to abolish war as the condition of heroic mastery has only resulted in the creation of ever more terrifying means of mass death. World War I, after all, was supposed to be the war to end all wars, and yet it led to war’s totalization in the mobilization of populations and their extermination in the name of defence and security. This paradoxical project to end war by universalizing it is an effect of a discursive shift in which the production of war takes the form of “University” discourse [dU]. The master’s war games, his chivalric tests of valour, virtus, honour and virility have become taboo. Miller cites Rameau’s Nephew as a cultural landmark in this shift, but Shakespeare is earlier, and the shamelessness of his character Falstaff much clearer in his view that “honour” is a simply a word, an airy nothing, a mere “scutcheon” of no utility to life.8 With the rise of capitalism and political science, war is seen as at best a calculated means for the acquisition of resources and markets, and at worst a wasteful excess. War becomes a surplus, the evidence of the failure of transactional economics, or politics by other means (Clausewitz and Hegel). Miller argues that for Lacan, the eclipse of honour marks modernity with the shame of shamelessness in which the economic preservation of life takes on the primary value. “The disappearance of honour instates the primum vivere as supreme value, the ignominious life, the ignoble life, life without honour … [which] means that the subject ceases to be represented by a signifier that matters”.9 General Howard’s good men of the war that services the Goods sacrifice the singular value of the subject, born by the insignia of the S1, in the meat grinder of death-production guaranteeing the modern way of life, the “subjectivity” of homo economicus or the statistical man without qualities.
What good is life? War as hystericization
Even in the midst of the “carnage incomparable” of WWI (Wilfred Owen), there are instances of poetic – or “hysterical” – questioning that sought not only to bring the S1, that lies at the truth of the dU, back to its desire. In so doing, they radically re-affirm the existence that the discourse negates, through a rejection of the “good life” of surplus jouissance that is offered in its place. WB Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” speaks of a politically neutral aviator, indifferent to both the British and the Germans, who nevertheless engages in aerial combat purely for the sake of a “lonely impulse of delight” compared to which his quotidian life is “a waste of breath”.10 German infantryman Ernst Jünger scandalously found the Western Front the most life-affirming place imaginable. “It is precisely the most vigorous life that sacrifices itself most willingly. It is better to go down like a bursting meteor than to go out trembling.”11 For writers like Yeats, Jünger and others – James Joyce, for example – the authority of the S1 is produced as an effect of authorship, but one that disavows itself as signifier for the sake of a different conception of life as action and a being-for-death.12
What their literature discloses is that war is the symptom of the life that is missing; the life from which we are alienated or separated. When structured by the dM, war gave meaning to life through the heroic narrative it guaranteed. Then, this war was abolished by the dU in the name of utility and production. Life was lost in the everyday world of work. It was essentially abolished along with war, and became something that had to be produced. A new life was promised as the end of the wars that nevertheless persisted as the continuation of (bio)politics by other means, a life that will be worth all the sacrifice, even the sacrifice of whole populations. In the literature of the poetic hysteric, however, a different, more intense, life is imagined or found in the hollow of war itself, in the fleeting moments of the “delight” (jouissance) of tumult and action; this Jouissance is the apotheosis of the life that is denied. There is no meaning to it, but there is satisfaction.
Psychoanalysis, of course, does not offer this kind of satisfaction, even though it does indeed, invariably, take place in the midst of war (because there is always war). Psychoanalytic discourse places the lost object in the position of agent, posing a question concerning the enigma of the subject’s existence with regard, precisely, to what matters or not to it, of what one wants of life, or not, and how it might be named. It is possible (if it is possible) that such a naming may provide meaning, and the satisfaction that meaning affords, however temporarily.13
Make transference not war
In his piece “A Phantasy”, Jacques-Alain Miller departs from Lacan when he re-considers the conditions of possibility for psychoanalysis. The condition is no longer, or will no longer be, the discourse of the Master, the structure for the discourse of the unconscious. “Lacanian practice”, Miller writes, “which is to be invented, will not operate with reference to the discourse of the unconscious as its other side”.14 Rather, psychoanalysis must operate with reference to a “hole in the real”, that is to say the absence of sexual rapport. Ironically, the condition of possibility for psychoanalysis, then, is impossibility. Like the life that really matters, the sexual rapport is missing. Is war – the battle of the sexes, perhaps – also its symptom? The answer is no – or maybe not – because hatred is still a possibility in transference. In “A Phantasy”, Miller wants us to make love not war, in the form of transference, because even though it is imaginary, it remains the necessary, preliminary condition for the (re)appearance of the symbolic. We are invited to love one’s unconscious (not make war with it), in order to make the symbolic exist, so that all of us, the ones-all-alone, might have the possibility of symbolic mediation.
In the practical negotiation of the ambivalence proper to transference there is, I would contend, the possibility of a transformation of war from symptom to sinthome, wherein psychoanalysis might become an ascetic work of love in which one develops strength in the effort and accomplishment of a task that is a satisfaction in and of itself. There is apparently a Samurai proverb that says that true strength lies not in the arm, but in the soul. What is the “soul”, in a psychoanalytic context? Something like the “personality”? Lacan amended the idea of the “personality” as the symptom that functioned as a “fourth term” to ISR to the sinthome. Where the love of the unconscious grasps its reality in the sinthome, as maintained by the body, it constitutes a fourth ring that ties together Real, Symbolic and Imaginary in the Borromean knot.15
The pieces that follow in this issue of Contemporary Heretic speak in the midst of war, but from the refuge that is the analytic situation, a refuge, however, that may itself become agonistic, in its own way, within the subject pre-eminently. They speak of how the trauma of war, as of the signifier, is specific to each, and indeed the basis of each singularity.
Illustration: Katsushika’s Hokusai, Watanabe no Gengo Tsuna and Inokuma Nyūdō Raiun, from an untitled series of warriors in combat. Woodblock print. Museum of Fine Arts Boston. https://collections.mfa.org/objects/209817.
1 Freud’s response is here: ““Why War? A Letter from Freud to Einstein,” The UNESCO Courier. https://courier.unesco.org/en/articles/why-war-letter-freud-einstein[last updated April, 2023].
2 Marie-Hélène Brousse (ed), La Psychanalyse à l’épreuve de la guerre. Paris: Berg International, 2015, 3.
3 Lacan’s four discourses are outlined in Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans Russell Grigg. New York: Norton, 2007.
4 Jacques-Alain Miller, “On Shame” in Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg (eds), Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, 11-28, 20.
5 Freud thought war could only be prevented by “firstly, a strengthening of the intellect, which tends to master our instinctive life, and, secondly, an introversion of the aggressive impulse, with all its consequent benefits and perils.” Freud, “Why War?” ibid.
6 Freud, ibid.
7 Sir Michael Howard, cited in Michael Dillon, Michael and Julian Reid, The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live. London: Routledge, 2009, 1.
8 William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part One. 5:1:127-38
9 Miller, “On Shame”, 18.
10 WB Yeats, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” from The Wild Swans of Coole. New York, Macmillan, 1919.
11 Ernst Jünger. War as Inner Experience. Trans. K.J. Elliot, Independently Published 2021.
12“Yes, the soldier in his relationship with death … knows very little about philosophers and their values. But in him and his deed, life expresses itself more poignantly and more deeply than any book could ever do.” Ibid.
13 Jacques-Alain Miller, “The Lying Truth” in The Lacanian Review 07. Paris: The New Lacanian School, 2019, 149-58, 152-3.
14 Jacques-Alain Miller, “A Fantasy” in Paradigms of Jouissance, Psychoanalytical Notebooks 34. London Society of the New Lacanian School, 2019, 139-73, 158-9.
15 Jacques Lacan, The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXIII, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans AR Price. London, Polity, 2016, 41-2, 119, 134.