Due to what is commonly referred to
as Lacan’s “notorious difficulty,” the vast majority of secondary literature
produced by Lacanian scholars is aimed at providing a comprehensive
introductory overview to the typically cryptic writings and oracular
pronouncements of the French Freud. 
Commentaries on Lacan generally seek to highlight the most important
theses traversing his theoretical developments, thereby furnishing a
streamlined presentation that enables readers to get a sense of the fundaments
underlying the Lacanian approach to psychoanalysis. Such scholarly works are necessary components in initiating the
sustained effort to come to terms with Lacan’s legacy. The very best of these sorts of commentaries
make an articulate case for taking Lacan seriously as a thinker of the human
condition, rather than dismissing him as yet another vapid postmodern
obscurantist. Without them, his
critics’ dismissals of him as a nonsense monger risk appearing justified, and,
consequently, Lacan’s texts might well be promptly relegated to the dustbin of
intellectual history.

At the outset of his project,
Philippe Van Haute directly acknowledges the value of introductions to Lacan
(i.e., macro-level surveys of an entire range of Lacan’s texts). However, Van Haute senses that the time is
ripe for a turn in Lacanian studies, for a shift towards what could be called
“micro-level” investigations into specific facets of the Lacanian corpus. Lacanian scholars should indeed cooperate
along the lines of a division of labor. 
Once the exegetical foundations for engaging with a given figure’s
oeuvre have been laid by a series of solid overviews, other scholars should
feel themselves free to pursue more detailed and complex investigations into
specific sub-constellations of concepts. 
Van Haute offers his study of Lacan’s 1960 essay “Subversion of the
subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious” (the final
essay selected for inclusion in Alan Sheridan’s 1977 English translation of the
Écrits) as a “close reading.” He presents his book as part of a turn
towards Lacanian scholarship beyond the introductory level, beyond the stage of
constructing comprehensive summaries of an entire series of works.

However, for a variety of reasons—his wise choice of
text, his solid overall understanding of Lacan, his grasp of the philosophical
issues at stake, his explanatory skills—Van Haute succeeds on both the
micro-level as well as the macro-level. 
His close reading accomplishes nothing less than showing readers how to
see the Lacanian universe in a textual grain of sand. In the “Subversion of the subject” essay, Lacan discusses his
theory of the point de capiton (i.e.,
the “quilting point,” a notion introduced in the third seminar of
1955-1956): central signifying units
are, in terms of their capacity to signify and their assumption of a concrete
meaning, shaped or conditioned by other such signifying units situated in a
shared network of significance; but, in this network of signifiers, certain
select signifiers (i.e., the quilting points) are absolutely pivotal in
governing the dynamics of this system. 
Not all differentially defined signifiers are equal. One could say that Van Haute properly
identifies this 1960 piece by Lacan as itself just such a point de capiton in his theoretical system.

Several aspects of “Subversion of
the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious” make it a
paradigmatic example from Lacan’s writings. 
Not only is it excessively baroque and overly dense in terms of the
writing style, but it also is organized around the explication of an intricate
visual graph (Lacan loves such quasi-mathematical models as illustrations of
his theories). Consequently, even
readers who are familiar with Lacanian ideas sometimes have trouble making out
exactly what is transpiring in the course of this particular essay. Furthermore, the “Subversion of the subject”
is situated right at the cusp of a major turn in the course of Lacan’s
intellectual itinerary: it’s
contemporaneous with the seventh seminar on The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis, a seminar in which the Lacanian register of the
Real starts to receive sustained attention (instead of the Symbolic being the
key focus, as in most of the seminars throughout the 1950s). Finally, this essay exhibits Lacan’s
premeditated placement of himself at the interstices of psychoanalysis and
philosophy (this piece served as a lecture in a colloquium on Hegelian
dialectics). Thus, Van Haute’s
strategic choice of textual object in his exercise of careful exegesis is well
suited to enable him to address a wide array of issues and topics in Lacanian
theory without, for all that, losing the thread of his close reading.

Against
Adaptation defies being easily summarized in terms of the gradual unfolding
of its content. This volume is simply
too rich in details to be encapsulated in a short review of only a few pages in
length. The primary reason for this is
Van Haute’s admirable fidelity to the letter of the Lacanian text: he spends
almost three hundred pages guiding readers through “Subversion of the subject”
paragraph-by-paragraph, sentence-by-sentence, and even phrase-by-phrase. No word in Lacan’s essay is left
untouched. By the time he’s finished,
one has the impression that this particular piece of writing has been virtually
exhausted, unreservedly decanted in terms of its significance. This isn’t just a reading of Lacan. It functions as an invaluable demonstration
of exactly how to set about reading Lacan. 
However, a few of Van Haute’s guiding interpretive principles and
underlying assumptions about Lacan can be highlighted and commented upon here.

From the very beginning, Van Haute
makes it clear that he views Lacan as a committed “ontological” dualist. Numerous commentators questionably claim
that Lacan, like every good twentieth-century “continental” theorist, is
interested in overturning the old, hackneyed philosophical dichotomies (along
with the notion of dichotomy in general) governing the Western tradition. Such a perspective can only be sustained
through an almost deliberate neglect of the plethora of places where Lacan
subtly presses conceptual schemes from the history of philosophy into the
service of elucidating his own metapsychology; Lacan is far from hostile to
many of the divisions and distinctions structuring the systems of thinkers like
Descartes, Kant, and Hegel. For Van
Haute, the central opposition operative, according to Lacan, at the very heart
of human subjectivity itself is the split between language and the body—the latter
decisively shapes the human relationship to the former, while, at the same
time, resisting unproblematic integration into the former (this isn’t an exact
reduplication of the bifurcation of the individual into res cogitans and res extensa,
but Lacan undeniably intends for his own theory of subjectivity to resonate
with that of Descartes, with the sheer volume of his references to Descartes
adding textual substantiation to this claim). 
In more concrete terms, Lacan’s (basically Hegelian) position is that
the individual’s “corporeal” condition (i.e., needs, urges, wants,
requirements, emotions, etc.) inevitably propels him/her to enter into a
socio-symbolic order organized by (primarily linguistic) trans-individual
systems of representation and exchange. 
And yet, this embodied point of departure, this bodily origin of
mediated subjectivity, is worked over and irreversibly transformed in its very
being by this “anatomically destined” propulsion into the Geist of human collective existence. However, this same body continues to cause difficulties for the
more-than-corporeal subject, thwarting total and complete identificatory fusion
with the mediating representations establishing the subject’s status (one
should note in passing that accusations to the effect that Lacan entertains a
strictly social constructivist model of embodiment lack any plausibility). This is a dialecticized dichotomy, but,
indeed, a dichotomy nonetheless.

Following from his construal of
Lacan as dualistic, Van Haute advances his underlying thesis as reflected in
the title of the book: Lacan’s most
important idea is the assertion that human beings are fundamentally and
constitutively maladapted in relation to their “reality,” to their natural/material
as well as social/cultural Umwelt. The antagonisms hindering “adaptation”
subsist on several levels: language fails to function as a transparent medium
for the flawless communicative coordination between bodily needs and
intersubjective responses to the articulated demands motivated by these needs;
the Real of excessive jouissance
continually threatens to disrupt the carefully negotiated balances and
compromises between the pleasure and reality principles by overriding the
self-interests of the ego-guided organism; 
and, the mediating system of representations structuring subjectivity
contains its own set of impasses, contradictions, and instabilities that make
it ill-suited to provide the individual with a lasting set of stable
“existential anchors” introducing order into corporeal chaos. Hence, Lacan’s dualistic conflict-models
aren’t limited simply to a division between body and language. In addition to the split between corporeal
materiality and disembodied structurality, Lacan posits the existence of
deadlocks within the body as well as within the symbolic order: not only is there a body-language conflict,
but also an intra-body conflict (for example, the lack of coordinated and
harmonious integration between the drive-sources, the sensory organs, and the
functioning of mnemic inscriptions from past perceptions) and an intra-language
conflict (as theorized by Lacan’s post-Saussurian musings on the dynamics
associated with signifiers—see, for instance, his well-known distinction
between the subject of the utterance and the subject of the enunciation from
the eleventh seminar, in addition to his later reflections from the seminars of
the 1970s on the Real as related to internal inconsistencies within the fabric
of the symbolic order). The relevance
of the above for understanding the “Subversion of the subject” resides in the
fact that the “graph of desire” around which Lacan’s essay is organized can be
deciphered as a meticulous delineation of this whole series of multiple
conflictual levels, as a provisional explanation of how necessarily maladapted
subjectivity is produced in and through the dialectical vacillations set in
motion by this thus-delineated framework.

According to Van Haute’s reading,
Lacan’s “Subversion of the subject” gradually builds towards the
conclusion—this is evident from the closing sentences of Lacan’s essay—that jouissance is impossible. An ultimate and exhaustive sating of the
desire characteristic of the human libidinal economy, a fully satisfying
“living out of the drives” that finally quells the incessant clamoring of
various insistent urges, is unattainable for the human subject (save for,
perhaps, at the cost of the subject’s own destruction and disappearance). Alongside Lacan’s famous dictum that Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel, one
could add that Il n’y a pas de jouissance
or Jouissance n’existe pas. Van Haute faithfully rehearses the familiar
Lacanian thesis that the individual’s entry into the symbolic order unavoidably
introduces a sort of “loss” or “absence” into the libidinal life of the
subject, that one’s rapport with the experiential field is decisively and
permanently altered by the settling into place of a thereafter irremovable
linguistic lens. Das Ding, the primordial, archaic focal point of the drives, is
both negated and preserved (in Hegel’s parlance, “sublated” à la the Aufhebung) in being representationally transubstantiated into die Sache, the Imaginary-Symbolic object
related to as an always-inadequate substitute for the forever lost “Real
thing.” The barring of the Thing of jouissance creates, almost ex nihilo, what Lacan calls “desire”
(the same desire referred to in the title of the essay here under
consideration). This notion can most
easily (although somewhat inadequately) be defined as the tension of the
libidinal economy’s perpetual striving towards an indefinitely receding horizon
of full satisfaction. And, this tension
is sustained exclusively on condition that the subject either does not or
simply cannot directly obtain what it’s ostensibly after; the object of desire
must be some sort of “lack,” as anyone acquainted with the Lacanian objet petit a knows. Van Haute favors the stronger interpretation
of desire here, arguing that the lack catalyzing and sustaining desire is
constitutive (and not accidental), an irreducible aspect of symbolically
established subjectivity. Just as Lacan
elsewhere proclaims that “Jouissance
is forbidden to him who speaks,” so too does Van Haute assert, in line with a
growing trend among Lacanian theorists, that loss, absence, lack, and so on is
inherently impossible to overcome for the subject as a parlêtre. The desiring
subject is faced with nothing short of a two-pronged forced choice: either desire as the
sustainable-yet-unsatisfying inaccessibility of the fundamental locus of the
libidinal economy, or, alternatively, an overwhelming, almost psychotic process
of self-annihilation in the attempt at directly seizing the jouissance-laden Thing. What isn’t an option is simply “pure
enjoyment.” In fact, Lacan can be
portrayed as undertaking a critique of pure enjoyment in the same way that Kant
attempts to rob pure reason of its alluring powers.

Based on this strong interpretation
of the negativity underlying desire, Van Haute proceeds to explain some of the
basic features of a Lacanian diagnosis of various classic psychoanalytic
pathological categories. For example,
he refers to Lacan’s distinction between the “object of desire” and the “object
of demand.” An object of desire is some
(fantasmatic) entity towards which the subject strives, but which it’s
impossible for the subject to ever attain. 
An object of demand, on the other hand, results from the neurotic
individual’s misrecognition of the unattainable objet a as a particular item or status which he/she has been
unfairly deprived of by someone or something; a formal, structural
impossibility is mis-recognized as a material, empirical fact. A standard refrain recited by neurotic
analysands is “I would be happy, if it weren’t for contingent factors ‘x,’ ‘y,’
and ‘z’ standing in my way. Once those
matters are settled, then I’ll finally be content and able to unproblematically
enjoy life.” In other words, and to
shift into a slightly different set of Lacanian concepts, neurotics are always
at risk of misconstruing the necessity of “symbolic castration” (i.e., the
inevitable loss of das Ding resulting
from the introduction of Imaginary-Symbolic mediation into libidinal life) in
terms of a series of arbitrary, contingent frustrations. Thus, a “grass is greener on the other side”
fantasy—basically, “Everyone else except me is able to obtain satisfaction”—is
at work in the neurotic’s unconscious as what Van Haute calls a “defense
against desire.” This provides a useful
hint as to one facet of what Lacan means by the phrase “jouissance of the Other”: 
the neurotic clings to the belief that, even if he/she is denied access
to “pure enjoyment,” someone, somewhere is able to have “it.” Necessary loss is deceptively turned into
the appearance of contingent deprivation. 
According to Lacan, a crucial component in the psychoanalytic cure is
the process of bringing neurotics face-to-face with the fantasies complicit in
sustaining this evasion of an essential aspect of their very being as
subjects. As Van Haute nicely
summarizes it, “Humans are… an ‘in-between-being’ whose existence is carried
on in a dialectical relation between two antithetical terms: jouissance
and castration. Human being is desire”
(pg. 280-281). Any therapy that gets
caught in the trap of endlessly trying to console patients for the supposed
wrongs that their life histories have dished out merely ends up reinforcing the
fantasies underpinning neurotic symptoms, as well as being guilty of
buttressing a denial of the human condition itself.

Although he doesn’t spend as much
time discussing psychosis in this light, Van Haute does furnish readers with
interesting remarks on perversion (in particular, sadism and masochism). Again, the crux of these descriptions of
general kinds of analytic clinical cases hinges on the above theme of an “impossible
jouissance” and the
never-unproblematic human (non-)relationship to it. The “pervert” is convinced not only that jouissance exists, but that he/she has a special sort of knowledge
enabling others to access this special enjoyment. Lacan describes perversion as a position wherein the subject
attempts to become the “instrument of the Other’s jouissance” (without, for all that, obtaining jouissance for themselves—the pervert can only fantasmatically
conceal the absence of pure enjoyment from themselves by catering to another’s
supposed enjoyment, and this inadvertently testifies to a fundamental impotence
of sorts that perversion is one attempt to flee from). So, what about the two most familiar
perversions, namely, sadism and masochism? 
For French psychoanalysis (as influenced by, for example, Gilles
Deleuze’s famous study of these notions), sadism and masochism aren’t simply
inverted-yet-parallel positions, nor is there such a hybrid phenomenon as the
popular notion of “sadomasochism.” In
Van Haute’s view, the sadist fantasizes about individuals capable of engaging
in unlimited debauchery and experientially sustaining infinite sensual
intensities (the main characters in the Marquis de Sade’s novels obviously
illustrate this). Similarly, the victims
of the sadist’s concocted protagonists are able to endure limitless amounts of
abuse and torture. But, don’t some
sadists really act out their fantasies? 
If so, how does this fit in with the claim that fantasized jouissance is constitutively inaccessible? One might anticipate Van Haute arguing that
the sadist, in the process of acting out, runs up against certain innate
barriers to sustaining unlimited enjoyment (such as the limits of one’s body
and its inability to indefinitely sustain or prolong various sensations). Instead, Van Haute speaks of the sadistic
torturer as identifying with his/her victim, so that, even during the intensive
height of the concrete actualization of the sadistic fantasy scenario, jouissance is elsewhere (in this case,
attributed to the victim-other).

The analysis of masochism here is a bit clearer and
more original. The full-blown
masochist, although perhaps initially appearing to be someone who voluntarily
de-subjectivizes themselves in order to undergo an overwhelming amount of jouissance qua pleasure-in-pain, is actually stuck in a scenario that involves
repeatedly staging the mythic encounter between “the Law” and jouissance. The masochist sets things up so that his/her punishing
authority-figure is eventually forced to stop the game. The person cast in the master/mistress role
feels that “things have gone too far” because of an anxiety or fear aroused
when the masochist wants the punishments pushed to the point of risking serious
injury or death. Van Haute claims that
the masochist is looking for an authoritative Other, not as a tool for his/her
capricious whims for self-abusive gratification, but as the agent for imposing
boundaries and parameters around jouissance. The masochist covertly seeks to cause
anxiety in this Other so as to provoke the imposition of a rule or prohibition
forbidding transgression beyond a certain threshold. The basic upshot here is that, despite their differences, neither
the sadist nor the masochist, even in the most extreme versions of their
perverse practices, gain access to jouissance. On the contrary, both sorts of perversions
involve evading it while preserving the illusion that it exists and can, in
principle, be accessed.  

For those interested in Lacan and/or
the philosophical dimension of psychoanalysis, Against Adaptation is a fabulous volume. Van Haute has produced a masterful piece of Lacanian
scholarship. For years to come, this
will be the study to consult for
anyone grappling with “Subversion of the subject.” In fact, little else like it (i.e., book-length examinations of a
single essay by Lacan) exists at the moment. 
Unfortunately, this review has only managed to selectively highlight a
few of its worthwhile and interesting features. In the bibliography, Van Haute lists another earlier book of his,
Psychoanalyse en filosofie: Het imaginaire en het symbolische in het
werk van Jacques Lacan (1990). 
Dutch isn’t exactly the lingua
franca of Lacanian theorists. 
Therefore, someone should definitely undertake translating this other
work, assuming it’s anywhere near as good as Against Adaptation. A wider
audience of Lacanian theorists is impatiently waiting.

©
2002 Adrian Johnston

Adrian Johnston
recently completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook. His dissertation
was Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive

Categories: Psychoanalysis, Philosophical