Plus d'une loi: Reading Repetition Compulsion and Generalized Fetishism with Deleuze-Guattari and Derrida

Abstract

Plus d'une loiReading Repetition Compulsion and Generalized Fetishism with Deleuze-Guattari and Derrida Elias Jabre (bio) Translated by Thomas Clément Mercier La psychanalyse devrait obliger à repenser beaucoup d'assurances, par exemple à reconstruire toute l'axiomatique du droit, de la morale, des "droits de l'homme," tout le discours construit sur l'instance du moi, de la responsabilité consciente, la rhétorique politicienne, le concept de torture, la psychiatrie légale et son système, etc. Non pour renoncer aux affirmations éthiques ou politiques, au contraire, pour leur avenir même. Cela ne se fait ni dans la société psychanalytique ni dans la société tout court, en tout cas pas assez, pas assez vite. Voilà peut-être une tâche pour la pensée. Nous vivons tous, à cet égard, dans une dissociation quotidienne, terrifiante et comique à la fois, notre lot historique le plus singulier … —Jacques Derrida, Le nouvel Observateur (1983)1 Since its inception, psychoanalytic theory has attempted to rethink what puts the "subject" in motion by theorizing a force of repetition which exceeds representation: the Oedipal law. Therefore, it might seem counterintuitive to resort to psychoanalysis in order to consider the modalities of social and political change. Shouldn't we assume that this law, because it is described as a force of repetition, is by necessity a conservative force, and that it results in defining social movements in the form of a process of reproduction? It is true that psychoanalysis also strived to account for phenomena of transgression; but transgression was also related to a force of repetition: the death drive or the repetition compulsion following Freud's "speculation" in Beyond the pleasure principle. [End Page 15] Interpretations of the death drive have been multiple and sometimes contradictory: the death drive has been interpreted as the result of a mis-incorporation of the Oedipal law; as a violent traumatism that exceeds the law of conservation; or as a compelling desire that exceeds any law. The death drive manifests itself in the form of a morbid jouissance, compelling the neurotic subject to repeat symptoms that make him or her suffer. Repetition compulsion thus signifies the insistence of the law, which enjoins the subject to return to the law and to find his or her place in relation to the law. Such insistence is also the process through which the subject can reconfigure his or her own place before the law in the context of the psychoanalytic cure. In this way, Lacan translated the Oedipal law into a language-structure: in his book Lacan avec Derrida, René Major explains that the truth of Lacan's Seminar on The Purloined Letter, given in 1955, is to "establish the insistence of the chain of signifiers—that is, the principle of the repetition automatism—which guides the most determining effects for the subject" (2001, 56). Thus, the work of the analyst consists in helping the subject to find their place before the Oedipal law by untangling their neuroses, and by curing correlated symptoms. In this perspective, and to this purpose, a certain Freudo-Lacanian orthodoxy supposes the dissociation between psychoanalysis and the field of politics, so that the patient does not get hampered by what Lacan calls in his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis "the service of goods" [le service des biens] (1986, 34). Without necessarily justifying the existing political order, the psychoanalytic doxa tends to legitimize said order by withdrawing from it in the name of a higher ethics. Let alone the fact that many psychoanalysts use the constant reference to Civilization and Its Discontents, as a way to disqualify the mirages and illusions of revolutions and to emphasize the indestructible aggressiveness of human nature. According to Freud, all cultures and civilizations are by necessity built against the death drive, and necessitate a certain renunciation of the drives. However, despite the apparent conservatism of repetition compulsion, philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari and Derrida [End Page 16] turned to repetition compulsion in order to reformulate libidinal economy in view of offering new perspectives for political transformation. For Deleuze and Guattari, as well as for Derrida, this political reformulation of repetition compulsion also involves a reinterpretation of the psychoanalytic...