LQ in English: « Racism 2.0 » by Eric Laurent

Éric Laurent

The recent debates surrounding the ban of
Dieudonné’s show in France are producing a very contemporary echo of what Lacan
foretold[i]
with respect to the function of psychoanalysis in civilisation. The closing
words of Seminar XIX, in June 1972,
were firmly levelled at what lies ahead of us. According to Lacan, our
emergence from the patriarchal civilisation of yesteryear was now beyond doubt.
The post-1968 period was still buzzing with talk of the end of paternal power
and the advent of a new society of brothers, accompanied by the blithe hedonism
of a new religion of the body. Lacan played the party pooper, specifying a consequence
that hadn’t yet been noticed:

When we come back to the root of the body, if
we are to reassert the value of the word brother,
[…] you should know that what rises up, the ultimate consequences of which have
yet to be seen – and which takes root in the body, in the fraternity of the
body – is racism.[ii]

Body idolatry has very different consequences
from the narcissistic hedonism to which some thought they could limit this
‘religion of the body’. These consequences foreshadow other forms of religion
besides the secular religions, as Raymond Aron put it, which haunted this
period and which, to Aron’s thinking, were peddling the ‘Opium of the
Intellectuals’.[iii]

Whilst Lacan was predicting the rise of
racism, which he was stressing insistently as of 1967 and through into the
’seventies, the prevailing atmosphere was rather one of delight at the prospect
of integrating nations into larger ensembles that would be authorised by
‘common markets’. At that time, people were more in favour of Europe than they are
today. Lacan accentuated this unexpected consequence with a precision that back
then came as something of a surprise. Questioning Lacan in ‘Television’ (1973),
Jacques-Alain Miller was a sounding board for this surprise, highlighting the
importance of his thesis: ‘What gives you the confidence to prophesy the rise
of racism? And why the devil do you have to speak of it?’ Lacan replied:

Because it doesn’t strike me as
funny and yet, it’s true.

With our jouissance going off
track, only the Other is able to mark its position, but only in so far as we
are separated from this Other. Whence certain fantasies – unheard of before the
melting pot.[iv]

The logic that Lacan develops is as follows.
We have no knowledge of the jouissance from which we might take our orientation.
We know only how to reject the jouissance of others. With this ‘melting pot’,
Lacan is criticising the twofold movement of colonialism and the will to
normalise he who has been displaced, the immigrant, in the name of all that is
supposed to be for his own ‘good’.

Leaving the Other to his own mode
of jouissance, that would only be possible by not imposing our own on him, by
not thinking of him as underdeveloped.

[…] How can we hope that the
empty forms of humanhysterianism [humanitairerie]
disguising our extortions can continue to last?[v]

This is not culture shock, but the shock of
different forms of jouissance. This manifold jouissance splits the social bond
apart, hence the temptation of calling upon a unifying God.

            Lacan
also heralds something else here: the return of different forms of religious
fundamentalism. ‘Even if God, thus newly strengthened, should end up
ex-sisting, this bodes nothing better than a return of his baneful past.’ In
these comments on the logic of racism, Lacan takes into account the varying
forms of the rejected object, distinct forms that range from pre-war
anti-Semitism (which led to Nazi radicalism) to post-colonial racism directed
at immigrants. Racism effectively switches its objects as the social forms
undergo modification. From Lacan’s perspective, however, there is always, in
any human community, a rejection of an inassimilable jouissance, which forms
the mainspring of a possible barbarism.

            Before
‘Television’, Lacan has raised the question of racism in his ‘Proposition of 9
October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School’ and in his ‘Address on Child
Psychoses’ of the same year. In the ‘Proposition…’, he mentions the precursory
aspect of Nazi barbarism:

Let me summarise by saying that
what we have seen emerge from this, to our horror, represents the reaction of
precursors in relation to what will unfold as a consequence of the rearranging
of social groupings by science and, notably, of the universalisation science
introduces into them.

            Our
future as common markets will be balanced by an increasingly hard-line
extension of the process of segregation.[vi]

In the ‘Address on Child Psychoses’ he
specifies the nexus between the position of the psychoanalyst and the movement
of civilisation: ‘we need to know what the rest of us, I mean psychoanalysts,
are going to respond [to] segregation, which has been put on the agenda by an
unprecedented subversion.’[vii]

            The
logic by which Lacan constructs all human ensembles, of any shape whatsoever,
actually gives a twist to Freud’s Massenpsychologie.
In 1921, after formulating the second topography that organises psychical
reality, Freud looked again at the question of the destiny of the drive,
starting off from the fate of identification which governs psychical life in a
decisive way:

In opposition to the usual
practice, we shall not choose a relatively simple group formation as our point
of departure, but shall begin with highly organised, lasting and artificial
groups. The most interesting example of such structures are churches – communities
of believers – and armies.

[…]

            We
should consider whether groups with leaders may not be the more primitive and
complete, whether in the others an idea, an abstraction, may not be substituted
for the leader (a state of things to which religious groups, with their
invisible head, form a transition stage), and whether a common tendency, a wish
in which a number of people can have a share, may not in the same way serve as
a substitute. […] Hatred against a particular person or institution might operate
in just the same unifying way.[viii]

For Freud, hatred and racist rejection form a
bond, but remain connected to the leader who takes the place of the father, or,
more accurately, the place of the father’s murder. The limitless dimension of
this requirement lives on in the group, and the establishment of the social
bond remains founded upon the base of the identificatory drive. A stable group
harbours within it the same principle of limitlessness that was isolated for
the primal group. In this way, Freud was able to account both for the army as
an organised mass and for the savage power of killing that accompanies it. A
common hate can unify a group, which remains bound to a segregative
identification with the leader.

            When
Lacan constructs the logic of the social bond, he does not begin with the
identification with the leader, but with an initial rejection at the level of
the drive. His formulation of logical time concludes with the proposition that
all human assimilation follows three temporal phases through which the subject
and the social Other are articulated:

1. A man knows what is not a man;

2. Men recognise themselves among themselves;

3. I declare myself to be a man for fear of
being convinced by men that I am not a man.[ix]

These temporal phases do not set off from
some knowledge of what it would be to be a man, followed by a process of
identification. Rather, this logic sets off from what is not a man – A man knows what is not a man. This says nothing of
what a man is. Next, men recognise themselves amongst themselves on account of being men: they know not what they do,
but they recognise themselves in each other. Lastly, I declare myself to be a man. Here lies the whole
question of the affirmation or the decision that is linked to the function of
hatred, the function of anxiety – for fear of being convinced by men that I am
not a man.

            This
collective logic is grounded on the threat of a primordial rejection, on the
menace of a form of racism: a man knows what is not a man. And this is a
question of jouissance. He whom I reject for having a jouissance distinct from
my own is not a man.

This movement provides the logical form of
all ‘human’ assimilation, precisely in so far as it posits itself as
assimilative of a barbarism, but which nonetheless reserves the essential
determination of the ‘I’…[x]

When Lacan wrote this text, Nazi barbarism
was close at hand. It began by pointing the finger at the Jew as he whose
jouissance is not the same as the Aryan’s: a man is not a man because his
jouissance is not like mine. The flipside of this is that, within this logic,
it may be asserted that whilst men do not know the nature of their jouissance,
men do know what barbarism is. Thenceforth, men recognise themselves amongst
themselves, but they don’t really know how. Then, subjectively, one by one: I
am caught in a movement of haste. I declare myself to be a man, out of fear
that I will be denounced for not being a man. Based on an absence of any
definition of being-a-man, this
collective logic will tie together the ‘I
that declares’ and the ‘set of men’, and in doing so will bypass the leader.

            This
logical form was to be pursued throughout Lacan’s work. It later became more
complex with the theory of desire and the theory of jouissance, but it would
continue functioning, as is the case in the logic of the Pass. The logic of the
constitution of a psychoanalytic collective was to be approached in keeping
with this same anti-identificatory logic, or more accurately, a logic of
non-segregative identifications, as Jacques-Alain Miller called them in his
‘Turin Theory’[xi].

1. A psychoanalyst knows what is not a
psychoanalyst – on no account does this mean that the psychoanalyst knows what
a psychoanalyst is.

2. Psychoanalysts recognise themselves
amongst themselves as psychoanalysts – this is what is asked in the experience
of the Pass: for a cartel to recognise this fellow here as one of us.

3. To present himself for the Pass, the
subject must declare himself, to decide, to be a psychoanalyst and to run the
risk of not convincing the others than he is a psychoanalyst.[xii]

In his ‘Proposition…’, Lacan insisted on the
dimension of racism in order to stress that any human ensemble harbours in its
depths a jouissance that goes off track, a fundamental not-knowing with respect
to the jouissance that would correspond to identification. The psychoanalyst is
simply he who has to find this out in order to constitute the community of
those who recognise themselves as psychoanalysts.

            The
malicious jouissance at stake in racist discourse is the failure to recognise
this logic. It is the fundament of any social bond. The founding crime is not
the murder of the father, but the will to murder he who embodies the jouissance
that I reject. Therefore, antiracism always has to be reinvented in keeping
with each fresh form of the object of racism, which looses its shape with the
rearrangements of social groupings. However, our history has shown in
particular, behind each guise of racism, the central place of anti-Semitism as
both a precursor and a horizon. Here I shall cite Bernard-Henri Lévy’s analysis
of the new form of what is coming our way:

Anti-Semitism has a history. Over the ages it
has taken on different forms, but they each correspond to what the spirit of
the times was willing or able to hear. I believe that, for reasons that it
would be impossible to detail here, the only anti-Semitism that could possibly
‘work’ in this day and age, the only one capable of abusing and mobilising a
broad swathe of women and men, as it did in other periods, is one that can tie
together the threefold thread of anti-Zionism (Jews who support a ‘deadly
Israel’), negationism (an unscrupulous people capable of inventing or
exploiting the martyrdom of its own so as to reach its goals), and competitive
victimhood (the memory of the Holocaust functioning as a screen over other
massacres across the planet). Well, Dieudonné was in the process of joining all
three.[xiii]

The astonishing response that Nicolas Bedos
has directed at Dieudonné has opened a further question as to the status of the
comedian who, in our civilisation of mass democratic individualism, goes
straight for the stomach. Besides, the stomach is not enough. These days it
takes all the viscera to make oneself heard. This brings with it an unexpected
consequence: television is losing its softness as a medium, with everyone
edging towards the violence of the internet.

 Translated
from the French by A. R. Price