The God Who Deconstructs Himself

Sovereignty and Subjectivity Between Freud, Bataille, and Derrida

Nick Mansfield

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780823232437
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

No topic has caused more discussion in recent philosophy and political theory than sovereignty. From late Foucault to Agamben, and from Guantanamo Bay to the 'war on terror, ' the issue of the extent and the nature of the sovereign has given theoretical debates their currency and urgency. New thinking on sovereignty has always imagined the styles of human selfhood that each regime involves. Each denomination of sovereignty requires a specific mode of subjectivity to explain its meaning and facilitate its operation. The aim of this book is to help outline Jacques Derrida's thinking on sovereignty - a theme which increasingly attracted Derrida towards the end of his career - in its relationship to subjectivity. It investigates the late work Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, as not only Derrida's fullest statement of his thinking on sovereignty, but also as the destination of his career-long interest in questions of politics and self-identity. The book argues that in Derrida's thinking of the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity - and the related themes of unconditionality and ipseity - we can detect the outline of Bataille's adaptation of Freud. Freud completed his 'metapsychology, ' by defining the 'economic' nature of subjectivity. In Bataille's hands, this economic theory became a key to the nature of inter-relationship in general, specifically the complex and shifting relationship between subjectivity and power. In playing with Bataille's legacy, Derrida connects not only with the irrepressibly outrageous thinking of philosophy's most self-consciously transgressive thinker, but with the early twentieth century scientific revolution through which 'energy' became ontology. As with so many of the forebears who influenced him, Derrida echoes and adapts Bataille's thinking while radically de-literalising it. The results are crucial for understanding Derrida's views on power, subjectivity and representation, as well as all of the other key themes in late Derrida: hospitality, justice, otherness and the gift.

Chapter 1: Economies of Subjectivity

Bataille After Freud

Bataille links subjectivity and sovereignty by way of a thinking of an economics of energy. Energy emerges as a universal term for matter, one that allows the quantification of all ontologies and events and thus of their ever open and ever motile interrelationship. This generalization of energy as a description of both substance and transformation is part of a wider scientific revolution in the consideration of the order of things. This change not only reduces all things to a single quantifiable substance, but also allows the material and the spiritual to touch one another. Politics and subjectivity, the physical tendency and the emotional impulse thus become articulable. Energy allows their connections to be spoken. The other term that facilitated the representation of subjectivity in relation to all its possible intimates was, interestingly and importantly, economics, first in Freud, then later in Bataille. Derrida had a complex relationship to the complex that links energy and subjectivity as an economy. Yet, consistently his work implicitly responds to the innovations of Freud and Bataille here.

It is important to consider the authority of the term economics. In Freud, the economic model was intended as the completion of the metapsychological investigation of the human subject. It aimed to make good the inadequacies of the topological and dynamic models and to provide the total picture that they were incapable of producing. In Freud, then, it is the subject itself that is first and fundamentally economic. In Bataille, the economic is a language to describe the flows that structure the cosmos in terms of its first and most fundamental material, energy. In these modern usages, the economics of energy becomes the first principle of all kinds of being. It is interesting to note that, through the modern period, economics has increasingly been a contender for the title of the primary language of sociality and political meaning. In the economic fundamentalism that has dominated Western social and political discourse since the 1980s—what Fredric Jameson astutely called the pursuit of “economics by purely economic means” (Jameson in Sprinker 1999, 55)—this same logic of economics as an incontestably fundamental, even parametaphysical discourse has grown stronger. Economics has become a language that nothing can supersede, and a conception of being that nothing can precede. It is no accident, therefore, that it has played in this same period a highly significant role in the conceptualization of human subjectivity and of the possibilities with which it may connect.

That sovereignty emerges here in its relationship with subjectivity is also highly significant. As a locus both of materiality and spirituality, the economy of energy allows for the unique collocation, even convergence, of mystical authority and physical power that we know as sovereignty. Economics then provides the way in which subjectivity and sovereignty can be linked as languages of power, individuality, physicality, and the ineffable. As we will see, the discourse of economics and the discussions that it has given rise to touch, like sovereignty itself, on the most violent and the most sublime, the most brutally physical and the most physically intangible of identities, on the most immediately conditioned and the most ethereally unconditional. This universalism of the economics of energy has been little recognized as the strong model it is for the West’s subjective and political, subjecto-political modernity, seeping into all our languages, but oddly a proud property of none of them.

Freud’s thinking of the subject in relation to energy emerges in a historical moment when energy rose to prominence as a definition of all matter. Lysa Hochroth has outlined the connections between Bataille’s thinking on the primacy of energy and the scientific developments of the time, particularly in the field of thermodynamics, and the work of Helm, Ostwald, and the energeticists (Hochroth 1995, 64–77). She writes that energeticism begins “by replacing the notion of force or work with one of energy, and then continues to substitute energy for matter as the basic substance of the physical world. In its most absolute form, the energeticists’ theory is that everything is energy: mind, matter and spirit” (Hochroth 1995, 68). The energeticists were ambitious, therefore, in the claim they were making for energy not only as a material universal but as applicable across all identity and experience. Hochroth argues that there are significant differences between what Ostwald, for example, and Bataille were attempting. She writes: “Ostwald is attempting to launch an energeticism that will explain all phenomena as a scientific concept. Bataille’s aim is philosophical, spiritual and political” (76). However, there remains much in common between the two thinkers: “Ostwald and Bataille both attempted to expand thermodynamics through energeticist theory, thereby extending its relevance to all the sciences and all human activities. To make such applications both men managed to view everything in terms of the emission and captation of energies in transformation” (71).

The opposition between, on the one hand, scientific discourse and, on the other, “philosophical, spiritual and political” discourse might not have meant so much to Bataille. Given the historical line of descent between Surrealism and contemporary art practices, especially in multimedia and digital performance, that deconstructs the false dichotomy between the “two cultures,” it would probably be more profitable to see the commonality between Bataille and energeticism as a crucial historical moment in which supposedly mutually exclusive discourses interpenetrated and influenced one another. Crucially, of course, this point is reinforced by the fact that the other significant locus in which energy was taken up as a way of describing subjectivity was psychoanalysis, itself also a critical moment in the deconstruction of the opposition between scientific and cultural discourses. Suffice it to say that Hochroth’s work helps us to see that the advancement of energy as a way of discussing subjectivity is part of a crucial scientific/cultural development in Western thought, one to which poststructuralism and Derrida’s work must be seen to relate. In this way, Bataille’s thought may be truer to the mainstream of modern Western common ontological discourse than is usually thought.

The aim of this chapter is to show the relationship between Freud’s thinking and Bataille’s thinking on the subject as either itself an economy of energy or as located in one. It is from this that the model of sovereignty that we want to trace into Derrida first arises in Bataille’s consideration of the politics of subjectivity.

How did the economics of energy develop as the completion of the Freudian model of the subject? Psychoanalysis established itself as a way of thinking about the psyche dynamically. The dynamic interrelationship of one psychic “system” (Freud 1984, 175) with another led next to the development of a topographical model of the structure of the psyche. Yet, somehow this schema outlining the relationships among events and settings in the psyche was neither fluid nor accurate enough to describe the full force of the tensions and contradictions within the mental apparatus. It was to what he called an “economic” model that Freud turned to supplement and subsume these former inadequate or incomplete models. The economic model “endeavours to follow out the vicissitudes of amounts of excitation and to arrive at least at some relative estimate of their magnitude” (184). The development of this model is described both as an “addition” (275) to the dynamic and topographical models and as “the consummation of psychoanalytic research” (184). In fact, so significant is it as a development that it allows Freud to announce that, when it is accomplished, it represents the completion of the description of the psychical processes that can now properly be spoken of as “metapsychological” (184).

The key point of interest for the economic model of the subject is that it understands the psyche in terms of shifting quantities as they encounter one another. In the essay “The Unconscious,” these quantities maintain a sense of drama and flow, of exchange and unstable mutual engagement. By Beyond the Pleasure Principle and “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” however, their meaning has narrowed to “the consideration of the yield of pleasure involved” (283), or, in other words, the return that a certain practice brings to the subject. There is a shift, then, from the subjective economy as a kind of field of contending forces, a chaotic marketplace of energized evaluations contesting with one another, to a simple balance sheet of profit and loss. This is crucial not only because it elides the issue of signification, which, as we shall see, is important to our understanding of exactly what we are dealing with when we see subjectivity described in terms of economics, but also because it shows a progressive retreat from Freud’s interest in a certain subjective intensity and instability. The always renewable possibility of destabilization, in contrast, will be crucial to both Bataille’s economics of power and Derrida’s thinking of both subjectivity and sovereignty.

Freud unfolds the economic model of the subject in “The Unconscious” by describing repression in terms of the investment and withdrawal of quantities of psychic energy. At the threshold of repression, the repressible idea is lying either in the preconscious or in the conscious:

Repression can only consist in withdrawing from the idea the (pre)conscious cathexis which belongs to the system Pcs. The idea then remains either uncathected, or receives cathexis from the Ucs., or retains the Ucs. cathexis which it already had. Thus there is the withdrawal of the preconscious cathexis, retention of the unconscious cathexis, or replacement of the preconscious cathexis by an unconscious one. (183)

According to Freud’s vision, ideas ride like flotsam on waves of psychic energy. These waves grasp and release ideas, latching onto or discarding them in a ceaseless movement. This is not a rationalized or systematic process. The cathexis that underprops an idea may come from the conscious, preconscious, or unconscious or from a combination of these. The loss of “(pre)conscious cathexis” (the definition of repression) may involve an idea receiving cathexis from the unconscious or retaining an unconscious cathexis that it already had. In other words, the repressible idea may have already been the object of more than one investment. Psychic energy is thus a multiple streaming, whose individual currents may invest something on their own, as an alternative to another stream of energy or in an unsystematic combination. Repression is a specific event in the contending play of these streams, the crucial moment when preconscious cathexis withdraws and unconscious cathexis alone persists or arises for the first time.

This leads to a second important point: Streams of cathectic energy are alternatives or substitutes for one another. An idea has no significance unless it is supported by cathectic energy, and, if one particular stream lapses, another takes its place, either by expanding to take over the role by itself or by arising to perform it for the first time. This idea is crucial to all subsequent uses of the term economy: The economy is a process of the mutual substitution of alternative impulses. The idea rides one stream of cathexis or another. These streams either lessen or lapse in the face of one another, but an absolute absence, a vacuum, never seems to develop. The psyche is always full. Different strands of cathectic energy may be differently badged or have different value according to their putative “location” in a hypothetical psychic topography. But there is a rapid, almost automatic substitution of one cathexis for another. According to Laplanche and Pontalis, the most central terms in Freud’s explanation for the mechanics of the unconscious—condensation and displacement—which reflect an understanding of mental processes as an alternation and substitution of investments and identifications from the analysis of dreams on, themselves bear “immediately economic overtones” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1974, 128). The implication of this reading is that Freud was always an economist, even before he used the term, precisely because of his emphasis on the play of ideas according to the substitution and alternation of energies.

The third thing to emerge from this passage is the relative autonomy of cathectic energy. Streams of energy can be nominated in one way or another, and they belong somewhere, but their operation is inevitable, unmotivated, and cannot not take place. The psyche cannot be without these impulses of mental energy, and they are not the mere agents of earlier or prior entities. The concept “economics” tolerates no ancestors. It is never preceded. We see the psyche as a field of contending streams of energy that select, abandon or persist in their fixation on specific “ideas.” These streams are alternatives to one another, and, in that sense at least, are more or less equivalent, regardless of their nominal location. This is why they can substitute for one another. Their meaning is provided only by their location, rather than by any prior motivating impulse. It is this insistence on the absolute priority of the economic that justifies its definition in terms of energy, which, as we have seen, is developing through modernity as the most authoritative term for all ontologies. Economics is the most fundamental of all languages. The authority this gives economics also legitimizes its claim to be the proper discourse for what will become modernity’s most important language for human being—subjectivity—and its most volatile and ineluctable image of social power—sovereignty. As we will see in Derrida’s Given Time, even the “gift” that both sets the economy in motion and inevitably destabilizes it is never extra- or discretely pre-economic. It is, at most, the aneconomic dimension of the economy and so makes sense only in relation to it. It cannot exist without or prior to it.

Returning to Freud, we can ask whether we have arrived at the full economic model of the subject yet. It is hard to tell. Freud has more to say before he produces the term, yet, when the term appears, it is phrased in this way: “We see how we have gradually been led into adopting a third point of view in our account of psychical phenomena” (184). We have been immersed in economic thinking about the subject before we know or say so, but when did we begin? There is not a clear dividing line between pre-economic and economic thinking. We suddenly look around and find that we are already there (have always been there, imply Laplanche and Pontalis). And economics has not been chosen by us as much as we have been led (by it) to it.

This implies that, although there is one more key point to make before the term “economics” actually arises, the idea of the subject as the site of contending cathexes that rival one another and are self-motivated is already economic. In other words, the economic is always already there: We find that when we were thinking something else, we were always already thinking economics. Even though it is not a logic that we identify as the most attractive or useful, we find when we look around that what we are already doing cannot be said to resist it or, in fact, even be exempt from it. This is not only significant as a literal event, but the ease of its recognition—our inability to resist conceding economics or to risk refusing it, our weakness in the face of its inevitability, even if we are not right that what we are doing is economics—is absolutely crucial and telling. It is definitive of the meaning and function of the term, both in theory and indeed in the wider culture, where practices and institutions once explained in terms of humanism, spirit, justice, nature, truth, and so on have all conceded their conformity to a deeper, incontestable economic logic, not imposed on them but seemingly revealed as their necessary prior structure and fundamental truth.

However, we have jumped ahead of ourselves: There is one more point that Freud makes before the term economics actually appears. After outlining the process of repression, a riddle emerges. Why, when the (pre)conscious cathexis withdraws to be substituted by an unconscious cathexis, does the idea not repeatedly resume its drive to enter the conscious mind, thus dooming the psyche to an endlessly repeated process that could not really be given such a stable denomination as “repression”? Similarly, what if an idea has not yet attained (pre)conscious cathexis? How can such an idea be repressed? The answer to these mysteries is to assume that there is another energy stream that holds the repressed idea in place and that is also able to stop other ideas that have not yet received (pre)conscious cathexis from doing so. Thus the withdrawal of (pre)conscious cathexis, and its substitution by unconscious cathexis, is not enough to make for repression. There has to be a counter-energy (an anticathexis) that will protect the (pre)conscious from the persistence of now unconscious ideas and ideas that have only ever been unconscious.

Thus repression demonstrates that cathectic energies not only are rivals to one another but positively oppose and contest one another. Cathexis meets anticathexis. In fact, crucially, cathexis can become anticathexis: “It is very possible that it is precisely the cathexis which is withdrawn from the idea that is used for anticathexis” (184), though it is unclear if this is a statement of theoretical speculation or a description of something that may or may not happen. This conclusion can be drawn, however: Cathectic energies attain their value and identity by belonging to either the (pre)conscious or the unconscious mind. Other than this, however, they can alternate and substitute for one another; they can reverse direction, changing from the motivating of ideas to resisting them, and they seem to satisfy only themselves. The economics of energy is a self-contained but always internally riven field.

In the face-off between cathexis and anticathexis, different quantities of psychic energy meet one another. Yet repression does not remain a purely unstable, volatile mess. In the midst of the thrust of energies, it discovers some equilibrium. A balance develops. This is, in fact, the mystery that needs to be explained. How can the dynamic nature of mental life ever be made to settle? Or, inversely, how can a psyche in which we have discovered identities and stabilities really have been the product of such chaos? The economic model, while not abandoning either the dynamic or the topographical model, translates mental force into quantities, which in turn regulate themselves by finding a kind of balance. Only by translating all mental phenomena into quantities of a single substance—“energy”—can both the motility and the possible parity of psychic processes be imagined. It is this quantitative emphasis that the economic model allows to come into the foreground. This is why the economic model completes the metapsychological project and can be seen as the culmination of psychoanalysis or, indeed, as its buried but persistent theme. The economy is a site of both balance and chaos and both stability and force. By translating mental processes into quantities of energy, the economy is revealed as a state, governed by regularities, but ones that are themselves always the product of danger. The economy, in other words, is a state at war with—and by way of—itself. In it, there is no parity without violence or vice versa. We will see how this image of the economy of energy as an unstable nonsystem will allow a model of charismatic but cruel and violent authority to develop in Bataille, transformed in Derrida into a conception of a power that resists itself, a sovereignty contra sovereignty.

What Freud’s analysis does, therefore, is to emphasize that the process of alternation and antagonism in the mental apparatus is one of rival and competing forces. We are not dealing here with a simple unfolding process of maturation that achieves a rational and logical stability. The metapsychological reading makes clear that whatever stability develops in the psyche is the result of violent displacements of energy, which do not collaborate with one another but threaten, check, and resist one another, even to the point of developing a complex defensive architecture. Suddenly, as soon as it is announced as a key explanatory concept, the economy is a meaningful organization momentarily grasped in the middle of a field of forces: risk as well as consolidation, danger if also improvement, tension, yes, and stability. The balance is a balance of force, not of coordination. Whatever prosperity it produces floats on a surface of paranoia and resistance.

This becomes clear when Freud tries to give an example of the economic or, at least, metapsychological analysis of a neurosis—in this case, “anxiety hysteria,” in which tropes of violence, conflict, and war predominate. In the first stage of the neurosis, a love-impulse is seeking access to the preconscious. The cathexis that the preconscious sends to meet it draws back “as though in an attempt at flight” (185), and the unopposed unconscious cathexis discharges itself as anxiety. In order to deal with this anxiety, the original preconscious cathexis (the one that had taken flight) latches onto a “substitutive idea” (185), thus rationalizing though not reducing the anxiety, which Freud describes as “uninhibitable.” This substitutive idea is thus an anticathexis trying to contest the original love-impulse, yet it does not succeed in controlling the anxiety-affect. The substitutive idea becomes a double focus of anxiety: It both allows the original love-impulse some resonance in the conscious mind and becomes a source of anxiety in itself. In fact, the second of these becomes increasingly more important.

Thus the original repression of the unconscious love-impulse has taken place by way of the withdrawal of a cathexis that should have given it its expression in the conscious, a cathexis that in turn becomes an anticathexis, producing a substitutive idea that gives some meaning to the uninhibited anxiety that the love-impulse became. In the end the anxiety attached to the substitutive idea plays a larger and larger role in the psyche and itself needs to be repressed. This happens not by the de-sensitization of “the associated environment of the substitutive idea” (186) but the opposite: by increasing its sensitivity and the sensitivity of the region around it. This heightened sensitivity makes the mental apparatus more alert to the slightest development of anxiety. This warns the preconscious cathexis that it should withdraw, reducing the possibility of fresh excitations. This complex system of defense, the construction of what Freud calls “the protecting rampart”(187), must be ever moving as the sources of excitation trouble the region of the substitutive idea. This defensive hypersensitivity is a phobia.

Thus, Freud concludes, the control of the phobia repeats at another level the original repression of the love-impulse: “The formation of substitutes by displacement has been further continued” (187). This controls the influence of the original, now repressed love-impulse but also magnifies it, by enlarging the mental space vulnerable to the excitations that would not have been set in train without it. “This enclave of unconscious influence extends to the whole phobic outer structure” (187: emphasis in original). What’s more, the danger that originally was derived from within is now projected outside, from the direction not of an instinctual impulse but of a perc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Economies of Subjectivity
• Chapter 2: Energy, Propriation, Mastery
• Chapter 3: Sovereign Counter-Sovereignty
• Chapter 4: Sovereign Counter-Sovereignty, Justice, and the Event
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index