foreclosure

Music: Ciccone Youth: The Whitey Album (1988)

Yesterday I finished a draft of a critical essay on the film Fight Club that I am coauthoring with Tom Frentz. It's our second project together and not likely to be our last because, well, because writing together is a blast! The essay began as Tom's counterargument to the work of Brookey and Westerfelhaus, who use Freud to critique Fight Club as a heteronormative exploration of homoerotic desire. Tom thought it was odd that they ignore the role of mother in the film. I think it is too, since the film seems to chronicle the Narrator's attempt to disassociate from mother/dependency/capitalism. I was invited to tie Tom's reading to contemporary anxities about masculinity, which I've tied into primary identification. The essay ended up becoming a warning about the decline of father figures in our time, which I tie into murderous rampages on the one hand and cutting on the other (the pivotal scene in Fight Club, for example, is the self-mutilation with lye, an attempt to inscribe the paternal metaphor literally on the body).

This essay is the second of three essay I have planned to work on concerning fathers. The first one just came out in CSMC ("Father Trouble"); this one with Tom is about to ship out ("Fight for Father"); and I have in mind a third essay---perhaps co-written with Chris Lundberg, though he doesn't know this yet---on the public psychosis of Tom Cruise, which I've blogged about before. Yet before I move on to these projects, I have to shift back to Zombies with Shaun, and then try to get some of my own book written (which is what I'm on leave to do anyway).

On a completely unrelated tangent: I'm this close [holds fingers very close together] from leaving RSA and boycotting the damn conference. Although the conference is not until the END OF MAY, they're threatening to drop people from the program if they don't register by THIS FRIDAY, four freakin' months early. What is wrong with the RSA leadership? I've already lost a co-author because she was turned off by RSA's silly super-early stance. I mean, first we complain that no more conventions should be held in five star hotels (maybe full professors can afford that, but I cannot); now the blue-blood urge is demanding super-early payment. WTF? I'm not happy with RSA.

Ok, so, now that my gripe is out of my system, some writing from yesterday. I'm not sure I have my Lacanian concepts straight (e.g., the relationship between the paternal metaphor/Name-of-the-Father/castration), but I think I managed to pump out a rather lucid yet economical explanation of foreclosure as the onset of psychosis. Let's see if this makes sense to anyone:

Perhaps the most important element of Lacan's re-reading of the Freudian Oedipal myths concerns the way in which he applied them to the "real world." Our contemporary concern with the "crisis of masculinity" and the (presumably) increasing paucity of paternal role models reflects a concern during Lacan's time as well. Dylan Evans explains:

Lacan's emphasis on the importance of the father can be seen as a reaction against the tendency of [popular psychoanalytic theories in Britain and the United States] to place the mother-child relation at the heart of psychoanalytic theory. In opposition to this tendency, Lacan continually stresses the role of the father as a third term who, by mediating the imaginary dual relation between mother and child, saves the child from psychosis and makes possible an entry into social existence. The father is thus more than a mere rival with whom the subject competes for the mother's love; he is the representative of the social order as such, and only by identifying with the father in the Oedipus complex can the subject gain entry to this order. (61)

Unless something mediates the original dyadic relation between mother than child, the child is caught in a scene of false plenitude and subject to the unbridled enjoyment of the mother. Broadly conceived, psychosis denotes a state in which an individual has not succumbed to the law and integrated the "paternal metaphor," an individual who has not accepted the symbolic order as one that bars certain kinds of enjoyment (e.g., incest). Extending Freud's concept of Verwerfung ("repudiation"), Lacan terms this failure to integrate and separate the "foreclosure of the Law-of-the-Father" (Écrits 481). "What is perceptible in the phenomenon of everything that takes place in psychosis," asserts Lacan, "is that it is a question of the subject's access to a signifier as such and the impossibility of that access" (Book III, 321). The Name-of-the-Father is Lacan's term for the signifier as such, the first or fundamental signifier.

If sex is not (initially) consequential in Lacan's rendering of the Oedipal, then why does he denote the first signifier as the Name-of-the-Father? The first reason is historical and cultural: "It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the basis of the function which, since the dawn of historical time, has identified his person with the figure of the law" (Écrits 230). Evans also stresses "the name of the father" is a homophonic play on "the 'no' of the father" in French (119), hence, "the name of the father" is phrase that denotes simultaneously the introduction of language into a subject's being and the first conception of recalcitrance and limit: "no!" Culturally the figure associated with the power of "no!" is the father or the state, both of which are coded masculine (for constructed, not essential, reasons). Finally, in his seminar on psychoses Lacan capitalizes the phrase to denote more specific functions: the Name-of-the-Father also denotes a signifier that "fixes" the swirl of incoherent signifiers, experienced by a young subject as meaningless babble, by first conferring identity (literally in terms of one's sir-name, which gives one a place in the social-symbolic order) and second by locating limits ("thou shalt not"; Evans 119). Hence, foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father betokens an uncertain social position ("who am I?") and ignorance about what is and is not permissible in the world. Foreclosure thus results in psychosis, however, this does not necessarily mean one will behave psychotically. Psychotic behavior only results when one confronts an inadmissible signifier—-which is almost always a crisis of identity brought about by a life event, a trauma, and so on.

Understood as a failure to accept limits or internalize one's identity, psychosis is thus a kind of infinite, narcissistic regress prior to sexual differentiation, prior to the object-choice of secondary identification, a failure to be "cut" or "castrated" by the symbolic order such that one can get some distance between objects and the names for those objects. Consequently there is no "difference" in psychosis. The failure to complete the Oedipus Complex thus results in a psychosis which is neither homosocial nor homoerotic: psychosis is simply homohomohomo-ad inifinitim, as the individual has no sense of (m)Other, only an undifferentiated, whole, and unmediated sense of self without limits. In this reading, what Westerfelhaus and Brookey identify as "homoeroticism" in Fight Club must be strictly situated in "extra-text," in the reception of spectators who are primed, for example, to see Brad Pitt's half-naked body as a homoerotic tease because of the Hollywood star-system. Within the diagetic space of the film itself, however, the Narrator's charged relation to Tyler represents psychosis, a deadlock of primal or primary narcissism that results in eruptions of violence toward the self or others.