A Different Kind of Negation

In our last discussion we began with the provocative statement by Bruce Fink who claims, following Freud, that the unconscious is the exact opposite of consciousness. This opened a discussion of negation more generally, and what ‘exact opposite’ could mean in this context. We looked at Badiou’s three forms of negation (classical, intuitionist, and paraconsistent) that might highlight Fink’s dubious statement, and it was left an open question whether the idea makes much sense or not from the perspective of logic. Here, I would like to spend some time getting more specific about the ontological status of the unconscious and what it means for the subject of psychoanalysis—the famous “split subject”, a subject torn between two kinds of being.

So, let’s begin with a few guiding questions:

1.      What kind of negation is operative in the unconscious, and in what sense is the unconscious a negation of consciousness?

2.      What is the primary status of loss or negation for the subject such that it produces the split subject?

I cannot promise that both questions will get adequate treatment here. But at least we can get a start somewhere for the purposes of our genealogy of nothingness from a psychoanalytical perspective. The hope is that these ideas will line up at some level with the philosophical ideas of Sartre, Badiou, and other philosophers concerned with metaphysics, ethics, and politics.

The Not-Mother

To answer our first question—what kind of negation is the unconscious? —we must answer our second. Because we cannot talk meaningfully about the kind of negation the unconscious is or does without assessing what psychoanalysis has to say about negation in general.

In Seminar I, Lacan says that “for repression to be possible, there must be a beyond of repression, something final, already primitively constituted, an initial nucleus of the repressed, which not only is unacknowledged, but which, for not being formulated, is literally as if it didn’t exist… it is the center of attraction, calling up all the subsequent repressions” (1991/1953-54, p. 43).

Lacan tells us that in Freud, from the beginning of analytic work, the concern of primal repression is evident. If repression is operative—and it clearly is—then there must be something which initially started the reign of repression in the subject, right? There must be a prototype of repression to get the whole chain started. And that is what is at issue for us here. (But so far, we can already mention a link to Sartre, who claims that, in the history of everything, the only proper event to have happened is the emergence of the for-itself, which happens all at once, not in a gradient or in stages.)

Alenka Zupančič wrote a brilliant commentary on Freud’s short essay “Negation” (1925). I will follow her argumentation here to sketch out the philosophical problems embedded in the psychoanalytic gesture of the negativity of the unconscious.

In “Negation”, Freud gives an example of a classic negation found in his clinic. The patient has a dream with a woman in it. When asked who the woman is, the patient cannot recall her identity, he doesn’t recognize it during his recollection to Freud. When asked if it might be his mother, the patient emphatically refused: “It is not mother.” Okay, so there is a negation: not-mother. But sometimes, it really was the mother in the dream, so the analyst might press on and get the patient to recognize the woman from the dream as, indeed, his mother. Another negation: “It is not not-mother.” This is very different, according to Zupančič, than saying “It is mother.” We are not moving from negation to a positing. We are moving from negation to negation of that negation. In other words, “We can accept the (repressed) content, eliminate it, but we cannot eliminate the structure of the gap, or crack, that generates it” (2012).

This is one reason why it is so difficult to speak of a ‘cure’ in psychoanalysis, because even if repression were removed in every dream, slip, or symptom presented to the clinician, the structure of the split, or fractured, psyche that makes us human itself cannot be removed, no matter how long the analysis is or how good the analyst is.

Thinking back to our discussion of logic and negation, we can say something more about the logical structure of the unconscious, and of the split subject. Zupančič clearly states that the logic presented in Freud’s paper is neither classical nor intuitionistic. A negation need not produce an affirmation; it might even produce a third term. Therefore, both the law of excluded middle and of non-contradiction have been violated. What then? With the concept of not-mother—i.e., negation of negation—we have to look for a model of negation which can account for this weird phenomenon that psychoanalysis discovered.

Zupančič asks this question in the following way: if there is a third which is produced in a negation (assuming no affirmative position follows), what is the nature of the third? “Is it something in between, a combination of two, a little bit of this and a little bit of that, a nuance with a certain degree of intensity? Or is it effectively something else (that is, precisely something “third”), with its own ontological status, even if the latter turns out to be very paradoxical? The discovery of the unconscious, and its real, brings forth the second possibility.”

In a strange way—and we’ll build this up here—we come back to a ‘paradoxical twist’ on classical logic.

In Freud’s “Negation” there is an interesting theory of the origin of the thinking subject in two steps. The first step is driven by the pleasure principle, and it dictates to the organism if something will be rejected (spit out; excluded) or accepted (taken in; included) based on how it feels. So, things that produce bad feelings are excluded, and things that produce good feelings are included. This is the first cut into the world of indifference, of objects without meaning or orientation.

But do we then have two different things (internal and external) after the work of the pleasure principle? Yes, but we also get a third thing: “1) affirmation (some positivity); 2) negation (absence, what is not); and 3) the place, or locus, of their difference” (Zupančič, 2012). In other words, we now have two elements which have been differentiated as well as the field or space in between them, which is not eradicated but sustained.

Within this movement, subjectivity emerges containing not only a negation (external or internal) but also the very form or structure of negativity as such, i.e., nothingness. This is why we cannot have merely a negation plain and simple, which is then supplanted by its opposite, the affirmation. Subjectivity is shot through with negativity as such. Sartre was on to something, then, when he claimed that human reality is fundamentally nothingness.

The Stumbling of Speech

So, to return to our first two questions above, we can provide an answer to the first one and a speculation about the second.

First, we can say that the relationship between the unconscious and the conscious is not a clear-cut affirmation/negation, but rather an affirmation+negation. In this case, we can have something like a not-mother, an entity which embodies both being and nothingness.

Second, what is true of the psyche that it can repeat repression as a mechanism? Zupančič (2012) very clearly states that “the inaugural ‘this is not mother’ contains a … dimension of truth; it indicates that whatever I can refind in reality is never IT.” The finding of an object is always a refinding because of the structural gap in subjectivity. What is true of the psyche is the inaugural negation—and we can think of every negation that comes after this as a repetition, a re-enactment, of this negation.

The tricky part—a frustrating part for me when researching this—is that we can’t directly get at this inaugural negation, or fundamental nothingness. Philosophers and psychoanalytic theorists have many ways of saying this, from the for-itself’s inability to found itself to primal repression to the effects of the signifier and finally to Zupančič’s statement that we can never really find IT. There’s a gaping hole in between the tools of these fields and the things which ground them, leaving the pursuit, to an extent, a bit futile. We encountered this in Sartre in the first essay: namely, while he is fantastic at describing the effects of nothingness and the dynamics of how it works, he cannot give an account for where it comes from. This is a difficulty which will run through our exploration of nothingness—and not without good reason!

The difficulty—and maybe the impossibility—of giving a solid and fundamental account of primary nothingness reveals the concept of nothingness as much as any great formulation of nothingness and its effects. The effect is similar to looking directly at a star in the night sky rather than looking just to the side of it. When you look at it straight on, it disappears; but when you look just to the side of it, you can see it shimmering in the corner of your eye.

The search for the ultimate gesture of nothingness is like the patient entering analysis looking to unravel her entire life, to get at the “core” of everything. But this never happens for structural reasons: nothingness is not being, it is not a thing—so it cannot be grabbed to held or discovered or mastered. The limitations of our method say something about the concept we are looking for. To use a phrase in our later essays, what is unsayable is doing a lot of work.

This is perhaps the main reason that Rudolf Carnap’s (1931) strict requirements for a concept in philosophy fall short here and why something like psychoanalysis and Peter Rollins’ methods may be more fruitful. Both methods recognize the ultimate impossibility of nothingness and are more invested in examining its effects, implications, and ethics.

This aporia opens a few lines of investigation. From the basic impossibility introduced into subjectivity by this nothingness, existentialist thinkers have argued that we enter the very human realm of anxiety, anguish, or desire. This kind of thinking is found in Heidegger, Sartre, Marcel, Kojève, and others. We can also get from subjectivity to ontology, from the human to reality. Zupančič’s essay begins to breach this area, for instance, by asking what the ontological implications of this ‘inaugural negation’ might be. Additionally, we can also get to a kind of mysticism by the attempt to position oneself ethically to the absolute nothingness (e.g., in negative or apophatic theology). All these positions are important and interesting to pursue, and I plan on tackling these issues in following essays. But more immediately, we must take up Lacan’s quote from the beginning of the present piece: “[the nothingness] is the center of attraction, calling up all the subsequent repressions”. What does this mean for a psychoanalytic practice? What kind of relationship can the subject assume in relation to negation, both structural and particular? This is the topic of the next essay.

References

A. Zupančič, “Not-Mother: On Freud’s Verneinung” (2012).

J. Lacan, Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique (1991/1953-54).

S. Freud, “Negation” (1925).

R. Carnap, “Overcoming of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language” (1931).