Conceptualización: Qué es autodeterminación

What sets Lacanian psychoanalytic paradigm apart from poststructuralist dis-course theories and countless ethnographic studies is this supplementary ele-ment of speech that refuses castration by the signifier during Oedipalization—a time when the child finds a new relationship to language. That process when language begins to “speak man (sic),” as Heidegger maintained, and the child begins to speak “back” by using the empty signifier /I/ through narratives,

puns, and jokes. This refusal can take the form of masochism where castration has not been entirely completed, meaning that the symbolic Law is not fully operative. Oedipalization as the pivotal process between the Imaginary order of primary narcissism of infancy and the establishment of the Symbolic Order is absolutely crucial to the pacification of the internal aggressivity of the drives that batter on the Imaginary in the pre-Oedipal period. It is here that Lacan locates a primary masochism—at the border of the Imaginary and the Symbolic where pain begins to be turned inward on the self as the Law inter-venes. But, this is also where the jouis-sense (the jouissance of failed meaning) of the voice in the form of the superego is located. The child being “installed,”

so to speak, in the Symbolic Order during the Oedipalization process is con-solidated around the experience of voice of the Name-of-the-Father, the injunction of the Law, marking a shift from visual to auditory registers—from gaze to voice.

This “installment” is never perfect. The voice is itself split and contradic-tory. The child does not obey every command, nor does s/he know all the rules and regulations of the culture in advance. At times the child is punished for acts that seem, at first, perfectly alright to do. The punishment meted out seems senseless. As Freud showed in “A Child is Being Beaten” (1919, SE IV), which traces the vicissitudes of this primary masochism, the child (both girl and boy) represses this beating by the father. It remains unconscious. In brief, the Law seems at times meaningless and is experienced traumatically as an injunction. Eventually, the call of conscience modeled on the voice of authority installs the superego as a menacing image of punishment and power, symbolic castration has now been achieved. Yet, what makes the superego such a contradictory voice is its “benevolent severity”—its attacks on the ego in the name of the Law harbor in it a death drive to the point of the ego’s destruction. The Law brought to its extreme self-negates itself, it passes into the obscenity, into its other side—what Lacan took to be an obli-gation to transgress. It begins to say, “enjoy” your jouissance, at the same time saying, “No!” Producing conflicted guilt in its very insistence that the trespass be taken. Good and Evil are not simply treated as binaries here but as self-negated opposites: Evil brought to its self-negation forms the Good, but it also works the opposite way. Evil can become a Good with no “patho-logical” status attached to it. Radical Evil, in this account, precedes the Good that belongs to its domain at the very point where evil cancels itself out by the Good and turns into its opposite (Zizek 1993, 83–124). It is their inter-changeability, like Derrida’s (1982) now famous commentary on Plato’s pharmacy where poison can be become the cure and the cure the poison, that is so unnerving. This means ultimately a lack of absolute certainty of a universal ethics since the realm of justice always lays “beyond” the Law, and that can mean not only transgression against it but outlawed behavior to it as well, being a form of Good. Ultimately, the Law is always an arbitrary

“cut” that is always subject to an “ethics of the Real,” as an insistent com-plaint by a disenfranchised and disembodied voice from the Real.

Lacan in his Ethics Seminar (VII) insists that Kant’s categorical imperative has nothing to do with common morality, with representing communal stan-dards of the Good; rather it is pain and not pleasure that conditions the eth-ical. “The outer extremity of pleasure is unbearable to us” because it forces

“an access to the Thing” (73). In the same seminar Lacan identifies the obscene jouissance of Marquis de Sade’s philosophy of the bedroom as form-ing the internal limit of such an ethics. When the sform-ingform-ing voice becomes

“painful,” when the fantasy to protect us from pain can no longer be sus-tained through a sublimation of the Thing that lies at the very core of our Being, the singer and those who can “hear” his or her insistent voice are con-fronted with the “call” of the Other as a “revelation.” It is a sublime encounter with the object of the Law; the Law as object—as the unbearable Thing—

which the voice confronts as it approaches this forbidden zone. The most powerful music places the listener on the barrier between the Real and the Imaginary to “feel” this ethical insistence. The words as signifiers no longer hold their meaning but spill over into their excesses.

History has judged that all those participants who believed that National Socialism was for the nation’s Good—turned out to be wrong. It ended up being a sadistic execution to achieve the idealization of the Third Reich. The Jew is tortured and exterminated to purify the infected blood. No one can deny the evil that ensued. But what about all those who thought the drop-ping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an act of Evil as well?

The counter-logic that informs the superego is that without the authority of the Name-of-the-Father there would be no transgression, no injunction to jouissance, and no “evil” per se, and no “cut” of castration of establishing the Law. If there is no Law then there is no movement, no way of deciding what is and isn’t permitted ending in a stalemate: everything is forbidden or every-thing is permitted. Transgression must face a limit. The transgression to enjoy (jouissance) is therefore sustained by the Law itself, by the contradic-tory superego that splits off as its obscene underbelly. The expectation to transgress is built into the Law. Ethics, against this backdrop, revolves around the limits of the Law and its beyond. Only there, in the extimate space of the Real, do the questions of freedom and justice emerge. In brief, the Law cannot be totalized, it always lacks, and it is around this lack that an ethics of the Real emerges, which asks us to take ownership of our fantasies, that is, our desires, in the way they organize our jouissance, and hence con-sider our transgressions in that context (see jagodzinski 2002b). This would account for one of the possible meanings of “traversing your fantasy,” by sus-pending its hold on you. Such an “ethics of the Real” will reappear through-out our study, especially as developed in our chapter on Buffy, The Vampire Slayer in a forthcoming book on television fantasies. With the decentering of Oedipalization into its post-Oedipalized forms as discussed in part II, the

“ethics of the Real” takes on the utmost importance for future directions.

II

P ost-Oedipalization: Postmodern