Let us begin with a declaration: declarations seemingly converge on a double potentiality, an either/or of love or war. But this is a declaration of partiality: a point of departure. I am not a fan of this form of psychoanalytic writing. I have a compulsive tendency to glaze over whenever confronted with a text peppered with a vocabulary involving ‘signifiers’ and ‘metonymy’. And sadly not the glazing over that is so often the prelude to the altered, heightened state of trance that is so redolent of the psychoanalytic experience. My difficulty is that I find so much of this stuff irretrievably dull; it does not sing (to me). But I have a difficulty with my difficulty. I fear that it dulls my response to that which in all seriousness, I assume to have a serious intent. There is a very real danger that my partiality congeals into becoming partisan. I may, as Badiou described those American commentators who so readily, so violently dismissed Derrida as an ‘abstruse thinker’, become too ‘Texan’—and that will never do.
So let us allow that, as an exegesis of a certain form of psychoanalytic theorizing, the ideas put forward in this essay have a certain merit. Nevertheless, almost before we have set off, we stumble up against a certain thicket of problematic, a potential for a confusion of terms. Part of the difficulty is that Rosolato appears not to go far enough. Not far enough at all. And we do not have to go very far to discern this. In his initial sentence ‘the unconscious’ is characterized by ‘an intentionality that aims at the attainment of pleasure and the flight from pain’. Yet surely if the unconscious is particularly implicated in anything it would surely be beyond the pleasure principle. Furthermore ‘the discovery yielded by psychoanalysis’ can hardly be upheld as ‘the unconscious’ as any self respecting historian of psychology would so readily testify. The unconscious always already being mythological, a myth that sets out to dislodge the myth of consciousness that could be returned to itself, as transparent, self same. Rather it is the ‘Death
drive' and ‘the compulsion to repeat’ so enmeshed in the aforementioned concerns of Beyond the Pleasure Principle that has a proximity to any notion of Freud's discovery. Even then, ‘discovery’ might be over-egging things. But there is an irresistible temptation to substitute the death drive for the unconscious at the beginning of the second paragraph and then perhaps we might have lift off.
This ‘double potentiality’ which we might re-frame as a structural duplicity hardly seems to be confined to any idea of ‘the unconscious’, but rather to the ideas that psychoanalysis proposes. Letting pass a number of minor infelicities (are ‘prohibitions voiced by parents’ genuinely ‘a major cause of libidinal and moral psychic conflicts? and strictly speaking for anything ‘to be located outside significance’ appears incoherent) it is possible to note that the author almost surreptitiously, ‘for simplicity's sake’, inches towards an acknowledgment that much of what is at stake in all this is, or ‘can be attributed to the death drive’.
And this is where things become more confused and potentially confusing, potentially doubled even. The idea that from ‘la belle indifference’ to fixed and banal explanations the specific result is the disappearance of the sense of an intentionality in relation to desire starts to look as if we are in the realm of resistance (or an ‘obstructive functioning’ as Rosolato dubs it). And yet for the most part it appears safe to assume that there will always be intentionality in play in any resistance. By underscoring the so called ‘negative potentiality’ as a ‘flight from sense’, as Rosolato does, the possibility of a drive to nonsense, to a meaningless obliteration of meaning appears to be extruded. In other words sense is prioritized. Yet Freud's project was to oppose all monism with his emphasis on the dual drives by speaking of a death drive. But quite where one might lodge this flight to nonsense, on which side of a hypothetical divide, which would always have a potentiality of insistent instability, and would never presuppose that one would be more originary than the other: would it be on the side of the drive for pleasure, or on the side of the drive for the non-meaning of death? If the latter, it is clearly quite other than resistance.
Let us pause for a moment. Shift the tone. I am having lunch with a good friend, Paul Zeal who also happens to be ‘a psychoanalyst’. And it turns out that, whilst enjoying an exquisite portion of scallops, we are
talking about certain events in my life. With a look of intense seriousness, a frown even, he asks ‘But did you know what you were doing?’ But a moment later, he sits back, relaxes and a wide grin spreads across his face, and he answers his own question, ‘But of course not, we never do’. And we both laugh—helplessly.
And this is what appears to be at stake in Rosolato's essay. Are we both, in that moment, collusively engaging in a flight from sense, an ‘avoidance of unpleasure’, a flight to the sanctuary of the truth of the ‘unknown’, the resting up place of the ‘immutable explanation’? A hysterical dissociation even? Or are we returned, entirely helpless in the face of the laughable absurdity that we might rendezvous with some ultimate truth ‘on the basis of a postulated origin’ of the complexity of my motivations. Which, I hasten to add, with the arrival of a further bottle, we continue to explore late into the afternoon. Some might say interminably.
Rosolato imagines the unconscious as a locus of repressed contents sustaining this notion of the ‘positive potentiality … which is a call for sense’ all predicated on this ‘postulated origin’—this ultimate but entirely fictitious rendezvous which (some) psychoanalysis works so laboriously towards. And it is not that a production of meaning is not part of what is involved in any psychoanalysis but this emphasis on making sense leaves too much out. That which can understandably be put forward as a ‘positive potentiality’ now doubles back on itself, starts to look increasingly negative. But unfortunately that is where I set out from.