Cogito, Madness and Religion: Derrida, Foucault and then Lacan •
.............Slavoj Zizek
The 'antagonism' of the Kantian notion of freedom (as the most conci expression of the antagonism of freedom in the bourgeois life itlf) does not reside where Adorno locates it (the autonomously lf-impod law means that freedom coincides with lf-enslavement and lf-domination, that the Kantian "spontaneity" is in actu its opposite, utter lf-control, thwarting of all spontaneous impetus), but "much more on the surface": [1] for Kant as for Rousau, the greatest moral good is to lead a fully autonomous life as a free rational agent, and the worst evil subjection to the will of another; however, Kant has to concede that man does not emerge as a free mature rational agent spontaneously, through his/her natural development, but only through the arduous process of maturation sustained by harsh discipline and education which cannot but be experienced by the subject as impod on his/her freedom, as an external coercion:
Social institutions both to nourish and to develop such independence are necessary and ar
e consistent with, do not thwart, its realization, but with freedom understood as an individual's causal agency this will always look like an external necessity that we have good reasons to try to avoid. This creates the problem of a form of dependence that can be considered constitutive of independence and that cannot be understood as a mere compromi with the particular will of another or as a parate, marginal topic of Kant's dotage. This is, in effect, the antinomy contained within the bourgeois notions of individuality, (Pippin – 118-119)
One can effectively imagine here Kant as an unexpected precursor on Foucault's thesis, from his Discipline and Punish, of the formation of the free individual through a complex t of disciplinary micro-practices - and, as Pippin doesn't wait to point out, this antinomy explodes even larger in Kant's socio-historical reflections, focud on the notion of "unsocial sociability": what is Kant's notion of the historical relation between democracy and monarchy if not this same thesis on the link between freedom and submission to educative dependence applied to historical process itlf? In the long term (or in its notion), democracy is the only appropriate form of government; however, becau of the i
mmaturity of people, conditions for a functioning democracy can only be established through a non-democratic monarchy which, through the exertion of itrs benevolent power, educates people to political maturity. And, as expected, Kant does not fail to mention the Mandevillean rationality of the market in which each individual's pursuit of his/her egotistic interests is what works best (much better than direct altruistic work) for the common good. At its most extreme, this brings Kant to the notion that human history itlf is a deployment of an inscrutable (?) divine plan, within which we, mortals, are destined to play a role unbeknownst to us – here, the paradox grows even stronger: not only is our freedom linked to its opposite "from below", but also "from above", i.e., not only can our freedom ari only through our submission and dependence, but our freedom as such is a moment of a larger divine plan – our freedom is not truly an aim-in-itlf, it rves a higher purpo.
舒展运动A way to clarify – if not resolve – this dilemma would have been to introduce some further crucial distinctions into the notion of "noumenal" freedom itlf. That is to say, upon a clos
er look, it becomes evident that, for Kant, discipline and eduction do not directly work on our animal nature, forging it into human individuality: as Kant points out, animals cannot be properly educated since their behavior is already predestined by their instincts. What this means is that, paradoxically, in order to be educated into freedom (qua moral autonomy and lf-responsibility), I already have to be free in a much more radical, "noumenal", monstruous even, n.
Daniel Dennett draws a convincing and insightful parallel between an animal's physical environs and human environs,; not only human artefacts (clothes, hous, tools), but also the "virtual" environs of the discursive cobweb: "Stripped of /the 'web of discours'/, an individual human being is as incomplete as a bird without feathers, a turtle without its shell." [2] A naked man is the same nonn as a shaved ape: without language (and ), man is a crippled animal - it is this lack which is supplemented by symbolic institutions and tools, so that the point made obvious today, in popular culture figures like Robocop (man is simultaneously super-animal and crippled), holds from the very beginni
ng. How do we pass from "natural" to "symbolic" environs? This passage is not direct, one cannot account for it within a continuous evolutionary narrative: something has to intervene between the two, a kind of "vanishing mediator," which is neither Nature nor Culture - this In-between is not the spark of logos magically conferred on homo sapiens, enabling him to form his supplementary virtual symbolic environs, but precily something which, although it is also no longer nature, is not yet logos, and has to be "represd" by logos - the Freudian name for this monstrous freedom, of cour, is death drive. It is interesting to note how philosophical narratives of the "birth of man" are always compelled to presuppo a moment in human (pre)history when (what will become) man, is no longer a mere animal and simultaneously not yet a "being of language," bound by symbolic Law; a moment of thoroughly "perverted," "denaturalized", "derailed" nature which is not yet culture. In his anthropological writings, Kant emphasized that the human animal needs disciplinary pressure in order to tame an uncanny "unruliness" which ems to be inherent to human nature - a wild, unconstrained propensity to insist stubbornly on one's own will, cost what it may. It is on account of this "unruliness" that the
human animal needs a Master to discipline him: discipline targets this "unruliness," not the animal nature in man.
In Hegel's 粘上日历假期Lectures on Philosophy of History, a similar role is played by the reference to "negroes": significantly, Hegel deals with "negroes" before history proper (which starts with ancient China), in the ction entitled "The Natural Context or the Geographical Basis of World History": "negroes" stand there for the human spirit in its "state of nature," they are described as a kind of perverted, monstrous child, simultaneously naive and extremely corrupted, i.e. living in the pre-lapsarian state of innocence, and, precily as such, the most cruel barbarians; part of nature and yet thoroughly denaturalized; ruthlessly manipulating nature through primitive sorcery, yet simultaneously terrified by the raging natural forces; mindlessly [3] This In-between is the "represd" of the narrative form (in this ca, of Hegel's "large narrative" of world-historical succession of spiritual forms): not nature as such, but the very break with nature which is (later) supplemented by the virtual univer of narratives. According to Sc
helling, prior to its asrtion as the medium of the rational Word, the subject is the "infinite lack of being /unendliche Mangel an Sein/," the violent gesture of contraction that negates every being outside itlf. This insight also forms the core of Hegel's notion of madness: when Hegel determines madness to be a withdrawal from the actual world, the closing of the soul into itlf, its "contraction," the cutting-off of its links with external reality, he all too quickly conceives of this withdrawal as a "regression" to the level of the "animal soul" still embedded in its natural environs and determined by the rhythm of nature (night and day, etc.). Does this withdrawal, on the contrary, not designate the vering of the links with the Umwelt, the end of the subject's immersion into its immediate natural environs, and is it, as such, not the founding gesture of "humanization"? Was this withdrawal-into-lf not accomplished by Descartes in his universal doubt and reduction to Cogito, which, as Derrida pointed out in his "Cogito and the history of madness", [4]一更是多长时间 also involves a passage through the moment of radical madness?
This brings us to the necessity of Fall: what the Kantian link between dependence and autonomy amounts to is that Fall is unavoidable, a necessary step in the moral progress of man. That is to say, in preci Kantian terms: "Fall" is the very renunciation of my radical ethical autonomy; it occurs when I take refuge in a heteronomous Law, in a Law which is experience as impod on me from the outside, i.e., the finitude in which I arch for a support to avoid the dizziness of freedom is the finitude of the external-heteronomous Law itlf. Therein resides the difficulty of being a Kantian. Every parent knows that the child’s provocations, wild and "transgressive" as they may appear, ultimately conceal and express a demand, addresd at the figure of authority, to t a firm limit, to draw a line which means "This far and no further!", thus enabling the child to achieve a clear mapping of what is possible and what is not possible. (And does the same not go also for hysteric’s provocations?) This, precily, is what the analyst refus to do, and this is what makes him so traumatic – paradoxically, it is the tting of a firm limit which is liberating, and it is the very abnce of a firm limit which is experienced as suffocating. THIS is why the Kantian autonomy of the subject is so difficult – its implicatio
n is precily that there is nobody outside, no external agent of "natural authority", who can do the job for me and t me my limit, that I mylf have to po a limit to my natural "unruliness." Although Kant famously wrote that man is an animal which needs a master, this should not deceive us: what Kant aims at is not the philosophical commonplace according to which, in contrast to animals who behavioral patterns are grounded in their inherited instincts, man lacks such firm coordinates which, therefore, have to be impod on him from the outside, through a cultural authority; Kant’s true aim is rather to point out how the very need of an external master is a deceptive lure: man needs a master in order to conceal from himlf the deadlock of his own difficult freedom and lf-responsibility. In this preci n, a truly enlightened "mature" human being is a subject who no longer needs a master, who can fully assume the heavy burden of defining his own limitations. This basic Kantian (and also Hegelian) lesson was put very clearly by Chesterton: "Every act of will is an act of lf-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that n every act is an act of lf-sacrifice." [5]
The lesson here is thus Hegelian in a very preci n: the external opposition between freedom (transcendental spontaneity, moral autonomy and lf-responsibility) and slavery (submission, either to my own nature, its 'pathological' instincts, or to external power) has to be transpod into freedom itlf, as the "highest" antagonism between the monstrous freedom qua "unruliness" and the true moral freedom. - However, a possible counter-argument here would have been that this noumenal excess of freedom (the Kantian "unruliness", the Hegelian "Night of the World") is a retroactive result of the disciplinary mechanisms themlves (along the lines of the Paulinian motif of "Law creates transgression", or of the Foucauldian topic of how the very disciplinary measures that try to regulate xuality generate "x" as the elusive excess) – the obstacle creates that which it endeavors to control. Are we then dealing with a clod circle of a process positing one's own presuppositions?
Madness and (in) the History of Cogito
This paraphra of the title of Derrida’s essay on Foucault’s Histoire de la folie has a preci stake: madness is inscribed into the history of Cogito at two levels. First, throughout entire philosophy of subjectivity from Descartes through Kant, Schelling and Hegel, to Nietzsche and Husrl, Cogito is related to its shadowy double, pharmakon, which is madness. Second, madness is inscribed into the very (pre)history of 牛人说Cogito itlf, it is part of its transcendental genesis.
In "Cogito and the History of Madness," (Writing and Difference) Derrida states that
the Cogito escapes madness only becau at its own moment, under its own authority, it is valid even if I am mad, even if my thoughts are completely mad. /…/ Descartes never interns madness, neither at the stage of natural doubt nor at the stage of metaphysical doubt. (55)
Whether I am mad or not, Cogito, sum. /…/ even if the totality of the world does not exist, even if nonmeaning has invaded the totality of the world, up to and including the very con
tents of my thought, I still think, I am while I think. (56)
Derrida leaves no doubt that, "/a/s soon as Descartes has reached this extremity, he eks to reassure himlf, to certify the Cogito through God, to identify the act of the Cogito with a reasonable reason." (58) This withdrawal ts in "from the moment when he pulls himlf out of madness by determining natural light through a ries of principles and axioms" (59). The term "light" is here crucial to measure the distance of Descartes from German Idealism, in which, precily, the core of the subject is no longer light, but the abyss of darkness, the "Night of the World."
This, then, is Derrida’s fundamental interpretive gesture: the one of "parating, within the Cogito, on the one hand, hyperbole (which I maintain cannot be enclod in a factual and determined historical structure, for it is the project of exceeding every finite and determined totality), and, on the other hand, that in Descartes’s philosophy (or in the philosophy supporting the Augustinian Cogito or the Husrlian Cogito as well) which belongs to a factual historical structure" (60).
Here, when Derrida asrts that "/t/he historicity proper to philosophy is located and constituted in the transition, the dialogue between hyperbole and the finite structure, /…/ in the difference between history and historicity" (60), he is perhaps too short. This tension may appear very "Lacanian": is it not a version of the tension between the Real – the hyperbolic excess – and its (ultimately always failed) symbolization? The matrix we thus arrive at is the one of the eternal oscillation between the two extremes, the radical expenditure, hyperbole, excess, and its later domestification (like Kristeva, between Semiotic ). Illusionary are both extremes: pure excess as well as pure finite order would disintegrate, This miss the true point of "madness," which is not the pure excess of the Night of the World, but the madness of the passage to the Symbolic itlf, of imposing a symbolic order onto the chaos of the Real. (Like Freud, who, in his Schreber analysis, points out how the paranoiac "system" is not madness, but a desperate attempt to ESCAPE madness – the disintegration of the symbolic univer - through an ersatz, as if, univer of meaning.) If madness is constituti
ve, then EVERY system of meaning is minimally paranoiac, "mad."静以修身
Recall Brecht's 'what is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?' - therein resides the lesson of David Lynch's Straight Story: what is the ridiculously-pathetic perversity of figures like Bobby Perou in Wild at Heart or Frank in Blue Velvet compared to deciding to traver the US central plane in a tractor to visit a dying relative? Measured with this act, Frank's and Bobby's outbreaks of rage are the impotent theatrics of old and
This step is the properly "Hegelian" one – which is why Hegel, the philosopher who made the most radical attempt to THINK TOGETHER the abyss of madness at the core of subjectivity AND the totality of the System of meaning. This is why, for very good reasons, "Hegel" stands for the common n for the moment at which philosophy gets "mad," explodes into a "crazy" preten at "absolute knowledge"...
So: not simply "madness" and symbolization – there is, in the very history of philosophy (of philosophical "systems"), a PRIVILEGED point at which the hyperbole, philosophy’s ex-timate core, directly inscribes itlf into it, and this is the moment of Cogito, of transcendental philosophy. "Madness" is here "tamed" in a different way, through "transcendental" horizon, which does not cancel it in an all-encompassing world-view, but maintains it.
In the rene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: /…/ the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of dia." [6] However, what about psychoanalysis? Is psychoanalysis not precily the point at which the "man of reason" reestablishes his dialogue with madness, rediscovering the dimension of TRUTH in it? And not the same ("hermeneutic"-mantic) truth as before, in the pre-modern univer? Foucault deals with this in History of Sexuality, where psychoanalysis as the culmination of "x as the ultimate truth"
In spite of the fines of Foucault’s reply, he ultimately falls prey to the trap of historicism which cannot account for its own position of enunciation; this impossibility is redoubled in Foucault’s characterization of his "object," madness, which oscillates between two extremes. On the one hand, his stategic aim is to make madness itlf talk, as it is in itlf, outside the (scientific, etc.) discour on it: "it is definitely not a question of a history of ideas, but of the rudimentary movements of an experience. A history not of psychiatry, but of madness itlf, in its vivacity, before knowledge has even begun to clo in on it." [7] On the other hand, the (later) model deployed in his 基础管理Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality compels him to posit the absolute immanence of the (excessive, transgressive, resisting…) object to its manipulation by the dispositif of power-knowledge: in the same way that "/t/he carceral network does not cast the unassimilable into a confud hell; there is no outside"; [8] in the same way that the "liberated" man is itlf generated by the dispositif that controls and regulates him; in the same way that "x" as the unassimilable excess is itlf generated by the discours and practices that try to control and regulate it; madness is also generated by the very discour that excludes, o
bjectivizes and studies it, there is no "pure" madness outside it – Foucault here "effectively acknowledges the correctness of Derrida’s formulation", [9] namely of il n’y a pas de hors-texte, providing his own version of it.
When Foucault writes "Perhaps one day /transgression/ will em as decisive for our culture, as much part of its soil, as the experience of contradiction was at an earlier time for dialectical thought." [10] So, does he not thereby miss the point, which is that this day has already arrived, that permanent transgression already IS the feature of late capitalism? His final reproach to Derrida’s il n’y a pas de hors-texte: [11] textual analysis, philosophical hermeneutics,
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reduction of discursive practices to textual traces; elision of the events which are produced in the practices, so that all that remains of them are marks for a reading; inventions of voices behind the texts, so that we do not have to analyze the modes of the implication of the subject in the discours; the assignation of the originary as /what is/ said and not-said in the text, so that we do not have to locate discursive practices in the fi
eld of transformations in which they effectuate themlves. [12]
Some Marxists even, as if Foucault/Derrida = materialism/idealism. Textual endless lf-reflexive games versus materialist analysis. BUT: Foucault: remains HISTORICIST. He reproaches Derrida his inability to think the exteriority of philosophy – this is how he designates the stakes of their debate:
