Subjectivity and objectivity are always locked in intra-psychological embrace, I believe. If this were to cease to occur, one would end up with psychosis.
Just as dreaming is a preventative of psychosis and should not be considered to meet the definition of psychosis, so also even the purest expression of subjectivity ought not to be assumed simply to be “psychotic” in and of itself.
The analysis below is based on my reading more deeply and analytically into a paradigm that places subjectivity and objectivity as metaphysical opposites — which, organically, they are not.
Theory, Culture & Society
http://tcs.sagepub.com
Politics and the Impossible: Beyond Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction Glyn DalyTheory Culture Society 1999; 16; 75DOI: 10.1177/02632769922050728 The online version of this article can be found at:http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/16/4/75
They key of the article for me is the incompleteness of identity as a psychic (soul) structure. Nobody’s identity is as complete as they feel it should be. We are all necessarily “decentered” in the postmodern sense — which is to say, in the Lacanian sense, we are all necessarily “castrated” (unless we are psychotic and do not feel that there is any difference between subjectivity and objectivity — but it is awareness of this difference that in technical terms “castrates” us whilst making us able to communicate objectively, in a way that makes sense to others). So we are all “castrated” so as to enter society and therefore have a depletion of jouissance (which I interpret to mean that sense of immediacy, of direct gratification in communion with the world, where pleasure-pain are barely differentiated). Nonetheless, none of us completely lack jouissance, or we would be robotic and spock-like. We have been castrated away from an infantile repletion in jouissance, but we still experience it, within the cracks of our socialised existence and the logic that pertains to that.
According to the article, however, the ruling classes and other politically influential groups are inclined to the mode of thinking that it is normal not to be decentred, but to have a fully complete identity. I read this as meaning that they want to have their cake and eat it too — to be able to be non-psychotic members of society, but also to have all of their jouissance (the collapse of objectivity into subjectivity, which defines sexual pleasure and/or psychosis).
Because they implicitly lack the understanding that in the psychic economy we cannot have all our jouissance AND be functioning members of society, and because these influential groups experience that necessary and universal constraint as being a “lack” in the constitutions of their own identities, they feel resentful. Instead of embracing the reality principle that this is simply how it is, they go on the warpath.
Specifically, they conclude that is is the social “other” — those who are not fully assimilated to a particular nationalistic identity or so on — who have stolen the interest group’s “jouissance”.
The dynamic of mis-identification that I have outlined above explains why it is that those who have the most power in society often attack those who have the least power in society. They see in the definitive “other” the missing element of their own jouissance. It is as if they figure out that the missing part of their totalitarian nationalist identity can be found in this other, who has gone astray by virtue of being “other”. By being other, they reason, these (marginal people or members of the oppressed classes) have undermined and decentered the national identity. They have stolen the “jouissance” — the sense of completeness — from the national state. That is the reasoning of the dominant classes, who want to get their “jouissance” back from those who are most oppressed.
In order to get back “their” jouissance (which obviously never was theirs in the first place), the dominant classes seek to prevent the lower classes from experiencing any jouissance of their own, by constantly harrassing them (or in the case given by the article, regarding Muslim women in Bosnia — by removing the community’s ability to experience jouissance by means of rape.)
