Female: How?
Deformed Man: They're ignorant.
- from Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) [1]
My previous entry ended with Lacan's dissection of the last concept of his book, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis – the drive. This post will discuss the rest of the book, which elaborates on this concept, then suggests the broader implications of how all four concepts function in societies and how this work shapes the analysts’ job. We can use the above film, in which an alien takes human form, to give us a good sense of Lacan’s message.
A point of light in the darkness suddenly expands into a large
blue star. Then we watch it from a distance as a translucent ring moves in
front of it. While the silhouette of a missile slowly approaches the ring's
center, a metallic female voice forms sounds that become a string of
alliterative words. Then we see a front-view of the ring, (which has become
milky white) with the black object filling the center, become an eye. After the
title shot, we see another light in the distance moving through a snowy nocturnal
landscape. As it approaches, we find it is a motorcycle headlight. The rider
pulls over on a highway, walks down into the dark, and emerges with a woman
lying limply over his shoulder. He puts her in the back of a van, and we see a
naked woman (identified only as “Female”) inside, who proceeds to clothe
herself with the victim’s apparel. The alien’s “birth” into her new form allows
us to enter Lacan’s discussion of how desire, as interpretation, relates to
“partial drives” and to sexuality, where he remarks that
… infantile sexuality is not a
wandering block of ice snatched from the great ice-bank of adult sexuality,
intervening as an attraction over an immature subject – this was proved at once
in analysis and with what, later, might seem a surprising significance…
The integration of sexuality into the
dialectic of desire passes through the bringing into play of what, in the body,
deserves to be designated by the term apparatus – if you understand by this
that which the body, with regard to sexuality, may fit itself up … as opposed
to that with which bodies may be paired off… {Lacan ends the chapter by noting
that, under some circumstances,} The subject will realize that his desire is
merely a vain detour with the aim of catching the jouissance of the other – in so far as the other intervenes, he
will realize that there is jouissance
beyond the pleasure principle. [2]
A tear runs down the human’s cheek, and Female kneels down for
a closer view, but we find that what she is looking at is an ant crawling on
the victim's body. We then cut to Female emerging from her new residence in an
abandoned building and getting in the driver's seat of the van as her
accomplice leaves on his motorcycle. We see Female in a mall buying a fur coat
and cosmetics, and, after observing how they are used, applying them herself.
These scenes can illustrate the first two of three levels into which Lacan says
Freud had divided “love structures”: the real, the economic and the biological.
To the level of the real
[autoerotisch] corresponds the that-which-interests/that-which-is-indifferent
opposition. To the level of the economic [lust-Ich],
that-which-gives-pleasure/that-which-displeases. It is only at the level of the
biological that the activity/passivity opposition presents itself, in its own
form, the only valid one in its grammatical sense, the loving/being loved
position. [3]
She drives around, watching men through her van windows, and
asking for directions, then questioning them to find if they have family or
friends nearby. When one of them says that he lives alone and works for
himself, she asks him if he wants a lift, and he gets in. She asks him to help
her find the “M8.” When he asks what she is doing, she replies that she is
driving some furniture for her family. He looks her up and down, and we cut to
her driving alone at night as ominous music plays. The interactivity in (and
described in) this scene brings us further into Freud's third level, about
which he explains
...that the polar reference
activity/passivity is there in order to name, to cover, to metaphorize that
which remains unfathomable in sexual difference… {Lacan elaborates that this
opposition is injected in the form of sado-masochism,
and notes that female psychoanalysts} are particularly disposed to maintain the
fundamental belief in feminine masochism. [4]
She later picks up a man from Dublin, flatters him, and asks
if he thinks she's pretty. When he says he thinks she's gorgeous, she says,
“good.” She brings him to her dark house and, walking ahead of him, takes off
items of her clothing. He follows her lead. In a long shot of them, we see that
they are walking on a reflective surface. By the time he has removed all his
clothes, the surface has become – for him – a dark liquid into which he sinks.
After he disappears, she returns and picks up her clothes. These clothes can
help us cover the concept of “masquerade” which Lacan says is at play on
…the symbolic level [on which basis
sexuality comes into play] through the mediation … of the partial drives. {Lacan
says that one of these drives, the drive to make oneself seen (which Freud
calls Schaulust,) brings this drive
back toward the subject, but the drive to make oneself heard (which Lacan
introduces as the “invocatory drive” noting it covers the only orifice in the
field of the unconscious that cannot be closed,) goes toward the “other.” He
then introduces us to the concept of an organ that is always at the center of
the drive, a “false” organ known as the libido. He illustrates this concept
with a fable about a monstrous, amoeba-like creature he names a “lamella” –
that part of oneself that the individual loses at birth and of which all forms
of the objet a are merely representatives (for example, the breast,
which can symbolize “the most profound lost object.”) He then describes the
libido as emerging with the subject, which subject} begins in the locus of the
Other, in so far as it is there that the first signifier emerges. {He defines
and expounds on a signifier in this way:} that which represents a subject … not
for another subject, but for another signifier … The relation to the Other is
precisely that which, for us, brings out what is represented by the lamella –
not sexed polarity, the relation between masculine and feminine, but the
relation between the living subject and that which he loses by having to pass,
for his reproduction, through the sexual cycle. In this way I explain the
essential affinity of every drive with the zone of death. {Lacan credits the
subject’s effort to cover its split nature with supporting an illusion of “an
apprehensible whole [in sexuality,] that would sum up its essence and
function,” and ends the chapter by telling us that} the exercise of a drive, a
masochistic drive, for example, requires that the masochist give himself, if I
may be permitted to put it in this way, a devil of a job. [5]
Back to the movie. Female is watching a man swimming in the
ocean. She briefly turns when an infant child, sitting on his father's lap,
calls out, “Mommy,” who replies with a delighted “Wooh!” The swimmer, wearing a
wetsuit, comes to the shore and approaches Female, joking that he thought she
was going to take his towel. She asks if he knows any good places to surf, and,
after he says he isn't a surfer, she finds that he is from the Czech Republic
and is camping in a tent nearby to “get away from it all,” choosing Scotland
because “It's nowhere.” As they speak, the young man sees the child's mother,
having tried to swim, being overpowered by the waves, then her husband jumping
in after her (still wearing his coat,) and runs down to the water to rescue
them. We can use these “exchanges” and
the idea of being “nowhere” to recall another concept of Lacan's – aphanisis.
{He uses this concept to show how all
subjects “fade” due to language using a Venn diagram of two categories: the
first of meaning/(the field of “the other,”) and the second of being, and he
writes the word, “non-meaning” where they overlap. If a subject} appears on one
side as meaning, produced by the signifier, it appears on the [second] as aphanisis.
… If we choose being, the subject disappears, it eludes us, it falls into
non-meaning. If we choose “meaning,” the meaning survives only deprived of that
part of non-meaning that is, strictly speaking, that which constitutes in the realization
of the subject, the unconscious. In other words, it is of the nature of this
meaning, as it emerges in the field of the Other, to be in a large part of its
field, eclipsed by the disappearance of being, inducted by the very function of
the signifier. [6]
The camper brings back the husband, who promptly pushes him
down and returns to the ocean. After the man goes back for his wife (the couple
are later identified as Kenneth and Alison McClelland,) Female gets a rock,
knocks the camper unconscious and pulls him up the beach and into her van. I’ll
use this act to drag in a form of these choices, the threat, “Your money or
your life!” with which Lacan elaborates on the Venn diagram illustration
through the result of this choice.
{unlike the choices indicated by an
inclusive or exclusive “or” (“vel,”) both “choices” result in the loss
of at least part of what we choose.} If I choose life, I have life without the
money, namely, a life deprived of something. [7]
The next scene, shot at night, shows the motorcyclist collect
the camper’s things and walk past the McClellands' screaming child, who is now
much closer to the waves. Then we cut to Female in her van looking at a child
of the same age in the car next to her. The children can convey Lacan's next points:
{He notes that the essence of the
alienating vel is “the lethal factor” before discussing another
operation, separation, which stems from the Indo-European root that designates
“to put into the world.” He goes on to discuss how a child learning to speak is
attempting to solve} the enigma of the adult's desire … Now, to reply to this
hold, the subject … brings the answer of the previous lack, of his own
disappearance, which he situates here at the point of lack perceived in the
Other. The first object he proposes for
this parental desire whose object is unknown is his own loss – Can he lose me? {Lacan ends by
emphasizing} the two elements that I have tried to present today, in this new
and fundamental logical argument – non-reciprocity and the twist in the return.
[8]
On the other side, a man is looking in her window, trying to
say something, and she follows him. We watch her walking down the street and
almost turning back when she sees him join a crowd, but she is quickly taken up
by a group of women going towards that crowd, bringing her to what turns out to
be a rave. Inside, disoriented by the loud noise and flashing lights, she again
tries to leave when the man she had been following stops her and asks if he can
buy her a drink. We watch them dance, and then we see him dancing in her lair,
half undressed. She repeats what she did to the first man, and we see him
floating under the surface of the “floor” where he sees Female’s previous
victim. The two briefly touch hands before the first victim is pulled away,
everything below his neck disappearing but his skin, left floating around his
head. We see blood and entrails running down a chute, then a red horizontal
“flat-line” of light turns into a point from which rays emerge. This pair of victims and the method used to
capture them can help us catch Lacan's next points.
{He speaks of the Freudian concept, Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, one that he
connects with desire, as the “representative of the representation” or
non-representative (defective) representative. He locates the concept in his}
schema of the original mechanisms of alienation in that first signifying
coupling that enables us to conceive that the subject appears first in the
Other, in so far as the first signifier, the *UNARY signifier, emerges in the
field of the Other and represents the subject for another signifier, which
other signifier has as its effect the aphanisis
of the subject. Hence the division of the subject – when the subject appears
somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as “fading”, as disappearance.
There is, then, one might say, a matter of life and death between the unary
signifier and the subject, qua binary
signifier, because of his disappearance. The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is the binary signifier.” {Lacan elucidates
Freud’s term, “unterdrückt” as describing how repression then sinks all}
of what has passed underneath as signifier. [9 *emphasis added]
A street peddler brings a rose to Female, motioning toward a
man in another car who had bought it for her. After taking it she notices blood
on her hands. She looks from the flower’s wrapping, which is also bloody, to
the vender, who is wearing bandages. We then hear a news report on her radio
that the man from the beach whom the camper had tried to rescue had died, and learn
that the wife and child are still missing. Female's bloody hands and the report
of her crime can point to Lacan's demonstration, following Hegel's line of
thought,
{… that the master is no more spared
alienation than his slave.} The revelation of the essence of the master is
manifested at the moment of terror, when it is to him that one says freedom or death, and then he has obviously
only death to choose in order to have freedom. {Lacan then stresses that, in
the compound word above, “Repräsentanz”
is at one pole, where we communicate at the pure function as Signifier (like
diplomats who speak on behalf of their countries,) while} Signification …
comes into play in the Vorstellung.
[10]
When we see more street scenes from Female’s point of view,
they focus on people other than her intended victims. We also see a poster with
the word “Doom” in large letters next to one with a heart graphic. She picks up
another man, who says, “Fúckin' hell, you're gorgeous … It's your eyes.
Somethin' about your eyes. Your eyes, your lips ... that black hair. You just
look … amazing.” They arrive at her lair, she opens the door and, although he
takes a fearful book back at her van, he follows her through it into blackness.
Through this opening we can follow how
{Lacan connects Hegelian thoughts on
this subject with Descartes and his
placing the desire for certainty (through God) where thought and being overlap.
Our author notes that Descartes' “I think” links death to} the very notion of
humanism, at the heart of any humanist consideration. And even when an attempt
is made to animate the term as in the phrase
the human sciences, there is something that we shall call a skeleton in the
cupboard. [11]
We cut to her applying makeup and the motorcyclist walking around
her, starting at the back and inspecting her hair, then moving to her front, and the
camera pans, in close up, from her chin to her forehead. He looks down at her
lips, then we get an extremely close shot of her eye. He walks away, and then
she walks out onto a street on which she trips and falls. Two men help her up,
but when they ask if she's all right, she just looks at them and walks away.
However, when we see the street from her point of view, she is looking at
people who are either older than the ones before or who are meeting various challenges,
such as handicaps or poverty, and we see her eyes filling up with some dark
liquid. The street scenes begin overlapping each other, and we get a montage of
numerous ghostly people simultaneously. Her face slowly comes into focus
through the chaotic golden images, then is obscured in shadow. This fall and
its subsequent change of viewpoint can orient us as Lacan expounds on
Descartes' desire “to walk with assurance in this life” and how it affected
philosophy. From an earlier chapter:
For Descartes, in the initial cogito … what the I think is directed towards, in so far as it lurches into the I am, is a real. But the true remains so
much outside that Descartes then has to re-assure himself … of an Other that is
not deceptive, and which shall … guarantee by its very existence the bases of
truth, guarantee him that there are in his own objective reason the necessary
foundations for the very real, about whose existence he has just re-assured
himself, to find the dimension of truth. I can do no more than suggest the
extraordinary consequences that have stemmed from this handing back truth into
the hands of the Other, in this instance the perfect God, whose truth is the
nub of the matter, since, whatever he might have meant, would always be the truth – even if he had said that two
and two make five, it would have been true. What does this imply, if not that
we will be able to begin playing with the small algebraic letters that
transform geometry into analysis, that the door is open to set theory, that we
can permit ourselves everything as a hypothesis of truth? {in other words,
allowing us false opposites and dualisms that exclude indeterminism.} [12]
She drives through a poor area, and stops. She turns and sees
a young man at her window who motions for her to roll it down. As she starts to
do so, another man jumps onto her hood and more surround the vehicle, yelling
at her to get out. She complies, driving away. In the next scene, she sees a
man in a hood and, telling him that she's lost, talks him into getting in her
van to help her find her way. Noticing that he isn’t taking off his hood, she
turns the heat up, and he removes it, revealing that his head is severely
deformed. She observes that he is very
quiet and asks why he shops at night, and they have the exchange that begins
this entry. We can let the “ignorance” he describes be a foil for the next
chapter title, “Of the Subject who is Supposed to Know” and the man’s initial
reticence underscore that chapter’s discussion of desire:
To desire involves a defensive phase
that makes it identical with not wanting to desire. Not wanting to desire is
wanting not to desire [and in following the latter, one will come back
mathematically to the surface that is supposed to be the former] It is at this
point of meeting that the analyst is awaited…The axis, the common point of this
two-edged axe, is the desire of the analyst … [I]t is precisely this point that
can be articulated only in the relation of desire to desire…Man’s desire is the
desire of the Other. {The chapter ends with a discussion of discovering the
desire’s cause:} It is the recognition of the drive that enables us to
construct … the functioning of the division of the subject, or alienation … we
have found a certain type of objects which, in the final resort, can serve no
function. These are the objects a …
[in which term] resides the point that introduces the dialectic of the subject qua subject of the unconscious. [13]
She says he has beautiful hands and, ignoring his terse,
sometimes gruff way of replying, gently seduces him. They enter her lair, and
the man asks, “Dreaming?” to which she replies, “Yes, we are.” We see him sink
into the liquid, then Female look in an old mirror, and then we see him, naked,
leave the house. Through this looking glass we can come to the transference
effect, an effect which “is unthinkable unless one sets out from the subject
who is supposed to know”
{Lacan identifies the supposed
knowledge as signification,} an absolute point with no knowledge…the point of
attachment that links [the analyst’s] very desire to the resolution of that
which is to be revealed. … [T]he
transference effect … like all love … can be mapped … only in the field of
narcissism. To love is, essentially, to wish to be loved.
What emerges in the transference effect is opposed to revelation.” [14]
What emerges in the transference effect is opposed to revelation.” [14]
Shots of Female alternate with those of her accomplice: They
show her in her car without her coat, then him taking a car from a suburban
neighborhood, then her again driving through a fog. She looks faint, and gets
out. She turns and looks around, disoriented. Then we see her accomplice in her
lair looking in her mirror. With these alternations we turn to Lacan’s next
point, that
…what is there, behind the love known
as transference, is [not only] the patient’s desire … but [is] in its meeting
with the analyst’s desire [15]
After an establishing shot of a snowy mountain we see her in a
restaurant, watching the patrons eat. A waitress brings her a piece of cake.
She slowly cuts some off with her fork and brings it to her mouth, but gags
as soon as she swallows, almost throwing up. This scene can help us digest
Lacan's example of the transference through an anecdote of Plato's: A statesman
[16], questioning the meaning of a mysterious object “beyond all good,” asks
the philosopher where he can find it. Socrates ironically replies,
Look
to your desire, look to your onions ... I think I was the first to remark
that the lines Plato puts in his mouth concerning the nature of love are an
indication of just such futility, verging on buffoonery, which makes Agathon
[17a] perhaps the least likely object to attract the desire of the
master...Thus, … the desire of the master seems, of its very nature, to be the
most inappropriate term. … It is in the direction of some kind of kinship that
we should turn our eyes to the slave, when it is a question of mapping what the
analyst's desire is. [17]
We watch her walk down a hill alone, and a man she is passing
tells her that a bus will be along in a minute. When she gets on, the driver
notes that she hasn't got the right clothes on – “the weather's terrible up
here.” The man from the bus stop asks several times if she needs help, to which
she finally replies, “Yes.” We see her, wearing his coat, follow him into a
convenience store. He buys some groceries, then takes her to his home. They eat
dinner on the sofa, and she watches the television, transfixed, as a comedian
performs a silly routine. In the kitchen, her benefactor turns on the radio and
washes the dishes, tapping his toe to the music. Female, sitting at a table,
taps her fingers in response. We then see him carry tea upstairs to a bedroom
and put it on a side table as she stands stiffly in a dark corner. He turns on
the space heater and says goodnight. After he shuts the door, she removes her
clothes, examining her naked body in a full-length mirror by the light of the space
heater (a light reminiscent of the “flat-line” from a previous scene.) With
these scenes, we can reflect on Lacan’s elaboration of his “mirror stage”
scenario:
…the sight in the mirror of the ego
ideal, of that being that he first saw appearing in the form of the parent
holding him up before the mirror. By clinging to the reference-point of him who
looks at him in a mirror, the subject sees appearing, not his ego ideal, but
his ideal ego, that point at which he desires to gratify himself in himself. [18]
Female’s former accomplice gathers other motorcyclists, and
they ride in separate directions, hunting for her. Then we cut to her and her
benefactor walking through the woods. They come to a large puddle in their
path, and he (in an interesting switch) carries her over it before they make
their way to an old, partly-decayed castle. Scenes of the motorcyclists’ search
alternate with Female’s benefactor helping her explore the dark castle, in
which he encourages her fearful descent down a dark stairway and praises her
after reaching the bottom. The puddle and encouragement can represent Lacan’s
phrase, “the liquidation of the transference.” In his concluding chapter, he
discusses the meaning of the term:
If the transference is the enaction of
the unconscious, does one mean that the transference might be a means of
liquidating the unconscious? … Or is it … the subject who is supposed to know
who must be liquidated as such? … It can only be a question … of the permanent
liquidation of that deception by which the transference tends to be exercised
in the direction of the closing up of the unconscious. [19]
We cut to a closeup of her partly-shadowed face as she closes
her eyes. We see her benefactor leaning forward, and they kiss. The camera shifts,
and we see they are in bed as they embrace and prepare to make love. She
suddenly stops and sits up, grabbing the lamp and looking at her crotch. We see
his startled face as he asks if she is all right, then a profile of her face as
she presses it against a wall, then we see her running towards and entering the
woods. While there a man approaches and talks somewhat nervously to her, asking
questions and telling her that there is about 2,000 acres of forest there - she
has “plenty of places to go.” He asks if she is on her own, saying, “it's a
nice place if you want some solitude.” After another shot of the motorcyclist’s
search, she finds a cabin with a sign, “Hill walkers are welcome to take
shelter here,” and she enters, falling asleep in a corner. After a dreamlike
shot of her curled-up body superimposed over a windy forest landscape, we get a
close-up of the man's hand fondling her. She wakes and runs away. He eventually
catches up with her, ripping her clothes off. They struggle, and she tears away.
He looks down at his hands and stands up, looking frightened. The camera moves
around behind him until we see her from the back, stripped to the waist, with
part of the lower torso of her human flesh torn, exposing some of her black,
shiny “true” form. He runs away as she staggers forward, peeling the human skin
off from her head to waist. She looks at her human face -- It is still alive,
looking back at her. Her would-be rapist sneaks up from behind, throws gasoline
on her, lights her on fire and runs. Dark as it is, this act can illuminate
Lacan’s thought on
…the paradoxical, unique, specified
object we call the objet a… stressing that the analysand says to his
partner, to the analyst, what amounts to this – I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than
you – the objet petit a – I mutilate you. {Lacan later observes
that} the operation and manipulation of the transference are to be regulated in
a way that maintains a distance between the point at which the subject sees
himself as lovable – and that other point where the subject sees himself caused
as a lack by a, and where a fills the gap constituted by the
inaugural division of the subject … The petit
a never crosses this gap. [20]
She runs out of the woods, then collapses in the snow. We get
a shot of her former accomplice on a mountaintop, slowly looking around, then
one of Female's burned corpse. The camera follows the smoke upwards until the
snow seems to be falling directly into our eyes. The screen goes black and the
credits start. With this conclusion, we reach the end of the book, wherein
Lacan discusses analysts' need to renounce their objects (a) in order to satisfy their desire:
The analyst's desire is not a pure
desire. It is a desire to obtain absolute difference [between the I –
identification – and the a], a desire
which intervenes when, confronted with the primary signifier, the subject is,
for the first time, in a position to subject himself to it. There only may the
signification of a limitless love emerge, because it is outside the limits of
the law, where alone it may live. [21]
I’ll end my post with an update on two
situations
that had resulted from the inability to make this separation. [22]
1. Scriptwriters: Walter Campbell, Michel Faber (I have found
no script on line, and, since there are no character names in the movie (or
even in the credits) except for the McClellands, I have taken the only other
“name” I use from its Internet Movie Database entry.
2. Jacques Lacan. The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. (1964/1973.) in: Ebooksclub.org.
(10 Mar 2001.) [Ch. 14]
3-5. Lacan. Concepts of
Psychoanalysis. [Ch. 15]
6-8. Lacan. Concepts of
Psychoanalysis. [Ch. 16]
9-11. Lacan. Concepts of
Psychoanalysis. [Ch. 17]
12. Lacan. Concepts of
Psychoanalysis. [Ch. 3]
13. Lacan. Concepts of
Psychoanalysis. [Ch. 18]
18. Lacan. Concepts of
Psychoanalysis. [Ch. 19]
19-21. Lacan. Concepts
of Psychoanalysis. [Ch. 20]
22a. Jon Queally. “NATO's "Military Hysteria" Undermines
Hope for Peace in Ukraine, says Russia.” in: Common Dreams. (September 2,
2014.)
22b. Common Dreams staff. “US Journalist Steven Sotloff
Reportedly Killed by ISIS.” in: Common Dreams. (September 2, 2014.)
22c:
hyperstillharry. “Re: Strangelove time again.” in: IMDB. (September 2, 2014.)
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