Desire is to law as drive is to ? (1)

For a while now, the theme of escaping the dialectic of law and desire has appeared in psychoanalytic approach to political and legal theory. Foucault's History of Sexuality provides one version of this theme. There are others. The Slovenian school, I have Zizek in mind, can be read as attempting to provide a response to the critique of Lacan's account of the constitutive relation between law and desire: desire is not all there is; one also needs to consider drive.

So desire is to law as drive is to what? Law's founding gesture? The beyond of law? The Real permanently shaping and eluding law? And if any of these answers are correct, what do they mean for politics? That desire is to law and drive is to revolution? This seems unsatisfying, I think, because it becomes just another version of constituted and constituting power or even of the police and politics of the order of things and the enthusiasm of the revolutionary moment.

But what if a better answer is desire is to law and drive is to biopolitics?

In The Indivisible Remainder, Zizek asks:

is the alternative of desire and drive, of lack and positivity--the alternative between, on the one hand, remaining within the constraints of the negative ontology of lack, of man's constitutive 'out-of-jointedness,' and so on, and, on the other, yielding to the pure positivity of drive qua the eternal return of the will which wills its object for ever--truly the ultimate unavoidable alternative of our lives?

No one will be surprised to learn that the answer is no. There is a third position. This third position involves the gesture of vanishing mediation, an idea that Zizek develops through his Lacanian rereading of German idealism. Before looking at the third position, here is the political version of the problem at hand:

it is easy to suspend the big Other by means of an act qua real, to experience the 'nonexistence of the big Other' in a momentary flash--however, what do we do after we have traversed the fantasy? Is it not necessary to resort again to some kind of big Other? How are we to avoid the painful conclusion that the experience of the nonexistence of the big Other, of the act qua real, is merely a fleeting 'vanishing mediator' between the two Orders, an enthusiastic intermediate moment necessarily followed by a sobering relapse into the reign of the big Other? What corresponds in the domain of politics to the resigned conservative notion of revolution as a transitory moment of liberation, the suspension of social authority, which unavoidably gives rise to the backlash of an even more oppressive power.

Zizek then asks:

What are the modalities of the big Other which emerges after the experience of its nonexistence?

Cynicism is the answer he introduces and rejects--there is more to the morning after than saying "thanks for a great time, I'll call you later." What, then, is the answer?

a gesture of precipitate identification, of an act not covered by the big Other's guarantee.

With such a gesture I "recognize myself in my symbolic identity-mandate." Such a gesture isn't provided by the big Other. It constitutes the big Other. It seems rather like adhering to an identity one gives oneself.

But this isn't terribly convincing. It seems to combine both the fact that 'the big Other doesn't exist' with its collapse, the fact that the big Other is the order of the lie, of law and its transgression, with the big Other's collapse. I'm not claiming that Zizek confuses these. Rather, I'm claiming that it seems that his argument moves between these different modalities.

But it doesn't seem to me that these are 'two sides of the same coin" or a change in one's attitude toward the non-existence of the big Other. Why? because one can know full well that the big Other doesn't exist but believe that others believe it exists. The decline of symbolic efficiency designates the collapse of this belief. Differently put, the non-existence of the big Other becomes "for-itself."  To then suggest that the next step is having this non-existence turn in and for itself doesn't work. Why? Because it conceals the prior elimination of the conditions of communicability. Without the communication of the notion (hey, none of us believe) the collapse cannot become in and for itself. Or, put another way, there is no big Other to register the fact that no one believes it exists.

Back to Zizek's argument:  Zizek emphasizes the Lacanian point that there is no Other of the Other, no metaguarantee for the symbolic. And he says this is not a deficiency but a positive feature--it's the knowledge we share that cannot be grounded in something external to that shared knowledge, something which would distance us from our connection. What concerns me is the status of this sharing. The decline of symbolic efficiency refers to the loss of the supposition that there is something, let's call it meaning, that is shared. So, not only is there no external referent (the regular condition of the big Other's effective non-existence) but there is no sharing.

How does Zizek explain Lacan's position:

Lacan asserts that it is this very impossibility which links an individual to his spiritual substance: the collective substance emerges because individuals can never fully co-ordinate their intentions become transparent to each.

and, somewhat later:

far from depending on a kind of minimal co-ordination individuals were able to reach in spite of the opacity of their true intentions, the spiritual Substance emerges as the way to avoid the impasse of this opacity by presupposing the co-ordination of intentions as already given in the purely virtual Third Order of impersonal rules...

We never fully know what others intend. They are opaque to us. The social substance images as a supplement to the impossibility of knowing the other. So, manners tell us what to do when we meet strangers, come into contact with others, etc. But, the problem is that Zizek's point here doesn't address the decline of symbolic efficiency. It is still part of an account of how it is that the symbolic order is possible in the first place.

He continues:

if individuals were able to coordinate their intentions via shared knowledge, there would be no need for the big Other, for the spiritual Substance as a spectral entity experienced by every individual as an external In-itself.

This seems to me to hint at the conditions of possibility for the decline of symbolic efficiency: we don't need a big Other anymore. Shared knowledge coordinates our activities, not as the result of our conscious communicative efforts but as materialized in networked communications, bureaucratic protocol, the discourse of the university, and biopolitics.