Long Live Neurosis!

“FICTION/REALITY”, CURATED BY ANDERS PAULIN Den Danske Scenekunstskole København/KUV Copenhagen, 4 October to 8 October, 2016 Long Live Neurosis! Benjamin Noys (2016) b.noys@chi.ac.uk Freud, resonantly, described the aim of psychoanalysis as the transformation of “hysterical misery into common unhappiness” (1974, 393). Freud’s tragic vision of humanity as riven by a constitutive dissatisfaction, one found within the sexual drive (Freud 1977, 258), suggests that happiness is impossible. This image of psychoanalysis is not strictly true. Freud, in his Introductory Lectures, defined successful analytic treatment as resulting in the “capacity for enjoyment and efficiency” (1973, 510). This has often been translated into a watered down version of “love and work.” In fact, Freud wrote “Genuss und Leistungsfähigkeit,” which could be translated as enjoyment, or jouissance, and productive capability (Harari 2002, 109). Happiness returns, in an unstable form, at once linked to social production and reproduction but also potentially excessive to those limits. Adorno violently rejected Freud’s suggestion that happiness could be found in enjoyment and productive capability. For Adorno, psychoanalysis had fallen into producing an administered happiness that occluded the unhappiness of society as it is constituted. We live under the imperative, to use the resonant UK title of Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent book, to Smile or Die. Adorno is scornful of the situation when “the resolute proclamation of compulsive extravagance and champagne jollity, formerly reserved to attachés in Hungarian, is elevated in deadly earnest to a maxim of right living” (1974, 62). In this situation the neurotic’s repression and regression is a sign of reason, of the attachment to remaining un-adapted to the compulsion to pleasure and happiness. I want to explore a very brief and selective history of neurosis. To begin I want to note a strange moment in Roland Barthes’s 1973 Pleasure of the Text. This text is best known for its contrast between texts of pleasure (plaisir), “the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria,” and the texts of jouissance, “the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts” (Barthes 1975, 14). Barthes seems to unequivocally belong to the current of theory that affirms and celebrates jouissance, an excessive pleasure on the verge of pain, against any kind of “conformist” pleasure. This tendency, inspired by Nietzsche, and identified with Georges Bataille and Lacan, often licenses an aristocratic rejection of minor pleasures and distress. It seems also to reject neurosis. Of all the mental “disorders” neurosis has, perhaps, got the worst name, lacking the “glamour” and excess of hysteria,1 psychosis, and perversion. Lacan, in his seventh seminar of 1959–1960 The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, suggests the ethic of psychoanalysis as one of not giving way on one’s desire, while the neurotic would be the one who does give way on their desire (Lacan 1992, 314).2 The neurotic, we could vulgarly say, is the one who does not go all the way. It is worth noting, however, that Barthes, is suspicious of what he calls an “insidious heroism” in our language (1975, 30; emphasis in original); Barthes has in mind Bataille. The writer against neurosis, again Bataille is Barthes’s subject of discussion, requires “that bit of neurosis” to engage the reader and to produce the text (Barthes 1975, 5–6). This would be contrary to the “heroic” anti-neuroticism on a certain strain of writing: along with Bataille we could consider Artaud and, after them, Deleuze and Guattari. It is Deleuze and Guattari who announce, in Anti-Oedipus, that: “A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch” (1983, 2). In contrast, Barthes, with whatever reluctance, seems to admit the necessity of a constitutive neurosis. He notes: “Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I deign not to be, neurotic I am” (Barthes 1975, 6; emphasis in original). The promise of jouissance finds itself only articulable in a neurotic fashion, suggesting a reduction of jouissance that does not simply correspond to pleasure, but which scrambles that division. Developing this brief point we could suggest that the path to happiness, even the path to jouissance, is also the twisted and variegated path of the neurotic. We could recall here Freud’s obsessional neurotic the “Rat Man,” with his convoluted train journey as he tries to return the money he owes (Freud 1979, 93). In contrast to Deleuze and Guattari, “a neurotic on a train journey” might be a better model on the twisted path between pleasure and jouissance. Happiness or pleasure would emerge out of this experience of delay and in the circuitous paths of desire and jouissance. This would later be the suggestion of Jacques-Alain Miller, who proposes an erotics of space in which the circuit of desire requires an obstacle as the condition of a circuit around the object, and the circuit of jouissance is the veering trajectory of the drive which tries to transgress to the object (9–13). Here Barthes’s opposition gets re-inscribed into a common circuit that deviates from the path, and in this deviation finds its pleasure. We could add that Barthes’s own The Pleasure of the Text enacts this pleasure in its own fragmentary and recursive exploration and iteration of plaisir and jouissance. In this new alignment a form of happiness emerges in this “cut” that does not quite align on either side of the binary, or which takes place in this in-between. The neurotic, whose symptom is what Freud called a “compromise formation,” unlocks this possibility. Freud remarks that the neurotic symptom is “the outcome of a conflict which arises over a new method of satisfying the libido” (1973, 404–5). The symptom, which is an expression of suffering, is also a mode of satisfaction and pleasure; this is the twisted “paths of to the formation of the symptom,” as Freud entitles Lecture 23 of his Introductory Lectures. This is also why Slavoj Žižek is astute when he titles one of his books Enjoy Your Symptom! Lacan’s concept of jouissance is precisely useful as it combines the form of pleasure with suffering. This is why contrary to the invocations of “pure jouissance” we could argue the twisted path of the neurotic is more revealing of the fact that jouissance emerges out of this compromise formation and not despite of it. Certainly Barthes still belongs to the Nietzschean theoretical lineage of excessive jouissance, but at the same time his attention to neurosis, even if fleeting, suggests another image of happiness. Barthes critiques the “heroism” which dominates that lineage, an aristocratism of pleasure, which reserves jouissance for the master. What is not indicated, and what I want to explore, is the possibility we could use this “neurotic” opening, this new circuit of delay, as a way to access an alternative image of pleasure. In his “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” published in 1973 in response to Michel Cressole, Gilles Deleuze reflects on the fate of his work, especially Anti-Oedipus (1972), co-written with Félix Guattari. In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari had celebrated the revolutionary possibilities of the “schiz,” not to be confused with the empirical schizophrenic. For Deleuze and Guattari: “Someone asked us if we had ever seen a schizophrenic—no, no, we have never seen one” (380). In the letter to Cressole Deleuze remarks that this is his “favorite sentence” in Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze 1995, 12). Accused by Cressole of merely tailing the experiences of others, Deleuze replies: “Real and pretend schizophrenics are giving me such a hard time that I’m starting to see the attractions of paranoia. Long live paranoia” (3). Certainly, however we take this comment, Deleuze remains within the distinction he draws between the intensive experience of the schizophrenic and the de-intensifying experience of paranoia, if only to reverse it (Deleuze and Guattari, 11). I want to suggest that another possibility remains open: the return to neurosis. As I have already suggested this involves a reworking of neurosis, in part inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms, which moves away from the assumption that neurosis is merely an internal affair. Let us take one of the central figures of Anti-Oedipus, Daniel Paul Schreber, the German judge who authored Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) about his experiences of schizophrenic breakdown. Interestingly, Schreber’s illness cut across the divide between schizophrenia and paranoia, he believed himself persecuted by God who was turning him into a woman so as to have sex with Schreber. If Deleuze and Guattari could reread the “schizoparanoiac” delirium of Schreber away from the psychoanalytic stress on “Schreber’s daddy” (14), then it is also possible we could return to neurosis with an awareness of its political investments and libidinal possibilities. Such a return has been suggested by Aaron Schuster. In his The Trouble with Pleasure, devoted to rereading Deleuze with Lacan, Schuster not only suggests a more psychoanalytic reading of Deleuze but also the possibilities of neurosis. For Schuster the neurotic is the figure of maladaptation, but one who in the act of complaint figures the maladapted nature of human existence in relation to political, economic, and philosophical frameworks: “Neurosis is the name for the crack in these frameworks, the protest that stems from their internal fissures and inconsistencies – the neurotic is somehow both a sad and heroic figure, the reject of civilization and the embodiment of its explosive dynamism” (Schuster 2016, 22). Schuster tends to give this maladaptation an ontological weight, as the neurotic’s complaint is related to the situation of being born, of the human being forced into existence with no way out as even suicide cannot erase the fact of being born. While this ontological insight then produces an ontic resistance to various “frameworks,” we might want to suggest a more historicized vision of this “ontological dilemma.” This can be found in Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Contemplating neurosis as a sign of “healthy” maladaptation, compared to “pathic health, infantilism raised to a norm” (Adorno 1974, 22), Adorno suggests a deeper truth of neurosis, even beyond neurosis. Treating the “healthy” character of capitalism as a deformation, Adorno argues “no science has yet explored the inferno in which were forged the deformations that later emerge to daylight as cheerfulness, openness, sociability, successful adaptation to the inevitable, an equable, practical frame of mind” (59). These traits are formed, according to Adorno, at an even earlier phase of childhood than the neuroses. They are the result of a “prehistorical surgical intervention” (59), a deep wound, while neuroses is a later formation of conflict. While this, again, would seem to point to the erasure of the possibility of happiness, Adorno also holds on to this historical and psychic wound as the possibility of critique and, however fleeting, as the indicator of collective happiness. In his essay “Notes on Kafka,” Adorno remarks that: “Instead of curing neurosis, he [Kafka] seeks in it itself the healing force, that of knowledge: the wounds with which, society brands the individual are seen by the latter as ciphers of the social untruth, as the negative of truth” (252). Neurosis has the function of being a “healing force” due to the fact that it registers “the negative of truth.” In Adorno’s scattered reflections we see the insistence on neurosis as registering an historical trauma, one that is not simply original but shaped and formed, or deformed, through the emergence and solidification of capitalism. Adorno finds in maladaptation the truth of the lack of collective happiness. The risk of returning to neurosis is that we simply celebrate a damaged form of subjectivity, and so celebrate failure and irresolution. This would be to remain in the position of what Hegel calls the “beautiful soul”: the one who projects their disorder onto the world and so falls into madness due to their own inability to accede to action (Hegel 1977, 400). Such a rehabilitation of inaction has been seen as part of the modernist project, especially in the work of Beckett (Milne 2002). Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit have remarked that such an art of failure can be seen as “a fancy theoretical pose” (1), implying a failure that either turns into a new form of success or returns to a madness of delay. Certainly, Adorno could be read as the anguished attempt to hold together Hegel and Beckett, to not simply accede to the attractions of the beautiful soul while also preserving a function of distance and inaction as a sign of truth. Here neurosis would not simply be a failure, not easily reversed into success, but the sign and register of historical suffering and the possibility of its transcendence. Out of this conflict, these opposing forces, this neurotic situation, I have suggested we might find something of pleasure and happiness, even if in the negative. Neurosis would be a phenomenology that did not simply jump to pleasure and happiness in the mode of jouissance, but indicate the impossibility of that celebration of transgressive excess. This is not a new conformity, but the mapping of impasses and failures, missed historical chances, and the trauma of the constitution of character under high capitalism. At the same time, it is a possibility, of something that places a demand on us, not to simply give up pleasure and happiness as contaminated and ruined or existing as a “beyond.” It is on this neurotic possibility that I, neurotically, prevaricate. Notes 1. While hysteria is classified by Freud as a neurosis, if not the neurotic disorder, the very theatricality of its form, attested to by Charcot’s demonstrations of hysteria, and the relative decline of the disorder in this form lends it a celebrated form as a site of resistance (see Cixous and Clement, 1985). Adorno had also noted that “Even in Ibsen’s time most of the women who had gained some standing in bourgeois society were ready to turn and rend their hysterical sisters who undertook, in their stead, the hopeless attempt to break out of the social prison which so emphatically turned its four walls to them all” (93). 2. Such a reading would be one that conforms to what Simon Critchley calls the “tragic-heroic paradigm,” and it is noteworthy that at the conclusion of the seminar Lacan also discusses comedy and the comic dimension has been significantly developed by Alenka Zupančič. Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. 1974. Minima Moralia. London: Verso. Adorno, Theodor. 1983. Prisms. Translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Barthes, Roland. 1975. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit. 1993. Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Cixious, Hélène and Catherine Clément. 1985. “The Untenable.” In In Dora’s Case, edited by Charles Bernheimer and Clare Kahane, 276–293. New York: Columbia University Press. Critchley, Simon. 1999. “Comedy and Finitude: Displacing the Tragic- Heroic Paradigm in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis.” In Ethics–Politics–Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought, 217–38. London and New York: Verso. Davies, William. 2016. The Happiness Industry. London and New York: Verso. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. “Letter to a Harsh Critic.” In Negotiations, 1972–1990, translated by Martin Joughin, 3–12. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2010. Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World. London: Granta. Freud, Sigmund. 1973. P.F.L 1: Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Translated by James Strachey and edited by Angela Richards. London: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. 1974. P.F.L. 3: Studies on Hysteria. Translated by James Strachey and edited by Angela Richards. London: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund. 1977. P.F.L. 7: On Sexuality. Translated by James Strachey and edited by Angela Richards. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund. 1979. P.F.L. 9: Case Histories II. Translated by James Strachey and edited by Angela Richards. London: Penguin. Harari, Roberto. 2002. How James Joyce Made his Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan. Translated by Luke Thurston. New York: Other Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1992. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by Dennis Porter. London: Routledge. Miller, Jacques-Alain. 2005. “Introduction to the Erotics of Time.” Lacanian Ink 24/25: 8–43. Milne, Drew. 2002. “The Beautiful Soul: From Hegel to Beckett.” diacritics 32.1: 63–82. Schuster, Aaron. 2016. The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1992. Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York and London: Routledge. Zupančič, Alenka. 2008. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 6