Introduction: The Origin, Structure, and Subversion of Paranoid Desire

Perhaps no literary audio genre demonstrates more fully French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s provocative notion that there is no such thing as “instinctual rapport” between human beings (“Geneva” 17) — which is to say, that there is no such thing as direct, unmediated relations between interlocutors — than the classroom dialogue, for if there anything to be heard in author-student interchanges, it is certainly the absence of rapport. Thus, while it may tempting, and likely quite fruitful, to treat the classroom dialogue as supplemental to what is undoubtably emerging as literary audio’s major genre, the Reading or the Performance, it must also be accentuated that, in capturing the correspondences between artists and their pupils, or more properly, the inevitable failure of these correspondences, this minor form expedites the analysis of the structure of the neurotic forms of paranoia that impede the establishment of rapport, or what amounts to the same, silo speaking beings, and consequently should not be relegated to the status of appendage, but subjected to the talking cure.

Given the distinct lack of rapport and ubiquity of paranoia in classroom dialogues, it is unsurprising when, in “Roy Kiyooka Classroom Visit at the University of Alberta, 1977,” one particularly frustrated student asks Kiyooka, who has just performed his experimental travelogue, Transcanada Letters, “Could you tell me some kind of approach, new and different approach, I could take to writing like yours . . . that might help me with it? Because I am certainly willing to learn what you want to say, but it's just not happening.” This question registers, at once, the student’s desire to fathom the import of the speech of the author, and is thus a typification of the aforementioned demand for knowledge and a variation of the question ‘what do you mean?’ or ‘what do you want from me?,’ and the “aggressivity” that is, according to Lacan, implicit in every dyadic exchange (“Aggressiveness” 21), as his preceding comment, “I found your diaries terribly uninteresting,” imputes to the question a sense of hostility, configuring it not merely as a cry for help (‘help me to understand, I’m begging you!’), but also, as a challenge to a rival, a provocation (‘you are bluffing,’ ‘your speech has no special significance,’ ‘you are not the subject of knowledge, but, exactly like myself, a loathsome worm vying for mastery’). Thus, while the allocution exalts the author to the position of, to borrow Lacan’s terminology, “the subject supposed to know,” that is, the Autre or big Other who knows the ‘true’ or hidden meaning of discourse (The Four Fundamental Concepts 253), and thereby evinces admiration, even love, for the addressee, it also transmits or functions as a vehicle for the student’s aggression, and is therefore simultaneously addressed to an autre, a little other, ‘alter-ego,’ or adversarial specular image. The ambivalence of the speech act therefore suggests that it is directed, not to the author as such, but to both a representative of the law and a reflection of the image of the law’s subject.

The contradictions that surface in the student’s subsequent remarks attest to the presence of the image of the autre in his perceptual field. For what other explanation is there for the student’s incongruous and completely paradoxical position that he both understands everything and nothing at all other than the sound claim that, at points, he speaks not to Kiyooka, but to a semblable or counterpart? Despite his initial assertion that the artist’s discourse is so utterly recondite and foreign (“I am willing to learn what you want to say, but it’s just not happening”) that it is, to borrow his exact words, “terribly uninteresting,” not to mention his proceeding acknowledgement that he doesn’t understand “modernist writing,” he goes on to say, following Kiyooka’s ripostes, that he understands “this language in this time that I’m living in,” thereby indicating that he does, in fact — miraculously, one might say — understand “modernist writing,” and, as if suddenly baffled by the admissions of ignorance that slipped from his mouth at the conversation’s outset, begins to retract and revise his inaugural gaffe: “Maybe I shouldn't have said that I don't understand what you're saying.”

These latter statements, by which the student attempts to reconstitute himself as a ‘subject of knowledge,’ as someone who ‘gets’ modernist writing, and thus to identify himself with the author, are symptoms of what Lacan refers to as an “imaginary transference” in his écrit, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis.” For Lacan, the imaginary transference fundamentally involves the unconscious projection of the image of an archaic rival onto a person in the present (“Aggressiveness” 16). The image that is projected or ‘transferred’ onto the object in the imaginary transference is the captivating facade with which the child identifies in the primordial mirror-stage (Lacan, “Mirror-Stage” 4). This seductive surface appearance gives rise to aggressive tension, for inasmuch as the child’s specular counterpart, in its superficial completeness and harmony, anticipates a future state of wholeness and motor coordination, and thus evokes joy and jubilance, it also threatens to usurp the caregiver’s love and attention, and thus equally evokes feelings of inferiority, jealousy, and hostility (Lacan, "The Mirror Stage" 4, 7; “Aggressiveness” 20-21; “Subversion” 295). In other words, insofar as the image resembles the child, it is a competitor. The reactualization of the narcissistic image thus recommences the ancient competition for the desire of the Other and arouses aggressive affects. Hence the student’s agitations are markedly acerbic: “I found them [your writings] terribly uninteresting . . . I couldn't help saying to myself [after hearing you speak], ‘so what?’” But it also instantiates an imaginary identification that creates the false impression that the interlocutor is the self. Hence the student suddenly apprehends himself, or more precisely, misidentifies himself, as the artist who understands the significance of the “language of this time.”

While the oppugnancies and inconsistencies of the first student’s chattering incarnate the specularity of the interchange, his aforementioned appeals and solicitations succinctly exemplify speech’s capacity to transfigure the receiver of the message into an omniscient Autre. The imputation of omniscience is audible, however, not just in the first student’s exhalations, but also in several other comments that are dispersed throughout the recording, comments that, despite issuing from different mouths and containing different signifiers, can nevertheless be considered ‘refrains’ in that they invariably attribute knowledge to the artist. Accordingly, in addition to the first student’s demand for meaning, there is the third student’s declaration that the significance of each individual letter can only be grasped by its author and recipient, as well as Doug Barbour’s presupposition, which is easily detectable in his questions, that Kiyooka’s readership will find his letters predominantly incomprehensible (“You’re willing to sacrifice, or you’re willing to have a reader miss a good portion of that book if something get through to them, then?”). These seemingly insignificant utterances are therefore speech acts, since they promote the author to a position of eminence. They consecrate Kiyooka, to again borrow Lacan’s terminology, as a representative of the symbolic, the domain of language and law, quite literally investing him with the authority to ’correctly’ interpret discourse or, at least, to disseminate its secret sense. Each authorization of the author can therefore be understood as an example of what Lacan refers to in his first seminar as the “efficacious” or “symbolic” transference, insofar as it “changes the nature of the two beings present,” casting the listener as a particularization of the great Other, and the speaker, as a docile vassal, eagerly awaiting revelation from on high (Book I 109; c.f. The Four Fundamental Concepts 232).

The hitherto mentioned exchanges suggest that the instinctive relationship is prohibited by the structure of ‘intersubjective’ communication: even when the encounter with the artist is not blocked by the imaginary relation, the struggle between the ego and its counterpart, it nevertheless remains mediated by speech, and is thus a petitioning, not of the author, but of the Autre. Lacan represents this problematic on his Schema-L:

On this schema, S designates the subject’s “ineffable and stupid existence; a, his objects; a’, his ego, that is, his form as it is reflected in his objects; and A, the locus from which the questions of his existence may arise for him,” or, in other words, the locus from which emanates the discourse of the Other (Lacan, “On a Question” 183). The first student’s perturbations and slips, because they issue from his ego, and are aimed at his image, can be situated on the line that runs from a, to a’. Inasmuch as he growls at, or likens himself to, the artist, he is adrift on this axis. The symbolic refrains, because they are not only endorsements of the Other, but equally, objectifications and debasements of the self, can be situated on the line that runs from a’ to A. Take, as an example, the first student’s request for “some kind of approach, new and different approach” that would “help him” with, not only, or even primarily, the author’s discourse (“your writing”), but with the discourse of his time (“writing like yours”). This plea succinctly exemplifies his wish to contort himself into the object of the Other’s desire, to posses the comportment of the ideal reader or listener, and thus, to occupy the place of the little a’ that sits directly opposite A on the zed-shaped diagram. Notably, the connection to a qua real object or material thing, Lacan’s rapport sexuel, is not represented on the quadrate, as a is, for him, strictly imaginary, a seductive facade or lure.

Why are the forenamed inquisitors invariably trapped on the four-pronged graph and thus totally and completely severed from the author? They are circumscribed to the Schema-L because they foremost desire, not the objects that might satisfy their carnal appetites, but the Other’s desire. Indeed, desire qua desire of desire is the connective tissue of the edifice. This desire is articulated most clearly in the recording’s refrains. Thus, returning to the example given above, the first student’s iteration of the refrain manifests his wish to acquire the disposition that would make possible the joussiance of the Other. Similarly, the third student’s iteration of the refrain probes for, or at least, posits the existence of, that extra bit of ‘context’ (“the circumstances”) that would make Kiyooka’s letters fully “applicable” to her, and thus, for the knowledge that would situate her firmly at a’. The question that must be answered is therefore not, ‘why do the recording's inquisitors find themselves trapped on Lacan’s diagram,’ but rather, ‘why do they desire the Other’s desire?’ or ‘why is this aspiration ubiquitous?.’

In his fifth seminar, Lacan suggests that human beings ab initio desire the Other’s desire, as this modality of desire is the product of the natal or perhaps even prenatal confrontation with the signifying chain (172, 202). This confrontation foreordains the infant to constitute its first object, namely, its mother, as a signifier, where a signifier is quite simply that which is capable of alternating between presence and absence; but insofar as the infant constitutes the mother as a signifier, as, again, someone who is there one moment and gone the next, it equally constitutes her as a being of desire, as her alternations necessitate the existence of a force that explains them (Lacan, Book V 165-166, 172-173, 182). Thus, in desiring the maternal signifier, the child is, in the most literal sense, desiring a desire. The two are strictly equivalent.

Yet the recording’s refrains do not manifest the inquisitors’ desire for mother’s desire, but rather, their desire for the Other’s desire. They have therefore undergone castration, as it the castration complex that separates the two forms of the desire for desire. According to Lacan, castration detaches the child from the maternal signifier while also revealing its signified, namely, the law which lies and beyond and supports it (Book V 166-167, 169-170, 173-174, 176, 180, 185-186, 187-188). This law, it should be noted, is, in his view, counterintuitively emancipatory, as if the child is not integrated into it by means of castration, it will quite simply ‘be’ the object of the mother’s desire, which is to say, will remain completely undifferentiated, utterly devoid of anything resembling ‘individuality’ (Book V 173, 185, 209-210). The wish of the first and third student, to the extent that it indicates their detachment from the mother’s desire or, conversely, their attachment to the law, testifies to their castration.

Is not the subject who desires the Other’s desire profoundly paranoid? Such a claim is antithetical to Lacan’s teachings, for he regards paranoia as a form of psychosis, and his concept of foreclosure suggests that human beings are psychotic only insofar as they have, by some accident of life, foregone castration, and thus been denied entrance into the symbolic order (“On a Question” 190-191, 205). Yet the symbolic refrains of the dialogue’s interlocutors are unmistakably paranoid. To the degree that they attribute knowledge to the artist and his addressees, they imply that only an elect few ‘know what’s really going on.’ Each refrain is in this regard its own little conspiracy theory. Thus Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their Anti-Oedipus, regard desire qua desire for the Other’s desire, contra Lacan, not as normative, but as a paranoid distortion of desire qua sexual instinct (206, 277, 279-280, 364, 376). Moreover, they argue that desire qua sexual instinct ceaselessly throbs beneath and undermines paranoid desire. Thus, it might be the case that the instinctive relationship, so hastily mythologized by Lacan, is not absent from the classroom dialogue after all, even though paranoia is evidently endemic to this minor genre. For is it not possible to observe legitimate moments of connective synthesis between the artist and his listeners in this recording? Beyond the provocations and appeals, there is Kiyooka’s buoyant laughter, which audience members desire as such, and from which they derive enjoyment and satisfaction. These minor moments cannot be mapped onto the Schema-L; they are off-the-grid, outside of the purview of the talking cure. Properly speaking, they are the objects par excellence of schizoanalysis, the science of instinctual rapport.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1972. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, Penguin, 2009.

Kiyooka, Roy. Transcanada Letters. 1975. Edited by Smaro Kamboureli, NeWest Press, 2005.

Lacan, Jacques. “Aggressiveness and Psychoanalysis.” 1948. Écrits, a selection. 1966. Translated by Bruce Fink, W. W. Norton & Company, 2002, pp. 10-30.

–––. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. 1973. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan, Karnac, 2004.

–––. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” 1949. Écrits, a selection. 1966. Translated by Bruce Fink, W. W. Norton & Company, 2002, pp. 3-9.

–––. “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis.” 1959. Écrits, a selection. 1966. Translated by Bruce Fink, W. W. Norton & Company, 2002, pp. 169-214.

–––. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954. 1975. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by John Forrester, W. W. Norton & Company, 1991.

–––. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III, The Psychoses, 1955-56. 1981. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Russell Grigg, W. W. Norton & Company, 1993.

–––. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book V, Formations of the Unconscious, 1957-58. 1998. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Russell Grigg, W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.

–––. “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire.” 1960. Écrits, a selection. 1966. Translated by Bruce Fink, W. W. Norton & Company, 2002, pp. 281-312.