The Narcissism of Small Differences

8/13/2019 The Narcissism of Small Differences

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[Post-print of] The Narcissism of Small Differences: On Becketts First Love

Sigi Jttkandt, Ghent University

(a): the journal of culture and the unconscious3.1-2 (2003): 117-26.

Let us begin by asking two questions: one, what is first about Becketts First Love?

and two, what does love have to do with counting? These seem like simple questions,

perhaps, but they bear on a number of important points for understanding the work of love,

both in the practice of psychoanalysis and in a certain literary tradition shaped by an

unrelenting encounter with this singular emotional state. What we will see here is how a

certain repetition that occurs in love is responsible for bringing about an ethically-charged

change in subjective consciousness. The irony that it should be Beckett, arch anti-Romantic,

who serves as the occasion for this discovery only underscores how, contrary to the central

tenets of the aesthetic tradition, love is neither the synthesizing, nor the recuperative concept

it is commonly held to be.1Instead, as Beckett helps us to see, loves operation is

mysteriously tied to a generative symbolicprocess whose role in the creation of metaphoric

names invites us to reconsider the concept of identity in terms that are hopefully less

pejorative than we have become used to today.

To address the first question: as any good psychoanalytic critic knows, ones first love

is always the love of the mother, insofar as she is the mOther with whom the child

experiences its first blissful feeling of satisfaction and wholeness. This harmony abruptly

comes to be curtailed by the entry of the Name of the Father, the paternal metaphor that takes

the form of the injunction against incest, irrevocably splitting the primordial mother-child

dyad and inserting the subject into the castrated, symbolic world of language. All subsequent

love objects, according to this psychoanalytic narrative, are nothing but failed attempts to

recapture the unity of this first love, sending the desiring subject off on its endless metonymic

task to find It, the little kernel of itself that vanished with the signifying cut and which it

manages to re-find only in the small doses of jouissance that come to pave the rutted paths of

its irrevocably unsatisfied and unsatisfiable desire.

Paul Davies Jungian reading of Becketts First Love romanticizes the Beckettian

universe in more or less these terms, arguing that in this tale Beckett presents what the critic

calls the spiritual emergency of the Cartesian subject, cut off both from itself and its

environment, and forced to inhabit the purely symbolic, hence deathly world of pure thought

(45). Davies goes on to give a vivid exposition of the landscape of the Beckettian subject in

all of its disgust, pain and filth which he ultimately attributes to a yearning for what Davies,

following Coleridge, calls the I AM, the Identity that predates the fatal divide into I and not-

I (63). But the problem as I see it with this reading of First Love is that the narrators

difficulty isnt so much his tragic inhabiting of a purely symbolic world cut off from a

primordial unity. Rather, his problem seems to lie in the fact that he isnt inscribed within this

symbolic world satisfactorily enough.

The novel begins with an account of the unnamed narrators visit to his fathers grave

in an attempt to establish the old mans age when he died. His death has caused the narrator to


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be forced from the fathers house, with the result that he meets the woman Lulu, the

ostensible subject of the first love of the title. This act of expulsion from the house, his

subsequent admission into Lulus apartment and his ensuing self-exile from it following the

birth of his child, constitute more or less the sole narrative action of this semi-

autobiographical nouvelle. The action, in other words, describes a series of ejections from

houses, a spatial back and forth movement from inside to outside and back again. But it is one

of the features of Becketts narrators particular humor consistently to invert the conventional

hierarchy associated with such spatial relations as, for example, becomes evident from the

epitaph that writes for himself: Hereunder lies the above who up below/So hourly died that

he lived on till now (11). In a series of condensed, witty paradoxes, this essentially empty

i.e. subjectless lifes story overturns life into a periodic series of small deaths that are lived

not, as one would expect, up above but are died up below.

Constituting the first narrated event of the story, the narrators eviction from his

fathers house invokes a similar inversion of the traditional Romantic terms of the

psychoanalytic theme of banishment from a maternal unity. For here, the banishment is an

expulsion not from a primordial mother-child dyad, but from the paternal house. As the bearer

of the signifier that separates the child from the mother, the fathers traditional role is to

guarantee the symbolic universe that his cut of castration has inaugurated for the subject, but

in Becketts narrators case, the fathers death appears to have rendered him strangely

impotent. Complaining that he was not allowed to see his fathers will which, the narrator

implies, would have contained provision for his continued existence in the house, the narrator

writes, It was he who wanted me in the house. . . . Yes, he was properly had, my poor father,

if his purpose was really to go on protecting me from beyond the tomb (13-14). As an aside,

it is worth noting how, in this novel, the father is the sole figure associated with feelings of

tenderness on the narrators part who, after his final self-exile from Lulus house, launches

into a moving recount of a childhood memory of his father pointing out the star constellations

and giving the names of lighthouses. I will come back to this conjunction of love and naming

in a moment, but it suffices to observe how the narrators conviction here that his fathers role

is to keep on protecting him from beyond the grave, a protection which for some reason has

mysteriously failed and caused his expulsion from the symbolic universe of the paternal

home.

Such an expulsion from the symbolic universe has precedents, of course, in Lacanian

psychoanalysis. For Lacan, each choice of neurosis contains a very specific relation to the

paternal signifier, one of which entails a similar symbolic exclusion. The psychotic is said to

foreclose the Name of the Father in its entirety, a typically gnomic Lacanian statement

which Joel Dor helps to clarify and refine when he says that foreclosure is not so much the

complete absence of knowledge of a paternal signifier after all, how can you foreclose

something you have no knowledge of? but that the subject refuses to be subject to this

knowledge (Dor 154). Through its foreclosure of the paternal or master signifier, the

psychotic subject is unable to join the Name of the Father to a signified in a signifying process

that would enable the paternal function to be represented. Instead, the psychotic remains in a

world organized through purely imaginary relations, in which the big Others structuringfunction manifests itself in the figure of a persecuting small other. Yet it seems clear that this


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is not the experience of Becketts narrator. He is, after all, able to establish certain symbolic

relationships such as the date of his birth and his age at the time of his marriage, even if

these are characterized by a persistently wavering doubt as we will see. His problem, then, is

not so much the complete lack but rather a certain shortfallof the structuring function that the

paternal signifier is supposed to effectuate.

Let us look at this collapse of the structuring function. The novel opens with the

comment I associate, rightly or wrongly, my marriage with the death of my father, in time.

That other links exist, on other levels, between these two affairs, is not impossible. I have

enough trouble as it is in trying to say what I think I know (7). With these qualifications, the

narrator introduces what will be a persistent characteristic not only of his, but of the more

general Beckettian heros discourse: the inability to state a thing definitively. What Davies

calls the Beckettian narrators doubting comment, qualification, review is one of the most

enduring characteristics of Becketts language and has been discussed at length in the critical

tradition. But what calls for further discussion is the way this perpetual doubting qualification

actually represents the symptomaticexpression of the absence of a linguistic anchoring point.

Becketts universe is not so much characterized by a refusal or foreclosure of this mooring

point, embodied in the Name of the Father, but rather by the melancholic experience of this

signifiers loss. The paternal signifier was once there, but has now disappeared, casting the

Beckettian subject out into a linguistic world that still bears traces of former meanings but

which has inexplicably lost its center. Detached from their anchoring points in the symbolic,

words now begin to exhibit a double instability, leading not only to a persistent doubt as to the

veracity of their content i.e. a metonymic instability and displacement that traverses across

different signifieds but their very form, too, becomes subject to mutation. This second

characteristic of Becketts prose is found in what are known as the famous portmanteau words

that litter his heroes recitations of events, the sudden unexpected combinations of words that

coalesce to form neologisms such as, for example, Catch-cony life! or Omnidolent! (27).

The effect of such verbal condensations that, to continue the Jakobsonian parallel, could

provisionally be aligned with metaphorical activity, is a certain thickening of the linguistic

material to the point where words almost seem to become objects within their own right.

Hence the psychoanalytic concept that best describes the Beckettian heros relation to

language is not psychosis but depression, although this is not a concept that has been

elaborated in any fully developed way by Lacan himself whose famous dismissal of it in

Television highlights what he considers the specifically ethical nature of its failure. Recall

how depression for Lacan isnt a state of the soul, it is simply a moral failing, as in Dante, or

Spinoza: a sin, which means a moral weakness, which is, ultimately, located only in relation

to thought, that is, in the duty to be Well-spoken, to find ones way in dealing with the

unconscious, with the structure (Lacan 1990, 22). Despite Lacans contempt, his pinpointing

of depression as a specific relationship with language has recently been taken up by some

psychoanalytic critics, notably Paul Verhaeghe and Stijn Vanheule at Ghent University, who

have begun to conceive of depression in seemingly more productive and, dare I say, less

judgmental ways. For Verhaeghe, for example, depression is understood in terms of a moment

of passage whose function, like mourning, is to facilitate a process of de-identification.Hence depression not only potentially holds out a similar ontological possibility as the


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psychoanalytic cure, but in many cases is the very sign of the analytic work itself that serves

to detach the subject from its primary identifications its fundamental fantasy and hurl it

into the void of subjective destitution.2

What is most striking for our purposes is how Vanheule, in an illuminating study of

the structural position of depression within the Lacanian difficulty/movement matrix,describes the depressive patients relationship to language.3Calling the depressive state

symbolically immobile in relation to anxiety, Vanheule finds typical of the depressive

subject a monotonous and empty discourse whose qualities exhibit just such a linguistic

drift as we have seen in Beckett. Vanheules implication is that in depression the formerly

structuring properties of language have been lost or abandoned, leaving the subject adrift in a

sea of language whose words still carry the traces of structure and signification but which,

having lost their metaphoric value as he puts it, now float like abandoned pieces of

driftwood from a shipwreck. The depressive state, in other words, has wrested words from

their embedding in the big Other, the symbolic structuring that gives them their brilliant

backlighting and imbues them with meaning. Cut off from such a support system, words

continue to circulate but are no longer rooted to any stable anchor or to what Lacan calls the

point de capiton, the quilting point that turns signifiers into the bearers of a subject, in

Lacans famous phrase. The effect on the subject is thus a similar loss of mooring, since it is

through language that one is hooked, as it were, into the Symbolic.

With this in mind, let us take a closer look at First Love. Once expelled from his

fathers house, the narrators subsequently indigent life is interrupted one day by the

unexpected appearance of the woman Lulu who joins him on his bench by the canal and they

spend a number of nearly wordless evenings together. All she had done the narrator tells us,

was sing, beneath her breath, as to herself, and without the words fortunately, some old folk

songs, and so disjointedly, skipping from one to another and finishing none, that even I found

it strange (21). An involuntary sexual encounter on the narrators part also ensues, after

which the narrator decides he can no longer stand her and tells her to stop coming to the

bench. She, however, negotiates a compromise where she says will come more infrequently

after which the narrator himself then abandons the bench, less on account of her, he says, than

that it is now failing to meet his particular needs. He installs himself next in a cowshed

whereupon he discovers to his horror that he has fallen in love with Lulu, whose name he

finds himself inscribing in the cowpats of his field among the nettles. He explicitly names this

feeling love:

Yes, I loved her, its the name I give, alas, to what I was doing then. I had nothing

to go by, having never loved before, but of course had heard of the thing, at home, in

school, in brothel and in church, and read romances, in prose and verse, under the guidance

of my tutor, in six or seven languages, both dead and living, in which it was handled at

length. I was therefore in a position, in spite of all, to put a label on what I was about when

I found myself inscribing the letters of Lulu in an old heifer pat or flat on my face in the

mud trying to tear up the nettles by the roots. (31-2)

Describing how his thoughts were all of Lulu, the narrator then makes a very

peculiar gesture and proceeds to change her name. Anyhow, Im sick and tired of this name


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Lulu, Ill give her another, more like her, Anna for example, its not more like her but no

matter. I thought of Anna, then, I who had learnt to think of nothing, nothing except my

pains (33).

Let us move a bit slowly through the moments here. First, the experience of love

becomes identifiable once it is associated with a label, a determination that is transmitted tothe narrator explicitly through writing and literary culture (the significance of which I will

come back to in a moment): Yes, I loved her, its the name I give, alas, to what I was doing

then (31). Second, this experience of love prompts its own act of writing in the narrator in

the form of a kind of primitive graffiti that has him inscribing his beloveds name in the cow

dung. Finally, the repetition of Lulus name associated with this inscription process generates

the new name, Anna. The striking thing about the narrators love, then, is the effect it has in

bringing another signifier into being, and this occurs through a loving repetition that the

narrator, a few pages later, explicitly identifies with counting, I thought of Anna, then, long

long sessions, twenty minutes, twenty-five minutes and even as long as half an hour daily. I

obtain these figures by the additionof other, lesser figures. That must have been my way of

loving (34) [my italics].

Working backwards, here we are beginning to broach an answer to the second

question I posed, namely, what does love have to do with counting? Let us therefore look

more closely at what happens when one counts. As we know from elementary set theory, in

order to count there must be a nothing that must come first, a nothing that must, strictly

speaking, be counted. Set theory names this nothing the empty set and, without going too

deeply into technical details, it is the principle through which ordinal numbers, that is,

numbers derived from the act of counting, are generated. The number 1, for example, is

simply the set that contains one member, namely, the element zero or empty set which is

counted as one. The number 2, subsequently, is the set that contains zero plus one, or, in

other words, two instances of the empty set. The question is where this ability to count comes

from. How does one arrive at the primary empty set, the nothing which makes up the first

number, 1? Here Lacanian psychoanalysis can help. While set theory names this principle the

empty set, Lacan designates it the unary trait or One that is the foundation of subjective

identity.

Lacans most extensive discussion of the unary trait is found in his seminar on

Identification (Seminar IX). He takes the term from Freud who, in his own chapter on the

same topic in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, notes how identification is the

earliest and original form of emotional tie with an object, formed by the subjects introjection

of a single trait of the Other (which in itself may be anything, a cough, a certain look etc.)

(Group Psychology 39). Love, for Freud, is the egos subsequent valorization of this unary

trait or Einziger Zug which comes to form the basis either for narcissistic or anaclitic love.

Narcissistic love loves the unary trait in oneself insofar as it is the core around which what

comes to be the subjects ideal ego is built. Anaclitic, or object love, is what Freud calls a

roundabout way of satisfying our narcissism (45) through which one projects onto the loved

object the original unary trait of the Other that one has come to love narcissistically in oneself.


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Originating out of Freuds theories of identification and narcissism, the concept of the

unary trait nevertheless acquires far greater reach in Lacan for whom it constitutes nothing

less than the genesis of difference itself, showing its kinship with the master signifier for

which it serves as a kind of primitive prototype.4As the source of what Lacan calls

signifying difference, the unary traits primary function is to mark the subject as a One

with all of the ontological implications that this carries, namely, the simultaneous ability to

negate oneself in another object5 by making the empty set of the counting procedure

emerge. To explain how this process works, Lacan takes the example of the primitive hunters

notching of the number of bison that have been killed onto a scrap of bone. In this simple act

of notating, which is nothing but the repetitive inscription or writing down of a single mark,

the signifying difference that becomes the support of numerical identity emerges. What is

this mysterious signifying difference, and what are its properties? Lacan takes pains to

distinguish it from the experiential or qualitative difference that obtains between each of the

little marks on the bone: each mark, insofar as it may differ slightly from the next, one

slightly larger, one more crooked etc. possesses a unique identity that distinguishes it from

the others. Nevertheless, such differential identity is not the identity Lacan wants to develop.

Perhaps the most accessible explanation of what Lacan has in mind with this idea of a

signifying difference can be found in Bruce Finks elucidation of the game of the coin toss.

Fink begins with the simple random possibility of heads or tails (16). The odds of the coin

landing on one or the other are 50-50. But once you begin to group a series of coin tosses into

pairs, something rather strange begins to emerge. While possible sets of pairs continue to

appear in completely random order, if one groups these sets as overlapping pairs, it becomes

evident that certain pair possibilities have been precluded by the pair that has immediately

preceded them. If, for example, all possible pair types are two heads, two tails, one head/one

tail and one tail/one head, a coin toss that produces a pair of two heads precludes there from

ever occurring a subsequent overlapping pair made up of two tails, since the first member of

that overlapping pair has already been established as a head. The only possible toss for such

an overlapping pair following two heads, must be either two heads again, or one head, one

tail.

What this illustration demonstrates is how a repeating pattern such as the hunters

notched bone, or the narrators repetitive inscription of Lulus name in the cowpats,

nevertheless manages to generate a structure that possesses certain intrinsic laws. These laws

are not externally imposed upon the pattern but are found to originate from inside the pattern

itself. And their function, as Fink explains, is to keep track of certain events, to count

certain numbers, preventing some from entering the series before enough of the others or

certain combinations of others have joined the chain. These laws structure a random series

into an order that can be counted and as such, being countable, testify to the implicit

presence of an original One, an empty set around which the entire structure grows. They

testify, in other words, to the presence of an absolute, original signifying difference a

difference detached from all possible comparison, as Lacan puts it in Seminar IX that

allows every other member of the set to take its place and be counted.

When Becketts narrator, then, tells us that his love consisted of the additionof

periods of time during which he thought of Lulu, the question we must ask ourselves is in


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what this thought of Lulu consists? When we think of someone we love, naturally we

imagine we are thinking of their unique qualities that mark them off in our minds as different

from everybody else, our narcissism as Freud calls it, of their small differences6(Freud

1961; 72): a certain way their hair sticks up, their particular smile, how they walk, the color of

their eyes, not to mention all of the wonderful special ways in which they have dealings with

the world around them and with us. In short, we imagine we are contemplating of all their

particularities and hope that we, too, are similarly loved for our unique qualities. But Beckett

draws attention to something else occurring in this thought of love. In the repetitive thought

of ones beloved under the condition we call love, we find ourselves, as Beckett makes us

plainly perceive, repeating the beloveds name. My thoughts were all of Lulu he tells us,

and then immediately following, Anyhow, Im sick and tired of this name Lulu (33). This

loving repetition of the name subsequently comes to have a very peculiar effect. It generates a

new name for the beloved. The endless counting and recounting of the beloveds name in

love, in other words, has had the remarkable effect of producing a new signifier, but one that

cannot be said to have been generated by any empirical similarity (Ill give her another, more

like her, Anna for example, its not more like her but no matter). Rather, it appears to have

been generated in and through the repeating procedure itself. The repetition of the name in

love, in other words, has enabled a kind of primitive metaphor to emerge, permitting one

signifier to substitute for another, but be the bearer of same subject, Lulu/Anna.

How has this substitution become possible? It seems that in the simple repetition of

the name, something like a unary trait has been generated, much in the way the One of the

empty set was derived from the consecutive coin tosses. This unary trait, or One, structures

the repeating sequences of the phonetic pattern, enabling a relation of identity to occur. But,

as we saw, this relation of identity the renaming of Lulu as Anna has nothing whatsoever

to do with her particular qualities (which would also then raise the interesting question of

what it would be for someone to be like their name). The identity that makes the name

Anna capable of substituting for Lulu is an identity of quite a different kind. Rather than an

empirical similarity, this is an identity that seems to have been generated, somewhat like a

crystalline formation, around the One that the counting procedure presupposes, that is, around

the unary trait that is the support of the entire series of identity and differentiations that make

up a symbolic system. The identity that inheres between Lulu and Anna, in other words, is an

identity that is hooked onto the One of the count, an identity that has introjected, if you like,

the original signifying difference of the unary trait that holds a signifying system in place,as reflected nicely by the formal qualities of the new name: from the interminable repetition

of the self-identical Lulu, the palindrome Anna is formed whose self-mirroring formally

reflects its anchoring capacities as a (provisional) linguistic quilting point.7

If the narrators problem, as I broadly conceived it, was the loss or disappearance of

the paternal signifier following the death of his father and expulsion from the world of

symbolic relations, thematized in the nouvelle as the narrators homelessness and which I

theorized in psychoanalytic terms as depression, loves counting re-generates what can only

be called a kind of primordial paternal signifier in the form of the unary trait, effectively re-

inscribing the narrator within the symbolic. Moving in with Anna, the narrator once more, nomatter how precariously, has a place, an address in the symbolic system. Hence the


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metaphorization involved in the narrators generation of the name Anna, I submit, is of a

radically different nature than that of his previous portmanteau word-creation. Where the

portmanteau words bodily joined two unassociated words together to create a new

combination, the name Anna emerges out of quite a different reproductive practice: the

seemingly spontaneous eruption of a new signifier out of a simple repeated pattern. If the

portmanteau words were, shall we say, the narrators symptomatic expressions of the loss of

his symbolic mooring, the creation of the word Anna is testament to its mysterious

regeneration, re-establishing the subject in the symbolic universe that First Love represents

thematically in terms of a social dwelling. The counting action of love, in other words, has

somehow reproduced the missing paternal signifier that permits something, with which it has

no empirical resemblance, to stand in for something else: nothing less than the fundamental

requirement of a symbolic system. The fact that the narrators re-inclusion into this system

remains only partial, and the novel ends with his final self-expulsion from Annas apartment,

should nevertheless not deter us from observing how, armed with the creative, i.e.

regenerative power of the signifier, the narrator once more possesses some control over his

comings and goings in the symbolic. Involuntary banishment has been replaced with a self-

exile whose concomitant implication is that return should also be possible.

Psychoanalytic discussions frequently emphasize the splitting action associated with

the first metaphor that divides the subject from itself. What Becketts First Love helps us to

see is how this cut instigated by the paternal signifier has the additional, obverse effect of

simultaneously holding the two divided parts of the subject together in a kind of floating

unity. Should this signifier disappear, or go missing, as happened with Becketts narrator, one

falls into a state of depression whose only truly effective cure, as countless sufferers of this

disease well know, is to fall in love. Loves repetitive counting re-generates the One holding

the signifier and signified together, enabling the subject once more not only to decant the

floating elements of the Real into symbolic forms but also, significantly, to generate new

signifiers in the form of new names: loves metaphors. It is no coincidence, then, that the

renaming that occurs in love is precisely the treatment Vanheule recommends for depression.

He writes,

The analysts preliminary interventions . . . will consist in attempts at signifying

discontent . . . .This means that the analyst effectively has to name discontent, giving the

subject something to hold on to and thereby to elaborate the named discontent

associatively Vanheule 47).

Loves (re-)naming hooks the subject back into the symbolic, enabling it to form

signifying relations with others on a basis other than that of imaginary relations, that is to say,

to form relations of identity other than those based on empirical similarities and differences.

That this is a productive rather than annihilating power is evident not only from the

subsequent literal birth of the narrators child in the story, but also from the narrators parting

words. Describing his final exit from the house, this time with his new-born baby inside, he

relates how I began playing with the cries, a little in the same way as I had played with the

song, on, back, on, back, if that may be called playing. (62). Opening the symbolic to new

significations and new language games, loves re-generation contains an explicitly linguistic


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dimension best known to us as the living metaphors, the new names lovers bestow upon their

beloved.

***

When, in Seminar XVII, Lacan famously positioned the master discourse as the

reverse side of analytic discourse, could he have had something like following in mind?

Under certain conditions it seems that the master discourse itselfpossesses some of the ethical

possibilities more commonly held to belong to the analytic discourse.It sounds a travesty, I

know. But the S1, the signifier from which the discourse of the master begins, and which is

indispensable for the discourses of philosophy, ontology, capital and indeed, as it appears

from even as unmasterly a writer as Beckett, literature permits a comparable change in the

subject albeit through a structurally opposed, inverse reverse path to that of analysis.

The question, which I will leave open, is whether the generation and transmission of the unary

trait that our love and repetitive reading of literature brings about, along with the new writing

it generates, can ever substitute, stand in for, metaphorizethe more classical work of analysis?

Instead let us return to my initial question whose answer at least can now be revised:

the first of Becketts First Love is neither a numerical nor a qualitative category but the love

of the first, of the One around which subjective identity came to be formed. It is the love of

the unary trait that comes from the Other, the little piece of external matter that seeds the pearl

of the subjects identity. But as I hope to have shown, unlike the Coleridgean I AM that

Davies has Becketts narrator mourn, this One of loves count is not created out of any idealist

act of self-positing but through an act of repetition that merely brings it to light. Revealing his

fidelity to a certain structuralism, Beckett indicates the extent to which the One of identity is

always already there, part of a network of signification that always precedes us but uponwhich we nevertheless exert some effects. Love aims at this network whose subjects, as

bearers of the signifier, we are. As Lacan puts it, in love what is aimed at is the subject, the

subject as such, insofar as he is presumed in an articulated sentence, in something that is

organized or can be organized on the basis of a whole life (Encore 50) [my italics].

If desire aims for a perpetually lost object, love is directed toward the name anchored

in the unary trait that positions us within the generational sequence of birth and death. First

love: love not of the mother but of the father whose primary signifying difference we either

bear or seek in our narcissism of the others small differences.


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Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. First Love. Trans. Samuel Beckett. London: Calder and Boyars, 1973.

Davies, Paul. Three Novels and Four Nouvelles: Giving Up the Ghost to be Born at Last.

The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Ed. John Pilling. Cambridge: CUP 1996.

Dor, Joel. Structure and Perversions. Trans. Susan Fairfield. New York: The Other Press,

2001.

Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton

UP, 1995.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Intro. Peter

Gay. New York, Norton, 1961.

---. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New

York: Norton, 1959.

Lacan, Jacques. Identification, 1961-2. Unpublished seminar.

---. Le Sminaire, livre XVII: LEnvers de la psychanalyse (1969-70). Texte tabli par

Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1991.

---. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of

Love and Knowledge, 1972-3. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. with notes Bruce

Fink. New York: Norton, 1998.

---. Television. New York & London: Norton, 1990.

Vanheule, Stijn. Neurotic Depressive Trouble: Between the Signifier and the Real. Journal

of Lacanian Studies 2.1 (2004): 34-53.

Verhaeghe, Paul. On Being Normal and Other Disorders: A Manual for Clinical

Psychodiagnostics. Trans. Sigi Jttkandt. New York: The Other Press, 2004.


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1Notes

Im thinking here not only of the general structural claims love makes on narrative

resolution within the Western literary tradition, but also more specifically of its privileged mediatory

role in idealism, beginning with Platos myth of Aristophanes in the Symposium.

2Paul Verhaeghe notes how Depression can thus be conceived as the reverse of identity

acquisition, the loss of an identificatory anchoring point in the Other, p. 275. See also his comment

about how both Lacan and Klein conceive of the end of the treatment in terms of depression, p. 278.

3Vanheule describes how Depression is characterized by an avoidance of the division and

conflict that are inherent to the signifier. The Real presses the subject on the scene, but the latter

doesnt occupy the role of one who carries speech and ends up in a stagnant position at the level of the

Other. The circulation of signifiers and the signifying capacity of the Other are put in suspension and

language loses its metaphoric value in organizing subjective reality. Clinically, this can be observed in

the depressive patients typically monotonous and empty discourse. A major consequence is that the

real of being remains profoundly unstructured. The depressive subject is only loosely integrated into

the Other and as such it stands quite apart from the Others structure. By the same token, order more

generally gets lost. Consequently, from a Lacanian point of view, the depressed subject is correct in its

impression that it is an outcast of the Other and that it lives in a senseless world. Its being is indeed

signified only poorly and suffering is largely felt at the bodily level. In the end, speech itself and more

specifically the associated object a, voice, is profoundly affected . The most severe cases can even end

in mutism, p. 46.

4The unary trait is, thus, logically anterior to the master signifier, representing a kind of

primitive ground from which metaphorization proper, i.e. castration can generate itself. Only as bearer


12/12

of the unary trait can the subject undergo the functions of privation, frustration, castration. See Lacans

discussion in Seminar IX, session 2/28/62.

5It is because there is a subject who is himself marked or not by a unary trait who is one or

minus one, that there can be a minus o, that the subject can identify himself with the little ball of

Freuds grandson and especially in the connotation of its lack: there is not, ens privativum.2/28/62, I

am indebted to Cormac Gallgher of St Vincents Hospital, Dublin, for this translation of Lacans

seminar.

6I have changed Stracheys translation from the narcissism of minor differences to the

narcissism of small differences in order to make the distinction between a signifying difference and a

differential difference clearer.

7I say provisional because it is precisely one of the features of the love name to spawn

additional loving names. This generative ability must nevertheless be distinguished from Becketts

narrators earlier linguistic drift, since this time the names are linked to one another by their mutual

support in the unary trait.

Documents

The Narcissism of Small Differences