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Paternal Overdrive and Traumatic Invasiveness

Sometimes the subject matter with which one engages frustrates the hermeneutic drive. Or it menaces the whole enterprise and plan of judicious approach, undermining all good intentions mobilized toward inviting a sensible dialogue or assuring a purposeful probe. A vexed motif, an unauthorized problem set, threatens to capsize you. Be that as it may, I am a child of the university, an entity whose expressions of ambivalence have not yet destroyed me. (But how does one know that one has not been destroyed? I have evidence to the contrary. That is a topic for another occasion. One day I will investigate the tyranny of the university over my own trajectories and dream projects, beginning with the way it has ruled over and overruled my body, beating down any healthy instinct, trampling the least cellule of creativity, but this problem does not move me now and I know too well that I’m rigged to be grateful to that traumatic invasiveness, which, with all its identificatory passes, is also in the end a structuring force.) I mark these coordinates not out of a sense of entitled indulgence or narcissistic complacency, but in order to situate myself near the problem areas that I would like to discuss here.

I intend to ride out a wave that was unleashed quite a while ago by Walter Benjamin, who saw and nailed the demise of aura in the artwork and those regions of existence claiming transcendence. Close by, Hannah Arendt was sizing the demise of authority, located within the political realm or in philosophical and artistic zones of creativity.¹ Both Benjamin and Arendt take measure of a loss that affects us all, if only, for starters, in a low burn kind of way. They gauge the vanishing velocities of something we had counted on, gathering together, in an historical sense, that which was needed in order for the world of humans to thrive and name and create. I add an unfinished work of Alexandre Kojève to the mix, for he has understood the disastrous consequences of relinquishing authority, be it that of God or nation-state, or of what is insinuated by the trickle-down divinity of the work of art. It would be presumptuous to tie together all these strands, but the charge of presumption has never stopped me before.

I want to consider what happens to our shared and fissured worlds when the auratic claims or mystical foundations on which the power pump of authority depends have been eroded. What happens to the performance of power and diplomacy, to world-running energies, when they are no longer backed by the assured stance of authority? Does one scale back on the way deals are cut, or do new smart powers emerge to fill in for what has gone missing? Or has the breakdown of authority’s long-reigning era—in many ways heralded by art and political forms of steady insurrection—brought us to a portentous standstill? Let us examine the premises behind these questions with patience and a fresh stash of curiosity. I begin by putting our focus on the problem of authority: the way it is carried, undermined, repelled, mimed, embraced, or perpetually questioned. I’ll start with my home ground, with one of my residential addresses, from where I frequently emit signals.

In the university, the exercise of authority, including the often-covert habits of tyranny and evocations of injustice, remain to be studied even as such investigations tend to downscale other, more manifestly distressed experiences of wrongdoing. Itself embattled by the threat of repressive regimes, the university seems in any case small in comparison to frankly pernicious political entities, and in some cases bravely shelters subversive cognitive sprees and intellectual diversity, making room for behaviors and reflections that receive no pass in other sectors of certain dominant cultures. Nonetheless, whether or not it mirrors larger social tendencies, the university-as-life form should not escape review, for it also sponsors unfreedom in a number of ways and appears to exhaust the teaching body under the weight of an ever-increasing bureaucratic prerogative. University offices, like all bureaucracies, dispense their toxic dosage of authoritarian rule; and the struggle over what carries authority or what is poised to make one perish (which is not limited to grammars of authorship and the contingencies of publishing) never stops.

If I have begun my discursive run by slowing down for an institutional checkpoint, this is happening in part because the very possibility of experience, be it flagged by distress, disaster, scales of exaltation, or even mundanity, must nowadays be faced without the hallmark of truth. Truth was once affiliated with and came after ruin; its disclosure and light often depending on the staging of someone’s or something’s ruinous disintegration. Today, by contrast, disaster is without truth, occurring without a sign cast from the luminous concealment of a “beyond.” Deprived of shelter, pitched on the edge of metaphysics, one is thrown back upon minimal signposts and decidedly modest directives. We are more on our own than ever before, more responsible for locating the incitements of an essentially untraceable call. This condition favors the spread of social narcissism, a problem that I would like to address briefly, with the understanding that it will receive more attention elsewhere.² In the meanwhile, I offer pledges of truthfulness, even if this gesture must be reduced to situating me in the very modest residential areas from where I write. So, here is how I would sum up my philosophical circumstances: I am a creature of the untimely, coached by Nietzschean temporal leaps yet put through my paces by obligatory relapses into what one might call “tradition.” This is the only way in which I might be considered conservative, or a conservationist—by adhering to the demands of traditional narratives and their silenced partners. That is to say, in part, that I am in my comfort zone when ferreting out the heavily sedated traces and repressed remnants of historical eventfulness. Trained on the sidelines of the master discourse, I advocate a kind of untimely activism, driven home by the joint closure of the philosophical and the political. If something has not been accounted for, I want it. The least probable cause, the darkest and most unavailable docket, sparks my curiosity (curiosity: itself a philosophically devalued motor for investigation). I scour the peripheries, the often-abandoned sites of ethical reconnaissance. Given these constraints and the way I curb the so-called object of contemplation, I like to stay away from the dominant trends and approved protocols for reading politics. Especially where “politics” becomes censorious and inevitable, unconditional (or as Arendt puts it, “total”), and thus, in terms of the way discursive containers are regulated and managed, kind of DOA, as so-called contemplative objects go. (Well, I suppose anything submitted to contemplation arrives de facto DOA. Let me clarify. I mean more mangled or disfigured, more subject to Entstellung, disturbed by displacement, than even language demands—barely recognizable or plainly obsolesced in terms of its presentation. That’s when it comes my way.) I honor and read my colleagues, those known to me and unknown, some of whom have sat on panels with me or have run the other way, who make it their life’s work to put unceasing pressure on the elaboration of social formations, and bravely continue to work through the mires of a relentlessly agonistic politics. But, for me, whether by default or theoretical perversion, there’s another way of going about things, another hand that can be played when it comes to the domination of the political and the necessity of sizing up its implications.

I start off by conducting nano-analyses, following minor or minoritarian tracks that may lead nowhere or, suddenly, they may flip into “the big picture” to function as canaries in a political coal mine. Growing into small spaces in order to bear hard upon big issues has its advantages, and I’m not the first to try this scholarly diet. Still, there are pitfalls and dramatic dissolutions. At the same time as one may be motivated by Kafkan velocities to interrogate the fate of a speck—at the same time as one senses the surprising advance of nano-traces, evicted conceptual shells, or the itineraries of imperceptible systemic disruption—one is also arrested by the magnitude of oversized concerns that are bound to existence. One is compelled to return to the fundamental structures that keep us going, if only in the mode of stationary mobility and according to archeophiliac determination—meaning that one is magnetized by the return of and driven by the return to ancient objects, concepts, formulae when piecing together the remnants of world. Even if one may favor the miniaturized portion of heavy-hitting problems, one sometimes crashes against the wall of their magnitude. Though preferring the speck to the spectacular, I must take my questions—well, they are not really questions, they are calls—I take these calls, given a choice (though it is not a matter of choice but let us go on). In order to be worthy of presentation, they should light up only when and if they arrive beyond themselves, from where they loom: big, barely manageable, yet non-dialectically allied with the speck. The calls may seem marginal, yet they require sizable backup from the tradition, the books, textual fronts, historical feints, and referential pretenses that increase their expanses. By chasing down the motif of authority—where big meets little, constantly exchanging and challenging attributes—I am attacking a cluster of issues that has been heckling me from the philosophical bleachers and that asks, in a way that won’t let up, these questions: Where does the political pose problems? How is the very possibility of peaceful coexistence undermined by apparently unbreachable structures?

The Fissures

I am not the only one to have been left behind when the gods absconded. I have heard you cry; I listen to the rumble of remote but unavoidable clashes: the job description of those left behind, without guarantor or reliable transcendence, without the pat on the back telling you to go on, you’re doing the right thing, hang in there. We scour the breakups, appraise the fissures, staying close to the fragile understructure of falsely grounded knowledge systems. We come in after the break, in the historical and nearly ontological zone that Jean-Luc Nancy designates as “after tragedy,” where he analyzes what “à venir après” means—what it means to ride in on the wake, to come in afterwards like the very concept of history, like all the posts and their chrono-logic that come after Aristotle.³ Setting up the links between the destinies of democracy and the loss of tragedy—the destruction of the tragic ethos—Nancy has underscored the risks of a continued experience of abandonment in the wake of true tragedy. The vanishing gods have left mortals on their own, among themselves in a space where we no longer address gods, offering victims and sacrifice, but one another, all the while wondering how and where language holds on to former rites of sacrifice. Whether or not we try to track the historical release from truth, its often violent unleashing, or the way ancient scenes of disaster bleed, leak, or smear into contemporary politics, it is still the case that, since or rather “after” Kant, one no longer knows what to do with or where to place “human dignity,” how to make it stick or stand plump with meaning.

I, for my part, coming after so many and so much, will grow low now, keep small, without the pretenses of any derivative of God or Subject or master signifier on my side, and strike out on my own, without any pretenses of having fully unloaded these unavoidable metaphysical bolsters. I don’t even have bragging rights or the wherewithal to boast with the triumphalist narcissism of being on my own or ownmost—even my being-towards-death is not my own—but that’s another philosophical story, invoking the well-known terms of Heideggerian thought. The strictures governing utterance are real and the scene of inscription, as Kafka has taught us, has become uncannily local, personal yet emptied of boastful interiorities, measurable achievement. So, for me, it’s back to school, strapped into place on academic death row, last seat in the last row, clenched by a history of repeated punishment. It’s not bad; I have grown to like it. I wobble in place without the brace of truth—that’s my only point here, which is what forces the “I” onto the page, as I offer a clip, a situation without substantial backing but that delivers the split injunction that I must go on, I can’t go on.

A Phenomenological Approach to “This Authority of the Father”

Authority, as Alexandre Kojève makes clear in La notion de l’autorité, has less than nothing to do with force or with strategies of implementation; it evades subphenomena of forcible assertion as well, since it repudiates legal types of bullying and disdains the arbitrary throwing of power punches. In fact, authority supersedes and trumps force on all essential counts, separating off from it with a kind of sovereign aloofness. I would want to argue with his view not only to the extent that “force” has proven to be philosophically inappropriable, difficult to pin down as concept or theme (unlike “violence,” with which philosophical thought has a long involvement), but also because we are made to confront other decisive shortfalls: Kojève’s set of assertions ignores the positing powers of linguistic acts, suppresses the subtle straits of education and sideswipes psychoanalysis, where figures of potency power up in covert sites and make legal inroads. Still, Kojève’s subtle analysis trains its focus on the debilitating consequences of tropological spillovers where politics is run by covert paternal commands. Thus, anything to do with paternal dominance easily slips into political dogma and comportment. Examining authority’s various forms of assertion from domestic habits to foreign communication, he remains attentive to the way it lends structure to material existence.

Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin, in another neighborhood altogether, paired up vitally to mark the ways that authority depends on its own representative and performative capacities. How do we locate authority’s domain and sort out its different functions in order to identify its wideranging conceptual alliances? Whereas Kant removed authority from persons and offices, trouncing some of Martin Luther’s calculated maneuvers, and rerouted authority to the law, Derrida notes that law, in terms of the authority it wields, is not merely “a docile instrument, servile and thus exterior to the dominant power,” but instead something that can and does “maintain a more internal, more complex relation with what one calls force, power, or violence.”⁴ Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, and Samuel Weber control other sectors of the authority problem and separately stress panic as a principal concern for political thought in the way it leads to self-authorizing acts and paternal markers. The three meet over a reading of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, where Moses serves both as perpetual child and founding father, both as law-bearer and breaker of that which regulates social narcissism. However, Kojève does not want to see authority bleed into other qualities of statement or act, and opposes authority to force and power, basing his observations on paternal paradigms that are spared deconstructive takedowns. In the introduction to La notion de l’autorité, the editor, François Terré, when broaching “this Authority of the Father,” whether hidden or repressed, writes that “[the] aforementioned contribution of psychoanalysis is here outside the frame of reflection.”⁵ Off the table at the very moment when paternal authority makes its mark, psychoanalysis is shown to be repressed. Although this repressive move enacts another scene of the slaying of the father, at least it is honest: psychoanalysis has been tagged out as concerns a phenomenological approach to “this Authority of the Father,” and will not contribute to the formation of identity organized around group psychology. Will the spliced-out discipline return to punish or unsettle the household of authority that Kojève sets out to establish? Doesn’t psychoanalysis always come back to bite the ass of the phenomenological politicology that thinks it can simply discard it? Such questions seem premature and have entered our initial sphere only to indicate how authority can replicate itself when under investigation, disabling a friendly discourse such as psychoanalysis—well, maybe not so friendly, nor merely discursive (because it’s too close for comfort). Kojève, in any case, proves impatient with the genealogical and Oedipal tracks that psychoanalysis will have laid down—perhaps even with the exorbitant authority of psychoanalysis over political analyses in weighted theoretical settings—and decisively covers over them.

The one thing I would have liked to have seen the severed pair of political philosophy and psychoanalysis get together on—and here their allied tendencies would have encouraged us to no end—involves new itineraries of pleasure and politics in conjunction with a relentless aestheticization of the political, the historical tendency that both Freud and Kojève have exposed, if not ripped apart. Even though he mutes the psychoanalytic program, Kojève relies on the draw of desire—you may say it’s Hegelian, I say it’s psychoanalysis (and then, depending on the intellectual climate, may whip out a what’s-the-difference-nowadays lecture)—in order to push forward with his political analysis. Kojève insinuates desire into the actualization of justice: his work brings to light the pleasure of judging, a pleasure as acutely felt and specifically rendered as sexual and aesthetic pleasures, emphasizing the blissed-out affect that art evokes. The human psyche is invested in and inspired by the idea of justice and is outfitted with a properly juridical interestedness, which is as personal as it is pervasive (that is why, I’ll venture spontaneously, television offers up so may juridical dramas, to prime and parasite the personal investment in law, the delight in representations of juridical eventfulness). One would have to roll back to Kant to see how the recharging of desire works here, in the sphere of judgment. Kojève puts the pleasure back in judgment whereas Kant directs the explicit thrill of judging to the aesthetic domain, calming it down with disinterestedness, abolishing the privative in order properly to “enliven” judgment and to resurrect it from the numbing fields of the two prior critiques. Jump-started in the third critique (Kritik der Urteilskraft or Critique of the Power of Judgment, 1790), judgment comes to life but within the limits of a safety zone secured by constant philosophical inspection and formal artistic communicability, a prime inflection of Kant’s theory of art. Disinterested pleasure, which is neither privative nor possessive—which cannot put a price on art—instigates the urge to communicate and share the formal experience attributable to the work of art. Art cannot be subjected to any concept (Begriff) or interest, but opens up a field of subjective interplay, encouraging the free-play of the faculties, as the philosopher puts it.

Kojève carries out a double move when dealing with the primal principle of cohesion that binds the state to a paternal metaphorology, for his aim is both to separate family and state and to disable the foundational myth of family. It is of some consequence for Kojève to disjoin paternal authority from the state and locks it solely into familial structures. The family depends on paternal ontology (Father having been set as cause, author, origin and source of what is) by default. Father, who figures the authority of the past, maintains himself only by means of ontological “inertia.” Kojève attempts to off the Father, who cannot be easily removed, with a silencer. No one will note the big bang of paternal jockeying because Father mutely survives himself. Father stays the execution to the extent that lassitude has overtaken the family “vote” and nothing energetically moves in to replace or refute him. His imputed authority accrues to a default position. Here again one might patch into Freudian circuits where the sons mobilize for the purpose of bumping off the Father. The overthrow of the paternal, according to Freudian patterns, gives rise to even more intense displays of authority squired by remorse. Kojève is perhaps equally as severe as Freud, if less inclined to construe a narrative explication that accounts for the fantasy of paternal demise. The Father only ever held the key to authority by means of a nearly arbitrary shortfall, the type of inert passivity that Kojève ontologizes. Inert and essentially absent (complaints about absent fathers are only empirical derivatives of this essential feature), Father has a lock on the past even though he was ever always on his way out and off the field of familial-social intensities.

Distinct Hierarchies of Authority

Family and State obey distinct hierarchies of authority to which they are deemed answerable. They belong to different transversals of time, the overlaps of which Kojève deems largely illusory. Still, derivations and signals sent across the divide of regularly disbanding typologies are not uncommon. Father mixes in where he was evicted or merely tolerated, and memory traces of early identifications abound. Kojève uses the notion of authority as a brace against the wages of an inassimilable history, as something that could override the blanking out of representation (where only a neutral gleam can be detected), and a relation to disabled time (when things go into hiding or a lull, when one feels pressed but nothing moves, except for an ominous slo-mo tic-toc of finitude’s metronome). In a sense, we are asked to examine the haunting qualities of a history that cannot be integrated, qualities that resist being simply absorbed and quieted down. Still, one would have wanted Kojève to take a stab at Father Time, to articulate what brings time down upon us in terrifying ways, what makes the past recur and stand before us as the sign of what’s ahead, and so on and back and forth, with childhood crawling through the temporal cracks at moments of extreme vulnerability to said authority. One’s experience of time is not as linear as Kojève would have us imagine: when things make one tremble and one is regressed to voiceless episodes of despair, time flips and turns you into a child without the means to represent your anguish or push against the squeeze of severe proportions. Childhood is never simply behind us, but jumps ahead at times, startling us with its incessant returns and uncontrolled gag orders. Thus traditionally, the figuring of time has been paternalized. These nonlinear riptides of temporality are outside of Kojève’s domain, perhaps for good reason, given his materialist rap sheet, and understandably so if he wants to manifest an intention and a plan without formal or aprioristic or ontological weights. Anyone subjected to time, bound to the temporal destiny on which Hölderlin broke—his extreme experience of sudden endings that had him sitting speechlessly in Mr. Zimmer’s Tübingen tower—is scorched by a notion of “finitude” and left bedazzled by the conspiracy, or authority, of father and time. Let us simply establish a dossier for this area of speculative inquiry and wonder how Father Time tics and tocs to make his offspring lose out to the authority and dissolution of time, a no-doubt-generalizable fate given over to the persecutory invasiveness that Kojève seeks to contain. Hence it is the schedules under which one labors in excess of Kojève’s program—timetables of compensatory aggression, the itineraries of historical payback, the beat of totalitarian return, whether subtle or overt—that I hope to highlight. Let us bear in mind that poetry joins philosophy and theology in attaching the very possibility of time-flow to the paternal, to the godhead as father, or in divine eschatology.

Authority also turns Arendt toward the vacant lot of divine abandonment, where humankind is left to fend for itself in the draft of monotheistic withdrawal. The gods have fled and the one deity left for us has bailed or retreated into mute indifference. Somehow, authority (whether viewed as a form of liberal democracy or as one profile among several secular totalitarianisms) is summoned to fill in the blanks with an ontotheological arrangement of replacement parts. For both Arendt and Kojève, the distress of losing authority convenes core survival issues that need inventive arbitration as well as, in some essential ways, the recall to the philosophical of the question of the political, allowing the political to receive a fuller range of theoretical considerations.

To get some traction on the problem of thinking the political and the philosophical precisely where they turn away from each other, one might consider the plight of Jimmy Stewart in Rope (1948). In Hitchcock’s allegory of pedagogical hate crimes, the teacher discovers—weakened and shaking, whisky in hand—that his Nietzsche course has been translated into murderous consequence by literalizing, Nazi-identified students. Or one might revert to the still stinging history of the great majority of the philosophical faculty in Germany, who supported the Third Reich. There is no doubt that Heidegger’s desire for, and enactment of historical praxis, which was promoted in terms of Geschick as a way of making history reinitiate itself, remains unprecedented among philosophers. Not even Plato signed up with, or for, the actualized State. What happens when philosophers or their outsourced affiliates, so-called intellectuals, leave the reserve or relax the gadfly function of which they were relentless practitioners? These instatements and sign-ups invite further discussion and a carefully delivered idiom by which to gauge the often-consensual parasitism of philosophy and State.

To be sure, studies on authority prior to Kojève’s had been linked to reflections on power, which he wants to see dissociated in terms of essential state and legal relations. Authority, according to Kojève, cannot operate in a relational void but implies (unlike force and power) some degree of reciprocal adherence and specific levels of responsiveness. There is the matter of those who bow to Authority, respect its principle and range, surrender without manifest struggle to its requirements—and let us not forget those among us who need the coveted whip. Even those who rail against Authority confirm its hold.

So, how am I doing? Have we seen authority brought to its stance of urgency? Can a different kind of approach better serve the needs of thinking through authority? Is this the time for greater or lesser degrees of sobriety in terms of exposition and analysis, in terms of prediction and the articulation of Sorge? Let me continue to explain some of the choices I have made.

What Was Authority?

I admit to having avoided quite a number of staple discursivities—the phrasal regimens of shared political infrastructures and anxieties that hold sway over the way we treat matters of common concern. I could have done a better job of subduing the extravagant distress that is usually narrowed down by acknowledged forms of political discussion. For starters, I could have mobilized recognizable themes or identifiable arguments that bind the disciplines, which run us safely to the types of suppositions that we return to everyday, that underlie the way we talk to one another. A more grounded procedure would have been tempting—backed, God forbid, by a “methodology”—and then there would have been no struggle for legitimacy, internally surveilled or more externally controlled. Finally, I could have disclosed a list of works that have been eliminated for these and those stated reasons. I can say this much for myself, however: unlike those who make claims for striking out on their own or those who adhere to group formations that exclude stray shots, alien premises, or intrusive contention, I have read extensively the very works that I choose not to mirror, and whose powerful legitimacies I relinquish. In part, this is why there has been no pretension to a political theory here or to restoring a political science.

Instead, I keep the focus mostly on the co-belonging of the philosophical and the political. Maintaining their reciprocal involvement, I account for the political as a philosophical determination, which is not to say that the philosophical simply precedes and trumps the political. It is understood that, for any serious investigation of authority, philosophy owns a timeshare in the neighborhood of psychoanalysis, whether this address is given out or kept unlisted. If you are thinking “philosophy, psychoanalysis: no thanks, not necessary,” then you are lapsing into the habits of the total dominion of politics which crowds out any critique and inevitably assumes totalitarian qualities.

This “recall” to the philosophical of the question of the political—which, contrary to what one might think, supposes no assurances as regards philosophy—is not a simply critical and “negative” gesture. Vigilance is assuredly necessary, today more than ever, as regards those discourses which feign independence from the philosophical and which claim, correspondingly, to treat the political as a distinct and autonomous domain (or, and this does not make much difference, one tied up with or subordinated to another empirical or regional domain). [...] The project of a theory or a science of the political, with all its socioanthropological baggage (and, consequently, its philosophical presuppositions), now more than ever necessitates its own critique and the critique of its political functions.⁶

This “recall” should not count as strengthening the dominion of the philosophical, but opens the space of a more original co-belonging, a conversation largely muted by the persistent clamoring of warring discursivities. Without a doubt, philosophy, stripped of power and more often than not dispossessed of authority, can and must, as Kant once admonished, fire blank shots at the political behemoth and its brutalizing tendencies. One must stay on guard against those discursive and academic practices that make claims for autonomy or subsist on disavowal when it is a matter of granting significance to an often-repressed philosophical ground. Nowhere is this more evident than in statements made on behalf of the fantasy of an independently sanctioned political domain. Let us not be intimidated.

In their opening address to the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political, cited above, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe consider the philosophical essence of the political. They observe that, when it comes to the political, philosophy unavoidably finds itself divested of authority. Something about this encounter manifestly weakens the philosophical hold on things, its ability to tell us about the world or to invent a future. In many contemporary forms of political discussion and theoretical exploration, it is no longer practicable to yoke politics and philosophy. Nevertheless, as a twosome they have counted on each other, if only behind the scenes; among the ancients, the philosophical and the political of course form an unbreakable pair, requiring each other’s attendance and support for family gatherings and foreign outings. At this point, they represent a severed couple, a fissured entity whose history of breakup continues in itself to be of consequence.

What Is Called Father?

Before going any further, it is perhaps necessary to interrogate the nearly immutable paternal input that still intrudes into places where the political gets marked or activated. This is the neuralgic point I’m trying to get at. Even where change is programmed there remains a relation to the Father’s worldly energy and familial endurance, precisely when we are dealing with a necessarily failing or fictional outlay of the paternal. A powerful philosophical energizer and political fiction since at least Plato, the assertion of paternity has served many crucial functions that, despite their ubiquity and conceptual banality, still require interrogation in the manner developed by Derrida in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” which links the Logoi to the origins of paternal interdiction as well as to particular rushes and writings. Using another watchword, let us return for a moment to Kojève’s casting off and retention of the paternal function—he manages to both remove and preserve the father, disqualify and hang on to the effects of this authority. Lacan has noted the way Kojève skips over the father’s very springboard into being, or let us downshift and say merely that Kojève refrains from engaging the Father’s onto-legitimacy. For some reason, Kojève won’t go there, can’t look back. One cannot simply enter codes to open up endless new accounts that may explain Kojève’s recalcitrance to explore this paternal overdrive and its precedence, neglecting the very premise of his thought. Still, it may be useful to pause and consider the snag in the political philosopher’s thought to which Lacan’s criticism points and wonder what route Kojève might have taken had he interested himself in what came prior to what he understood as the fundamental and master position—and what Lacan saw as derivative of the paternal metaphor. One might further wonder what the stakes are for Lacan in bringing up this missing link to the ousted Father in Kojève, and how it serves the unfolding of his own argument. Lacan may be trying to manage the field of the subject, which remains a point of fixture as he himself navigates through Heidegger, Luther, and Descartes. Lacan never gives up on the subject, even when traversing the Heideggerian oeuvre. The steadfast engagement with the subject on the part of Lacan may well clue us in to his investment in the matter of paternity. A quality of Kojève’s refused “regression” to what precedes the figuration advanced by Hegel comes to light in Freud’s own insistence on what is prior to the Father and what anticipates something like the subject on which so many of these reflections rely. Freud underscores the ruptures and breaks that lead up to the paternal positing. What this means can be understood most clearly (I am not joking) in terms rendered by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy in “La panique politique,” which reminds us of the phrase in Freud’s Moses and Monotheism: “We must recall that the father too was once a child.”⁷ Freud has always emphasized that the emergence of the subject derives “neither from other subjects nor from a subject-discourse (whether it be of the other or of the same, of the father or of the brother), but from the non-subject or non-subjects.”⁸ To the extent that the non-subject can be designated or named, this priority falls to “the without-authority” or “the without-father.” The without-superego—and thus without-ego—is “anterior to every topic as well as to every institution, of an anteriority with which no regression can properly catch up,” and has a broader base than any founding agency. The non-subject forms “the joint limit of psychoanalysis and of the political.”⁹

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy go on to explore the limit shared by psychoanalysis and (or as the science of) the subject, when these are challenged by power, and the way that power traces the contours of the political. For them, Freud searches his own limit “obscurely, obstinately, and repetitively,” and proceeds by an “impressive series of admissions of defeat or incompletion”—what they also call, when considering his quasi-system, “the (false / true) modesty and the hyperbolic circumspection” of his work—and poses two fundamental questions.¹⁰ The first of these questions asks how the subject supports itself. This problem, which they all raise, is especially important when one considers that the subject, the substance, is supposed to be the support and now is found wanting support in order to be. The second question interrogates authority, involving its paternal, political, and psychoanalytic dimensions, and thus bringing us back to a basic disturbance in any thought on authority, namely, “how does authority authorize itself?”¹¹ By the time Freud reaches Civilization and Its Discontents (first published in German as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1930), his thought effectively “bears the mark of the renunciation of the idea of a decisive amelioration of society (by psychoanalysis in particular) such as one found it in previous texts (Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious especially).”¹² The end of Civilization gestures towards, and hopes that, one day the cure of society will be taken up. But the practical obstacle to “surmount in this undertaking will be that of ‘the authority necessary to impose such a therapy upon the group [Masse]’.”¹³ The question for Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy becomes: “How could psychoanalysis endow itself with this authority? How could this authority be analyzed?”¹⁴ The political is seen to encounter its limit here, where authority gathers up the limit-question of power over the meeting grounds of psychoanalysis and politics (a.k.a. collective neurosis).

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy wrap up a discussion of the contrast (Gegensatz) between social and narcissistic mental acts—“the contrast of the social and individual falls within the limits of psychoanalysis”¹⁵—with a situating statement that further guides their argument:

The Freudian science is by rights a science of culture, and consequently a political science. Even and precisely if it turns out that this right gives rise to the greatest difficulties, indeed to the greatest disorder, and to the threat [...] of a theoretical panic.¹⁶