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Negotiating the ‘Paranoiac Structure’ of Human Knowledge: Fowles's The Magus and Lacan

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Abstract

In this article, a reading is offered of John Fowles's novel, The Magus, in an attempt to show that the conception of human ‘knowledge’ put forward in the narrative is an instantiation and development of Lacan's claim that human knowledge is ‘paranoiac’ or delusional. Far from amounting to the claim that humans can and should do without it, though, Fowles, like Lacan, demonstrates in the unfolding story of his main character and narrator, Nicholas Urfe, that there is a veritable exigency for (or what Foucault has called a ‘will to’) ‘truth’ on the part of the human subject (what Lacan intimates, more appropriately, to be a will to ‘illusion’), even to the point of clinging to a presumed residual layer of ‘knowledge’ when everything around one has been systematically discredited as far as its veracity is concerned. In this way, I would like to show, one can learn a great deal from both Lacan's claims concerning human knowledge as ‘paranoiac’ and Fowles's insights concerning the epistemic demands of ‘healthy’ people, which may perhaps be said to bear a certain resemblance to the delusions of psychosis. In the end, both Lacan and Fowles offer different versions of an ambivalent insight, that ‘paranoiac’ expectations should be tempered with more modest claims regarding knowledge — what may be called ‘learned ignorance’.
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Bert Olivier
Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy
University of the Free State
OlivierG1@ufs.ac.za
Negotiating the ‘paranoiac structure’ of human knowledge:
Fowles's The Magus and Lacan.
This paper first appeared in South African Journal of Psychology 38 (1), April 2008, pp.
176-199, and was reprinted in Bert Olivier: Philosophy and Psychoanalytic theory. Collected
essays. London and Frankfurt: Peter Lang Academic Publishers, 2009, pp. 179-210.
Abstract: In this paper, a reading is offered of John Fowles's novel, The Magus, in an attempt to show
that the conception of human ‘knowledge’ put forward in the narrative is an instantiation and
development of Lacan’s claim, that human knowledge is ‘paranoiac’ or delusional. Far from amounting
to the claim that humans can and should do without it, though, Fowles, like Lacan, demonstrates in the
unfolding story of his main character and narrator, Nicholas Urfe, that there is a veritable exigency for
(or what Foucault has called a ‘will to’) ‘truth’ on the part of the human subject (what Lacan intimates,
more appropriately, to be a will to ‘illusion’), even to the point of clinging to a presumed residual layer
of ‘knowledge’ when everything around one has been systematically discredited as far as its veracity is
concerned. In this way, I would like to show, one can learn a great deal from both Lacan’s claims
concerning human knowledge as ‘paranoiac’, and Fowles's insights concerning the epistemic demands
of ‘healthy’ people, which may perhaps be said to bear a certain resemblance to the delusions of
psychosis. In the end, both Lacan and Fowles offer different versions of an ambivalent insight, that
‘paranoiac’ expectations should be tempered with more modest claims regarding knowledge what
may be called ‘learned ignorance’.
Key words: ‘paranoiac’ knowledge, illusion, four discourses, Fowles’s The magus, Lacan.
The desire for knowledge bears no relationship to knowledge. Jacques Lacan: The
other side of psychoanalysis (2007, p. 23).
‘The basic principle of life is hazard…If one goes deep enough in atomic physics one
ends with a situation of pure chance. Of course we all share the illusion that this can’t
be so.’ Lily de Seitas in John Fowles’s The Magus (1983, pp. 627-628).
Apparently humanity has a deep-seated fear of being deceived how else can one
explain Descartes’s (1972, pp. 144-157) strenuous attempt to exorcise the malin
genie, born of a powerful ‘will to truth’ or ‘will to knowledge’, that exerts certain
‘constraints’ on other types of discourse as Foucault (1972, p. 219) thinks of it or
the ostensible smug satisfaction, if not joy, with which humanity regards its ‘edifices
of knowledge’: the sciences, technological achievements, the so-called ‘knowledge
society’? But, considering the arguments as well as the evidence adduced by thinkers
such as Schopenhauer (see for example 1969, pp. 103-104) and Lacan, humans seem,
simultaneously, to desire being deceived, to want to cling to illusions. This smugness
or joy regarding the vaunted achievements of human civilization would be short-lived,
in other words, if the human race should take seriously Jacques Lacan’s (1977, p. 17;
1977a, p. 3) claim, that the structure of human knowledge is ‘paranoiac’, that is, that
human knowledge is built on illusion. What does Lacan mean by this? And, if one
could come to a cogent understanding of his claim, how should one account for it? In
terms of the ‘will to truth’? Whatever answers are available to these questions from
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thinkers such as Foucault and Lacan, I believe that John Fowles’s novel, The magus,
puts one in a position to appreciate the extent to which human beings are driven by an
irresistible ‘will (or desire) to know’ one that does not cease functioning even when
indications are that one is constantly being deluded by what ostensibly amounts to
evidence supporting certain interpretations and conclusions. Moreover, Fowles’s
novel also seems to point in the direction of an alternative to the blind adherence to
epistemic mirages, an alternative predicated on a more modest claim, compatible with
the paradoxical Socratic dictum, ‘I know that I do not know’.
The Magus.
If one considers that the notion of Bildung or self-cultivation (self-formation)
originated in medieval mysticism, became important for 18th-century thought, and
fundamentally informs the thought of Hegel in the 19th century (Gadamer, 1982, pp.
10-18) as the ‘series’ of forms assumed by consciousness on the developmental path
from self-alienation to self-knowledge (Hegel, 1966, p. 136) it is not difficult to
grasp it as underpinning the development of the narrative in The magus, albeit not
straightforwardly, as in a conventional Bildungsroman. The narrative concerns what
one might call the counter-Bildung the simultaneous Bildung and its own
subversion, in contrast with the Bildung of the protagonist, Pip, in Dickens’s Great
expectations (1993) of the narrator and protagonist (perhaps anti-hero), Nicholas
Urfe. The latter is a young, simultaneously (over-)confident and unsure Oxford
graduate in literature, who fancies himself a ‘discoverer’ or ‘adventurer’ of sorts, not
least when it comes to women. The following excerpt captures his character well
(Fowles, 1983, p. 21):
I suppose I’d had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex
for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car not so common
among undergraduates in those days and I had some money. I wasn’t ugly; and
even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly
weapon with women. My ‘technique’ was to make a show of unpredictability,
cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjuror with his white rabbit, I produced
the solitary heart.
I didn’t collect conquests, but by the time I left Oxford I was a dozen girls
away from virginity. I found my sexual success and the apparently ephemeral
nature of love equally pleasing. It was like being good at golf, but despising the
game. One was covered all round, both when one played and when one didn’t. I
contrived most of my affaires in the vacations, away from Oxford, since the new
term meant that I could conveniently leave the scene of the crime…I became
almost as neat at ending liaisons as at starting them.
This sounds, and was, calculating, but it was caused less by a true coldness
than by my narcissistic belief in the importance of lifestyle. I mistook the feeling
of relief that dropping a girl always brought for a love of freedom. Perhaps the one
thing in my favour was that I lied very little; I was always careful to make sure
that the current victim knew, before she took her clothes off, the difference
between coupling and marrying.
It is impossible to do justice to the long and complex narrative; here only the briefest
of summaries can be provided, in addition to which relevant information will be
provided as the need arises in the course of the theoretical discussion. Nicholas meets
an Australian girl, Alison Kelly, with whom he falls in love without really
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acknowledging it to himself, given his ‘self-absorption’ (Fowles, 1983, p. 35). She
starts working as an air hostess; he goes off to teach English at a boys’ school on a
Greek island in the Aegean Phraxos in search of a ‘new mystery’ (1983, p. 19),
with a certain ambivalence regarding his feelings for Alison, but with a tentative
agreement between them to meet when she is in Athens. At the school on Phraxos he
learns about a mysterious man called Conchis, who lives at an estate called Bourani
on the other side of the island, where some of his predecessors at the school,
according to their communication with Nicholas, had puzzling experiences. To cut a
long story short, Nicholas’s curiosity impels him to make contact with Conchis, and
as their acquaintance grows in the course of weekend visits to Bourani he
becomes deeply aware of the intellectual and psychic power of the older man, who
shares with Nicholas his personal experiences as a soldier in WW I, as well as in his
role of medical doctor and psychiatrist. In the course of these visits, which
increasingly exercise a veritable mesmerizing effect on him despite his belief that he
is able to maintain a certain sceptical distance from Conchis Nicholas is introduced
to a beautiful young woman, Lily, who seems to be play-acting the role of Conchis’s
(deceased) beloved from his youth, and with whom he (Nicholas) becomes infatuated.
Parallel to these developments, he experiences what he describes as ‘mysteries’
(incomprehensible experiences of visions as well as several of an auditory and
olfactory nature, which seem to be connected with Conchis’s narration of salient
episodes from his life) a description that, needless to point out, powerfully resonates
with the spirit of the bygone realm of ancient Greek mystery religion and tragedy, in
the context of an atmospheric landscape which still inescapably evokes that ancient
world. These ‘mysteries’ initially seem inexplicable, but gradually Nicholas comes to
believe that they are staged for his benefit his edification by Conchis, with the
help of a number of elusive ‘actors’ who perform their roles (of ancient Greek deities,
among other personages) with chilling conviction.
Nicholas manages to befriend ‘Lily’, and attempts to uncover the purpose behind
Conchis’s increasingly elaborate ‘masque’. He also discovers that she has a twin
sister, June, that her ‘real’ name is Julie Holmes, and that they were initially hired in
England by the wealthy Conchis as actresses to star in a film he was to produce, only
to find themselves enmeshed in the elaborate scheme aimed at simultaneously
deceiving and enlightening Nicholas hence my initial characterization of The magus
as a kind of counter-Bildung novel. Conchis, having become aware of the contact
between Nicholas and Lily/Julie, advises Nicholas to act with the utmost care
regarding her well-being, as she is a patient of his who is suffering from
schizophrenia, and can therefore not be relied upon as a rational interlocutor. Needless
to stress, in the face of conflicting messages from various individuals, together with
the sometimes disturbing experiences to which he is privy, as well as his irresistible
attraction to Julie, Nicholas finds himself vacillating between what he believes to be
insight into the ‘truth’ about Conchis’s intentions, on the one hand, and utter
confusion, accompanied by anger in the face of apparent deceit, on the other. In fact,
at one point he acknowledges to himself that (Fowles, 1983, p. 294): ‘Every truth in
his world was a sort of lie; and every lie a sort of truth’.
By now it should be apparent that the theme announced at the outset of this paper
of the ‘will to truth’, or in Lacanian terms, the ‘will to illusion’, is powerfully
deployed in the narrative. With consummate, tantalizing mastery, step by step,
Conchis lures Nicholas further along the way to what seems to be the promise of an
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eventual revelation of the truth about him, about Bourani, about Lily/Julie, Rose/June,
about the elaborate masque ostensibly staged for his (Nicholas’s) benefit, and –
perhaps most important about Nicholas himself in the guise of some profound
variety of self-knowledge. One might say that the narrative is driven by the Socratic
injunction, to ‘know thyself’, except that the object of this quest appears to be elusive,
and as the narrative progresses its presupposition, that there is some ‘self-
knowledge’ worthy of the name, to be discovered, illusory. This narratively structured
insight as embodied in Fowles’s novel, I want to argue here, is consonant with
Lacan’s claim to be unpacked shortly that the structure of human knowledge is
‘paranoiac’ (that is, illusory or even delusional).
The narrative culminates in a series of events so startling that it sometimes catches the
reader unawares who, for reasons of ineluctable identification with the first-person
narrator of the story (see in this regard Olivier, 2005a & 2006), sometimes vicariously
registers the shocks and surprises on the part of the protagonist with remarkable
intensity. Every time that Nicholas is convinced, apparently with good reason, that he
has finally discovered what the true state of affairs is, this ‘ground’ is knocked from
under his feet, and he is, once again, propelled onto a roller-coaster of events that
point to yet another possibility, rendering his previous belief that he has discovered
the true state of affairs, null and void. The remarkable thing is, however and this is
the point that is germane to the theme of this paper that he never seems to give up
the belief that there is some final, conclusive opportunity waiting for him, some
ultimate discovery of the ‘truth’, no matter how many masquerades he has to brave in
the interim. In this respect, I believe, the character of Nicholas represents the human
condition. Along the way, it should be mentioned, Nicholas meets Alison in Athens,
from where they embark on a simultaneously wonderful and (for their relationship)
disastrous journey to Mount Parnassus, at the end of which Nicholas breaks ties off
with her. As a sequel, he later receives the devastating news (resulting in some serious
soul-searching on his part) from a friend that Alison has committed suicide only to
learn, much later in the narrative, that she is alive and complicit in the masque to
which he has been subjected.
The crucial event in the novel, as far as Nicholas’s counter-Bildung is concerned a
kind of simultaneously climactic and anti-climactic dénouement is, to my mind, the
‘trial’ to which Nicholas is subjected by a group of people who claim to be human
scientists: psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, including ‘Dr’ Conchis and
Lily/Julie, who also turns out, supposedly, to be a psychologist (named Dr Vanessa
Maxwell) and one who does not hesitate to engage in participative research in the
guise of her relationship with Nicholas, which ‘ended’, just before the ‘trial’, in a
passionate sexual encounter between them. All of his experiences relating to Conchis,
Lily/Julie, Rose/June, the elaborate masque, and even to Alison, are made the subject
of the trial where Nicholas is bound like some sacrificial animal, but at the
conclusion of which, subsequent to the scientists’ judgment of him, he is invited to
deliver his own judgement of them in turn. Things do not end here either before
being released, he is subjected to a gruelling series of ‘de-briefing’ encounters, in the
position of involuntary spectator, with the enactment of various ‘primitively
Dionysian’ sexual encounters between Lily/Julie and her lover, a black American
psychologist previously known to Nicholas as ‘Joe’, one of the ‘actors’ in Conchis’s
masque or symbolic enactment of events for Nicholas’s benefit. It is significant that,
in the end, Nicholas discovers that even Alison’s ‘death’ was part of the masque, and
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the novel ends with a puzzling, ambivalent encounter and eventual parting between
them, with the apparent (uncomfortable) realization, on his part, that he has lost
something very valuable through his inability to embrace her love for him and
perhaps also his (unacknowledged) love for her instead of which he has persisted in
chasing an elusive and illusory goal dangled like a carrot before his nose by Conchis,
the Magus of the narrative.
The final question that confronts the reader of this to my mind profound novel, is:
has Nicholas learned anything worthwhile through his trials and tribulations? Has
there been Bildung comparable to Pip’s in Dickens’s Great expectations, or only a
breaking-down (an un-Bildung or de-cultivation) of his ability to trust his faculties?
And if the latter, or perhaps a paradoxical combination of the two, what could one
learn from it? The role of Conchis in this regard appears to be that of an epistemic
catalyst (perhaps even that of a psychoanalyst) who assists Nicholas in ‘assuming his
desire’, in the process disabusing him of his epistemic illusions and misguided beliefs.
It seems to me, therefore, as if Fowles’s novel is consonant with certain aspects of
Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the human subject.
Lacan on the paranoiac structure of human knowledge.
In ‘The mirror stage’ (1977a, p. 3) – where Lacan shows how the primitive ego
develops through a dialectic of méconnaissance (‘misrecognition’), on the part of the
infant, of its mirror image as ‘itself’ (see Olivier, 2004) he talks of ‘…the social
dialectic that structures human knowledge as paranoiac’. In ‘Aggressivity in
psychoanalysis’ (1977, p. 17), referring to a ‘stagnation’ of one of the stages of
organization of the ego and of objects (which are experienced as ‘events in a
perspective of mirages’), he elaborates as follows:
…this formal stagnation is akin to the most general structure of human
knowledge: that which constitutes the ego and its objects with attributes of
permanence, identity, and substantiality, in short, with entities or ‘things’ that are
very different from the Gestalten that experience enables us to isolate in the
shifting field, stretched in accordance with the lines of animal desire…
What I have called paranoiac knowledge is shown, therefore, to correspond in
its more or less archaic forms to certain critical moments that mark the history of
man’s mental genesis, each representing a stage in objectifying identification.
One has to be very clear on what Lacan is claiming here. He is in fact extrapolating
(Lacan 1977, p. 20) what he has shown regarding the genesis of the subject’s sense of
self as ‘ego’ in the imaginary register – that it emerges from a kind of alienating
projection of vaunted ‘permanence’ into a mirror image which is then mistakenly
taken as being the subject ‘itself’, despite really being a fictional construct distinct
from the ‘I’-position from which one speaks (Lacan, 1977a, pp. 1-7) to the world of
objects which, in the ‘shifting field’ of quotidian experience, lacks the ostensible
‘permanence’ or substantiality attributed to it through this gesture of ‘stagnation’. In
brief: the dynamic field of experience is constituted by humans as if it consists of
relatively unchanging objects identical to themselves.
If this seems startling to some, one might remind oneself that Kant (1964, pp. 1-24;
90-94) already, in the 18th century, argued that human reality is constituted as
‘manifold of experience’ by way of the synthetically structuring, a priori,
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transcendental functioning of forms of intuition (space and time) in combination with
the categories of the understanding (such as causality and substance). What Kant
argued as transcendental thinker, sets the scene for Lacan’s argument – without the
synthetic role of the cognitive faculties of reason, there is no coherent ‘reality’;
outside of the constitutive functioning of the faculties of reason, there is only the ‘I
know not what’ of what Kant called the Ding an sich (thing in itself) the
unknowable or noumenal ‘ground’ of the phenomenal world. As psychoanalytical
theorist, and in contrast with Kant, Lacan places the genesis of human (phenomenal)
reality in a developmental schema, and like Kant before him intimates that
‘reality’, or the world of egos and objects, is a function of human cognitive
exigencies: reality is constituted as an amalgam of the imaginary and symbolic
registers (‘entered’ by the subject at successive stages in its life), and is breached from
within by the ‘real’ in so far as it resists being assimilated into human reality (see
Olivier, 2004; 2005). To be sure, by attaching the epithet ‘paranoiac’ to knowledge of
such a world, Lacan does seem to put a different complexion on things compared to
Kant (who believed that ‘objective’ knowledge of phenomenal reality is possible
precisely because human subjectivity is the condition for objectivity) after all,
‘paranoia’ is a delusional psychosis (Lacan, 1997, pp. 3-4), and even if one assumes
him to be using it as a metaphor where he describes human knowledge as ‘paranoiac’,
it still seems to imply that there is something about it which makes it illusory. Why
such an apparent overstating of the case? It is instructive in this regard to turn to
Lacan’s theory of the ‘four discourses’.
The four discourses.
For this theory to make sense, it bears repeating that the world or human reality, as
intimated above is structured (quasi-)transcendentally (that is, conditioned regarding
its possibility as well as its ‘impossibility’ or ‘impurity’) through perception and
language, or (what amounts to the same thing) iconically, at the level of the imaginary
register, and linguistically, at the level of the symbolic register. The fact that one
always, ineluctably, comes up against the limits of the imaginary (imagination) and
the symbolic (language) when they falter in the face of an unassimilable, traumatic
experience, or of an inexplicable scientific discovery (or anomaly) of some kind,
announces the elusive operation of Lacan’s third register, the so-called ‘real’.
Nevertheless, it is through language (and, as will become apparent, discourse) as well
as iconicity that the organization of experience into quasi-stable entities occurs
those entities which supposedly comprise the correlates of human knowledge in the
encompassing field known as (social and natural) ‘reality’.
Lacan refers to the ‘production of the four discourses’ those of the master, the
university, the hysteric and the analyst. Think of these as four different kinds of
operation of language, each of which constitutes and structures both the subject and
social reality differently in cratological terms that is, structurally as far as identity
and interpersonal or social power relations are concerned. In his Seminar 17 The
other side of psychoanalysis; 1969-1970 (Lacan, 2007, p. 13) he intimates that he
thinks of discourse as something by means of which several ‘stable relations’ are
established, and within which ‘conduct’ or ‘acts’ can be ‘inscribed’ as within a kind
of ‘framework’ of ‘primordial statements’. As an instance of validation regarding
these claims concerning the character of discourse, he alludes to psychoanalytic
experience, where one encounters, for example, such ‘stable relations’ in the form of
the superego. It is not difficult to grasp this the superego, in so far as it is
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recognizable as a psychic structure of authority and subjugation by which the
subject’s actions are constrained as an exemplary instantiation of the operation of
discourse.
How do the four discourses differ (see Fink, 1997, pp. 129-136; Bracher, 1994, pp.
115-126)? Lacan gives phylogenetic and ontogenetic priority to the discourse of the
master the subject is first constituted by its (nonsensical) subjection to language or
the master signifier, which alienates it irreversibly from the real by introducing a split
into it, in this way rendering the lacking subject, forever divided between
consciousness and unconsciousness. However, the master’s discourse systematically
hides or represses the unconscious ‘knowledge’ of its incompleteness it shows no
interest in knowledge as such; as long as things ‘work’. The discourse of the master is
the discourse of power (today, that of liberal democratic capitalism), which, unlike the
discourse of the university, is not concerned with knowledge, but simply with whether
the system of dominant power relations works.
The university discourse is in the position of the slave (whose knowledge serves the
master), and is predicated on the attainment of knowledge, but knowledge putatively
of a specific kind, namely systematic, factual or encyclopaedic knowledge regarded as
being, in principle, ‘completeable’. As such, it functions to support the discourse of
the master in so far as the latter claims unquestionable power one finds here an
acknowledgement, on Lacan’s part, that the university as an institution more often
than not serves the dominant powers of the age.
The discourse of the hysteric comprises that epistemic position from which the
master’s discourse (and by implication that of the university) is relentlessly
questioned concerning the justifiability of its claims. Interestingly, Lacan associates
this the hysteric’s discourse, and not, as one may expect, that of the university
with authentic science, because the questioning or problematization of the master’s
discourse by the hysteric’s exemplifies the structural ‘uncertainty’ or indeterminacy at
the heart of science. Needless to say, this insight dispels the illusory claims and
aspirations of the master’s as well as the university’s discourse, by uncovering a logic
which limits, and therefore subverts all claims to the justifiability of unconditional
power, and to presumed wholeness of ‘knowledge’ from within, as in the case of
Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty (indeterminacy) principle’ (Fink, 1997, pp. 133-134). This
explains why Lacan increasingly identified the discourse of the hysteric and the
discourse of science (Fink 1997, p. 133).
In its turn, the discourse of the analyst marks that discursive position from which the
subject’s certainties (its master signifiers) are symptomatically decoded as being
indicative of its desire in other words, the analyst’s discourse, representing the real
(the impact of which requires the reconfiguration of one’s symbolic horizon),
mediates between the subject’s explicit claims (whether these belong to the
university’s discourse or to the hysteric’s) and its repressed or hidden desire, in the
process uncovering the master signifiers driving the subject, and submitting them to a
relativizing dialectic by implying that the subject is never ‘master’ of her or his
discourse. Nevertheless, as Bracher (1994, pp. 123-124) reminds one, for Lacan the
analyst’s discourse does not enable one to break with the master’s discourse once and
for all; the crucial difference here is that, instead of being subordinated to master
signifiers imposed from the outside, the subject learns to ‘produce’ them her- or
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himself. The analyst’s discourse therefore functions paradoxically to disabuse the
subject of the implicit claims to authoritativeness and completeness of the discourses
of the master and the university, while acknowledging the ineluctable need, on the
subject’s part, to be temporarily empowered in order to act. The analyst’s discourse
therefore enables the subject to resist the illusion of conclusive empowerment by
master signifiers and final enlightenment by their servant, the university discourse, in
the place of which he or she is encouraged to settle for knowledge that is open-ended
and revisable.
Although it is not the main focus of this article, it should be noted that Lacan
formalizes the relation of the four discourses (Fink, 1997, pp. 130-136) to one another
by assigning a symbol to each, and placing them, in turn, in the positions,
respectively, of ‘agent’ over ‘truth’, on the left side, and ‘other’ over ‘product/loss’ on
the right side, with an arrow (), representing the function of ‘addressing’, pointing
from the left side position of the ‘agent’ to the right side position of the ‘other’. Every
time the formal schema of these four symbols is rotated in a counter-clockwise
direction, it changes the power relations fundamentally, with the result that each turn
gives rise to the representation of (the emergence of) a different discourse. For
example, the master’s discourse is represented with the symbol
the position of ‘agent’, over the ‘truth’ (the split subject, $), addressing () the
‘other’ (S2; the slave), over ‘product/loss’ (a, or object a, representing, in a capitalist
system, surplus enjoyment, for example). In the university’s discourse, the symbol for
the slave (S2) occupies the position of ‘agent’, while in the hysteric’s discourse the
split subject $ (that is, the subject divided between conscious and unconscious, which
the master cannot afford to recognize) occupies that position, and in the analyst’s
discourse the agent-position is occupied by the symbol (a) for the cause of desire. The
upshot of this, as Fink (1997, p. 132) notes, is to suggest a kind of ‘historical
movement from the master’s discourse to the university discourse’ as its
‘legitimation’. The hysteric’s discourse, in turn, which represents a challenging of
prevailing systems of knowledge in the university discourse (and indirectly that of the
master, served by the university), as well as that of the analyst, which represents the
repressed desire of the subject, may plausibly be seen as having emerged historically
after those of the master (grasped as such by Hegel) and of the university (or Hegel’s
‘slave’), namely in the late 19th century. The power of this theory derives from the
fact that, as represented by the different permutations of the symbols representing the
four discourses, it may be used as analytical or ‘hermeneutic’ schema to make sense
of a wide variety of discursive power relations as well as the conditions under which
they may be challenged or changed.
The first of these four kinds of discourse the master’s discourse operates through
master signifiers that create the illusion on the part of its speakers that they are, in fact
‘whole, undivided, self-identical’ (Bracher, 1994, p. 121) – a clear indication that this
corresponds with the putative paranoiac structure of human knowledge, although the
university’s discourse in its epistemically supportive function should be added here,
given its founding principle of systematic knowledge as ‘the ultimate authority’,
where ‘everything has its reason’ (Fink, 1997, p. 132). Philosophy, in its traditional
guise of rational discipline par excellence, instantiates the discourse of the university
in its role of ‘rationalizing and propping up the master’s discourse’ (Fink, 1997, p.
132; Lacan, 2007, pp. 20-22). Instances of the master’s discourse are afforded by all
ideological and religious systems, which comprise closed ‘paranoiac’ or ‘delusional’
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totalities, where meaning subsists in an undiluted plenum. By contrast, the discourse
of the hysteric, in so far as it questions the discourse of the master, registers the
refusal, on the body, to submit to such master signifiers (Bracher, 1994, p. 122), and
the delusional claims of both the master’s discourse and its servant discourse, that of
the university, are symptomatically apparent precisely there where symptoms such as
nervous tics or stammering become manifest in subject’s actions. Lest the impression
be created that it is only in pathological hysterical behaviour that the illusory claims to
wholeness on the part of the discourses of the master and of the university become
visible, consider Mark Bracher’s illuminating extension of the hysteric’s discourse in
the following (1994, p. 122):
The hysterical structure of discourse also characterizes other instances of
resistance, protest, and complaint from the plaintive anthems of slaves to the
yearning lyrics of lovesick poets to the iconoclastic rhetoric of revolutionaries.
The hysterical structure is in force whenever a discourse is dominated by the
speaker’s symptom – that is, his or her unique mode of experiencing jouissance, a
uniqueness that is manifested (in experiences such as shame, meaninglessness,
anxiety, and desire) as a failure of the subject, $, to coincide with or be satisfied
by the master signifiers offered by society and embraced as the subject’s ideals.
In what, precisely, can one detect the paranoiac structure of human knowledge, then,
where the four discourses are concerned? The master’s discourse functions
unreflectively through the exercise of power, and the discourse of the university
proceeds on the assumption that knowledge in the guise of scientific disciplines in
principle comprises a plenum, and that only considerations of an empirical nature
stand in the way of erecting the final storeys of its edifice. In brief: these discourses
are committed to the illusion (if not delusion) that knowledge comprises a systematic
whole. The fact that Lacan associates the hysteric’s questioning, challenging
discourse with science something that would strike most people as counter-intuitive
is a stark reminder of the distance that separates mainstream opinion from this
insight. After all, as Fink (1997, p. 138) remarks, standard conceptions of science
(especially in America) entail the naïve belief that the conclusions of ‘hard science’
are agreed-upon in scientific circles, and are virtually unassailable, in contrast with
the true state of affairs, that there is wide disagreement among scientists at any given
time concerning the question, what makes science into science.
Psychosis as basis for analogy with ‘paranoiac knowledge’.
While the characterization of human knowledge as ‘paranoiac’ is evidently
metaphorical on Lacan’s part, it is instructive to consider his commentary on paranoia
in a pathological sense, because it enables one to flesh out the analogy with
knowledge. In The psychoses (The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III; 1993, p. 85),
commenting on Freud’s case of the delusional Judge Schreber, Lacan makes the
following observation:
What is the psychotic phenomenon? It is the emergence in reality of an enormous
meaning that has the appearance of being nothing at all in so far as it cannot be
tied to anything, since it has never entered into the system of symbolization but
under certain conditions it can threaten the entire edifice.
10
Clearly, human knowledge as ‘paranoiac’ cannot be identified with psychosis or
paranoia in this strict sense for one thing, the ‘meaning’ of knowledge is always
made manifest in the symbolic system, unlike the ‘enormous’, un-symbolizable
delusional ‘meaning’ on the part of the psychotic subject. Its delusional, psychotic
status is shown by the fact that, despite its enormity, it appears to be ‘nothing at all’ –
that is, it does not connect with the normal, pragmatic state of affairs, which is
regulated by linguistic exchange. In contrast to this, knowledge for instance the
‘rational’ disciplines taught at universities apparently does ‘connect’ with pragmatic
life through symbolic exchanges. (Psychological theories on personality types offer
psychologists pragmatic guidelines for working with clients, for example.) So where
is the analogy? It lies precisely in the description: ‘an enormous meaning that has the
appearance of being nothing at all’. In the case of the paranoid person, this is a
delusion which manifests itself ‘in the real’ (Lacan, 1993, pp. 86-88), that is, as a
bodily symptom of sorts (a hallucination, for example), which resists linguistic
articulation. In the case of systems of knowledge, it lies in the enormity of the system,
which as systematic totality appears to be ‘nothing at all’, that is, metaphorically
speaking ‘delusional’ in the sense of not taking account of all those anomalies which
are the ‘real’ driving force of true science. Speaking of the university’s discourse in
Lacan’s thought, Bruce Fink (1997, pp. 132-133) says:
…the kind of knowledge involved in the university discourse amounts to mere
rationalization…We can imagine it, not as the kind of thought that tries to come to
grips with the real, to maintain the difficulties posed by apparent logical and/or
physical contradictions, but rather as a kind of encyclopedic endeavor to exhaust a
field (consider…Auguste Comte’s goal of a total sociology).
Lacan’s discussion of psychosis offers another basis for an analogy with ‘paranoiac’
human knowledge. The psychotic subject, he points out (Lacan, 1993, p. 87),
‘substitutes for symbolic mediation a profusion, an imaginary proliferation’. With this
in mind, it appears to be no accident that ‘paranoiac knowledge’ is mentioned in
Lacan’s ‘The mirror stage’ (1977a, p. 3), where he outlines the subject’s entry into the
imaginary register via its identification with its own mirror image which it
mistakenly regards as being ‘itself’. This ‘misrecognition’, according to Lacan,
comprises the ambiguous ground for the subject’s sense of identity as well as its
alienation from itself: it functions ‘orthopaedically’ (Lacan, 1977a, p. 4) in so far as
the infant subject lacks and desires the ostensible wholeness and unity of the mirror
image, and it operates in a rigidly restrictive fashion, like an armour of sorts, as far as
other possibilities on the part of the subject are concerned. The upshot of this is that
the subject’s ‘identity’ as ‘ego’ (moi) is of a fictional nature, and must be
fundamentally distinguished from its position as ‘I’ (je) in the symbolic register,
which is located where it exceeds the domain of conscious deliberation and control,
that is, at the level of the unconscious (Lee, 1990, pp. 40-41). In fact, Lacan counsels
that, for the subject to participate in the narrative of its own story (in dialogue with the
analyst and in relation to the role of the unconscious via parapraxes, like slips of the
tongue), the ‘empty speech’ of its alienating ego- or moi-position in the imaginary
register should be uncovered for what it is, namely an illusory construct (Lacan,
1977b, pp. 41-50). Because the imaginary ‘proliferation’ which characterizes it is not
susceptible to symbolic articulation, psychosis, strictly speaking, therefore differs
from imaginary identification on the part of ‘normal’ subjects, which always overlaps
the functioning of the subject in language. But one cannot ignore the fact that the
11
imaginary component of the subject’s complex structure ironically, that which is
usually regarded as marking its ‘true’ identity, namely its ‘ego’ introduces a
fictional or illusory dimension into it, albeit tempered by its imbrication with the other
registers of the subject’s articulation, namely the symbolic and the real (see in this
regard Olivier, 2004, 2005 & 2005a). It is here where the pertinence of Lacan’s
metaphorical description of human knowledge as ‘paranoiac’ is apparent: the role of
the imaginary as common element in psychosis (minus symbolization) as well as in
the (illusory) identities of ‘normal’ individuals explains what may to some seem to be
an unjustified epithet for one of humanity’s most prized achievements, namely
systems of ‘knowledge’.
The maternal imago.
There is another source in Lacan’s work that casts light on the puzzling comparison of
human knowledge with paranoia, namely what he described, in his early work, as one
of the ‘imagoes’ – the maternal, fraternal and paternal (Lee, 1990, pp. 14-15)
which fulfils a psychically structuring function in the life of the infant, namely the
‘maternal imago’. These three structuring complexes correspond with the registers of
the real, the imaginary and the symbolic, respectively (see Olivier, 2005a, for an
elaboration on this in relation to the question of narrative identity). While the fraternal
imago born of envy, rivalry and identification with siblings anticipates the quasi-
transcendental imaginary function of the ‘mirror stage’, and the paternal imago the
societal or Oedipal (superego-) subjectivization accompanying the child’s entry into
the symbolic sphere, it is especially the maternal imago which strikes one as being
pertinent to the illusions that accompany human cognitive aspirations, despite being
located at the level of the real. This becomes more apparent when one learns that the
maternal imago is correlative to the infant’s ‘congenital deficiency’, signalled by its
dependence on the mother’s breast as source of fulfilment of its bodily needs (Lee,
1990, p. 14). It is but a small step from here to conceiving of the structuring function
of this ‘maternal’ imago as paving the way for all (fundamentally discursive) quests
for a totality of some kind, whether political, religious or ‘philosophical’ (that is,
metaphysical), in so far as these register the interminable lack on the part of the
subject in the face of whatever plenum it desires (behind which the experience of the
maternal breast lurks; Lee, 1990, p. 14). Lacan’s own formulation is telling as far as
the connection between the maternal imago and the illusory character of human
knowledge is concerned (quoted in Lee, 1990, p. 14):
If it were necessary to define the most abstract form where it is refound, we
might characterize it thus: a perfect assimilation of the totality of being. Under
this formulation with a slightly philosophical aspect, we can recognize these
nostalgias of humanity: the metaphysical mirage of universal harmony, the
mystical abyss of affective fusion, the social utopia of a totalitarian guardianship,
and every outburst of the obsession with a paradise lost before birth or of the
most obscure aspiration toward death.
Knowledge and desire.
In The ethics of psychoanalysis Lacan offers an additional insight into the grounds for
the human drive towards (illusory) knowledge. In a discussion of Aristotle’s ideas on
the problem of human intemperance, in the face of accompanying ‘knowledge’ (that
is, despite ‘knowing better’) – or on a ‘syllogism of the desirable’ – he says (1997, pp.
29-30):
12
Beside the major premise one must always taste what is sweet there is a
particular, minor premise, i.e., this is sweet. And the principle of wrong action is
to be found in the error of a particular judgment relative to the minor premise.
Where is the error found? Precisely in the circumstance that the desire which is
subjacent to the major premise causes the wrong judgment to be made
concerning the reality of the supposed sweetness toward which the action is
directed.
The major premise is abstract, conceptual, while the minor premise depends upon
something intuitive and particular perception where desire leads judgment astray.
In other words, the error of the minor premise which is no doubt followed by the
inference: ‘Taste this’ results from ascribing pleasure anticipatorily to something
particular because it is desired. One witnesses here the ingenious twist given by
psychoanalysis (in Freud, who is discussed in the same section as Aristotle, referred
to above, and developed by Lacan) to the transcendental tradition going back to Kant.
According to Kant, it will be remembered, the rational faculties of intuition (space
and time) and the concepts or categories of the understanding are the conditions of the
possibility of there being a (human) reality or world. These faculties fulfil an
indispensable constitutive or structuring role regarding what is ‘given’ to perception
from the side of the un-objectifiable noumenon. It was Freud, however, who added
something which made Kant’s ‘rational faculties’ look anaemic and sterile in
retrospect, infusing the constitution of ‘reality’ with that unmistakeable human
element, namely desire or what Freud referred to as the singular Wunsch peculiar to
every human being universally (Lacan, 1997, p. 24; see also in this regard Hurst,
2006, Chapter 2, especially pp.35-37). In brief: knowledge of ‘reality’ is not merely a
synthetic function of perceptually ‘given’ content and rational forms; it is ineluctably
affected or distorted by desire. This is consonant with what Lacan terms the
‘paranoiac structure of human knowledge’: desire affects judgment, it may even cause
wrong judgment or illusion. Because one desires a certain kind of knowledge,
especially in particular or specific situations (as Lacan argues in the passage cited
above) for example coherent, systematic, clear and distinct conceptual knowledge
the inclination asserts itself to construct such ‘knowledge’ on the basis of specific,
desire-induced perceptions, that is, perceptions that are guided by the desire for an
encompassing, complete, ultimately closed system. Even in the philosophy of science
the phenomenon of ‘theory-laden perception’ is well-known (Hurst, 2004, pp. 20-23;
Chalmers, 1982, pp. 25-38) the way in which theory is said to precede observation
in the sense that observation is guided by theoretical or hypothetical expectations.
This would be related to what Lacan is arguing here, although given the status of
desire as unconscious the two things are arguably not synonymous.
Life as hazard, and ‘the smile’ in The magus.
I mentioned at the outset in this article that Fowles’s The magus (1983) constitutes a
kind of counter-Bildung novel, which eschews the narrative effect of the protagonist
growing wise through painful experiences, embodying a process of incremental
disillusionment instead. (At an advanced stage in the narrative Nicholas considers all
the instances where, what was presented to him by, or through the mediation of
Conchis, and correspondingly, what he initially regarded as ‘true’ that is, as
‘knowledge’ which had been imparted to him turned out to be false or fictitious in
varying degrees at a later stage; see Fowles, 1983, pp. 576-583) One witnesses a
13
tantalizing epistemic relation between Conchis and Nicholas at one point the latter
actually tells Conchis that he is sometimes ‘very tantalizing’ (1983, p. 109) so much
so that its unfolding could be read as a model for the paranoiac structure of
knowledge, on the one hand, and a way of negotiating its pitfalls in a paradoxical
manner, on the other: Nicholas constantly desiring to know (of Conchis, of Bourani,
the secluded estate on Phraxos where Conchis lives, of the reasons for Conchis’s
interest in him, of the mysterious experiences that he is privy to at Bourani, of Lily’s
true identity, then of Julie’s, and so on), and Conchis constantly luring him further;
Nicholas ostensibly satisfied, at least intermittently, then disappointed by the
unmasking of his presumed knowledge as illusory, only to be lured further on the
supposition that he has discovered the ‘true state of affairs’, then to be disillusioned
again, and so on and on.
The dynamic is therefore one of presumed knowledge followed by ostensible
discovery, calling for revision of an initial supposition; revision of an earlier position,
followed by further discoveries calling for further revisions if not reversals,
culminating in several ‘showdowns’, first, between Nicholas and Conchis, later
between him and Lily de Seitas (the twins’ mother, whom he tracks down in
England), and finally between Nicholas and Alison. While one gets the impression,
especially from his final meeting with Lily de Seitas (Fowles, 1983, pp. 622-631), that
the rigorous, if alternatingly exciting and infuriating ordeal that Conchis’s has
imposed on Nicholas has not been without some salutary effects concerning the young
man’s conspicuously enriched and comparatively increased, nuanced understanding
of himself, of others, and more broadly of life, the same cannot be said of his final
meeting with Alison (Fowles, 1983, pp. 647-656), which he craves unbearably before
it finally happens. This encounter is highly ambiguous, in so far as they do not seem
to be able to get through to each other. It seems to suggest that Nicholas has not really
learned anything about the importance of smiling in the face of one’s ineluctable
mortality, of all loss, and of the indispensable place of love in human life. I would
suggest that this has to do with what I shall discuss below, namely human fallibility
and finitude especially Nicholas’s in this encounter and the ineluctable
responsibility that one’s decisions and choices impose on one. But before one gets to
this point in the narrative, there are many lessons to be learned.
In passing, I should note that the novel ends on an exemplary, self-reflective literary-
theoretical note, which bears on the difference between literature as art, on the one
hand where the actions in fictional space occupy a kind of ‘eternity’ in the sense that
they will stay the same, frozen, for all time and social reality, on the other where
things change irreversibly. Unless this is kept in mind, readers would find the last
paragraph endlessly puzzling. On this note, a perceptive critic has suggested
footnoting the literary-theoretical aspect of this article by referring to the work of
literary theorists Robert Con Davis and Isaiah Smithson, which would certainly be
illuminating. As a counter-suggestion I believe that what Deleuze and Guattari write
in their volume, What is philosophy? (1994), where they discuss the differences
between art (including literature), philosophy and science, captures exactly what I
argue here as far as literature is concerned (1994, p. 163):
The young man will smile on the canvas for as long as the canvas lasts. Blood
throbs under the skin of this woman’s face, the wind shakes a branch, a group
of men prepare [sic] to leave. In a novel or a film, the young man will stop
14
smiling, but he will start to smile again when we turn to this page or that
moment. Art preserves, and it is the only thing in the world that is preserved.
It preserves and is preserved in itself (quid juris?), although actually it lasts no
longer than its support and materials stone, canvas, chemical color, and so
on (quid facti?).
As they proceed to argue further in this chapter (1994, Chapter 7), art differs from
philosophy in so far as it creates ‘percepts’ and ‘affects’, embodied in the characters,
shapes, movements, and so on, which are preserved in art and, in turn, preserve it.
Philosophy (and one may include the theorizing in which I am engaged here), by
contrast, creates (novel) ‘concepts’ through which the world is reconfigured. One of
the exemplary ways for a theorist to proceed is to bring the percepts and affects
embodied in a narrative such as The Magus into a productive heuristic constellation
with illuminating concepts such as those drawn here from (mainly) Lacan’s work. In
this way literature, philosophy and psychoanalytic theory may enter into a fruitful
collaborative relationship.
Returning to the narrative in question, during one of his first visits to Bourani
Nicholas already feels constrained to change his mind about Conchis, whom he
initially regarded as being merely an eccentric old man (Fowles, 1983, p. 102):
I was increasingly baffled by Conchis. At times he was so dogmatic that I wanted
to laugh, to behave in the traditionally xenophobic, continentals-despising way of
my race; at times, rather against my will, he impressed me not only as a rich
man with some enviable works of art in his house. And now he frightened me. It
was the kind of illogical fear of the supernatural that in others made me sneer; but
all along I had felt that I was invited not out of hospitality, but for some other
reason. He wanted to use me in some way.
Later during the same visit, in the face of what he calls Nicholas’s ‘pessimism’
(which seems more like nihilism or cynicism to me), Conchis proposes to show the
young man ‘the innermost secret of life’ (Fowles, 1983, p. 146). Because this scene
contains something that is crucial for assessing the epistemological and axiological
position of The magus, I shall quote it almost in full (Fowles, 1983, pp. 146-147).
It was a stone head, whether of a man or a woman it was difficult to say. The nose
had been broken short. The hair was done in a fillet, with two sidepieces. But the
power of the fragment was in the face. It was set in a triumphant smile, a smile
that would have been smug if it had not been so full of the purest metaphysical
good humour. The eyes were faintly oriental, long, and as I saw, for Conchis put a
hand over the mouth, also smiling. The mouth was beautifully modelled,
timelessly intelligent and timelessly amused.
‘That is the truth. Not the hammer and sickle. Not the stars and stripes. Not the
cross. Not the sun. Not gold. Not yin and yang. But the smile.’…
He was right. The little sunlit thing had some numen; or not so much a
divinity, as a having known divinity, in it; of being ultimately certain….
‘Tell me where it came from.’
‘From Didyma in Asia Minor.’
‘How old is it?’
‘The sixth or seventh century before Christ’….
15
The little head watched our watching; bland, certain, and almost maliciously
inscrutable. It flashed on me that it was also the smile that Conchis sometimes
wore; as if he sat before the head and practised it. At the same time I realized
exactly what I disliked about it. It was above all the smile of dramatic irony, of
those who have privileged information. I looked back up at Conchis’s face; and I
knew I was right.
This scene and the important place of the smile in it connects with several other
scenes in the narrative, such as the one (Fowles, 1983, p. 531), where Nicholas has
just been coerced into witnessing a scene of passionate lovemaking between
Lily/Julie/Dr Maxwell and her black lover, Joe, apparently in the roles of Desdemona
and Othello. Conchis approaches him and informs him that he is ‘now elect’, and
when Nicholas, who is gagged, shakes his head violently, indicating his rejection and
contempt for the process that he has been subjected to, Conchis insists that he has ‘no
choice’, and urges Nicholas: ‘Learn to smile, Nicholas, learn to smile.’ The
significance of this for the overall theme of the novel should not be underestimated.
That is, it should be seen in relation to the theme of ‘hazard’, suggested to Nicholas
several times by Conchis (see, for example, Fowles, 1983, pp. 87-88) but probably the
most eloquent formulation of which is given by Lily de Seitas, mother of Lily and
Rose (or Julie and June), when Nicholas meets her after his return to London from
Greece, desperately trying to make sense of his ordeal in retrospect. She tells him
(Fowles, 1983, pp. 627-628; see also p.294 regarding the ‘equivalence’ of truth and
lie in Conchis’s world):
‘Nicholas, if one is trying to reproduce, however partially, something of the
mysterious purposes that govern existence, then one also has to go beyond some
of the conventions man has invented to keep those purposes at bay. That doesn’t
mean that in our ordinary lives we think such conventions should be swept away.
Far from it. They are necessary fictions. But…we start from the premise that in
reality all is fiction, yet no single fiction is necessary.’…
‘The basic principle of life is hazard. Maurice [Conchis] tells me that this is no
longer even a matter of debate. If one goes deep enough in atomic physics one
ends with a situation of pure chance. Of course we all share the illusion that this
can’t be so.’
Fowles, Lacan, Foucault and Derrida: poststructuralist logic.
The first thing that strikes one about this is its resonance with Lacan’s (2007, pp. 23,
33-34) contention, that knowledge or science corresponds to the discourse of the
hysteric, which proceeds by relentless questioning, and not as one might expect
with that of the university (underpinned by a commitment to ‘complete’, systematic
knowledge of what is). The upshot of this is that the discourse of the hysteric is
predicated on the structural impossibility of a ‘complete’ system of knowledge, no
matter what the discipline. Interestingly, Foucault (1972, pp. 222-224), too, argues
that disciplines are characterized by a paradoxical tension between their vaunted
open-endedness (in the sense that something novel or fresh can always be added to
them, adding to their growth), on the one hand, and the fact that at any given stage in
their development, only a limited number of statements or hypotheses can be
accommodated by them as his example of the work of Mendel, which could not be
accommodated in biology when it first appeared, demonstrates: Mendel was not (yet)
‘within the true’. This is not where the correspondence between Lacan, Fowles and
16
Foucault on this question ends, either. What Foucault says in The discourse on
language (1972, p. 216) on the function of discourse in society is uncannily close to
Lily de Seitas’s words, quoted above, on conventions being ‘necessary fictions’ that
‘keep those [existence-governing] purposes at bay’. Foucault intimates that the
function of the principles governing the generation of discourse and I believe this
statement is consonant with Lacan’s theory of the four discourses is primarily to
provide a medium for ‘controlling’ it, lest society fall apart:
I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once
controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of
procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance
events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality.
In other words, for Foucault as for Lacan (and one could add the names of other
poststructuralist thinkers such as Derrida, Kristeva and Deleuze), the ideal of an
encompassing, all-inclusive, coherent system of knowledge, is an illusion or, in
other words, it is paranoiac.
Derrida’s (1978, p. 285) deconstructive reading of Lévi-Strauss’s distinction between
the bricoleur (tinkerer) and the engineer is a particularly striking example of this,
while simultaneously exemplifying the paradoxical or aporetic logic of
poststructuralist thinking. On the one hand, he points out, the concept of the bricoleur
signifies someone who always uses ‘the means at hand’ (no matter how adequate or
inadequate it may be) to construct what is needed, while, on the other, the ‘engineer’
represents the person who constructs ‘the totality of his language’ – a formulation that
strikingly reminds one of what Lacan calls the ‘paranoiac structure’ of human
knowledge, that is, an epistemic totality or all-inclusive system. Derrida hastens to
point out, however, that this conception of someone who is the origin of his or her
own discourse is a myth (and probably one produced by the bricoleur). Most
importantly, however, he insists that humans cannot stop believing in such an
‘engineer’, because as soon as they do, the very distinction between the bricoleur
who always, inevitably, has to avail him- or herself of the available historical
discourse(s) and its opposite, the engineer who stands for a discourse which starts
afresh, with precise, clear rules and instruments of exactitude breaks down, and the
meanings of the two opposing concepts collapse. In other words, for Derrida as for
Lacan, we cannot ever choose definitively between the paradigm of ‘absolute’, certain
knowledge (the engineer, the discourse of the university) or the epistemic paradigm of
always already ‘ruined’ or ‘uncertain’ knowledge (the bricoleur, the discourse of the
hysteric). We have to learn to negotiate the difficult terrain constituted by their
difference. Clearly, Fowles’s position in The magus is consonant with this one.
The ‘smile’, paradox, ‘learned ignorance’ and Nietzsche.
What about the smile? The smile functions as the image of a kind of paradoxical
Socratic docta ignorantia (as metaphor of what has been argued above): an ‘I know
that I do not know’, captured in Lily de Seitas’s remark (quoted above), that, although
it is beyond debate that life is governed by the principle of hazard (chance, risk,
danger, uncertainty), ‘we all share the illusion that this can’t be so’. That is as much
as reiterating Lacan’s claim concerning the paranoiac structure of human knowledge:
regardless of its semblance of systematicity (Derrida’s ‘engineer’) and the repeated
attempts to ground such knowledge ‘empirically’, human systems of knowledge are
17
vitiated by their mostly unacknowledged subjection to the principle of hazard or
chance (Lacan’s discourse of the hysteric; Derrida’s ‘bricoleur’). And yet, we cannot
do without this illusion like Nicholas in the novel, every human being has to act on
the basis of presumed knowledge, and further, in the course of our quest for
knowledge, as if every discovery of the illusory nature of an explanation or account of
knowledge points forward to a better, alternative explanation. In this way human
beings move the epistemic, cognitive goalposts every time, in the ineluctable (but
illusory) belief that, sooner or later, we shall discover the ‘true state of affairs’. Hence,
the smile signifies, metaphorically, the knowledge and acceptance of hazard as the
inescapable law of life, accompanied by the reflective knowledge of this knowledge
hence Nicholas’s feeling that the smile signifies ‘privileged information’ (Fowles,
1983, p. 147).
My argument here is that, in the light of what has been shown, Fowles’s The magus
may be understood as offering the reader a sustained narrative account, consonant
with Lacan’s position on the paranoiac or illusory structure of human knowledge
(with Nicholas in the role of the exemplary human subject), on the one hand, but also,
on the other, a way of negotiating this ostensibly hopeless state of affairs in such a
manner that it would induce a paradoxical smile of ‘informed ignorance’. This smile,
I would further contend, is a metaphor for the manner in which Lacan’s discourse of
the hysteric and that of the analyst function together with the other two discourses,
those of the master and the university, in the manner explained above (just as
Derrida’s paradigmatic figures of the bricoleur and the engineer cannot function on
their own, but require each other). To be sure, from one situation to the next, Fowles
emphasizes different aspects of the smile. When Conchis shows Nicholas the ancient,
sculpted head with its enigmatic smile, it will be remembered, its embodiment of
good humour is highlighted; by contrast, where Conchis tells Nicholas that he should
‘learn to smile’ (referred to earlier), it is noteworthy that something different from
good humour is foregrounded (Fowles, 1983, p. 531):
It came to me that he meant something different by ‘smile’ than I did; that the
irony, the humourlessness, the ruthlessness I had always noticed in his smiling
was a quality he deliberately inserted; that for him the smile was something
essentially cruel, because freedom is cruel, because the freedom that makes us at
least partly responsible for what we are is cruel. So that the smile was not so much
an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we
cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence.
What at first sight may seem like a blatant contradiction in the text, starts making
sense when it is kept in mind, firstly, that all signifiers including iconic ones such as
a smile on a person’s face – are ineluctably multivocal. We cannot get away from the
fact that what may appear to be ‘one and the same’ signifier generates a different
meaning in a new context in accordance with the one movement of what Derrida
(1982, pp. 7-9; see also Olivier, 2005b) calls différance, namely spacing or the
endless, ‘aneconomic’ deferral of meaning (as opposed to its counter-movement,
namely temporization, or the ‘economic’, temporary stabilization of meaning) and it
is understandable that the two different contexts involved here would generate very
different meanings of ‘the smile’. In the first, relatively early in the narrative,
Nicholas was Conchis’s guest, and was being regaled and impressed by every new
piece of information about the older man’s world that Conchis could conjure up;
18
hence the predominant impression of good humour projected by the smile on the
sculpted face. By the time Conchis accosts the shackled Nicholas, he has been
through an ordeal he could not imagine before; hence the impression of cruelty.
What exactly does Fowles mean by ‘cruelty’? By equating it with ‘human existence’
here he gives one an important clue, which resonates with the interpretation that has
been given of Lacan’s puzzling claim concerning the ‘paranoiac structure of human
knowledge’, specifically that human aspirations to ‘timeless’ systems of knowledge
betray a desire for the kind of knowledge that would overcome, once and for all, the
inescapable imprint of time on human knowledge, as conveyed in the relentless
questioning of the master’s and the university’s discourses by that of the hysteric.
Such questioning signifies human finitude (including suffering) and fallibility, and it
seems clear that this is what the ‘cruelty’ detected by Nicholas in Conchis’s smile
intimates as well: the unmitigated contingency of human existence is characterized by
the impossibility to avoid suffering of some kind, even if it is true that it usually
affords the individual his or her share of joy and pleasure as well.
A brief Nietzschean digression which would simultaneously demonstrate the
compatibility between Nietzsche, Lacan and Fowles would clarify what is at stake
here. Just how close the latter two thinkers are to the German, is evident from
Nietzsche’s elaboration, in Beyond good and evil (1966, p. 35), on the ‘will to
knowledge’ as being underpinned by a more profound ‘will to ignorance a phrase
that resonates with Lacan’s notion of the ‘paranoiac’ structure of human knowledge,
and with Fowles’s contention, in The magus, that ‘in reality all is fiction’ (even if
humans cannot do without such fictions, whether in the shape of conventional beliefs
or scientific theories). But secondly, regarding the interpretation of the ‘cruelty’
signified by Conchis’s smile (suggested above), namely, that it signifies the utter
finitude and contingency of human life, which one has to learn to accept, it is
instructive to note that Nietzsche establishes what is arguably an ethical connection
(see Olivier, 2007 for an elaboration on this question) between the so-called ‘eternal
recurrence’ and human finitude by way of what he calls the ‘spirit of revenge’.
One could say that, for Nietzsche, by affirming the contingent or chance events which
inevitably occur in one’s life, one simultaneously affirms or activates the ‘eternal
recurrence’, in so far as chance events are, in this way, tied into the circle of necessity,
of the ‘eternal recurrence’. Ethically, the latter doctrine implies the exhortation to do
the ‘impossible’, namely to affirm one’s life as something that one ‘wills’ to recur
‘eternally’, regardless of the amount of joy or suffering experienced by the person in
question. And those rare individuals who are capable of such unconditional
acceptance of their finitude (their inability to reverse what has happened once), and
therefore of their mortality, in this way succeed in overcoming what Nietzsche, in the
persona of Zarathustra (1984, p. 252) calls the ‘spirit of revenge’: ‘…the will’s ill will
against time and its “it was”’. Such individuals would also attain ‘singularity’ in so far
as acceptance of the finitude or (in Fowles’s idiom) ‘cruelty’ of human life is linked
with the affirmation of the unique, albeit contingent actions performed by an
individual, in this way imparting a certain ‘necessity’ to them (see Olivier, 2007 for a
thoroughgoing examination of this problematic in Nietzsche’s work). It is precisely
such an affirmation of the ‘cruelty’ of life signified by the ability to smile that
Conchis asks Nicholas to perform in The magus. The ability to smile would signify
one’s affirmation that ‘freedom is cruel’, and the fact that Fowles links this to one’s
19
responsibility (in the above excerpt), confirms the correspondence between Fowles’s
and Nietzsche’s (and Lacan’s) positions regarding human finitude: freedom is ‘cruel’
because, tied as it is to contingent situations in which one has to make decisions in the
absence of anything or anyone else who could take responsibility for our decisions,
each human being bears the terrible burden of responsibility for the consequences of
her or his choices and decisions. This is why Sartre (1956, p. 567) says: ‘…I am
condemned to be free’.
Conclusion.
To conclude, it seems to me that Fowles provides a degree of corroboration of the
interpretation put forward here, which aligns his position in The magus with Lacan’s
notion, that human knowledge exhibits a paranoiac, or illusory (if not delusional)
structure, but one that may nevertheless be negotiated in a paradoxical fashion. This
entails ‘unlearning’ one’s perhaps naïve attachment to conventional beliefs (instances
of the master’s discourse), as well as overcoming a superior attitude, born of a degree
of ‘higher learning’, like Nicholas’s at Oxford (the university’s discourse), in the
place of which one learns to ‘smile’ in the face of one’s fallibility and the concomitant
realization that one has to negotiate, or alternate between relentless questioning of
conventional morality (the hysteric’s discourse) and revisable beliefs in the necessity
of (questionable) convention, without which no one could live (as shown by the
analyst’s discourse, represented by Conchis and Lily de Seitas). In the Foreword to
the revised edition of The magus (1983, p. 10) he remarks apropos of the novel:
If there was some central scheme beneath the (more Irish than Greek) stew of
intuitions about the nature of human existence and of fiction it lies perhaps in
the alternative title, whose rejection I still sometimes regret: The Godgame. I did
intend Conchis to exhibit a series of masks representing human notions of God,
from the supernatural to the jargon-ridden scientific; that is, a series of human
illusions about something that does not exist in fact, absolute knowledge and
absolute power. The destruction of such illusions seems to me still an eminently
humanist aim; and I wish there were some super-Conchis who could put the Arabs
and the Israelis…through the same heuristic mill as Nicholas.
Compare this excerpt from Fowles’s reflection on The magus with Lacan’s
observation, in The other side of psychoanalysis (2007, p. 23), that ‘…the desire to
know is not what leads to knowledge. What leads to knowledge is…the hysteric’s
discourse’. From what was said earlier about the hysteric’s discourse it should be
apparent that it represents those discursive practices which are structurally
characterized by relentless questioning, from within, of the (illusory) claims and
aspirations regarding the systematic completeness, or encompassing, of the realm of
the knowable on the part of the master’s as well as the university’s discourse. It is not
difficult to discern here, too, a ‘destruction of…illusions’ comparable to those
thematized by Fowles in The magus. And, in my judgment, to disabuse human beings
of their illusions, in the place of which a practice of coping with the difficulty and
complexity of life is encouraged, can in the final analysis only be a way of promoting
psychic health.
Needless to stress, the upshot of this article is the insight that both Fowles and Lacan
are ambivalently located in the Enlightenment tradition of largely rationalist-scientific
western thought neither is prepared to throw the baby of knowledge out with the
20
bathwater of rationalist illusions; hence their respective complexifications or
problematizations of knowledge, or more broadly, of human existence. The radicality
of this mode of thinking should not be overlooked, in the erroneous belief that
radicality requires resolute ‘opposition’ to conventional ways of thinking – in this
case, sticking to one’s charge (derived from Lacan), that human knowledge is
‘paranoiac’ in structure. This would simply be to collapse into the paralysis of binary
thinking once again, instead of which Lacan and Fowles (together with other
poststructuralist thinkers like Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault and Kristeva) introduce a
truly revolutionary way of thinking opposites together in an aporetic manner, which
preserves the irreducibility of each member of the opposition, in this way
acknowledging the inescapable complexity of life. In the face of Hegel’s optimistic
belief in the possibility of conclusive, consummate Bildung, Lyotard (1992, pp. 1, 8-
16) counters with the ‘experimental’ (not pessimistic) spirit of the avant-garde, which
is predicated on the possibility of learning by ‘trying’ (Latin experiri: to try, to test). It
is impossible to ignore the consonance between this position and Fowles’s in The
magus, where Nicholas is ‘tried’ in more than one sense, in the process being given
the chance to learn by experiment, or what amounts to the same thing experience.
In retrospect, therefore, the structure of knowledge in a complexified sense turns out
to be not quite paranoiac as the conceit on the part of the university’s discourse
would suggest, taken by itself or in conjunction with that of the master but instead,
given the mediating function of the discourses of the hysteric and the analyst,
paradoxical or aporetic: we know and we don’t know. That which provides (illusions
of certain) knowledge fulfils an epistemic function for a limited time, until the
hysteric’s persistent interrogations, interpreted by the analyst, point in the direction of
possible revisions, open-endedness and alternative understanding or explanation. To
learn this, constitutes a kind of counter-Bildung on the part of the person fortunate
enough to be disabused of the illusions keeping the vast majority of people captive,
one that inculcates a radical humility in the face of inescapable epistemic finitude and
the ‘cruelty’ of existence a humility accompanied by the smile of ‘learned
ignorance’.
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In this paper an analogy is drawn between certain features of Einstein's special theory of relativity and the model of signification encountered on the part of poststructuralists Lacan and Derrida. This analogy pivots on an achievement that is common to both Einstein's theory and the (post-) structuralist model of the sign, namely to have subverted the conceit of having access to something 'absolute' – an 'absolute' spatiotemporal vantage point, in the case of Einstein, and 'absolute' (immediate, fully present) meaning in the case of Derrida and Lacan. To be able to demonstrate this, the functioning of the structuralist 'sign' as well as its radicalized poststructuralist counterpart is contrasted with the traditional referential model of meaning, while Einstein's special theory is scrutinized with a view to establishing a basis for comparison with poststructuralist semiotics. Die tydgenootlike konteks van relatiwiteit en relativisme In hierdie artikel word betoog dat 'n analogie bespeur kan word tussen Einstein se spesiale teorie van relatiwiteit en die betekenis-model wat by poststrukturaliste Lacan en Derrida aangetref word. Hierdie analogie berus op wat Einstein se teorie en die (post-) strukturalistiese model van die teken met mekaar gemeen het, naamlik om die waanbeeld van menslike toegang tot iets 'absoluuts' te ondergrawe – 'n 'absolute' tydruimtelike oogpunt in die geval van Einstein, en 'absolute' (onmiddellike, volledig teenwoordige) betekenis, in die geval van Derrida en Lacan. Ten einde dit te demonstreer word die funksionering van die strukturalistiese 'teken' asook die geradikaliseerde poststrukturalistiese weergawe daarvan met die tradisionele referensiële betekenismodel gekontrasteer, terwyl Einstein se spesiale teorie onder die loep geneem word met die oog op 'n vergelyking met poststrukturalistiese semiotiek. This paper first appeared in The contemporary context of relativity and relativism. Acta Academica Supplementa, 2005 (2), and was reprinted in Philosophy and Psychoanalytic theory. Collected essays. London and Frankfurt: Peter Lang Academic Publishers, 2009, pp. 91-122.
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The importance for narratology of the psychoanalytical theory of the subject, formulated by the poststructuralist, Jacques Lacan, should not be underestimated. The reason for this is that, for Lacan, the subject is not monodimensional, but has to be conceived of as occupying different subject-positions, namely those of the subject of the symbolic register (the 'je'), of the imaginary (the 'moi') and of the 'real' (the body-subject or the subject as body). Moreover, his early theory of the three 'imagoes', as well as his work on aggressivity, fleshes out the structural relevance of the imaginary 'identity' of the subject for narratological purposes. Every human being – and therefore also every human character in narrative fiction – is precariously constituted in the tension-field between these three registers and their constitutive structures, and each subject-position highlights a different possibility in the life of a human being. The Lacanian theory therefore provides one with a flexible grid for the understanding of actual or fictional subjects and of their narrative development. To demonstrate this, the complex narrative character or 'identity' of the piano teacher in the film by that name is analyzed in terms of the various registers of Lacan's theory, and in the process his theoretical model of the subject is shown as allowing for an exemplary grasp of narrative identity.