SUBJECT AND SUBJECTIVITY: REFLECTIONS ON the RELATION BETWEEN STRUCTURE AND HISTORY

SUJEITO E SUBJETIVIDADE: REFLEXÕES SOBRE ESTRUTURA E HISTÓRIA

ABSTRACT:

This paper discusses the opposition between, on the one hand, the subject and their causation by structure and language and, on the other hand, subjectivity and its production by power and history; opposition that is evident in some current psychoanalytical perspectives. For the purpose of this discussion, it analyzes the works of Nietzsche and Freud, particularly their conception of power. This conception will pose the genesis of the subject from a standpoint, which proposes a relation between structure and history free from the transcendent and antithetical criteria that have prevailed in the treatment of this issue.

Keywords:
psychoanalysis; subject; power; structure; history

Resumo:

Este documento discute a oposição entre o sujeito e sua causação pela estrutura e pela linguagem, por um lado, e a subjetividade e sua produção pelo poder e pela história, por outro; oposição que é evidente em algumas perspectivas psicanalíticas atuais. Para isso, analisa as obras de Nietzsche e Freud, em especial a concepção do poder evidenciada por eles. Essa concepção postulará a gênese do sujeito a partir de um ponto de vista que propõe uma relação entre estrutura e história, livre dos critérios transcendentes e antitéticos que têm prevalecido no tratamento dessa questão.

Palavras-chave:
psicanálise; sujeito; poder; estrutura; história

1 INTRODUCTION: CAUSATION OF THE SUBJECT AND THE PRODUCTION OF SUBJECTIVITY

The distinction between subject and subjectivity is used by J. Alemán (2016) as a basis to clear the horizon of the politics as the advent of the subject as difference and as ‘know how’ of that difference. This distinction allows him to think about what can be inappropriate for the historical operations of power, and to pose, from there, a hegemonic practice - consistent of the articulation of differences, which are impossible to be appropriated - for the construction of a collective will.

The argument can be summarized as follows: analyses such as Foucault’s, Deleuze’s or Butler’s, emphasize the historical production of subjectivity in the context of power relations and they omit or they do not highlight strongly enough that there is something that cannot be produced, since it responds to a different logics from that of power, that is to say: the subject. The subject is an effect of the language and the relation between the subject and the language is not that of production but of causation, that is to say: of a constitution due to cause and structure; not to production and history.

On the one hand, thus, power and its historical dimension, on the other hand, language and its structural dimension; on the one hand, power logics, on the other, the ontological. Thereby, if subjectivity is a contingency or a historical variant, the subject is a necessity or an invariant of the structure. In the face of history relativism, or namely, historicism, determination of the structure opposes: the subject is, from this perspective, concerning not to the becoming of history (that responds to its mutability), but to its destination in language (that responds to its immutability).

Power may produce certain subjectivities, as it is evident, in neoliberalism, with figures such as ‘self- entrepreneur’ (FOUCAULT, 2007), ‘the indebted man’ (LAZZARATO, 2019), or ‘bare life’ (AGAMBEN, 1998). In fact, neoliberalism as a specific formation of Capital logics is always, for Alemán, the first historical formation that tries to reach the ontological nucleus of the subject, that is to say, it targets subjectivity production. Foucault (2007) had already highlighted that neoliberalism itself had extended market rationality to areas that, like subjectivity, had stayed, up to that moment, alien to economics. In biopolitics, political power is no longer related to sovereignty but to governability, what supposes that the individual sees themselves involved in the conservation techniques and the administration of their own lives. An economy of decentralized power is only possible from the self-government of the members of the social body. If neoliberalism is, as Alemán claims, the first historical formation that aims at the production of subjectivity that happens, in this way, because the dominance over the subject started to be conditioned by its own subjective participation in the act of dominance.

Since then, there have been multiple perspectives that started to envisage subjectivity as a micro-political field of fundamental strategic nature, since the subsistence of a determined macro-political system depended, largely, on its colonization. From the point of view of social transformation, it started to be emphasized not only the politics of production, as the traditional left, but also those of life reproduction: sexuality and gender, affections and the body, the desire and the intimate (ROLNIK, 2019; FERNÁNDEZ, 2013).

In Alemán’s point of view, these historical productions of subjectivity are inscribed in the difference that divides the subject in their constitution by language, which is always first and, unlike the others, not dispensable. This allows the author to make a lucid combination of both levels of analysis:

Every era colonizes the empty place of the subject in a different way […] in every era sexuality, death and the word are historically treated, I will never oppose the theory of historical construction; however, we cannot reduce everything to the historical construction. (ALEMÁN, 2016, p. 127).

Then, it is in the context of a power that tries to capture the ontological core of the subject that it is necessary, for Alemán, to present the subject as not appropriable by the logic of Capital. Otherwise, neoliberalism wins the game and the horizon of the political is blurred in the frame of unlimited power: “If these two things are confused and we believe that power definitely captures the moment of the revival of the subject, the crime is perfect” (ALEMÁN, 2016, p. 46). This is the issue that Alemán finds as regards historicist approaches: they contain the hint of an absolute appropriation, in which everything ends up being historical subjectivity captured by power dispositives. To pose a rest, an absolute difference that no production can fill, allows the integration of that difference into a collective dimension. Alemán (2012) addresses this as “Loneliness: The Common”.

However, this same gesture includes Alemán’s proposal in a psychoanalytic tradition which, still with exceptions, has not stopped envisaging the relation between the subject and power as a transcendent relation: power would be, according to this tradition, something external, secondary in comparison to the subject that pre-exists it and which can, therefore, be outside its field. This conception brings such tradition closer to the sovereign model of power, in which the subject, in the state of nature, pre-existed and was outside the sovereign power that he or she established, with others, through the contract.

The issue is that this model becomes obsolete in the current discussions due to its insufficiency to account for a power whose dimension, as it has been exposed, is nowadays difficult to distinguish from the dimension of life or from subjectivity. Thus, the problem that historicist approaches could face, concerning Alemán’s proposal, is the same as has been supported so many times regarding psychoanalysis in general: in the attempt not to confuse structure and history, in the attempt to pose the subject constitution by language, psychoanalysis has removed, in this way, the subject from the events of history, and has reproduced then, an operation that would redirect it, overcoming the micro-political sphere of the subjectivity historically produced, to the sovereign model of power.

As it has been exposed, this is apparent not only from Alemán’s perspective. Actually, this is one of the expressions of the psychoanalytic field, particularly of Lacanian tradition, which does not stop underpinning its theoretical elaborations on distinctions of this type (see Lacan’s perspective itself, 1973, 2005, or those of Rabinovich, 1986, Vegh, 2016, or from another disciplinary field, that of Žižek, 2001).

It is true that psychoanalysis has neither ignored nor hidden the political issue, as it has been recurrently supported (e.g. by CASTEL, 2014). In fact, Freud’s theory is based on the topic of fight and conflict, and calibrated on the basis of the political issue. Far from ignoring this matter, psychoanalysis has chosen to pacify it, when decoding it in terms of law, order or the symbolic, in a movement which brings it the closest, as has been discussed, to the pacifying movement involved in the sovereign contract. Regarding this, The Anti-Oedipus’ words are worth remembering: “As if Freud had backed down from a world of savage production and explosive desire, and, at any price, wanted to put a little order in it, an order now classic, of the old Greek theatre” (DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2009, p. 60).

Perhaps what language provides psychoanalysis with is the same as what sovereign power has contributed with in the sovereign model: a transcendent point of pacification regarding the historic sphere, fragile and unstable, of fight and conflict (ESPOSITO, 2011). Transcendence, namely, the exemption of the subject from the historical sphere of power, as an element of pacification, would lead to the security of the subject, just as Heidegger (1996) showed about his ally in this enterprise, representation. Let´s remember that both Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Foucault and others, have deviated from the issue of language and sense, and if they have conceived it, it was always from the point of view of its strategic use, following Nietzschean tradition. In this spirit, Foucault (2010) himself tried, from his early work, to escape from the categorical division between language and history (the same intention is embodied in the psychoanalytical field, in Birman, 1994, 2019).

Then, the question is: how can we be saved from this opposition between structure and history? Or how can we conceive structure, that is to say, the ontological difference in a way that does not oppose it to the historical becoming? We will take Nietzsche’s philosophy, the mainstay of many of the perspectives with which Alemán argues, and Freudian psychoanalysis itself, on which his argument rests in part, to answer these questions. Taking Freud will also provide us with the opportunity to prove not the presumed adherence of his theory to the repressive or legal model of sovereign power, sufficiently demonstrated, and which we will not discuss, but the point where it ceases to come to terms with the said model. Alemán’s perspective will allow us to reconstruct the narrative that will be questioned from these counterpoints.

2 WHAT IS POWER? ERASURE OF STRUCTURAL DIFFERENCE

Alemán opposes the ‘metaphysics of revolution’ that is based on the idea of a pre-constituted historical subject that, oriented by historical laws, would get emancipation in the framework of a pre-defined telos, namely, to reach a society without divisions. For the author, on the contrary, emancipation has to do with the contingent articulation of indelible differences, and with a subject that will come into being without historical laws that ensure their future.

Alemán’s idea of emancipation presupposes a notion of power that is defined by opposition to the notion of Hegemony. For example: “Capitalism […] is the structure of power of the contemporary world, homogenous, circular, capable of erasing any difference or heterogeneity and, therefore it is a power not a Hegemony” (ALEMÁN, 2016, p. 27). Power here is what tries to erase the constitutive difference of the subject and of the social. Hegemony, as the logic of the political, is another way of relating with difference, one that seeks to admit it in its inevitability and found in it an emancipatory practice that does not strive for a society without fractures or with synthesized differences, as the metaphysics of the revolution claims. Emancipation, whose condition of possibility is Hegemony, is of radical instability and contingence since there is no historical law that ensures its occurrence. Alemán explains it as follows: “Hegemony is not a will to power” (ALEMÁN, 2016, p. 17). If Capitalism is then a will to power as a will to erase the constitutive differences of the subject and the social, Hegemony is a will to articulate them without erasing them but assuming them in their irreparable character.

With this notion of power, Alemán is in the line of authors such as Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault or Deleuze, who questioned the idea of a negative power, a power that would find the essence of its function in prohibition. Such an idea is found in that representation of power that conceives it as the stable attribute of one of the poles of the antithetical relationship that it would maintain with the expressive element. Foucault (2013, 2014), Deleuze and Guattari (2009), among others, attributed this representation of power to psychoanalysis itself, in a move that reduced the complexity of the operation of pacification that psychoanalysis, by focusing on the negative element of repression and order, would have exercised against the historical-political field of the struggle that it simultaneously recognizes and admits.

All these perspectives have tried to highlight the productive dimension of power: not only does power deny; but it also produces bodies, affections, sexualities, subjectivities, all in all, life or segregation and death. Although Alemán, as it has been argued above, recognizes this dimension of power, his commitment is to distinguish it from the constitutive dimension of language, in order to avoid the pitfall of historicism. Power produces, but not everything: there is a rest that escapes power and history, and that rest is for Alemán, as it has been suggested, the foundation of an emancipatory politics.

3 NIETZSCHE AND FREUD: POWER PRODUCES DIFFERENCE

Nietzsche’s philosophy lies in the ancestry of many of the authors with whom Alemán argues. Since the beginning, the philosopher has highlighted that power did not reduce itself to its negative dimension but that it also had an affirmative dimension. It is true that in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), the relationship between the negative and the affirmative, or the Apollonian and Dionysian, was conceived in metaphysical terms, that is to say, as antithetical elements that would keep a transcendent relation with each other. The Dionysian was actually thought there, as an original background (Ur-Eine), denied in a second moment by the Apollonian, which would endow it, from the outside, with the forms that it would lack in that origin (NIETZSCHE, 1872/2007).

However, in his works and in his posthumous fragments from the 1880’s, the relationship between the affirmative and the negative, or what is the same, between the expansive and the conservative, will be posed within an immanent relational field, constituted by forces that produce forms that will be destroyed in the course of their becoming. This becoming of multiple and immanent forces is what Nietzsche will call the will to power (Wille zur Macht). Thus, the forms cease to be elements which are imposed from the outside at a second moment to deny an original affirmation, and become elements which are produced and destroyed by the negative and affirmative forces in their becoming.

This model provides this discussion with several elements. Firstly, not only does it highlight the affirmative-expansive dimension of power but also it gives it a pre-eminence with respect to the power of the forces and not regarding the origin. Affirmative forces are not more original, they are stronger than negative-conservative ones, which displaces the latter to a secondary place within a tradition that had been prioritizing them in the fields of politics, biology, medicine and philosophy (ESPOSITO, 2011). According to Nietzsche, self-conservation is just a ‘consequence’ (NIETZSCHE, 1885-9/2016, p. 261), an ‘exception’ (NIETZSCHE, 1889/2010, p. 101), a ‘temporal restriction’ (NIETZSCHE, 1882/1999, p. 213), a

[…] limitation [Einschränkung] of the truly fundamental instinct of life [eigentlichen Lebens-Grundtrieb] that moves towards power extension [Lebens-Grundtriebes] and that, quite frequently, questions and sacrifices self-preservation through this will. (NIETZSCHE, 1882/1999, p. 212-213).

The categories of ‘lavishness’ [Verschwendung] (NIETZSCHE, 1889/2010, p. 101), ‘dation’ [ausgeben] (NIETZSCHE, 1889/2010, p. 128), or ‘gift giving virtue’ [schenkenden Tugend] (NIETZSCHE, 1883-4/2007, p. 118-123), result from this emphasis on the affirmative aspect of power. In this context, repression, whose problem is related to conservation, experiences the same fate as this one: more than a central element in the diagram of power, it becomes one additional effect, one which does not hold any privilege, in the field of the will to power.

Secondly, this model eradicates the transcendence criteria that defined the relationship between negation and affirmation according to the negative representation of power that has been analyzed here. Besides, when they are brought back to the immanence plane, the problems of affirmation and negation become indistinguishable, which will fill Nietzsche’s model with multiple contradictions. In Nietzsche, affirmation requires the negation that limits and reduces it. In the same way, negation is an element which favours the same affirmation that seeks to negate. It is only necessary to refer to the concept of the ‘ascetic ideal’ [Asketische Ideal] to notice the contradictory imbrication which is revealed by the affirmative and negative forces in the will to power. The ascetic ideal designates a turning of life against itself, a life that refuses to affirm itself.

It must be a need of the first rank that makes this species hostile to life grow and prosper over and over again, it must be, without a doubt, an interest of life itself that such a type of self-contradiction is not extinguished. For an ascetic life is a self-contradiction. (NIETZSCHE, 1887/2011, p. 172).

The same happens with the issue of creation. In the same way in which affirmation does not distinguish itself from negation, creation is indistinguishable from destruction: “the one who has to be a creator [Schöpfer] always annihilates [vernichtet]” (NIETZSCHE, 1883-4/2007, p. 96). Regarding this, it should be remembered that, in many passages, Nietzsche approaches the artist that creates to the criminal (Verbrecher) that breaks (brechen).

Finally, the most important factor in this discussion is Nietzsche’s assessment, according to which, the subject does neither pre-exist nor are they outside the field of power, but they are an effect constantly produced by it. The subject is one of the forms that forces produce in their becoming. To state that will to power erases the difference is inaccurate in Nietzsche´s philosophy; on the contrary, it produces it. Therefore, when Nietzsche (1883-4/2007) removes the Ego (Ich) from the central place that the metaphysics of subjectivity had assigned to it, that is to say, that of the origin and producer (of thoughts, volition, etc.), to support that it is actually produced by the body (Leib), he is referring to this status of a subject that abandons such centrality to become a relative product of the will to power, which is the instance to which the figure of the body leads in Nietzsche. In the same way, the author argues that the subject is divided in the assignment of moral values to the world, a phenomenon that constitutes a movement of power denial, not to any external instance, but to itself (NIETZSCHE, 1878-9/2001).

It would not be possible, from this point of view, to posit either a distinction or a transcendent relationship between the subject and their constitutive division, on the one hand, and power, on the other, or between the structure and its effects of causation and becoming and its historical productions. In Nietzsche, the division of the subject does not arise at the hands of any external instance, but of a necessity of life itself conceived as will to power. The subject is a form that acquires power, and its structural difference is produced by historical development, in a general and transcendental sense.

It is the kind of doing with the difference, the criteria that will allow Nietzsche to oppose the strong to the weak, the aristocrat to the flock, the exception to the average. The weak turns the moral values into unchangeable, which means, in the field of will to power, a forces stagnation by a predominance of the negative that develops units which do not make way to its disaggregation. The strong recognizes the transient character of moral values as a need to unify and temporarily stabilize the becoming of the forces to be able to move and act in the world. Then, those values are not taken away from the movement of perpetual transformation that is the will to power. This eradicates the predominance of the negative: the negative becomes an element of temporal limitation subordinated to the affirmative-expansive character of life. If the weak pretends to be perpetually unified, the strong recognizes the difference to which they are inevitably submitted by the becoming of the forces in the will to power. To give or to withdraw oneself definitively to the transformation (which produces the difference) that is will to power is, in Nietzsche, what distinguishes the strong from the weak.

Despite its assimilation to the repressive or sovereign Hobbesian model, Freud’s model of power contains elements to pose that power does not erase but produces the difference. This stems from the notion of life that Freud develops from the reformulation of the drive model of 1920, and that regards it as a fight between opposed forces, life drives (Lebenstriebe) and death drives (Todestriebe). Some current perspectives have highlighted the importance of this notion of life in Freud’s theory, because of the subversion that it would allow to impart on the emphasis that modernity has given to the theme of life conservation (BILBAO; HENRÍQUEZ RUZ, 2017), or on the models based on the idea of a neutralization or resolution of a fight that in both Freudian and Nietzschean notion of life would be impossible to eliminate (ZENGOTIA, 2013).

Life and death drives represent the principles that seek to, in the case of the former, “preserve the living substance and collect it into larger and larger units” [größeren Einheiten zusammenzufassen], and, in the latter, “dissolve those units [diese Einheiten aufzulösen] and redirect them to the initial inorganic state” (FREUD, 1930/2012, p. 114-115). These principles of union and disunion engage in a fight that, for Freud, constitutes the content of life in general. It is in this frame where Freud will pose the relationship between the cultural and the individual processes: “Both the cultural process of humanity and the individual development are, undoubtedly, vital processes, that is to say, they cannot help sharing the most universal character of life” (FREUD, 1930/2012, p. 135). It is about “‘a same process’ [that of life] that involves objects of different kinds” (FREUD, 1930/2012, p. 135). Only one of the aspects of these objects would make them distinguishable in the field of life, namely, the relationship that they keep with the principle of pleasure: if the individual process pursues it to achieve satisfaction, the cultural one seeks to limit it.

Here Freud assigns a repressive power to culture, and this is what has given rise to interpretations that highlighted the merely negative aspect of his theory of power. However, this repressive function is submitted to a primal function, that of “producing a unit from human individuals” (FREUD, 1930/2012, p. 136). Culture represents that aspect of the vital process constituted by erotic drives that have the function of linking a multiplicity of elements in a unit. Not only does culture repress, it also produces unity from the multiple: actually, its repressive function responds only to the necessity of containing the discretional expressions which can threaten the conservation of the cultural unit.

From this perspective, Freud, as Nietzsche and the authors that dealt with power following the guidelines of his philosophy, would also have emphasized the productive character of power. The discretionary power of the individual constitutes a disintegrative power that threatens the units that the power of the culture produces and seeks to preserve. The cultural process, which ensures the reunion of individuals into units, and that of the individual, who seeks blissful satisfaction, enter into a relationship that constitutes only one of the forms of the general conflict between the unifying and disintegrating forces of life:

The sense of the cultural development […] must teach us the struggle between Eros and Death, the drive for life and the drive for destruction, as it is consummated in the human species. This struggle is the essential content of life in general [das Leben überhaupt]. (FREUD, 1930/2012, p. 118).

At first, it is about substituting the power of the individual for that of culture, making its members limit themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction, where the isolated individual had no reason for doing it. This is where Freud’s categories reveal his most contractualist profile: the individual must give up some freedoms to enter the social order, which is guaranteed by the legal framework that ensures the permanence of such cession: “our culture is built from the suffocation of drives. Every individual has given up a fragment of their patrimony, of the fullness of their powers, of the aggressive and vindictive inclinations of their personality” (FREUD, 1908/1992, p. 167). But, in Freud, the social order, rather than being founded by the pacifying act of law, as in the contractualist tradition, it is referred to its origins in the totemic cultures, where the limits to individual aggressions were a consequence of a bloody and not very peaceful act: the murder of the forefather or first parent (Urvater).

The operation of culture will become more complex with the introduction of the issue of aggression (Aggression). The demarcation of this problem from its relationship with sexuality, such as Freud had been considering it, results in an eminently warlike anthropology: the human being is constitutionally inclined to aggression, and the other is not only a helpful or sexual object but is also the occasion to satisfy the aggression in him/her. This inclination makes aggression a component that is impossible to eliminate from human relationships. This anthropology is what ends up legitimizing the constitution and permanence of sovereign power. This was the historical-political function that, for Foucault (2014), for example, had the theory of sovereignty in the framework of the struggles which fragmented the social body in the seventeenth century England, namely, to legally link the individuals to the sovereign through the system of arguments that posed that the preservation of individual life depended on that act. If the social bond is crossed by this savagery, this can only be eliminated or tempered by the emergence of a transcendent pacifying point, the sovereign. It should not be forgotten that Freud takes, regarding this, Plauto’s aphorism popularized by Hobbes: “Homo homini lupus” (FREUD, 1930/2012, p. 108).

Freud’s theory was related to the sovereign model of power in many respects (cf., for example, Ortiz Molinuevo, 2017). However, this relationship must be discussed. Undoubtedly, in Freud, there is a will to pacify the struggle and everything that it supposes in terms of aggression, dissolution, contingency, etc. Nevertheless, in Freud, pacification designates a frustrated intention, a partial movement. Pacification by law, repression or the symbolic is never a settled dispute, since it does not reduce itself to a permanent stabilization. The very idea of the death drive indicates this: repression does not eliminate the disintegrative element to be repressed, in the same way that law does not eradicate the violence to be legislated. Both of them require the element they are heading for to make their operation effective (FREUD, 1930; 1933).

This supposes a difference regarding both the sovereign model and the Hegelian-dialectical regime. While in these, there is a definite pacification since they make the struggle and conflict disappear, either through a contract of pacification or a definite synthesis; in Freud, on the other hand, struggle and conflict are not likely to be finalized. Thus, pacification is, in Freud, a movement of institution and destitution. Pacification is a pacification of that which is not likely to be (definitively) appeased. This paradox defines the political problem of this theory. In it, there is a co-existence of the permanent thanatic transformations and a will that is also persistent to dominate them in order to achieve the conservation of the erotic units (cultural, institutional, etc.).

As it has been exposed, aggression is the form adopted by the power of the individual that, expressed in relation with the other, constituted the externalization of a death drive that represented a dissolving force in permanent struggle with the unity power of culture. This is the reason why Freud will argue that the inclination to attack each other constitutes the major obstacle for culture because of putting it “under a permanent threat of dissolution” [beständig von Zerfall bedroht] (FREUD, 1930/2012, p. 109). This fact foreshadows the most significant problem for culture. What should be done about the aggressive exteriorization of individuals? Freud would state that culture must prohibit them. However, this prohibitive power of culture was not only subordinated to a productive power, but also it is carried out through the production of what Freud calls “reactive psychic formations” [psychische Reaktionsbildungen] (FREUD, 1930/2012, p. 109).

In opposition to the contractualist model, in Freud, the individual actually does not give up anything, since they do not tolerate well any drive resignation. That is why the external coercion operation will be insufficient, and this is also why it is inaccurate to assimilate the Freudian model of power to the repressive or sovereign model. Not only does culture prohibit but also it operates by producing subjectivity: it settles a psychic formation, the superego, which spits off the psychic, and introjects (introjizieren) aggression, internalizes it (verinnerlichen), and turns it towards one’s own ego (gegen das eigene Ich gewendet). Thus, the aggression that was previously raised in the relationship between the individual and the external is exerted by the individuals over themselves. In this loop, the aggression begins to be played on the individual plane in an intertopic relationship: the superego, Freud states, exercises “against the ego the same aggressive severity that the ego would have willingly satisfied on other individuals” (FREUD, 1930/2012, p. 119).

This argument had already been exposed by Nietzsche. In his thesis, from the moment the human being started living in society and in an order of peace, their instincts had to search for new appeasement. As it may be noticed, the social order does not pacify anything, in Nietzsche, since the human being does not give up their original inclinations, but they redirect them. Thus, an external struggle turns into an internal one:

Those terrible bastions with which state organization protected itself against old freedom instincts […] made all those instincts of the savage, free, vagrant man go back, go against himself. Hostility, cruelty, the pleasure in the persecution, in the aggression, in the change, in the destruction - all this against the holder of such instincts: that is the origin of ‘bad conscience’ [schlechtes Gewissen]. (NIETZSCHE, 1887/2011, p. 122).

Freud reproduces the same formula: if it is limited in its exteriorization, aggression leads to an increase of self-destruction. However, while Nietzsche speaks about “bad conscience” (schlechtes Gewissen), Freud will speak about “guilt” (Schuldgefühl). Thus, culture controls aggression placing it in an interior instance that exercises it against the individual through, on the one hand, an intransigent vigilance which Freud names “moral conscience” (Gewissen) and that not only does it observe behaviors, but also intentions and volition, and on the other hand, through a sanction system that is more ruthless as more conquered the individual is (FREUD, 1930/2012).

There is in this an internalization process of the authority in which the superego relieves the external authority. If with this process the control system optimizes itself, the situation of the individual aggravates. The renunciation of drives to which culture compels, creates moral conscience which is the aspect of the superego that exercises the function of surveillance. Here is where Freud presents his paradoxical theory: if before authority interiorization, anguish due to the possibility of losing their parents was what aroused in a child the renunciation of drives; anguish that disappeared once this resignation took place, after authority was interiorized and moral conscience constituted, drives renunciation does not appease the demands of the latter but it encourages it. With the interiorization of authority, each drive renunciation becomes a source of moral conscience, and each new renunciation increases its severity (FREUD, 1923/1992, 1930/2012).

The aggression whose exteriorization was limited is taken back by the superego that exercises it against the subject through a system of surveillance and demands that feeds itself, to carry out its function, from the same energy whose exteriorization pretends to deny. Not having been able to be exteriorized, aggression finds an alternative of discharge in the relationship of the subject with themselves and in the form of those surveillance and demands that promote resignation. Aggression is kept, only its sign changes: from dialogical to monologic. Thus, resignation turns to be loaded by the same that it pretends to deny, which manifests in the situation of a subject who finds jouissance in their constitutive splitting and in their self-denial.

Unlike the original situation in which resignation eliminated anguish, with the interiorization of authority, all resignation generates anguish, now turned into guilt. An exterior, occasional and temporary misfortune, the loss of the love from parents, becomes a permanent interior misfortune, the feeling of guilt, fed by the same aggression whose exteriorization was resigned. Paradoxically, we feel guilt because we resign to attack. This explains the situation of an individual who the more virtuous they are, the more severely they treat themselves: the more they resign - the more virtue -, the more severity from the superego, which is nourished by the energy of that, which was resigned (FREUD, 1930/2012). Then, as it can be seen, there is no way out for the situation of aggression.

The subject is divided as a consequence of this interiorization of authority: “the [aggressive] bond between the superego and the ego is the return of [aggressive] bonds between the still undivided ego and an external object” (FREUD, 1930/2012, p. 125). Thus, the subject rediscovers the same struggle in which their structural division was conceived at the bottom of the relationship with themselves. To the rhythm of this struggle between unitive and disintegrative forces, in the game of hostilities and mutual cooperation in which they dispute the field of life in general, is where the difference of the subject is decided contingent and structurally. Like Nietszche, Freud argued that the subject as difference of itself arises within the immanent and productive orbit of power, which eliminates the necessity to resort to a transcendence to account for that genesis.

The feeling of guilt is not a reparable contingency; it is the fatality on which the cultural progress depends. The strengthening of the superego and the reinforcement of the feeling of guilt are the conditions which the cultural goal of uniting and keeping united to the multiplicity of individuals depend on. Once these have been accomplished, people change, to the detriment of themselves, from the enemies of culture to its holders, and the external forms of coercion on which it was intended to situate the fundamental aspect of Freudian theory of power, become not only secondary but expendable (FREUD, 1930/2012). Such is the verification of the loss in which one enters if we consider primary what only constitutes a secondary and possibly expendable operation.

The affirmation of the savage and bloodthirsty nature of the human being not only legitimizes political sovereignty, as in the sovereign paradigm of power, but it is what allows it to be preserved, provided that it is redirected to the plane of the relationship of the individual with themselves. Paradoxically, the unitive power of culture lies on the disintegrative power of the individual. Thus, opposite to the sovereign power, in Freud, the political power is kept not by eliminating the struggle, which is an impossible task, but by redirecting it to the confines of the psyche of an individual who the more adapted, the more unfortunate they are.

4 CONCLUSION

To reduce power to a historical contingency introduces us into a level of analysis that is problematic in the context of the preceding perspectives. We must differentiate the transcendent dimension of power and its historical-factual dimension. To make power a historical contingency, whether called neoliberalism or whatever, is to fall into a historicism incapable of explaining the genesis of the subject in a rigorous sense.

In the constitution of the difference, it is not the genetic general description what Alemán criticises, but rather that which is supported in a science of facts. The relativity of this empirical genetism is substituted by the generality of the transcendental genetism. And this genetism, both in Freud and in Nietzsche, cannot disregard the hypothesis of power. It is undeniable that there are factual conditions of submission and subordination that are proper to a specific historical moment. In this sense, that neoliberalism is the first historical formation which tries to erase the constitutive division of the subject can be something acceptable from this perspective. This is what Nietzsche would call ‘control’ (Herrschaft), the tendency to simplification, to the reduction of the complex, to the assimilation. And this is a level of analysis that is as important as the first one.

Following Nietzsche and Freud, we understand that the subject arises in power not through external coercion or violence but through a relationship of power with itself, that is to say, through a denial of power towards itself (Nietszche) or through an affirmation, which, turning in on itself, takes the paradoxical form of denial (Freud). Perhaps for this reason, Butler (2010), in her analysis of these authors, concluded that the subject is the modality of power that turns against itself.

These perspectives would still have the consequence of showing that it is power itself, which generates its points of resistance. Thus, it would not be necessary to pose any beyond power: the rest that is not appropriable, the subject for Alemán, is not outside; is in the unstable field of power. The subject would be, from this perspective, that which resists its own conditions of possibility.

If we consider the preceding hypotheses, we understand that power produces difference and it produces it permanently, which would demand reanalysing the thesis that supports the a-historicity of difference. Freud himself (1927/2012) asserted the philo- and onto-genetic character of the superego, thus imprinting a contingent character on it. This point is important to warn about the danger of making the unconscious or the superego a new ‘monototheism’, a new immutable fundament - albeit in the form of the absence and impossibility of fundament. From this point of view, the problem is not power. Understood in this way, power is the permanent condition of possibility of difference, and as such it is what ensures and protects it. The issue is, again, what do we mean by power?

And finally, it could be said that power permanently produces difference from particular historical conditions, which does not mean erasing the ontological difference, but avoiding the risks of a-historicity or immutability. Thus, the hypothesis of a subject produced by power does not endanger the ontological difference; it guarantees its historical and structural evidence. Saying that the ontological core of the subject is formulated by power has the benefit of showing that this dimension - impossible to be suppressed - is traversed by the becoming of history, which ends up giving the structure a mutable character, in a radical and accidental sense. This could be the point where history and structure meet in an impossible synthesis, a unity that is not unaware of its difference but that omits its formulation in antithetical terms.

REFERENCES

• AGAMBEN, G. Homo sacer El poder soberano y la nuda vida. Valencia: Pre-Textos, 1998.
• ALEMÁN, J. Horizontes neoliberales de la subjetividad Olivos: Grama, 2016.
• ALEMÁN, J. Soledad: Común Políticas en Lacan. Madrid: Clave Intelectual, 2012.
• BILBAO, A.; HENRÍQUEZ RUZ, F. Hacia una teoría antivital, antihomeostática y antiadaptativa de la vida en Freud: el trabajo del concepto de pulsión. Tempo psicanalitico, v. 49, n. 2, 2017.
• BIRMAN, J. Mal-estar na atualidade: a psicanálise e as novas formas de subjetivação. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2019.
• BIRMAN, J. Psicanálise, Ciência e Cultura Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1994.
• BUTLER, J. Los mecanismos psíquicos del poder Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2010.
• CASTEL, R. El psicoanalismo: el orden psicoanalítico y el poder. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 2014.
• DELEUZE, G.; GUATTARI, F. El Anti-Edipo: capitalismo y esquizofrenia. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2009.
• ESPOSITO, R. Bíos: biopolítica y filosofía. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 2011.
• FERNÁNDEZ, A. M. Jóvenes de vidas grises: psicoanálisis y biopolíticas. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión , 2013.
• FOUCAULT, M. Defender la sociedad: curso en el Collège de France (1975-1976). Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2014.
• FOUCAULT, M. Las palabras y las cosas: una arqueología de las ciencias humanas. México: Siglo XXI, 2010.
• FOUCAULT, M. La voluntad de saber Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2013. (Historia de la sexualidad, 1)
• FOUCAULT, M. Nacimiento de la biopolítica: curso en el Collège de France (1978-1979). Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007.
• FREUD, S. La moral sexual cultural y la nerviosidad moderna (1908). Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 1992. (Obras completas, 9)
• FREUD, S. El yo y el ello(1923). Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 1992. (Obras completas, 19)
• FREUD, S. El porvenir de una ilusión (1927). Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 2012. (Obras completas, 21)
• FREUD, S. El malestar en la cultura (1930). Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 2012. (Obras completas, 21)
• FREUD, S. ¿Por qué la guerra? (1933). Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 2012. (Obras completas, 22)
• HEIDEGGER, M. La época de la imagen del mundo. In: HEIDEGGER, M. Caminos de Bosque Madrid: Alianza, 1996.
• LACAN, J. Los cuatro conceptos fundamentales del psicoanálisis Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1973. (El seminario de Jacques Lacan, 11)
• LACAN, J. Posición del inconsciente Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2005. (Escritos, 2)
• LAZZARATO, M. La fábrica del hombre endeudado: ensayo sobre la condición neoliberal. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 2019.
• NIETZSCHE, F. El nacimiento de la tragedia: o Grecia y el pesimismo (1872). Buenos Aires: Alianza, 2007.
• NIETZSCHE, F. Humano, demasiado humano: un libro para espíritus libres.Vol. 1 (1878-9). Madrid: Akal, 2001.
• NIETZSCHE, F. La ciencia jovial («La gaya scienza») (1882). Caracas: Monte Ávila, 1999.
• NIETZSCHE, F. Así habló Zaratustra: un libro para todos y para nadie (1883-4). Madrid: Alianza, 2007.
• NIETZSCHE, F. Fragmentos póstumos: v. IV(1885-9). Madrid: Tecnos, 2016.
• NIETZSCHE, F. La genealogía de la moral: un escrito polémico (1887). Madrid: Alianza, 2011.
• NIETZSCHE, F. Crepúsculo de los ídolos o cómo se filosofa con el martillo (1889). Madrid: Alianza, 2010.
• ORTIZ MOLINUEVO, S. Notas para una lectura política del psicoanálisis. Avatares filosóficos, v. 4, p. 126-135, 2017.
• RABINOVICH, D. Sexualidad y significante Buenos Aires: Manantial, 1986.
• ROLNIK, S. Esferas de la insurrección: apuntes para descolonizar el inconsciente. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2019.
• VEGH, I. Retorno a Lacan: una clínica del sujeto. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2016.
• ZENGOTITA, A. Derivas sociopolíticas nietzscheanas y freudianas de la expansión y la conservación, Estudios Avanzados, v. 20, p. 75-95, 2013.
• ŽIŽEK, S. El epinoso sujeto: el centro ausente de la ontología política. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2001.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  17 June 2022
• Date of issue
  Jan-Apr 2022

History

• Received
  27 Oct 2020
• Accepted
  19 Mar 2022