anger-passion-commitment ... as symptom?

Lacan is always there with a twist, a spasm, a neat and terrifying paradox to unthink the stubbornly always-already thinkable, to make strange what is given, to shake up and reorder the relations among power, ethics and selfhood. For anger, this might be particularly useful. Imagine it along Lacanian lines, then, if you will, as a symptom:

My anger, a symptom, is not a twitch, or a spasm, but precisely a symptom, a sinthome, even, in that it is not about le vouloir-dire (“wanting to say”) but it speaks only in so far as space is made for it in the analytical situation, in so far as we believe in the believing…. That symptom, my anger (at what?), is thus without cause and is real: it is in itself without ontology and must be made to speak by an act if wilful symbolisation; speak it, say it, let it out, we might say. But that simple modality of outpouring, of ‘freeing’ of ‘opening’, of touching and feeling is circular and without usefulness here since it shortcircuits the coming to be of the symptom in a way altogether unhelpful for the broader analytical arch of the symptom. To ‘understand’ the symptom, one must certainly make room for it: bring it into speech, certainly, but also bring it into silence, allow it to swell, to fill and tremble; nurture it, hold it close, take it on, make it yours, because that is precisely what it is.

My anger is my own, my special, my exception.

It is here that the so-called blindspot (seeing red) seems to show itself as not quite right, not quite the place at which anger as symptom works, too reduced to a mere structural ‘is-not’, to mere emptiness. This is too clean, too pure, too neat. If anger as symptom is anything it is never neat, never clean, but always contaminated somehow, always beholden, always already thrown, always already become, too real, too material. Perhaps blindspot (seeing red, going ape), then, is too glib a shorthand: let’s think it differently again.

If anger is a state of exception, as we have already suggested, then it is also, as symptom, paradoxically, the repetition of that exception, the greying over-and over that makes it want to say, to vouloir dire, to show itself in the space we make for it. In repeating it, in becoming angry again and again, the symptom is given space to be and it announces itself to us. Here I am; your anger; let us embrace.

This anger is not the the place at which you hide yourself from me, but the place at which hiding and revealing are endlessly repeated.

Comments

[Sinthome]

Great post. I don't know if this is neither here nor there, but in Seminar 10, L'angoisse, Lacan remarks that "anger is what happens when the little pegs don't fit into the holes." Since nothing can have a place or be lacking in the real-- at least according to Lacan's early definitions of the real as that without lack or fissure --this implies that there must be something like a symbolic grid (the holes) thrown over the world for something like anger to be possible. Yet anger seems to emerge at precisely those points where the symbolic is no longer functional... The trite example of someone failing to use their turn signal as they suddenly jump in front of you in traffic. The thing I find curious and especially frustrating about anger-- and maybe I'm just idiosyncratic this way --is that it seems to be accompanied by an intersubjective double-bind. If I try to articulate my anger or someone tries to understand it, I seldom find that the anger dissipates, but rather it seems to grow and increase like gasoline has been thrown on it. Maybe this is the point of the first Ring film. The film follows the standard New Age ideology that if the wrong is just acknowledge or cathartically relieved (learning the girls story, dying with her, burying her), the wrong will be surmounted. Yet the spectre returns after Naomi Watts has done all this and the only way to appease the haunting spirit is to distribute the trauma to others by making copies of the video tape. On the other hand, if the anger is not recognized, placed in speech, or acknowledged, it also seems to fester and grow, forming relations to everything else, such that before long all sorts of things previously unconnected to the anger now get drawn into its symbolic universe as a sort of network.

[blahfeme]

hey sinthome

sorry i's taken me SO long to get back o you on this. I've been away in Spain (lucky me? - no - it was work not fun, believe me). Anyway, his is all very useful stuff. i know the Lacan text, bu for some reason, I completely forgot to check it again before writing these posts. I'll have a good read now I have some time. Hope Easter found you well and content. I agree absolutely about the double bind of anger - it is as if to express it is to give it life, somehow - it's like a very strange symptom of the superego in that neither avoiding it nor giving in to it offer any respite....