To return to immonde, the term signifies a specific negation of the world, the unworld. The prefix ‘un-’ relates to the ‘world’ similarly as in unbewusst (unconscious) or unendlich (infinite). In all cases ‘un-’ does not simply negate consciousness, finitude and worldliness, but rather pinpoints their unstable character, the fact that finitude, reality and consciousness are from within traversed by a disturbance. Their out-of-joint feature obtains a thingly expression, as Lacan explicitly suggests:
‘there are things that only imbeciles believe to be in the world’, things that corrupt the world’s consistency and through their very presence ‘in the world’ make it appear unworldly. One can only speak of the world in the way cosmology did under the condition that one blends out these problematic things, which literally prevent the world from existing. The opposite of immonde is therefore Weltanschauung (worldview).
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It is not even remotely Kantian. I make that quite clear. If there is a notion of the real, it is extremely complex and in that sense it is not graspable, not graspable in a way that would constitute a whole. It would be an incredibly anticipatory notion to think that the real constitutes a whole. As long as we haven’t verified it, I think we would do better to avoid saying that the real in any way whatsoever forms a whole.
In the Kantian scenario the thing in itself operates as an ontological stabiliser, if one may say so, preventing the absurd scenario in which appearance would not relate to anything outside itself. It is the necessary assumption in order to envision reality as stable, ordered and complete. The thing in itself turns out to be the exact opposite of the ‘extreme complexity’ of the real; it is extremely simple, since it is ultimately nothing but the pure assumption of externality and objectivity. Of course, Kant equally criticised the speculations of cosmology regarding the completeness and totality of the world. His account of cosmological antinomies is a retrospective look at the notion of world from an epistemic paradigm, in which the world no longer stands for an operative epistemic fiction. However, the critical point of Lacan’s self-differentiation from Kant concerns the status of the thing in itself as a regulative border and as an assumption of pure objectivity, which continues to reproduce the ontological thesis of reality’s completeness. It is its presumable withdrawal from reality that is problematic, and Lacan’s main effort in his critique of Kant’s theory of cognition is to point out the existence of things, which are in themselves yet do not match the Kantian divide on phenomena and noumena because they are, precisely, epistemic and economic fabrications, fictions objectified. In distinction to the thing in itself, the existence of ‘lathouses’ does not have to be assumed, since they impose themselves, for instance by causing desire (to link back to the earlier quote, where Lacan links the scientific ‘lathouse’ with object a, the object-cause of desire). The very presence of these hybrid objects – both material and symbolic – demonstratively corrupts the worldliness of the world, again not because they would be withdrawn or absent from the world or unreachable for thinking, but because they are very much thinkable and present. Their very presence demonstrates the ontological incompleteness and instability of the real
It is no coincidence that, after differentiating between the real and thing in itself, Lacan references a forgotten debate between the mathematician Émile Poincaré and the philosopher Émile Boutroux regarding the ontological status of natural laws. A few years ago, Boutroux’s name re-emerged from oblivion in the polemics around Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative realism. It was Boutroux who first authored the idea of the contingency of natural laws, albeit not in Hume’s sense, where natural laws reflect human habit and chance remains external to these laws.28 Contrary to Hume’s scepticism, Boutroux argued that the real follows a law which is neither invariable nor sustained by some kind of intrinsic necessity. In order to sustain his point on the dysfunction and incompleteness of the real, Lacan comments, ‘it is not at all clear to me why the real would not allow for a law that changes’.29 Hence, the real is not simply without law, chaotic or anarchic. It is both organised and unstable. One could say that, in contrast to the cosmological idea of the complete, homeostatic and equilibrated, in short functioning world, post-Newtonian physics and modern biology conceive the real in terms of organised disequilibrium. Or, as Lacan simplifies the point, the real does not work, in other words the mechanistic world picture does not hold. The mechanistic philosophy reinvented the premodern paradigm of worldliness, which was now sustained with ongoing mathematical formalisation rather than with imaginary ‘cosmetics’.30
This brings us back to the second meaning of immonde, the revolting or polluted world, the world populated not only with epistemic objects, but also with those that confront us with the destructive consequences of modern extractivist metaphysics, of the capitalist mode of production and its corresponding mode of enjoyment. Here the surplus-object immediately turns out to be the central objective fiction of modernity. Lacan at some point argued that there was a homology between the economic category of surplus-value and what he called surplus-enjoyment. The latter attempted to translate the German Lustgewinn (yield in pleasure), with which Freud named the libidinal ‘side product’ of mental activities and processes. The homology between both surplus-products, the mental and the social evolves around the fusion of material and symbolic, objectivity and fiction. At the same time it strives to pinpoint a common problematic of psychoanalysis and critique of political economy, the destructive consequences of the emergence of this new type of object in reality.
SAMO TOMŠIČ
The object in question is characterised by the fact that it contains movement. This feature is expressed in the double meaning of the French term plus (surplus), which depending on the context can mean ‘more’ and ‘no more’. The equivocity points out that this specifically modern object, in which lack and surplus are fused, in the same move causes satisfaction and dissatisfaction.31 Its condition of possibility is the symbolic register in the triple guise of linguistic value (language), economic value (social production) and epistemic value (knowledge). Furthermore, its objective status signals that the surplus must not be dismissed as subjective illusion or fantasy, just like the capitalist demand of surplus-value must according to Marx not be viewed as mere ‘individual mania’.32 The surplus is a fiction, which, while dependent on the existence of the human subject, turns against the latter. The subject finds itself in the status of an inner exclusion from the object. One could equally say that the surplus-object is that part of the subject which is detached from the latter, autonomised and endowed with logic and life of its own.
In can be recalled in passing that Lacan proposed three examples of the fusion of the material and symbolic, which are not to be conflated: agalma, Thing and object a. These objective fictions are unambiguously discussed in relation to different historical epochs. Agalma is contextualised in Plato’s dialogue Symposium, and more specifically in Alcibiades’s speech in praise of Socrates. Alcibiades insists that Socrates possesses a distinguished, except that the object now stands for an absolute outside. Coming finally to treasure, which is enclosed in his interior, Socrates’s body being merely an unattractive shell containing this love worthy object. Agalma implies an interior which is separated from exterior. Further, the Thing is exemplified in the context of medieval troubadour lyrics and concerns above all the status of the Lady, who is depicted as a transcendent, unreachable object of the poet’s desire. The only relation with this exteriority is language, notably poetry, by means of which the troubadour expresses his praise to the Lady-Thing and in doing so unites desire, love and enjoyment. Interior and exterior are again sharply object a, Lacan makes clear that this specifically modern surplus-object requires a different topology. Object a is situated at the very border between inside and outside, blurring the distinction between both orders. It is this blurring that introduces the necessary dynamic, which makes the object appear as endowed with growth (hence ‘surplus’ in the sense of ‘more’).
It is equally important that in their theories of surplus-object, Marx and Freud both argue that work is the only way of linking with this surplus: social work when it comes to surplus-value and unconscious work when it comes to surplus-enjoyment.33 But work is also the process, in which the object is lost the moment it is produced (and it is continuously produced): surplus-value joins capital, thus making it grow, while surplus-enjoyment is consumed by the drive, thus inciting its demand for more.
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