The Vagaries of the Superego

Elementa
Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology
and Empirical Perspectives

1
(2021)

1-2

Pierpaolo Limone
Editorial 7

First Section

Slavoj Žižek
The Vagaries of the Superego 13

Ricardo Espinoza Lolas
Nature and Pandemic 33

Paolo Ponzio
Mask and Otherness between Recognition and Concealment: 47
Notes on the Self and the You

Daniela Savino
“Liquid” Identity and Otherness in the Phenomenon 61
of Religious Alienation: The Loss of Critical Thinking
and the “Barter” of the Self in the System of Communion

Francesca R. Recchia Luciani
The Sexistential Vulnerability of Bodies in Contact 85
in the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy

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Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives

Second Section

Martina Rossi
Universal Design for Learning and Inclusive Teaching: 103
Future Perspectives

Marco Ceccarelli
A Historical Account on Italian Mechanism Models 115

Giusi Antonia Toto - Alessia Scarinci
Cyberfeminism: A Relationship between Cyberspace, 135
Technology, and the Internet

Luigi Traetta - Federica Doronzo
Super-Ego after Freud: A Lesson not to Be Forgotten 153

Federica Doronzo - Gianvito Calabrese
Functioning of Declarative Memory: Intersection 163
between Neuropsychology and Mathematics

Giuliana Nardacchione - Guendalina Peconio
Peer Tutoring and Scaffolding Principle for Inclusive Teaching 181

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The Vagaries of the Superego
Slavoj Žižek
Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London (England)

doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.7358/elem-2021-0102-zize
slavoj.zizek@guest.arnes.si

Abstract

Starting from the distinction between “ideal ego”, “ego-ideal” and “superego” structured
from the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real triad made by Lacan, this study investigates how is
possible to distinguish the a-sexual social space from the domain of libidinally-cathexed
interactions. Through the analysis of Balibar’s, Miller’s, Schuster’s and Hägglund’s ideas,
paths and strategies are defined to analyze the existing dynamics between symbolic power,
law and superego. What emerges is the reconstruction of a new subjectivity which is
capable, at the same time, to overcome the jouissance-superego dynamic at the basis of
Lacanian reflection and face the challenges of contemporary post-humanism. Therefore,
what subject stands for is the inhuman core of being-human, what Hegel called self-
relating negativity, what Freud called death drive. The text proposes, in short, how the
Subject is what is in a human being more than human, the immortality of the death-
drive which makes it a living dead, something that insists beyond the cycle of life and
death.

Keywords: ego; jouissance; Lacan; law; superego.

The big question Freud addressed in the aftermath of the Great War was:
how does the a-sexual social space distinguish itself from the domain of
libidinally-cathexed interactions? For Freud, the operator of this a-sex-
ualization is superego. In his superb essay The invention of the superego,
Etienne Balibar (Balibar, 1922) deals with the dialogue between Freud
and Hans Kelsen, the leading Austrian legal philosopher, after the publi-
cation of Freud’s Crowd psychology and the analysis of the ego (1921). One
should mention here also The Ego and the Id (1923) which is Freud’s
reaction to Kelsen’s critique of Crowd psychology. The irony is that the

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title The Ego and the Id is in some sense deceiving: the crucial new term
introduced in the booklet is superego which forms a triad with ego and
Id, and the main point of Freud’s detailed analysis is how superego, the
instance of our psychic life that acts as a self-critical conscience, internal-
izing social standards mostly learned from parents and teachers, draws
its libidinal energy from the darkest sadist and masochist depths of the
Id. However, Lacan has convincingly shown that there is a confusion in
Freud: the title of the third chapter of The Ego and the Id is “The Ego
and the Super-Ego (Ego-Ideal)”, so Freud tends to use these two terms as
synonyms (conceiving the ego-ideal as a forerunner of the superego), plus
he also uses ego-ideal and ideal ego as interchangeable terms. The premise
of Lacan’s clarification is the equation between jouissance and superego:
to enjoy is not a matter of following one’s spontaneous tendencies; it is
rather something we do as a kind of weird and twisted ethical duty. Based
on this equation, Lacan introduces a precise distinction between the three
terms: the “ideal ego” stands for the idealized self-image of the subject
(the way I would like to be, I would like others to see me); the ego-ideal is
the agency whose gaze I try to impress with my ego image, the big Other
who watches over me and propels me to give my best, the ideal I try to
follow and actualize; and the superego is this same agency in its revenge-
ful, sadistic, punishing, aspect. The underlying structuring principle of
these three terms is clearly Lacan’s triad Imaginary-Symbolic-Real: ideal
ego is imaginary, what Lacan calls the “small other”, the idealized double-
image of my ego; ego-Ideal is symbolic, the point of my symbolic iden-
tification, the point in the big Other from which I observe (and judge)
myself; superego is real, the cruel and insatiable agency which bombards
me with impossible demands and which mocks my failed attempts to
meet them, the agency in the eyes of which I am all the more guilty, the
more I try to suppress my “sinful” strivings and meet its demands. The old
cynical Stalinist motto about the accused at the show trials who professed
their innocence (“the more they are innocent, the more they deserve to
be shot”) is superego at its purest. So for Lacan superego “has nothing
to do with moral conscience as far as its most obligatory demands are
concerned” (Lacan, Miller, & Porter, 1992, p. 310): superego is, on the
contrary, the anti-ethical agency, the stigmatization of our ethical betrayal
(Žižek, 2006).

In his critique of Freud’s notion of the crowd, Kelsen as a neo-
Kantian implicitly relies on the distinction between ego-ideal (the anony-
mous big Other, the symbolic order the status of which is non-psychic, i.e.,
which cannot be reduced to empirical psychic processes) and superego (the
product of empirical psychic dynamic in an individual’s interaction with

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others) 1. The reproach to Freud is, to simplify it, that he only provides
the empirical psychic genesis of a crowd held together by a Leader – there
is no space in his theory for the big Other, for the ideal symbolic order
which sustains individual subjects, for the public space of institutional
state authority which makes us subjects in the double meaning of the
term (autonomous subject and an individual subjected to the Law). More
precisely, what Freud describes is the pathological distortion of the Law, is
regression into mythic crowd-psychological level: Freud describes crowd
pathology (constituted through the short-circuit of I and a, in Lacanese),
and since he lacked the notion of the Symbolic, he misses the normal-
normative big Other. (x) That’s also why, from Lacan’s standpoint, there
is no space in Freud’s triad of ego-superego-id for the “pure”/barred
subject ($), subject of the signifier, for the subject which is not psychic-
empirical but equal to the Cartesian cogito or Kant’s transcendental apper-
ception: the Lacanian subject is not ego (which, for Lacan, is defined by
imaginary identifications).

At this point, Balibar returns to Freud and defends him: superego as
a psychic process is not just an accidental pathological distortion, it is the
process which enables the subject to internalize the law, to integrate it into
its psychic life as an agency which exerts an authority over him/her. As such,
superego is a “pathological” supplement which necessarily accompanies the
law, since the public law exists ONLY as internalized by subjects. What
this means is that a subject is the subject of law only insofar as s/he remains
caught in the unresolved Oedipal tensions which are the form of the inter-
personal politics of power and subordination. These persisting tensions
open up the subject to the authority of the Law – they push the subject to
accept authority of the Law as the external (non-psychic) agency, the stable
point of reference which can ease the inner-psychic tensions. The tensions
described by Freud are, of course, not simply internal to the subject but
are part of the interpersonal (family) politics, power struggle – this is why
Balibar points out that, in his description of the formation of a crowd
and the genesis of the superego, Freud doesn’t provide a “psychoanalysis
of politics” (an explanation of the political dynamic of crowds through
libidinal processes which are in themselves apolitical) but rather its oppo-
site, the politics of psychoanalysis (the explanation of the rise of the triadic

1 There is a crucial difference here between Kant and Hegel: for Kant (and Kelsen
as a neo-Kantian) empirical perversions are secondary, while for Hegel they arise from the
immanent tensions of the notion itself – absolute freedom necessarily turns into terror, the
honour of serving the Master who personifies a Cause into hypocritical flattery (as in the
passage from Lenin to Stalin).

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structure of ego-id-superego through the familial “political” power strug-
gles) – or, as Lacan put it, the Freudian Unconscious is political.

But, as Lacan repeatedly points out, the big Other of the symbolic
Law must already be here if a subject is to refer to it as the neutral external
space – so we should make here one step further: how can the public
authority itself, in its non-psychic status, emerge? Lacan’s answer is: the
big Other cannot be reduced to a psychic agency, but it exists only if it is
“externalized” by subjects – the “internalization” of the Law is effectively
its externalization, its (presup)position as a non-psychic symbolic space.
The Law is non-psychic, but it exists only if there are subjects who take
it as existing. One has to be very precise here: Lacan is not providing the
genesis of big Other from psychic dynamics, his thesis is rather that the
subject is constitutively divided in itself, that its psychic intimacy exists only
if there is a big Other, a space alienated from the subject to which it relates.
(Only in psychosis this alienation is suspended.) The subjective correlate of
the big Other is the empty “barred” subject ($) which is more “intimate”
than all the intimacy of even the deepest psychic processes. So we should
turn around the usual notion that the “pure” abstract subject (the Cartesian
cogito) is a kind of ideological illusion whose reality is the actual concrete
individual caught and torn in psychic antagonisms: all the wealth of the
individual’s “inner life” is a content which ultimately just fills in the void of
the pure subject – in this sense, Lacan said that the ego is the “stuff of the I”.

Today, however, fathers behave more and more as ideal-egos, engaged
in narcissistic competition with children – they no longer dare to assume
the “authority” of a father – and, paradoxically, this process poses a serious
obstacle to the emancipatory process. Let’s take the case of Chile: the
difficulties in the ongoing struggle there are not the legacy of Pinochet’s
oppressive dictatorship as such but the legacy of the gradual (fake) opening
of his dictatorial regime: especially through the, 1990s, Chilean society
underwent what we may call a fast post-modernization: an explosion of
consumerist hedonism, superficial sexual permissiveness, competitive
individualism, etc. Those in power realized that such atomized social
space is much more effective than direct state oppression against radical
Leftist projects which rely on social solidarity: classes continue to exist “in
themselves” but not “for themselves”, I see others from my class more as
competitors than as members of a same group with solidary interests.

Direct state oppression tends to unite opposition and promote organ-
ized forms of resistance, while in “postmodern” societies even extreme
dissatisfaction assumes the form of chaotic revolts (from Occupy Wall
Street to Yellow Vests) which soon run out of breath, unable to reach the
“Leninist” stage of an organized force with a clear program.

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At a more general level, this means that, if the symbolic Law (Name-
of-the-Father) loses its authority – i.e., if there is no prohibition –, desire
itself (sustained by the prospect to transgress it) vanishes – this is why
permissiveness kills desire. Along these lines, Pierre Legendre and some
other Lacanians claim that the problem today is the decline of the Name-
of-the-Father, of the paternal symbolic authority: in its absence, patholog-
ical Narcissism explodes, evoking the specter of the primordial Real Father.
Consequently, we should try to restore some kind of Law as the agent of
prohibition.

Although this idea is to be rejected, it correctly points out how the
decline of the Master in no way automatically guarantees emancipation
but can well engender much more oppressive figures of domination. Is,
however, the return to Prohibition sustained by Law the only way out? It
seems that the very last Lacan, aware of this problem, proposed another
solution which Miller, in his reading of Lacan, calls “cynical” – we cannot
return to the authority of the Law, but what we can do is act as if we
sustain the Law, we should maintain its authority as necessary although
we know it is not true. Adrian Johnston (Johnston, n.d.) brought out the
intricacies and ambiguities of this solution:

Passage through a concluding experience of “subjective destitution”, in
which ego-level identifications as well as points of reference such as big
Others and subjects supposed to know vacillate or vanish altogether, indeed
is an essential, punctuating moment of the Lacanian analytic process. Never-
theless, Lacan does not consider it possible or desirable to dwell permanently
in such an analysis-terminating destitute state. He sees it as both appropriate
and inevitable that egos, big Others, subjects supposed to know, and the like
will reconstitute themselves for the analysand in the aftermath of his/her
analysis. Hopefully, the versions of these reconstituted in the wake of and in
response to analysis will be better, more livable versions for the analysand.

What we get here is some kind of “postmodern” Lacan: we can confront the
Real only in rare moments of lucidity, but this extreme experience cannot
last, we have to return to our ordinary life of dwelling in semblances, in
symbolic fictions… So instead of erasing god out of the picture, the only
way is learn to how “‘make use of ’ Dieu comme le Nom-du-Père”. In what
precise sense, then, les non-dupes errent, i.e., those who pretend not to be
duped by the religious illusion err, are in the wrong? Johnston indicates the
way:

Lacan’s paraphrase of Dostoyevsky, according to which “if God is dead, then
nothing is permitted”, seems to convey the sense that permanent radical
atheism is undesirable as per the strict Lacanian definition of desire. De
Kesel claims that, for Lacan, religion enjoys the virtue of sustaining desire. If

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so, does Lacan’s version of analysis really seek to do away with theism, religi-
osity, and the like? […] The libidinal economy of the unconscious, centered
on desire with its fundamental fantasies involving objet petit a, is sustained
by the Law of God as the dead father and/or Name of-the-Father. If this
God dies, then the entire economy He supports collapses (i.e., “nothing
is permitted”). In Télévision, Lacan, speaking of matters Oedipal, remarks,
“Even if the memories of familial suppression weren’t true, they would have
to be invented, and that is certainly done”. Paraphrasing this remark, one
might say that, by Lacan’s lights, if God is dead, then, at least for libidinal
reasons, he would have to be resurrected – and that has certainly been done.
(Johnston, n.d.)

This is also how one can read Agamben’s idea that if there is no god then
reason itself disappears. Does “if god doesn’t exist, then everything is
prohibited” not mean that, in order to avoid the deadlock of everything
being prohibited, there has to be a big Prohibition which calls for excep-
tions, i.e., which opens up the space for transgressions which generate
jouissance? Or that, in order to sustain our desire, we need something
like god (even if it is only in its more neutral irreligious form, as subject
supposed to know)? How to combine this with Lacan’s claim that atheism
is the pinnacle of psychoanalytic experience? Is Lacan’s line that name-of-
the-Father should not be abolished but make use of the only way out?
Jacques-Alain Miller has fearlessly spelt out the political implications of
this stance: psychoanalysis

reveals social ideals in their nature of semblances, and we can add, of sem-
blances with regard to a real which is the real of enjoyment. This is the
cynical position, which resides in saying that enjoyment is the only thing that
is true. (Miller, 2008, p. 109)

What this means is that a psychoanalyst:
acts so that semblances remain at their places while making sure that the
subjects under his care do not take them as real… one should somehow
bring oneself to remain taken in by them (fooled by them). Lacan could say
that “those who are not taken in err”: if one doesn’t act as if semblances are
real, if one doesn’t leave their efficacy undisturbed, things take a turn for the
worse. Those who think that all signs of power are mere semblances and rely
on the arbitrariness of the discourse of the master are the bad boys: they are
even more alienated. (Fleury, 2010, p. 96)

The axiom of this cynical wisdom is that
one should protect the semblances of power for the good reason that one
should be able to continue to enjoy. The point is not to attach oneself to
the semblances of the existing power, but to consider them necessary. “This

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defines a cynicism in the mode of Voltaire who let it be understood that God
is our invention which is necessary to maintain people in a proper deco-
rum”. Society is kept together only by semblances, “which means: there is
no society without repression, without identification, and above all without
routine”. (Fleury, 2010, p. 95)

But is this cynical stance the only way out? It raises a series of questions.
First, what if God, the divine authority, only really functions when the

believer is aware that “God is our invention which is necessary to maintain
people in a proper decorum”? Baudelaire saw this well – he wrote: “God is
the only being who, in order to rule, doesn’t even need to exist” Dieu est le
seul être qui, pour régner, n’ait même pas besoin d’exister (Baudelaire, 1920,
p. 3). If a believer directly “really believes”, we slide into fundamentalism –
every authentic religion is aware that its authority is a fetishist fake: I know
it is not really true, but I believe in it. The opposite of fundamentalism
is the awareness that the authority we refer to has no real fundament but
is self-referentially grounded on an abyss. Let’s take a perhaps surprising
example: the finale of Wagner’s Rhinegold which ends with the contrast
between Rhinemaidens’ bemoaning the lost innocence and the majestic
entrance of the Gods into Valhalla, a powerful assertion of the rule of Law.
It is customary to claim that the sincere and authentic complaint of the
Rhinemaidens makes it clear how the triumphant entrance of the Gods
into Valhalla is a fake, a hollow spectacle; however, what if it is precisely
the saddening background of the Rhinemaidens’ song which gives to the
entry into Valhalla its authentic greatness? Gods know they are doomed,
but nonetheless they heroically perform their ceremonial act. This is why
we are not dealing here with the usual fetishist disavowal but with a cour-
ageous act of taking a risk and ignoring my limitations, along the lines of
Kant’s Du kannst, denn du sollst! – I know I am too weak to do it, but I’ll do
nonetheless do it – a gesture which is the very opposite of cynicism.

Let’s ground this conclusion from another starting point. Authority
has the effect of symbolic castration on its bearer: if, say, I am a king, I have
to accept that the ritual of investiture makes me a king, that my authority
is embodied in the insignia I wear, so that my authority is in some sense
external to me as a person in my miserable reality. As Lacan put it, only
a psychotic is a king who thinks he is as king (or a father who is a father)
by his nature, as he is, without the processes of symbolic investiture. This
is why being-a-father is by definition a failure: no “empirical” father can
live up to his symbolic function, to his title. How can I, if I am invested
with such an authority, live with this gap without obfuscating it through
psychotic direct identification of my symbolic status with my reality?
Miller’s solution is cynical distance: I am aware that symbolic titles are just

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semblances, illusion, but I act AS IF they are true in order not to disturb
not only the social order but also my own ability to desire. Aaron Schuster
adds three modes to deal with the impossibility of acting with authority (it
is because of this impossibility that Freud counted exercise of power as one
of the three impossible professions): “to pretend as if there were no Other;
to make oneself the mouthpiece of the Other; to identify the Other with
one’s charismatic persona” (Schuster, 2016, p. 191). The example of the
first option is that of a postmodern friendly boss who acts as if he is one
of us, part of the team, ready to share dirty jokes with us, joining us in a
drink, etc. – but while doing this, he retains his full symbolic authority and
can treat us in an even more ruthless way. The second option is personified
in the figure of an expert, a medium through which the authority of the
impersonal science (or law) speaks; such a figure avoids the position of
authority by pretending that he is not giving orders, just say what science
tells it has to be done (like an economist who claims market mechanisms
should not be disturbed). The third option is exemplified by an obscene
charismatic leader like Donald Trump who takes himself, with all his
personal quirks, as a direct embodiment of the big Other – his authority is
not based on his knowledge but on his will: “It is so because I say so”. At
this point, Schuster makes a crucial observation:

The leader of competence and calculation, disappearing behind and speak-
ing in the name of the big Other, finds its uncanny counterpart in the over-
present leader whose authority is based on his own will and who openly
disdains knowledge – it is this rebellious, antisystemic theater that serves as
the point of identification for the people. (Schuster, 2016, p. 234)

The obscene charismatic leader is thus the “return of the repressed” of the
expert knowledge which pretends to act without support in a figure of the
master: the repressed Master (authority which personifies the Law) returns
in its (almost, not quite) psychotic form, as a lawless obscene Master. The
Master is here “overpresent”: he is not reduced to his symbolic dignity, he
stands for authority with all his idiosyncrasies.

So is there a way out of this deadlock? The obvious one would have
been for the bearer of authority to admit openly to those subjected to him
that he is not qualified to exert authority and to simply step down, leaving
his subjects to confront reality as they can – Schuster quotes Hannah
Arendt who outlines this gesture apropos parental authority:

Modern man could find no clearer expression for his dissatisfaction with the
world, for his disgust with things as they are, than by his refusal to assume,
in respect to his children, responsibility for all this. It is as though parents
daily said: ‘In this world even we are not very securely at home; how to move

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about in it, what to know, what skills to master, are mysteries to us too. You
must try to make out as best you can; in any case you are not entitled to call
us to account. We are innocent, we wash our hands of you. (Arendt, 1961,
p. 191)

Although this imagined answer of the parents is factually more or less true,
it is nonetheless existentially false: a parent cannot wash his/her hands in
this way. (The same goes for saying: “I have no free will, my decisions are
the product of my brain signals, so I wash my hands, I have no responsi-
bility for crimes that I committed!” Even if this is factually true, it is false
as my subjective stance.) This means that

the ethical lesson is that the parents should pretend (to know what to do and
how the world works), for there is no way out of the problem of authority
other than to assume it, in its very fictionality, with all the difficulties and
discontents this entails. (Schuster, 2016, 219)

But, again, how does this differ from Miller’s cynical solution? Paradoxi-
cally, it is that that the subject, although fully aware of his/her incom-
petence to exert authority, assumes it not with a cynical distance but
with fully sincerity, ready even to sacrifice his/her life for it if needed. To
grasp this difference, one should also bring into view libidinal economy,
different modes of jouissance. Politics does not happen primarily at the
level of semblances and identifications (imaginary and symbolic), it always
involves also the real of jouissance. Political semblances and identifications
are profoundly impregnated by different modes of jouissance – can one
even imagine a racism or anti-feminism which does not mobilize jouis-
sance (jouissance attributed to other race or women, jouissance I find in
attacking and humiliating them…). That’s why, in his detailed analysis of
the Petainist discourse in the Vichy France, Gerard Miller (Miller, 2004)
speaks of Petain’s “pushes-to-enjoy (even pushes-to-come)” – and, in a
homologous way, can one even hope to understand Trump without taking
into account his “pushes-to-enjoy”?

The same goes also for societies with emancipatory goals. Let’s take
Lacan’s own psychoanalytic society (which he dissolved, thereby admitting
it was a failure): was it also a society “kept together only by semblances”? Is
the only step out of the domain of semblances only the individual moment
of “traversing the fantasy” in the analytic process? It certainly wasn’t meant
to be this: was Lacan’s attempt to organize a society not a “Leninist” attempt
to constitute a society which is NOT kept together “only by semblances”
but by the Real of a Cause. (This is why, after dissolving his school, Lacan
formed a new one called École de la Cause freudienne – a school of the
Cause itself – which, it is true, failed again.)

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Does it help to introduce some order in this confusion if we turn
Lacan’s anti-Dostoyevsky formula around: if god DOES exist then
NOTHING is prohibited? It is clear that this holds only for so-called
“fundamentalists” who can do anything they want since they act as direct
instruments of god, of his will. We can see how PC rigorism and religious
fundamentalism are two sides of the same coin: in both cases, there is no
exception – either nothing is prohibited or everything is prohibited… To
bring some clarity into this picture, we should perhaps bring into the play
Lacan’s so-called formulas of sexuation. The two couples of universality
grounded in exception and non-universality (“non-all”) which implies
there is no exception.

So what is the status of the postmodern permissiveness in which
everything turns out to be prohibited by infinite PC regulations? Are they
masculine (everything is permitted except…) or feminine (there is nothing
which is not prohibited)? It looks that the second version is the right one: in
a permissive society, violations of the regulations (which allegedly guarantee
sexual permissiveness) are themselves really prohibited and not secretly
tolerated. This means that we should transpose Lacan’s claim into feminine
form: if god doesn’t exist then there is nothing which is not prohibited,
which means that not-all is prohibited, and this not-all exists in the guise
of a universal a permissiveness: in principle, everything is permitted (all
different form of sexuality), but every particular case is prohibited. Recall
the proverbial figure of a permissive husband who, in principle, allows his
wife to have lovers, but is opposed to every particular choice (“why did you
have to choose precisely THIS appalling guy? Anyone BUT him…”), or, at
a political level, Chapter 15 of the Khmer Rouge constitution of Kampu-
chea: “Every citizen of Kampuchea has the right to worship according
to any religion and the right not to worship according to any religion. /
Reactionary religions which are detrimental to Democratic Kampuchea
and Kampuchean people are absolutely forbidden” (Documentation
Center of Cambodia, DC-Cam). So, again, any religion is permitted but
every particular existing religion (Buddhism, Christianity…) is “absolutely
forbidden” as reactionary.

How, then, do things stand with today’s pandemic regulations?
Do they also solicit transgressions (private rave and parties, even violent
outbursts)? But they are not the Law, they are scientifically-grounded
regulations, they belong to the university discourse. Scientists and health
administrators gladly explain why they are demanded, they don’t function
as the abyssal law, as regulations which should not be questioned. Is thus
the hedonism of jouissance the other side of the reign of the university
discourse? But what if those who resist pandemic prohibitions and regula-

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tions are confusing scientifically-grounded regulations with ungrounded
arbitrary prohibitions (which solicit transgression)? Of course, one should
add: but what if this confusion is already present in the thing itself? Is the
“truth” of the university discourse not a Master, or, as we say today, is the
(not even so) secret agenda of those who impose anti-pandemic prohibi-
tions not to assert social control and domination?

To complicate things further, we should introduce here two other
axes. First: permitted versus enjoined (ordered). Lacan’s argument was that
enjoyment, once permitted, sooner or later inevitably turns into injunc-
tion – you HAVE to enjoy, hedonism is superego at its most cruel. This
is the truth of today’s permissiveness: we feel guilty not when we violate
prohibitions but when we cannot enjoy. That’s why psychoanalysis aims
not to enable the patient to fully enjoy but to limit the power of the
superego, to turn enjoyment from enjoined to permitted (you can enjoy
but you are not obliged to).

The other axis is the one of possibility and impossibility. Prohibition
is, as Lacan repeatedly claimed, here precisely to create the illusion that
enjoyment is not in itself impossible, that we can reach it through violating
the prohibition. The goal of psychoanalysis is precisely to make the move
from prohibition to immanent impossibility. So a prohibition primarily
prohibits something that is in itself impossible… But is this not going too
far? When a poor starving man is prohibited to grab a piece of food which
is not his, does this prohibition not prohibit something that is in itself
quite possible? In other words, is an elementary operation of ideology also
not to present as in itself impossible something that is prohibited because
of economic class interests and the interests of domination? (No universal
healthcare because it is impossible, it would ruin economy…)

Further paradoxes arise here. There are prohibitions one is not only
permitted to violate but obliged to violate, so that the true transgression is
to stick strictly to the rule of prohibition. (This is what I called inherent
transgression: if you do not participate in the secret transgressive rituals of
a closed community, you are excluded faster than if you violate its explicit
rules.) And then there are prohibitions that are themselves prohibited (one
obeys them, but one cannot announce them publicly). The big Other of
appearances enters here: you obey a prohibition, but you publicly act as
if this means nothing, as if it is just a chance that you don’t do that, as if,
if you wanted, you could easily do it; plus the obverse, you can violate a
prohibition, just not publicly, in an open way. (Trump and today’s New
Right populists break this rule: they violate prohibitions openly, in public.)

A further complication: what if we enjoy oppression itself, not just
its violation? Is this not the elementary form of surplus-enjoyment? For

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example, with regard to the pandemic, Darian Leader pointed out how
obeying the rules imposed by the authorities because of the pandemic can
bring its own compulsive satisfaction. Similarly, the Politically Correct
enjoyment arises through the very process of discovering how we unknow-
ingly violated the PC rules (“now I discovered that the phrase I used has a
racist dimension…”).

The worst solution here is to oppose necessary repression (renounci-
ating the satisfaction of some of our desires as the condition of our survival)
and surplus-repression done on behalf of exploitation and domination,
as Herbert Marcuse did (Marcuse, 1974) – for conceptual reasons, this
distinction cannot be drawn. First, domination and exploitation are as a
rule operative in the very way the renounciations necessary for our survival
are libidinally cathexed. Second (and in an apparent contradiction to the
first point), it is the surplus-oppression (the prohibition for which there is
no apparent reason) which generates surplus-enjoyment – as Lacan says,
enjoyment is something that serves nothing… Third, one should draw
another distinction here: between oppression and repression. Oppression
(brutal exercise of power) is not repression: oppression is directly experi-
enced as such, but we are not aware of repression (in the Freudian sense).
When I am oppressed, what is often repressed is the way I enjoy this
oppression (with all that it involves: my complaints, etc.).

So what we get here are not just the two axes of a semiotic square:
(impossible-possible, prohibited-permitted) but a complex texture which
includes the axis of permitted-enjoined and even a triangle of oppression-
repression-depression. Miller simplifies the image here: he claims that oppres-
sion is necessary, by which he means that there is no enjoyment without
oppression (obstacles, prohibitions to our desires). The opposite of oppres-
sion is not freedom to do what one wants but depression, the loss of desire
itself. But is oppression the only way to save our desire, the only way to avoid
depression? The question we should raise at this point is: where is repression
here? Lacan strictly opposes the traditional Freudo-Marxist thesis that repres-
sion is the internalization into the victim’s psyche of the external oppres-
sion (I misperceive social oppression as a psychic force that sabotages my
desires) – repression comes first (in the guise of what Freud called “primor-
dial repression”), it designates an immanent impossibility that is constitutive
of human subjectivity. This “primordial repression” is the other face of what
we call “freedom”: it opens up the void, a crack in the chain of natural causes,
which makes us free. The figure of an external symbolic Law as the agent of
Prohibition already obfuscates this immanent impossibility of desire.

That’s why psychoanalysis does not aim at liberating our desires so
that we can freely desire what we want (what we want is not what we

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desire: our innermost desire as a rule appears to us as what we don’t want,
what terrifies us) – more precisely, it liberates our desires only in the precise
sense that we fully assume the impossibility on which our desiring capacity
is grounded. Psychoanalysis endeavours to mark out in a new way this
impossibility – it’s premise is that we cannot get rid of a constitutive impos-
sibility, but we can re-inscribe it in a different way. An elementary example:
the imaginary number (square root of -1). It is an impossible number, but
while it was traditionally dismissed as simple nonsense (even Marx did it in
one of his manuscripts), modern mathematics uses it in its calculations and
it work – the statics of real buildings are constructed based on calculations
which include the imaginary number. At a different level, modern democ-
racy did something similar: what was for a premodern political order the
moment of threat to be passed over as quickly as possible (when, after the
monarch’s death, the throne is empty), becomes in modern democracy a
positive feature (as Claude Lefort demonstrated it): no one can legitimately
make a direct claim to power, the place of power is in principle empty, it
can only be temporarily occupied by democratically elected persons.

And is this also not the lesson of psychoanalysis: there is no “true”
object of desire, every object is a place-holder of Nothing? This is why
one should resolutely reject the idea that the goal of the psychoanalytic
treatment is to enable the patient to move from internal psychic conflicts
(between his conscious ego and unconscious desires and prohibitions) to
external obstacles to his happiness which s/he can now approach without
self-sabotaging inner conflicts. This idea was not foreign to Freud: already
in his early Studies on hysteria (1895, co-written with Breuer), Freud wrote,
addressing an imagined reader/patient, that “much will be gained if we
succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappi-
ness. With a mental life that has been restored to health, you will be better
armed against that unhappiness” (Freud & Breuer, 1999, p. 305). Later,
however, the new topics of death drive and the so-called “negative thera-
peutic reaction” – clearly point towards an immanent conflict constitutive
of our psychic life.

The move accomplished by psychoanalysis is thus a Hegelian one:
from external opposition to immanent impossibility, and this holds also
for the vision of a Communist society: there is no freedom without impos-
sibility, and this impossibility not just the limit imposed on us by external
reality (the limited amount of objects that satisfy our needs) but also the
immanent “self-contradiction” of our desire. There is, however, another
trap that lurks here: to confuse this impossibility with our finitude, so
that the impossibility that grounds our freedom is the fact of our mortal
life full of risks and non-transparencies – there is no freedom in immor-

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tality. Exemplary is here Martin Hägglund who, through new readings
of Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and Martin Luther King, deploys a coherent
global vision which brings together materialism, existential finitude, and
anti-capitalism (Hägglund, 2019). His starting point is the rejection of the
religious ideal of eternity: the only life we have is THIS life, our social and
bodily existence which is irreducibly marked by mortality and incertitude.
Every faith in another world or a higher being that guarantees our fate is
an illusion, so faith has to be reconceived in secular terms: it expresses our
practical commitment which, due to our finitude, exposes us to contin-
gency and always involves a risk of failure. However, precisely because we
are finite beings who have to decide without any higher guarantee, we are
free: freedom and mortality are the two sides of the same coin.

In the second part of his book, Hägglund turns to the socio-economic
and political implications of his focus on “this world” of our finite temporal
existence. Since, as finite mortal beings, we don’t have an infinite time at
our disposal (and since our eventual immortality would also make our life
meaningless: choosing a life project that determines our engagement can
only occur in a finite lifetime), our central preoccupation is to own our
time, getting as much of it as possible disposable for the free development
of our creative capacities in all their diversity. This, however, by definition
cannot happen in capitalism where, in order to survive, we have to spend
most of our time working for a wage, “losing time” for things we intrinsi-
cally don’t care about. If we want to overcome this alienation, we should
enact a new revaluation of our values, replacing the money-form of value
with the value of the free time at our disposal. The only way to do this is
to replace capitalist form of life with a post-capitalist democratic socialism
where private ownership of the means of production as well as the alienated
state apparatuses regulating our lives will disappear; in this way, we will no
longer be competing with each other for the possession of money-value
but spontaneously working for the common Good – the very antagonism
between the common Good any my personal interests will disappear.

Hägglund doesn’t go into the specifics of how to realize this radical
social change, and many critics of his work see in this vagueness the main
failure of his book. One can also speculate that it is precisely this vagueness
which made This life susceptible to being praised not only in academic
circles but also by the big media. The topic of disalienation, of people
directly exerting their power, is a feature that, in spite of their radical differ-
ences, unites Hägglund and Trump.

But what I find much more problematic is that, to put it in a
brutally simplified way, there is simply no place for Freud in Hägglund’s
universe. How can he claim that, in a post-capitalist society, people

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would spontaneously tend to work for the common Good – why?
Where is the envy constitutive of human desire? Where are all the basic
“perversions” of human desire described by Freud and concentrated in
his notion of death-drive? It is his humanist trust that all the horrors
humans are capable of – all the self-sabotaging, all the complex forms of
search for unhappiness, of pleasure in pain and in humiliation, etc. – can
be reduced to the effect of a specific alienated social form, that makes
Hägglund’s book so attractive for broad public. What I try to develop is a
vision of Communism compatible with all these horrors, with the “alien-
ation” implied by the very fact of language, with all the reflexive twists of
human desire (how the repression of desire necessarily turns into a desire
for repression, etc.) (Kevin Bacon said: “I’ve been told I’m more well
known for being well known than for anything I’ve acted in’”) – this is
the reflexivity of language or, in Hegelese, the way, in a language, a genus
can be one of its own species: being-well-known-for-something has many
species, and one of them is being-well-known-for-being-well-known.
The same holds not only for Kim Kardashian but also, in a more specific
way, for love: you can well [and you always do] love somebody for love
itself, not just for reasons to love (her/him/it.) This reflexivity is Hegel’s
name for actual infinity (as opposed to the spurious infinity of a series
without end), and, since this reflexivity is constitutive of the Freudian
death-drive, we encounter here – from my Freudo-Lacanian standpoint,
at least – a fateful limitation of Hägglund’s insistence on radical finitude
of the human condition.

The axiom of the philosophy of finitude is that one cannot escape
finitude/mortality as the unsurpassable horizon of our existence; Lacan’s
axiom is that, no matter how much one tries, one cannot escape immor-
tality. But what if this choice is false – what if finitude and immortality,
like lack and excess, also form a parallax couple, what if they are the same
from a different point of view? What if immortality is an object that is a
remainder/excess over finitude, what if finitude is an attempt to escape
from the excess of immortality? What if Kierkegaard was right here, but
for the wrong reason, when he also understood the claim that we, humans,
are just mortal beings who disappear after their biological death as an easy
way to escape the ethical responsibility that comes with the immortal soul?
He was right for the wrong reason insofar as he equated immortality with
the divine and ethical part of a human being – but there is another immor-
tality. What Cantor did for infinity, we should do for immortality, and
assert the multiplicity of immortalities: the Badiouian noble immortality/
infinity of the deployment of an Event (as opposed to the finitude of a
human animal) comes after a more basic form of immortality which resides

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in what Lacan calls the Sadean fundamental fantasy: the fantasy of another,
ethereal body of the victim, which can be tortured indefinitely and none-
theless magically retains its beauty (recall the Sadean figure of the young
girl sustaining endless humiliations and mutilations from her depraved
torturer and somehow mysteriously surviving it all intact, in the same
way Tom and Jerry and other cartoon heroes survive all their ridiculous
ordeals intact). In this form, the comical and the disgustingly-terrifying
(recall different versions of the “undead” – zombies, vampires, etc. – in
popular culture) are inextricably connected. The same immortality under-
lies the intuition of something indestructible in a truly radical Evil. This
blind indestructible insistence of the libido is what Freud called “death
drive”, and one should bear in mind that “death drive” is, paradoxically,
the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears
within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an ‘undead’ urge
which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation
and corruption. Freud equates the death drive with the so-called “compul-
sion-to-repeat”, an uncanny urge to repeat painful past experiences which
seems to outgrow the natural limitations of the organism affected by it and
to insist even beyond the organism’s death.

Matthew Flisfeder noted two features that clearly distinguish the
“theoretical anti-humanism” of the, 1960s from today’s post-humanism:

Whereas the anti-humanists of the, 1960s proclaimed the death of the sub-
ject, today we encounter a far more unnerving death of the human. While
the anti-humanists sought merely to deconstruct the subject within dis-
course, the Posthumanists today are far more ambitious in realizing a return
to matter and objectivity that they claim has been displaced by the verticality
of humanity. (Flisfeder, n.d.)

So in the, 1960s, with Foucault and Althusser, the notion of subject (our
self-perception as subjects) was “deconstructed” as a historically-specific
discursive formation (although, for Althusser, it was more a universal ideo-
logical misrecognition); plus the ultimate horizon of this deconstruction was
discourse, i.e., discourse was posited as a kind of transcendental a priori, as
that which is always-already here in our dealings with reality. Today’s post-
humanism, on the contrary, doesn’t deal with the “death of the subject” but
with the “death” of humans, it asserts the falsity of our self-perception of
humans as free responsible beings, demonstrating that this self-perception
is based not on some ignored discursive mechanisms but on our ignoring of
what we really are – the “blind” neuronal processes that go on in our brain.
In contrast to the anti-humanism of the, 1960s, today’s posthumanism
relies on direct materialist reductionism: our sense of freedom and personal

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dignity is a “user’s illusion”, we are really just a complex network of bodily
processes in their interaction with environment…

An ironic consequence of this shift from anti-humanism to post-
humanism is that the remaining anti-humanists or their followers (like
Miller), when confronted with the posthumanist challenge of full naturali-
zation of human beings, all of a sudden start to talk (almost) like human-
ists, emphasizing the uniqueness of human self-experience (“decentered”
as it is), and the impossibility to fully reduce it to “objective” neuronal
processes. A further difference is that, while discursive deconstruction
doesn’t directly affect our everyday life (where we continue to experience
ourselves as free responsible agents), posthumanism promises (and to some
extent already achieves) interventions into our reality which will radically
change our self-perception: when we are submitted to total digital control
and our brains will be directly wired, when our DNA can be modified,
when pills can change our behaviour and affections, this basically affects
the way we experience ourselves and act.

My only difference with Flisfeder is that, based on these insights, he
argues for a new universal humanism that could ground the global eman-
cipatory struggle needed today. His argumentation is ultimately a new
version of transcendental reflection: when I as a neuroscientist argue that
I am just a set of neuronal and biological processes, I always do this in
the form of rational argumentation, trying to convince others, as a part of
scientific community – the space of this community where I address others
(and act as) a free rational being convinced by reasons is always-already
here, operative in my activity, not as an abstract Cartesian cogito but as a
human collective… So, to simplify the image a little bit, while Flisfeder is
ready to sacrifice subject but not humanity, not the basic dimensions of our
being-human, I am tempted to do the exact opposite: I am ready to sacri-
fice (what we perceived till now as) the basic features of our being-human
but not subject. “Humanity” is a notion at the same level as personality,
the “inner wealth” of our soul, etc. – it is ultimately a phenomenal form, a
mask, which fills in the void that “is” subject. What subject stands for is the
inhuman core of being-human, what Hegel called self-relating negativity,
what Freud called death drive. So in the same way that Kant distinguished
the subject of transcendental apperception from a person’s soul and its
wealth, in the same way Freud and Lacan distinguish the subject of the
unconscious from the Jungian personality full of deep passions, we should
in our unique predicament stick to the inhuman core of subjectivity against
the temptations of being-human. Subject is what is in a human being more
than human, the immortality of the death-drive which makes it a living
dead, something that insists beyond the cycle of life and death.

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References

Arendt, H. (1961). Crisis in education. In Between past and future (pp. 170-193)
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G. Cres et Cie.

Flisfeder, M. (Manuscript). Renewing humanism against the anthropocene: Towards
a theory of the hysterical sublime.

Floury, N. (2010). Le réel insensé. Introduction à la pensée de Jacques-Alain Miller.
Éditions Germina.

Freud, S., & Breuer, J. (1999). Studies in hysteria. In The standard edition of the
complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. II. Vintage Press.

Hägglund, M. (2019). This life: Why mortality makes us free. Profile Books.
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Christian atheism. Non-accredited quotes that follow are from this text.
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The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960. Routledge.
Marcuse, H. (1974). Eros and civilization. Beacon Press.
Miller, G. (2004). Les pousse-au-jouir du maréchal Pétain. Points.
Miller, J. A. (2008). La psychanalyse, la cité, les communautés. La Cause Freu-

dienne, 68, 105-119.
Schuster, A. (2016). The trouble with pleasure: Deleuze and psychoanalysis. MIT

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Riassunto

Partendo dalla distinzione fatta da Lacan tra “io ideale”, “ego-ideale” e “super-io”,
strutturata dalla triade Immaginario-Simbolico-Reale, questo studio indaga come sia
possibile distinguere lo spazio sociale a-sessuale dal dominio delle interazioni libidiche-
cattive. Attraverso l’analisi delle idee di Balibar, Miller, Schuster e Hägglund, vengono
definiti percorsi e strategie per analizzare le dinamiche esistenti tra potere simbolico,
legge e super-io. Ciò che emerge è la ricostruzione di una nuova soggettività capace, al-
lo stesso tempo, di superare la dinamica godimento-super-io alla base della riflessione

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lacaniana e affrontare le sfide del post-umanesimo contemporaneo. Pertanto, ciò che il
soggetto rappresenta è il nucleo inumano dell’essere-umano, ciò che Hegel chiamava ne-
gatività auto-relazionale, e ciò che Freud chiamava pulsione di morte. Il testo propone,
in breve, come il Soggetto è ciò che è in un essere umano più che umano, l’immortalità
della pulsione di morte che lo rende un morto vivente, qualcosa che insiste oltre il ciclo di
vita e morte.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How to cite this paper:
Žižek, S. (2021). The vagaries of the superego. Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy,
Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives, 1(1-2), 13-31. doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.7358/
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Elementa_1-2021-1-2_00b_Sommario.pdf
Editorial
Pierpaolo Limone

First Section
The Vagaries of the Superego
Slavoj Žižek
Nature and Pandemic

Ricardo Espinoza Lolas
Mask and Otherness
between Recognition and Concealment: Notes on the Self and the You

Paolo Ponzio
“Liquid” Identity and Otherness
in the Phenomenon of Religious
Alienation: The Loss of Critical
Thinking and the “Barter” of the Self in the System of Communion

Daniela Savino
The Sexistential Vulnerability of Bodies in Contact in the Philosophy
of Jean-Luc Nancy

Francesca R. Recchia Luciani

Second Section
Universal Design for Learning
and Inclusive Teaching: Future
Perspectives
Martina Rossi
A Historical Account on Italian
Mechanism Models

Marco Ceccarelli
Cyberfeminism: A Relationship
between Cyberspace, Technology,
and the Internet

Giusi Antonia Toto 1 - Alessia Scarinci 2
Super-Ego after Freud: A Lesson
not to Be Forgotten

Luigi Traetta 1 - Federica Doronzo 2
Functioning of Declarative Memory: Intersection between Neuropsychology and Mathematics

Federica Doronzo 1 - Gianvito Calabrese 2
Peer Tutoring and Scaffolding
Principle for Inclusive Teaching

Giuliana Nardacchione - Guendalina Peconio