In the spirit of Lacan, a brief return to Freud promises to be productive at this point. Hägglund himself zeros in on one of Freud’s texts of the greatest degree of topicality in this context: the short 1916 piece “On Transience.” Therein, Freud succinctly addresses issues and themes at the very heart of Hägglund’s undertakings (both in Radical Atheism as well as the article “Chronolibidinal Reading: Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis”). Without exhaustively summarizing the various details contained in this three-page Freudian text, suffice it to say for now that the discoverer of the uncon- scious, himself burdened by a persistent, obsessive concern over his own mortality,26 here confronts (through two other people as interlocutors) the
fleeting, transitory nature of all things, the condemnation of each and ev- ery being, without exception, to the cycles of generation and corruption, growth and decay. In response to this undeniable fact, Freud resists fall- ing into a depressive refusal to engage with the world under the shadow of this world’s transience. Disputing a contention voiced by one of his walking companions, a poet, that transience, like an inverse Midas touch, lessens the value of everything it envelops, Freud retorts in quasi-economic terms, “On the contrary, an increase! Transience value is scarcity value in time. Limita- tion in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment.”27
Basing himself on this statement by Freud, which he takes to support his radical atheist theory of desire, Hägglund concludes that, “Indeed, temporal
26. Adrian Johnston, “Intimations of Freudian Mortality: The Enigma of Sexuality and the Constitutive Blind Spots of Freud’s Self-Analysis,” Journal for Lacanian Studies 3 (2005) 224–26, 243–45.
finitude—far from being a privation—is the reason why anything is desir- able in the first place.”28 Or, as he puts it in Radical Atheism, in which he
calls for a temporalized conception of enjoyment,29 “temporal finitude is the
condition for everything that is desirable.”30
Already, there are several problems plaguing the conclusions Häg- glund draws from this 1916 essay by Freud. To begin with, Freud doesn’t maintain that transience (i.e., temporal finitude) is the ultimate underlying reason or source (in Hägglund’s parlance, the ultra-transcendental condi- tion) for the desirability of anything and everything. Rather, he merely ob- serves that scarcity in/of time need not, as is the case for his friend the poet in particular, be bemoaned as a wretched stain indelibly tainting objects and experiences that, in the absence of ubiquitous transience, supposedly would be worthy of committed love and enthralled esteem (or, so this melancholic writer imagines). Freud responds to this poetic pessimism in a very analytic manner, inquiring whether it’s obvious and self-explanatory that one neces- sarily must construe scant time, with its constraining parameters, as poison- ing and devaluing all that one might otherwise invest with one’s desires. He proposes, to himself, his interlocutors, and his readers, that another attitude toward temporal limits is possible. This is a (self-)analyzed analyst offering those with ears to hear an alternate interpretation, one that opens up the affirmative potential for embracing a superabundant reality full to overflow- ing with finite things, rather than defensively retreating from this fluctuat- ing existence into a rigid, lifeless pseudo-safety toiling in vain to fend off feeling losses (i.e., neurotically attempting to lose feelings of attachment to temporally finite beings so as to avoid inevitable feelings of loss).31 Hence,
Freud is prescribing another way of positioning oneself vis-à-vis transience, and not describing how transience is an ultra-transcendental condition for each and every instance of desiring something (with this being Hägglund’s earlier-mentioned misapplication of the description-versus-prescription distinction). Along these lines, Freud, in “On Transience,” doesn’t claim that temporal “scarcity” (i.e., finitude) creates desirable values. Instead, he merely maintains that such scarcity/finitude can become a supplement augmenting or enhancing (i.e., increasing, rather than decreasing) what is already enjoy- able in things happening to be transient. All things are temporally finite, including all things desired. This temporal finitude either can decrease or increase the ability to desire one’s desire, to enjoy one’s enjoyment, of these
28. Hägglund, “Chronolibidinal Reading.” 29. Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 157. 30. Ibid., 32.
transient things. But, neither of these two premises leads to and licenses the conclusion that temporality and the fleeting, ephemeral fragility it brings with it are the ultimate causal origins of desirability tout court.
To the extent that Hägglund brings Freudian psychoanalysis into the picture of his Derrida-inspired radically atheist theory of desire, additional problems multiply once one turns to the bundle of roughly contemporane- ous texts with which 1916’s “On Transience” is inextricably intertwined: “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), the 1915 papers on metapsychology (“Drives and Their Vicissitudes,” “Repression,” and “The Unconscious”), “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915), and “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917). To reduce several very long narratives to one very short story—obviously, there can be no attempt here at an exhaustive en- gagement with this dense cluster of immensely rich slices of the Freudian corpus—these writings, spanning a critical four-year period of Freud’s intel- lectual itinerary, all present ideas cutting against the grain of the Derridean- Hägglundian account of desire. In particular, these essays by Freud contain assertions that, on the one hand, point to deeply engrained patterns of af- fectively motivated cognition in the psychical apparatus obeying neither classical nor deconstructive logic, and, on the other related hand, cast into doubt whether the unconscious, with its fundamental fantasies, ever was, is, and/or will be radically atheist. Freud’s psychoanalytic metapsychology outlines a psyche whose ways and means of thinking, including the think- ing (or, alternately, constitutive inability to think) time, must appear to be quite irrational and unreasonable, in a resistant and refractory manner, to a radical atheist equipped with his/her arguments, objections, proofs, and so on (in line with Lacan’s warnings against practicing analysis as a knee- jerk hermeneutics of suspicion always on the lookout for intricate, complex hidden meanings of profound significance—he indicates that the truth is sometimes superficially “stupid”32—one could say that the unconscious is
simultaneously both surprisingly clever as well as unbelievably stupid when measured against the standards of conscious thinking). Will this analytic unconscious listen to these proselytizing efforts at atheistic persuasion? Can conversion take place in this case?
During the conversation in which condemnation to never-enough time is under discussion, neither of Freud’s companions are convinced by
32. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XV: L’acte psychanalytique,
1967–1968, unpublished typescript, 11, 22, 67; Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XVI: D’un Autre à l’autre, 1968–1969, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Édi-
tions du Seuil, 2006) 41; Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XXIII: Le
his rationalizations to the effect that temporal finitude adds to, instead of detracts from, the desire-worthiness of transient beings. Freud notes:
These considerations appeared to me to be incontestable; but I noticed that I had made no impression either upon the poet or upon my friend. My failure led me to infer that some pow- erfulemotional factor was at work which was disturbing their judgment, and I believed later that I had discovered what it was. What spoilt their enjoyment of beauty must have been a revolt in their minds against mourning. The idea that all this beauty was transient was giving these two sensitive minds a foretaste of mourning over its decease; and, since the mind instinctively recoils from anything that is painful, they felt their enjoyment of beauty interfered with by thoughts of its transience.33
He continues:
Mourning over the loss of something that we have loved or admired seems so natural to the layman that he regards it as self-evident. But to psychologists mourning is a great riddle, one of those phenomena which cannot themselves be explained but to which other obscurities can be traced back. We possess, as it seems, a certain amount of capacity for love—what we call libido—which in the earliest stages of development is directed towards our own ego. Later, though still at a very early time, this libido is diverted from the ego on to objects, which are thus in a sense taken into our ego. If the objects are destroyed or if they are lost to us, our capacity for love (our libido) is once more liberated; and it can then either take other objects instead or can temporarily return to the ego. But why it is that this detachment of libido from its objects should be such a painful process is a mystery to us and we have not hitherto been able to frame any hypothesis to account for it. We only see that libido clings to its objects and will not renounce those that are lost even when a substitute lies ready to hand. Such then is mourning.34
If the desires of Freud’s companions are grounded upon temporal finitude as an ultra-transcendental condition, they certainly aren’t willing and able to acknowledge this and make it their own. Additionally, one can see in these passages connections lead back to 1914’s “On Narcissism” and forward to 1917’s “Mourning and Melancholia.” In the former essay, Freud distinguishes between “narcissistic ego-libido” (i.e., libidinal cathexes of
33. Freud, “On Transience,” 306. 34. Ibid., 306–7.
one’s own ego as a love-object) and “anaclitic object-libido” (i.e., libidinal cathexes of another as a love-object). In certain instances, ego-libido resists being converted into object-libido (in terms of the Freudian economics of psychical-libidinal energy, a zero-sum relation obtains between the narcis- sistic and the anaclitic).35 Freud proceeds to speculate that a general resis-
tance to other-oriented sexuality might exist, specifically insofar as sexual reproduction confronts the ego with something injurious to its own sense of itself: its status as a “mortal vehicle of a (possibly) immortal substance”36
(interestingly for Hägglund’s account of desire, it’s here not the beloved ob- ject’s temporal finitude that’s the focus, but the lover’s own self as mortal). In “On Transience,” a preemptive recoiling before loss, an aversion-in-advance to mourning, is said to be operative in Freud’s two interlocutors. At least in these two individuals, desire seems to be dampened or turned off by the scarcity of time, by the temporal finitude of all things. Moreover, in both this text and “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud indicates that anaclitic libidinal attachments, once established, are stubbornly sticky; more specifi- cally, in light of mourning, he observes that the psyche is incredibly slow to concede that the loved object is truly gone, that the beloved has departed and is never coming back again.37 In short, the psyche’s desires for others,
rather than being aroused by the finite, mortal status of each and every other, persevere in protracted denials of the transient, evanescent quality of whatever can be and is desired, even when faced with the gaping holes of irrevocable loss. Lacan drops similar hints about mourning couched in his own terminology (in the sixth seminar [1958–1959], he characterizes mourning as the inverse of his notion of “foreclosure” as per the third semi- nar [1955–1956], that is, as a process in which the void of a Real absence [i.e., the loss of an actual object] is filled in with seemingly indestructible Symbolic signifier-traces of the vanished entity).38
Thus, the shadow of death glaringly looms large in the background of “On Narcissism,” “On Transience,” and “Mourning and Melancholia.” It would be neither possible nor productive, in the time-limited format of
35. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” SE 14:76. 36. Ibid., 78.
37. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” SE 14:255.
38. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993) 81, 190–91, 321; Jacques Lacan, “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet,” ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. James Hulbert, Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977) 37–39; John P. Muller, “Psychosis and Mourning in Lacan’s Hamlet,” New Literary History 12.1 (1980) 147, 156; Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski Between Theory and Post-theory (London: British Film Institute, 2001) 100; Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 37–38.
this response to Hägglund’s project, to dwell at length on the numerous intricacies, inconsistencies, tensions, and contradictions plaguing Freud’s conflicted, multi-faceted relation to the topic of mortality. However, what Freud has to say about death in two other papers contemporaneous and associated with these three already-mentioned papers (these two being “The Unconscious” and “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death”) is highly relevant to the issues at stake in this context. The metapsychologi- cal essay “The Unconscious,” in seeking to delineate the essential contours of the unconscious as the proper object of psychoanalysis as a discipline, is careful to spell out why the unconscious is not simply a “subconscious” qua split-off double of consciousness, a second consciousness hidden from first-person consciousness. The unconscious must not be thought of as akin to consciousness precisely because it itself doesn’t think like conscious thought. The unconscious thinks differently, engaging in mental maneuvers unfamiliar relative to the ideational patterns manifested and recognized by conscious cognition; conscious and unconscious thinking are not the same thing differentiated solely by whether or not there is an accompanying first-person awareness of thinking.39 In particular, Freud stipulates that the
unconscious is not bound by the logical and chronological principles upon which conscious thought generally bases itself. More precisely, the Freud- ian unconscious disregards both the logical law of non-contradiction (by virtue of the absence of negation in its mental operations) as well as the chronological law of temporal finitude (by virtue of its “timelessness” when measured by the standards of linear time).40 If psychoanalysis is right that
desires fundamentally are informed by the primary process mentation of an unconscious inherently incapable of obeying classical, bivalent logic (as grounded on the function of negation and the corresponding law of non- contradiction) and congenitally blind to the passage of chronological time (with the finitude this incessant movement entails), then, without utterly contradicting and discarding psychoanalysis altogether, how can one main- tain not only that desire can become radically atheist, but that it always has been? Don’t Freud’s metapsychological axioms pertaining to unconscious psychical life indicate that indissoluble residues of religiosity (with “religios- ity” understood in the broad Derridean-Hägglundian sense as centered on ideas of an immunity unscathed by time and everything time brings with it) cling to subjects’ thoughts and desires thanks to the primary process under- pinnings of these subjects’ libidinal economies?
39. Adrian Johnston, “Sigmund Freud,” in vol. 3 of The History of Continental Phi-
losophy, ed. Alan Schrift (Durham: Acumen, 2010).
In “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” dating from the same year as “The Unconscious,” Freud draws the obvious conclusion from the metapsychological premises according to which the unconscious lacks cog- nizance of both logical negation and chronological time: The unconscious is therefore also unaware of its own mortality (at least to the extent that the conscious concept of mortality, one relied upon by Hägglund too, combines the ideational components of the negation of the notion of life [i.e., death as “not-life”] and the sense of the limited nature of lived, linear time [i.e., the chronology of life]). The second section of Freud’s essay, titled “Our At- titude Towards Death,” repeatedly stresses this imperviousness to the idea of death of those sectors of the psyche lying beyond the circumscribed sphere of consciousness. At the start of this section, Freud remarks:
To anyone who listened to us we were of course prepared to maintain that death was natural, undeniable and unavoidable. In reality, however, we were accustomed to behave as if it were other- wise. We showed an unmistakable tendency to put death on one side, to eliminate it from life. We tried to hush it up; indeed we even have a saying [in German]: ‘to think of something as though it were death.’ That is, as though it were our own death, of course. It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still pres- ent as spectators. Hence the psycho-analytic school could venture on the assertion that at bottom no one believes in his own death, or, to put the same thing in another way, that in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.41
Freud is far from the first German-speaking thinker to put forward these pro- posals apropos death (Kant and Schelling make identical claims).42 Addition-
ally, twelve years later, Heidegger famously articulates similar propositions in his well-known discussion of “being-towards-death” in Being and Time.43
But, Freud’s arguments regarding mortality and immortality in psy- chical life don’t rest on private phenomenological thought-experiments alone. Rather, his clinical and cultural observations of unconsciously influ- enced thought processes as well as the metapsychological framework with
41. Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” SE 14:289. 42. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978) 55–56; F. W. J. Schelling, “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,” in The Unconditional
in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays (1794–1796), trans. Fritz Marti (Lewisburg:
Bucknell University Press, 1980) 181–82; Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 25–26.
43. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) 280–81.
which these observations maintain a dialectical relationship of reciprocally determining co-evolution lead him to surmise that, at least unconsciously, people can’t shake a “childish,” “primitive” belief that they’re somehow im- mortal. Later on in the second section of “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” he transitions from an analysis of human perspectives on death evidently pervasive in earlier historical periods (i.e., beliefs of “prehistoric men” in “primaeval history”)44 to the contemporary, “civilized” psyche’s rap-
port with mortality (he obviously is relying here on the speculation accord- ing to which “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” a speculation he entertains in the contemporaneous metapsychological paper on phylogenetic heritage he destroyed unpublished [but a copy of which was found amongst Sándor Ferenczi’s possessions]).45 Freud states:
Let us now leave primaeval man, and turn to the unconscious in our own mental life. Here we depend entirely upon the psycho- analytic method of investigation, the only one which reaches to such depths. What, we ask, is the attitude of our unconscious towards the problem of death? The answer must be: almost ex- actly the same as that of primaeval man. In this respect, as in many others, the man of prehistoric times survives unchanged in our unconscious. Our unconscious, then, does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal. What we call our ‘unconscious’—the deepest strata of our minds, made up of instinctual impulses—knows nothing that is negative, and no negation; in it contradictories coincide. For that reason it does not know its own death, for to that we can give only a negative