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Master Signifier: a Brief Genealogy of Lacano-Maoism1

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Master Signifier: a Brief Genealogy of Lacano-Maoism1 FILOZOFIA ___________________________________________________________________________Roč. 69, 2014, č. 9 MASTER SIGNIFIER: A BRIEF GENEALOGY 1 OF LACANO-MAOISM JASON BARKER, Department of British and American Language and Culture, Kyung Hee University, Korea BARKER, J.: Master Signifier: A Brief Genealogy of Lacano-Maoism FILOZOFIA, 69, 2014, No. 9, pp. 752-764 Historical studies of Mao Tse-tung and Maoism are mostly damning moralisations. As for Mao’s influence in philosophy, such studies are rare if not completely non- existent. By conducting a brief genealogy of Lacano-Maoism, a hybrid of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Maoist politics which emerged post-May 68 in France and whose adherents still include Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, this article considers the ex- tent to which this fusion of Mao and Lacan may still have implications for contempo- rary philosophy and related theoretical discourses. The article speculates on Mao, not as a historical figure, but as a “master signifier” in French theory of the 1960s and 1970s. Keywords: Badiou – Lacan – Mao – Politics – Psychoanalysis – Revolution – Theory – Žižek Introduction. Mao Tse-tung has exerted a considerable influence in French philoso- phy, one whose true scope is arguably yet to be fully explored. I want to restrict myself in this essay to the reception of Mao in the realm of theory – the theory which originates in France and which today extends to a number of fields outside philosophy, notably to po- litical and critical theory, literary and cultural studies – in Great Britain, the United States, Australia, as well as many other Anglophone countries around the world. Mao’s status in the aforementioned theory, I claim, is that of a master signifier. What is a master signifier? The function of a master signifier is to “make understandable [lisi- 2 ble]” speech. In linguistic terms, according to the psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller, the master signifier “succeeds in making the signifier and the signified correspond, hal- 3 ting them in their contrary shift of meaning [glissement].” In psychoanalysis such shifts or “slips of the tongue” mark the beginning of the transference through which the subject 1 This is a revised version of a paper presented at The Second International Conference on Chinese Form of Marxist Literary Criticism, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China, 9-14 April 2013. I would like to thank the organizers for their kind invitation to the event as well as the editors of Filozofia for accepting the article for publication. 2 Jacques-Alain Miller, “inconscient ≠ psychanalyse”, Le Cours de Jacques-Alain Miller, Ecole de la cause freudienne, no date. Accessed 1 September 2014. http://www.causefreudienne.net/etudier/le- cours-de-jacques-alain-miller/inconscient-different-psychanalyse 3 Ibid. 752 generates a new meaning – a new master signifier – through word association. Mao was of course a master signifier in the sense of an ideological rallying point for the radical left whose politics swept across France in May 68, and inspiring the students’ and workers’ movements there for several of the following years. These movements coin- cided with Mao’s unleashing of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, which officially lasted from 1966 to 1976. But Mao was not always equal to the direction of the political events he unleashed, and so was not always up to the task of halting contrary shifts of meaning. Clearly there are historical explanations for the contradictions which afflicted and ultimately undermined the revolutionary movements in China and France in the 1970s. However, my approach here will be theoretical and, in drawing on the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, concerned with the discursive register of revolu- tionary politics, and ultimately limited to the general discursive field in which any master signifier must operate as a linguistic term. In other words, “Mao” serves as a signifier for the inventive and revolutionary potentials of theory itself, rather than as the biography from which historical or political lessons can be drawn. There are more than enough biog- 4 raphies of Mao already in circulation. It is important to underline the fact that Mao’s personal history and politics are not my primary concern. Indeed, there is still something compelling to Lacan’s thoroughly rationalist idea that all subjective (or, strictly speaking, analytic) experience is formalizable (rather than a question of interpretation). No serious discussion of contemporary theory can ignore its formalistic or scientific basis. This will be the basis of my argument at least. The Mao Paradox. Perhaps the first philosopher in France, if not the West, to admit the influence of Mao in his philosophy (or “Theory” with a capital “T”), was Louis Al- thusser. In Althusser’s Pour Marx (1965) there are a handful of references to Mao and his famous Yenan essay On Contradiction (1937). Furthermore, unposted correspondence from November 1963 confirms that Althusser self-censored a lengthy Mao quotation from “On the Materialist Dialectic” prior to its publication in La Pensée, in August 1963, at the 5 request of the editor in chief. Althusser’s interest in Mao can be understood in at least two ways. The first relates to philosophy. In the late 1950s and early 60s an intellectual battle was being conducted in France between phenomenologists on one side – principally Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty – and the so-called “structuralists” on the other – principally Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Althusser himself. Among the latter thinkers only Althusser was a Marxist and mem- 6 ber of the French Communist Party (PCF). However, what these “structuralists” alleg- 4 See e.g. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: the Unknown Story (London: Cape, 2005) for a typically bitter and depressing rendering of Mao as a tyrant responsible for more deaths than Hitler and Stalin. 5 Louis Althusser, “Unposted Letter to Lucien Sève (24 November 1963).” Alt2.C6-02. Althusser Fond 2, Correspondence. Archives de Louis Althusser. L’IMEC. 6 In the Italian foreword published in the English translation of Reading Capital (1970) Althusser says: “With a very few exceptions ... our interpretation of Marx has generally been recognized and Filozofia 69, 9 753 edly shared was a commitment to the human sciences (and principally structural linguis- tics) and their progressive approach to the study of human beings in society. Althusser’s 7 allegiance to structuralism is at least debatable (as is Foucault’s ), a fact made abundantly clear in a polemical seminar Althusser gave in 1966 denouncing Lévi-Strauss’ structural- 8 ist methodology. Althusser’s battle against phenomenology can be understood on the same terms as his battle against Hegelian Marxism. And not just against the “bad Hegel” or the idealist aspects of Hegel that Lenin famously criticised. For Althusser, Hegel had to be purged from Marxist doctrine; this was the measure of Marxism’s scientificity and its modernism i.e. its consistency with the 20th century revolutions in Russia and China, as well as with the progressive development of the human sciences in the West. Let us quote briefly Al- thusser from his essay “Contradiction and Overdetermination” (1962) from Pour Marx: Mao Tse-tung’s pamphlet On Contradiction (1937) contains a whole series of analy- ses in which the Marxist conception of contradiction appears in a quite un-Hegelian light. Its essential concepts would be sought in vain in Hegel: principal and secon- dary contradiction; principal and secondary aspect of a contradiction; antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradiction; law of the uneven development of a contradic- 9 tion. Althusser concludes this passage by noting that Mao’s essay is both “descriptive” and “abstract.” For Althusser, Mao’s essay is certainly not a work of philosophy. How- ever, the influence of Mao on Althusser’s philosophy is perfectly emblematic of the inter- disciplinary nature of French intellectual life from the late 1950s. That a philosophy pro- fessor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, an institution not known for its cosmo- politan eclecticism, could draw philosophical inspiration from the work of Mao was tes- timony to the revolution taking place in French intellectual life at that time. And this trend in philosophical inventiveness would also inspire many of Althusser’s students, many of whom would emerge in the 1960s and 70s as important theorists in their own right. Mao also had tactical significance for Althusser. Apart from an intellectual or phi- losophical battle, Althusser’s other battle during the 1960s was “internal,” and was being waged against “theoretical sterility” in the PCF, of which Althusser was a lifelong mem- ber. In 1956 Khrushchev’s famous speech at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party had opened the way to de-Stalinization. Although supposedly a “liberation” from judged, in homage to the current fashion, as ‘structuralist’... We believe that despite the terminological ambiguity, the profound tendency of our texts was not attached to the ‘structuralist’ ideology.” Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books 1970). 7 Foucault’s resistance to the label (and to any label) is well known, although his early work does at least recognize the displacement of philosophy by the human sciences, among them structural linguis- tics, in the era of modernity. 8 Althusser, “On Lévi-Strauss” in The Humanist
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