Domenico Cosenza’s new book with Routledge, titled A Lacanian Reading of Anorexia (2024), has inspired some thoughts concerning our most recent period of history. These thoughts concern the transformative potential of television, which remains a fundamental gadget at the convergence of capitalism, science, and madness, as a prelude to the body sent into outer-space. Cosenza’s book demonstrates that our clinic, just as our society, is in sore need of another paradigm of thought. In this case, anorexia points us toward the possibility, though not necessity, of returning to the positively charged object that Lacan referred to as the ‘nothing’ as an object of foreclosure.
The Tele-Mirror
Marshall McLuhan (1976) once remarked that one of the foremost gadgets of the electric age, the television, promoted out-of-body experiences among its users by dislodging them from their private identities and facilitating them into a corporate identity. The imaginary body becomes witnessed from the gaze of another scene as if it were detachable. Hence, man has a body, but we cannot say that he or she is reducible to their body. Gesticulations return, via the television circuit, but perhaps asynchronously, out-of-sync, or, what is even worse, not at all. We should distinguish this from the child who witnesses gestures in simultaneity via the mirror: television, unlike mirror, advances the madness of the photograph through the introduction of editorial cuts, and these cuts incite imagination. Moreover, disruptions promoted by television are heightened by the film medium and contribute — though I dare not say ‘cause’ — body trouble.
In the age of television, we witness the emergence of the mirror as a foreign device. Put another way, the father becomes exchanged for a maternal television, and the mirror becomes a site of spooky images.
This sort-of body trouble should be distinguished from what we modestly describe within classical symptomatology as trouble within or upon the body. Hence, we are not interested so much in headaches, obscure pains in the arm, or itchy earlobes, but with the experience of the body cut from the speaking-being such that it appears as if it were itself a symptom or foreign agent. Film invokes a possible separation of speaking-being from body, of speech from any implication within a world. Consequently, McLuhan claimed that “[we] become corporate, peer-group people, just by watching it.” What could this mean? Perhaps it implies that television signals an erosion of the efficacy of psychoanalytic theories predicated upon simplistic or reductive conceptions of the mirror stage, especially those which presume, from the outset, the efficiency or ‘reach’ of the father-function. In the age of television, we witness the emergence of the mirror as a foreign device. Put another way, the father becomes exchanged for a maternal television, and the mirror becomes a site of spooky images.
Today, the internet fosters identifications, nourishes them, through secondary social groups, which continues the work of the education system through other means. Hence, we witness the unforgiving battles today of the family against the education system over the ‘rights of the child.’
For McLuhan, this erosion transforms speaking-beings into ‘peer group’ folk, or what, within mainstream sociology, is often referred to as a subject of the ‘secondary social group.’ In the contemporary era, the secondary social group supplants the primary by offering horizontal identifications among peer networks to counterbalance the loss of the father’s function: it is a movement from prohibition of drive satisfactions toward affirmation or perseverance of drive satisfactions. This occurs outside of the traditional patriarchal family system which, in the Abrahamic highlights the competition of the brothers, Cain against Abel, toward the babbling of those who enjoy themselves, as in the Abrahamic narrative of the fall of each into their worlds, Babel. Today, the internet fosters identifications, nourishes them, through secondary social groups, which continues the work of the education system through other means. Hence, we witness the unforgiving battles today of the family against the education system over the ‘rights of the child.’
At the end of his pivotal 19th seminar, Lacan warned about the consequences of the loss of the father function. He insisted that the child would instead become ‘wowed’ by the peers or comrades, forming themselves into insular groups, fraternities that were closed in upon themselves and segregating from the world. It was a movement from the Other to the other, from the symbolic toward the upsurge of the imaginary. He said:
How people today indulge in stories of paternal inadequacies! It’s a fact that there is a crisis. The father wowing us is a thing of the past. This is the only genuinely decisive function of the father. […] If the father no longer wows the family, something better will be found. […] There are others who will wow them (Lacan, 2023; emphasis is mine).
I propose to put into circulation, by which I mean to introduce a concept, extracted from this seminar, which will be referred to as the “wow of the father.” By introducing this concept, I intend to contribute to a disruption of the routinization of theories of the “name of the father.” The speaking-being must, as a preliminary to any acceptance of the name of the father, and as the act which would establish an emergent subjectivity, experience a certain reverence for the father: wow!
It is well-known that the father’s function was in some way to impose a prohibition upon the child’s satisfaction. Yet, the wow of the father is rather a wow on the part of the child, a response of the speaking-being which clears away something within the insular satisfaction of the drives, a space for the efficacy of a paternal function. If the father-function relied upon the metaphoric substitution of the mother’s desire, as in “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” then we can say that it was also the route through which the subject became incorporated as a missing place within the field of the Other. Lacan discovered another possibility: the speaking-being could be inaugurated into the field of the “other,” spelled with a small “o,” through metonymic displacement (rather than metaphoric substitution) of imaginary satisfaction.
Our moment indicates that there are many today who are no longer wowed by the father. Secondary social group identifications are widespread and they occur frequently among today’s newest social movements — among the comrades, the school peer networks, the colleagues, or team Wal-Mart. This is also a manner of building a world. The secondary group proceeds where the regulatory function of the law has failed, through a compensatory mechanism of jouissance-affirmation. Lacan refused nostalgia: the movement from the name-of-the-father toward the segregative fraternal group is worse. Yet, Lacan didn’t want to return to the reign of fathers either. I would claim that the entirety of Lacan’s very last teaching was an attempt to escape precisely this deadlock: it is either the father’s prohibition or else it is the wowing of the peers, either pere or peers.
Lacan said to those who watched him on television: ‘beware of satisfying the requests of peers! It is often a lesson learned too late, like the lessons of the scientific discourse which have necessitated ethics and oversight committees. It was Jacques-Alain Miller who made the request to Lacan that he appear on television: “I wanted Lacan, just once, to speak to the common man.” Yet, it is obvious, if only from the crooked cigar, idiosyncratic silky clothing, mercurial personality, and voice of oscillating pitch, there was not much common about Lacan. On the contrary, Lacan said: ‘that makes me a self-made man!’ He isolated his singular style from the common discourse, without, for that reason, presuming himself to be without some relation to the filth that characterizes the lives of those who desire. The question nonetheless remains: can one anyway speak to common man [sic] through the medium of television? Or, rather, does television already prefigure the loss of ‘common man’ and the acceleration of the peers as a domain of common madness?
Several years ago, while teaching over the Zoom platform to students in Mumbai, I discovered that one student was projecting a hologram of his body. His eyebrows were continuously furrowed, as if deep in thought, and a fist supported his head. A rhythmic breathing occurred, and there was a movement, every so often, as if an idea had suddenly harnessed his desire.
Television eventually gave way to video-telephony, which increasingly integrated into social media and became infused with artificial intelligence: Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Microsoft Teams. The body speaks without an anchoring point, on screen. Several years ago, while teaching over the Zoom platform to students in Mumbai, I discovered that one student was projecting a hologram of his body. His eyebrows were continuously furrowed, as if deep in thought, and a fist supported his head. A rhythmic breathing occurred, and there was a movement, every so often, as if an idea had suddenly harnessed his desire. This scene played out in fifteen minute intervals. The body that would have housed a symptom, reverberating and experiencing resonances from the impact of the signifier, was itself missing. It was replaced with an image in motion, on repeat. Hence, it was impossible for there to be any thought whatsoever. A relatively straightforward insight suddenly dawned upon me: the student’s body was a prerequisite for thought. Yet, it was missing, just as the body seems to be missing, for observers of those who are asleep and dreaming.
In the electric age, the classroom itself becomes a daydream, at best.
From Interpassivity to Refusal
What is the significance of the rise of television cooking shows such as Master Chef, Kitchen Nightmares, Hell’s Kitchen, Top Chef, and so on? For me, a question has repeated for several decades: why do so many people seem to enjoy watching and listening to another’s experience of food? It seems to me that this is not exactly a case of what Slavoj Zizek and Robert Pfaller famously named “interpassivity.” In fact, it seems to point us toward a paradigm shift. It is not enjoyment within or via the field of the Other but rather enjoyment without the Other.
For example, two decades ago, the University of Michigan published a study which found that “young children may develop eating disorders from watching television” (see Harrison, 2000). Whereas some media studies pioneers will point toward the changes in the media (so-called “media effects”), as in a sort-of deterministic account of media environment, in order to catalog an inventory of its effects, psychoanalysis proposes another point of departure: structure, guided not by changes in new technologies but by the realities presented by speaking-beings within the clinic. Psychiatry has for a long time relied upon the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which first included “anorexia” in 1952 (as a broad-based gastrointestinal disorders, alongside peptic ulcers, chronic gastritis, and ulcerative colitis). In 1968, during the second iteration of the DSM, anorexia was categorized differently, as one of the “special symptoms.” In the most recent period, a popular attack upon the DSM has occurred, which has its basis in secondary social groups.
We typically attribute the rise of cases of anorexia to the postwar situation in Western civilization. It was a time when the father was displaced from ‘home’ to ‘battlefield.’ Yet, we seldom acknowledge that the television was being mass produced as a gadget at around the same time. This is why it is important to avoid the historical perspective on clinical phenomena: structure allows us to assess the effects of the displacement of the father and the rise of the symptomatic gadget within the context of the bold advancement of scientific capitalism. The scientific discourse of this period prefigured a shift that would come later in world political economies, the expansion of so-called neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s. The gadget as ‘symptom’ returns one to the body, and to the signifier of the father. Freud said in Civilization and Its Discontents that man has transformed himself into a prosthetic god, a sort-of god-all-alone. There is, therefore, within the measure of each speaking-being, a radical kernel of satisfaction untouched by the father, one that may be referred to as ‘symptom.’ In this case, the symptom is a satisfaction that is allowed to pass in public.
Anorexic Refusal
Domenico Cosenza’s new book is at the fore of a number of emerging works that intend to signal a shift in the anglophone Lacanian milieu (which has for a long time focused disproportionately on the early or middle period of Lacan’s teaching, alongside its philosophical or cultural extensions). Most of the scholarship for decades has been loosely concentrated within or alongside cultural studies, philosophy, or literature departments. Conversely, Cosenza’s book focuses on the very last teaching of Lacan, though without discounting the earlier teaching. It uses Jacques-Alain Miller’s work as a compass, but without at all avoiding the clinical challenges that constantly perplex social theorists. For example, the last portion of his book details several cases of anorexia according to their distinctive modes of refusal: hysterical, obsessional, psychotic and ordinary psychotic. This makes his book a welcome supplement to Gabriella Ripi di Meana’s popular Figures of Lightness: Anorexia, Bulimia, and Psychoanalysis (1999), which, for a long time, occupied the obscure entryway into the Lacanian orientation on anorexia within the clinic.
Cosenza offers a novel twist: the centrality of jouissance and the concomitant focus on anorexia not as a pathology that ought to be cured but rather as its own ‘symptomatic solution.’ Hence, anorexia is often presented within the book according to the following paradigm: first, it is a solution chose by the subject, often against the overwhelming jouissance of the Other, or else it is a manner of incentivizing the Other’s love; second, it may be an independent structure, to be distinguished from neurosis and psychosis. Indeed, Cosenza approaches a position that is similar to that of Brenner (2020) by promoting it as a ‘solution’ and a structure in its own right (e.g., neurosis, psychosis, autism, anorexia, and so on). One nonetheless wonders the extent to which anorexia, or indeed autism, remains structurally differentiated from neurosis or psychosis. One runs the risk of either reifying the structures in one’s very attempt to introduce diversity (since neurosis and psychosis are already sufficiently malleable categories that may be taken up in relation to the singularity of a case) or else diversifying the cases in one’s attempt to introduce another pathway (since foreclosure always operates according to a singular and hence differentiated pathway within psychosis).
If the hysteric asks ‘what does the Other want from me?,’ thereby testifying to subjective insertion within the field of the Other, then the anorexic will essentially ask: ‘does the Other want to lose me?’ Cosenza thereby locates two sides to the classic anorexic dilemma: a hysterical side, which attempts to incite desire, and a psychotic side, which pushes toward death, isolation, and the bedroom.
Cosenza places the fantasy of one’s death at the heart of many experiences of anorexia. It is the fantasy of death that saves a space for the very possibility of desire for the anorexic of this purer form. Hence, one of the difficulties of anorexia within the clinic is that it can often emerge before the formation of symptoms as a denial of the Freudian unconscious itself (e.g., a denial of the symbolic or transferential unconscious). The psychotic variant of anorexia therefore appears as a primordial defense against the Other’s unbearable jouissance: the child takes the responsibility of weaning upon him or herself rather than choosing to be guided by the mother. If the hysteric asks ‘what does the Other want from me?,’ thereby testifying to subjective insertion within the field of the Other, then the anorexic will essentially ask: ‘does the Other want to lose me?’ Cosenza thereby locates two sides to the classic anorexic dilemma: a hysterical side, which attempts to incite desire, and a psychotic side, which pushes toward death, isolation, and the bedroom.
What makes this book particularly remarkable is the lengths to which it is willing to go in order to demonstrate clinical technique. There are vignettes of clinical work with obsessional, hysterical, psychotic, and ordinary psychotic anorexics. Moreover, the book takes, as its guiding insight, the centrality of the Lacanian object ‘nothing.’ This was one of Lacan’s least developed insights into the contemporary clinic, and it is valuable not only for those working with anorexics but also those suffering from various new forms of social disinsertion. Ultimately, the anorexic does not refuse the object but rather accepts a positively charged object: ‘the anorexic eats the nothing.’ For this reason, the book will be invaluable to clinicians because it offers coordinates for working with anorexics without presuming that anorexia is ‘one thing.’
On February 6th, 2016, Cosenza held a seminar on eating disorders in English for the Irish Circle of the Lacanian Orientation of the New Lacanian School in Dublin, Ireland. During that seminar, he highlighted the new challenges faced by analysts in the ‘era of the speaking-being’: a different modality of the real, or, rather, another paradigm of jouissance. The speaking-being, unlike the subject (who is always shadowed by the name-of-the-father), speaks with its jouissance. The new paradigm of the real, the ‘real without law’ or the ‘symptom without meaning,’ concerns the one of satisfaction outside of discourse and language. Ultimately, it is a non-social dimension of the clinic, one that forces us to return to the question of the body. Finally, the condensation of this asocial jouissance is lodged within the body of the speaking-being. Cosenza said, during his talk: “eating disorders are not symptoms of the unconscious in the classical Freudian sense, but rather are symptoms of the speaking-being.”
It is curious that eating disorders such as anorexia arose primarily in advanced technological countries, those which experienced a rise to the zenith of the scientific gadget, within those societies typically known as ‘neoliberal’ by the Marxian intelligentsia. Cosenza says that these advanced capitalist countries demonstrated that there was a “dominant discourse involving a rise in jouissance to a social peak, and a decline in the normative function of the symbolic which is reduced to the pure function of the semblant.” In the latest period, “virtual communities distinguished by identification with the symptoms of anorexia and bulimia [have emerged to propagandize] in favor of anorexia and bulimia, which are deified as incarnations of an alternative, fundamentalist lifestyle.” For these communities, the peer-group, which is paradoxically non-social and segregative, “disconnects them from the unconscious.” As such, they cannot be interpreted according to traditional techniques of the Freudian clinic, and we witness the demise of the effectiveness of all insight-based techniques or interventions. Cognitive behavioral techniques are now at risk of exacerbating the eroticization of repetition, since what reigns over the new modalities of sociability concern “condensations of jouissance anchored on the exercise of a number of regularly reiterated practices.” In other words, the symptom is an “incarnation of a substantial refusal of the Other [as such].”
For the anorexic, refusing food, by which I mean to say ‘eating the nothing,’ actually produces more satisfaction, more good humor. In the final instance, what the anorexic will not eat is the signifier. For the anorexic, the signifier is, quite simply, saturated in a saucy mixture of jouissance.
Thus ate Zarathustra.
References
Brenner, Leon. (2020) The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language. Palgrave MacMillan.
Harrison, Kristen. (2000) “Young Children May Develop Eating Disorders From Watching TV,” Communications Newsletter. University of Michigan. As Retrieved on February 1st, 2024 from <https://news.umich.edu/young-children-may-develop-eating-disorders-from-watching-tv/>
McLuhan, Marshall. (1976) “Television Extending the Tactile Sense,” As Retrieved on December 27th, 2023 from <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWqOts9oq80>
Ripa di Meana, Gabriella. (1999) Figures of Lightness: Anorexia, Bulimia, and Psychoanalysis. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.