Introduction

Recent years have seen influential ‘left’ theorists such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek¹ join with earlier ‘right’ theorists of normativity to argue that poststructuralism’s particular form of privileging the other and difference leads to the “dispersion” of the self as ethical agent,² as well as to resignation and cynicism concerning politics and the political. Precipitating a growing crisis of poststructuralism, they variously call for a renewed attention to the ‘singularity’ of the self and of events in a ‘return of the real’. That is, against what they take to be the ambiguities and deferrals of poststructuralism, they deploy practices of thought, inspired in significant ways by the work of Jacques Lacan (among others), which variously posit a singular Real decisive for the interpretation and negotiation of the infinite differences of the present situation – this the better to recognise and resist the specific unfreedoms that characterise it.

This paper considers the later work of Michel Foucault against this backdrop, proposing that the announcement of the incipient eclipse, or end, of poststructuralism may prove premature, insofar as Foucault’s work engages with such questions of singularity and the real in ways that challenge the trajectories of Badiou and Žižek – even as their critique challenges his poststructuralism to re-examine its ends and to re-position its concerns within an altered situation. In particular, it proposes that Foucault, in his later work concerning practices of the self, situates the drive toward ‘becoming other’ in relation to a historically-constituted singularity of the self. In so doing, he implicitly connects the singularity of the self with his earlier analyses of specific prohibitions, exclusions, and disciplinary productions of individuals, in a thought, it is argued, which is not unsympathetic to the call for the ‘return of the real’. At the same time, it will be proposed, that Foucault’s attention to the ambiguity involved in what he termed “événementialisation”, the analysis of discourse and practices as dimensions of events, complicates the relation of the singularity of the event and the self to the specific and material.³ In Peter Hallward’s terms, the critical question, then, becomes that of how to formulate adequately the singular in its relation (or non-relation) to the specific.⁴ As such, the paper proposes that the important debate between poststructuralism, at least in its Foucauldian form, and these more recent theorists concerns modes of singularity and their ethical and political implications.

Before turning to Foucault, a brief consideration of the basic coordinates of Badiou’s and Žižek’s deployment of the Lacanian Real is in order.

Badiou, Žižek and the Return of the Real

Crucial to both Badiou and Žižek is Jacques Lacan’s move in the 1960’s beyond a psychoanalytic therapeutics focussed upon understanding and negotiating identity and subjectivity as ‘Imaginary’ constructs that are constituted within, and in relation to, the ‘Symbolic’ system of societal signifiers – the unconscious big Other, to which individuals must give themselves over if they are to achieve being. At that point, Lacan began to formulate his conception of the ‘Real’, as that which is prior to and lies outside of the Symbolic, resists symbolisation, and, hence, is unrepresentable within it. The Real emerges as that which is irreducibly repressed by the Symbolic.

With this development, the focus of Lacanian psychoanalysis shifted to a discernment of those points at which the Real is encountered as the void of gaps in the Symbolic, revealed by symptoms and revealing of the contingency (or “contingent necessity”) and repressions of the Symbolic. In particular, Lacan’s attention turned from negotiating the Imaginary identity of the subject within the Symbolic to a notion of the subject as the split and void that separates the Imaginary ego from its Symbolic unconscious.⁵ Later still, he would point to those relatively rare moments of “subjectivation”, when individuals attend to, and identify with, the cause of their desire – what he termed “traversing the fundamental fantasy”.⁶ That is to say, by attending to the remainder of a unity possessed prior to the split engendered in becoming in the big Other – a remainder expressed as a fundamental fantasy, Lacan’s petit objet a – the individual achieves an encounter with the Real and gains a certain subjective power over the split which alienates them, by subjectifying the desires shaped by that split.

For his part, Žižek pursues a more or less direct mapping of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory onto the political sphere, the trajectory of his work mirroring in important respects that of Lacan himself.⁷ Hence, in his earlier work he attempts to demonstrate how the postmodern obsession with the play of signifiers and the infinite possibilities of deconstruction obscures those ‘symptoms’ that point to the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real structure of the contemporary socio-cultural and discursive situation.⁸ Indeed, he considers postmodernism (and poststructuralism in its resonances with the postmodern) to be a particularly insidious subordination to the cultural superego, which in its Lacanian conception operates not merely by prohibition, but additionally through the injunction to “enjoy your symptom”. In Žižek’s view, the ironic distance from and cynicism toward commitment and action are the correlate of our postmodern enjoyment of difference predicted by Lacanian theory.

Drawing on Lacan’s later notion of the “sinthome”, he attempts to bring into focus those specific socio-cultural and discursive ‘symptoms’, the enjoyment of which, function to hold together the Symbolic against irruptions of the Real – irruptions which reveal the former’s necessity to be a radical contingency and thus point to the inherent instability of the Symbolic. In this context, mirroring Lacan’s “traversing the fantasy”, Žižek advocates and performs, as a political strategy, an “overidentification” with those decisive cultural and political ‘symptoms’ that he uncovers, in a complex “acting out” of society’s neurotic, psychotic and hysterical symptoms, designed to provoke readers into a confrontation with the Real of our socio-cultural context.⁹

More recently, Žižek has acknowledged his excessive dependence on Lacan’s early conceptualisation of the Real as a kind of quasi-Kantian noumenal Thing, positing instead a Real that better resonates with Lacan’s later emphasis upon “traversing the fantasy”.¹⁰ Hence, Žižek now posits a Real that is thoroughly immanent and reveals itself not as the void of the Symbolic, but as the “minimal difference” by which things differ from themselves within it. In this framework, one encounters not only a “real Real”, but a “symbolic Real” and an “imaginary Real” as well, such that the Real is woven into the fabric of the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real framework as its internal self-difference. If the first is the early Lacanian “horrifying Thing”, the symbolic Real is constituted by those points where our significations of reality can no longer be translated into everyday terms (Žižek gives the example of quantum representations of reality), while the imaginary Real refers to the quality which allows the sublime to shine through ordinary objects.¹¹ This nuancing of his position notwithstanding, he nonetheless continues to argue for the singularity of the Real in relation to the Symbolic and Imaginary, the encounter with which offers us the possibility of radically and effectively engaging the complexities and ambiguities of the present.

For Badiou, by contrast, the importance of Lacan lies more indirectly in the resources toward a theory of the event offered by the conception of the Real as a void which irrupts into the Symbolic. At the same time, Badiou rejects as “antiphilosophy” Lacan’s notion that such decisive events are centred upon the drives generated by quasi-originary constructions of identity. Rather, Badiou focuses upon events as “haphazard” occurrences that interrupt a given situation, allowing for genuinely new beginnings. At the same time, he retains the Lacanian notion of the Real as that which is irreducibly repressed by the Symbolic. While the event is of the same order of being as the elements of the situation in which it irrupts, it counts as nothing in the situation and is unrepresentable within it. Moreover, for Badiou, subjectivity does not coincide with the void of such an irruption, but is constituted after the event, in fidelity to it, when the unpresentable event must be asserted.¹²

Specifically, subjectivation takes place in the naming of the event, that is, in a subjective deciding upon its intrinsic undecidability – a naming which avoids reduction to decisionism by grounding itself in the event. This subjective naming involves the endless labour of clarifying the specific truth of an event, by identifying its “evental site” within the situation – the site of the event within the situation, which is nonetheless not specified by the situation, but rather which reveals the void of the situation. In particular, this process involves tracing the “edge of the void” where the event irrupts upon each specific element of the situation. Truth emerges, not as a contribution to prevailing systems of knowledge, but in its singularity as the specific truth of the event, a truth nonetheless universal to the situation. This truth can be arrived at only through the ‘subtraction’ of all elements specific to the situation, the event constituting that which is present but unrepresented within each of the situational elements.

Even as Badiou departs significantly from Lacan, he adopts elements of the deep structure of his thought. Indeed, against the differing and deferrals of poststructuralist difference both Badiou and Žižek variously forge the possibility of articulating singular symptoms or events of the Real and the singular truth of current situations or events. And for both, a singular self – a subjectivation in fidelity to the event of the Real or a subjectivation coincident with it – is integral to intellectual practice.

Thinking differently and the Aging Relationship with the Self

Against this backdrop, the later Foucault’s conception of the care of the self, especially conceived as an “aesthetics of existence”, appears to be vulnerable of the criticisms of Badiou and Žižek. This is particularly so when Foucault, in his account of an aesthetics of existence, draws explicitly upon Baudelaire’s dandy moving through a succession of fleeting moments in his evocations of a contemporary care of the self.¹³ Not only does Foucault appear to remain firmly within the co-ordinates of the Imaginary-Symbolic framework that dominated the work of the early Lacan, as Fabio Vighi and Heiko Feldner argue, but he appears to celebrate the pursuit of a difference without a Real.¹⁴ In this regard, Žižek claims that the later Foucault remains enmeshed in a humanist elitism which holds that the Imaginary self is capable of adequately negotiating in itself all of the signifying forces of the Symbolic.¹⁵ Indeed, in his introduction to his revised history of sexuality project in 1984, reflecting on the complex set of transformations, which his work had undergone in that period, not least his reorientation of his history of sexuality to resurrect a question of the self, Foucault stresses that the underlying philosophical problematic is one of a radical becoming other: “to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known”.¹⁶ Deploying several metaphors, he stresses and valorises thought as a pure becoming other: it is an “essay” after difference, irredu