Abstract

An Analysis of the Correlation between Psychosis and Posthuman Subjectivity

                 In “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” Lacan (1959) specifies the reason behind psychosis—the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father. For “psychosis to be triggered, the Name-of-the-Father—verworfen . . . must be sum­moned to that place in symbolic opposition to the subject” (p.481). In clinical contexts, the “foreclosure” means that in the discourse of the patient who explains his/her predicament, the analyst could not excavate a stable representation of lack. This paper will examine the embodiment of this “foreclosure” and contextualize one of the symptoms of psychosis—delusions of paranoia—with posthuman subjectivity, singling out two cultural representations which showcase how the bioengineered bodies provoke the eruption of jouissance in contemporary society.

As Stijn Vanheule (2020) elaborates, for Lacan, “the unconscious is the place from which questions relating to existence are formulated: when productions of the unconscious or symptoms are fully analyzed by means of free association, the subject is confronted with the fundamental question: ‘What am I?’” (p.179). Staging the mechanisms which give rise to the paranoia in Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation and Anna Dumitriu’s bioart, this paper will address how biotechnology (particularly the CRISPR-Cas9 system), amidst the ongoing destabilization of the category “Human,” brings the “foreclosure” of the Name-of-the-Father to the surface. Centralizing the question— “What am I, a human or a nonhuman?”, this paper argues that the symptom of paranoia initiated in/through these cultural (and medical) phenomena manifests suppressed societal anxiety over an epistemological shift that questions the ontological border between the natural and the artificial, between the human and the nonhuman—a shift that brands the subject, not as transcendent and agential, but as embedded and relational. From a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, it is this epistemological shift that induces the lack of a stable Name-of-the-Father which functions to shield the subject from panic, disorientation, and hallucinations.

Works Cited

Hook, D., Neill, C., & Vanheule, S. (2020). Reading Lacan's Écrits : from 'The Freudian thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache'. Routledge.

Lacan, & Fink, B. (2006). Ecrits : the First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg. W.W. Norton & Co.

 Biotechnology under the Psychoanalytic Microscope: the Border of Pleasure and Pain

 keywords: biotechnology, bioart, ecology, Lacan

        In November 2018, the Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui claimed that two babies, Lulu and Nana, who were genetically modified by his research team in order to endow them with immunity to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), were born. It is the first time that scientist claims to have conducted gene editing on human embryos, thus sparkling new debates about the legitimacy of gene editing and the ontological border between human and non-human beings. In this paper, I will use the Lacanian “microscope” to explore the psychoanalytic dimension of the phenomenon of human(nonhuman) gene-editing in contemporary medical and artistic fields where the transgressing of boundaries is seen as taboo. 

          Specifically, I will focus on the following questions: How does bioart bespeak our relation to the non-human other? Why do bioart and biotechnological products often trigger the mixed feeling of excitement and repulsion? Do bioart and biotechnology touch upon the Lacanian jouissance, an enjoyment that combines pleasure and pain? Is this feeling of repulsion and excitement a testimony to our encounter with the “uncanny”? Is biotechnology our modern day “symptom”, without which we could not even sustain our consistency? How does the Lacanian “real” help us understand our quest for this very scientific liminality?

        If Donna Haraway radicalizes the boundary between organisms and machines, arguing for “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries” (7), then Lacan tells us that it is precisely through this dissolution of boundaries that we encounter the inherent limitation of our symbolic world, the glamorous techno-capitalist social reality we live in. On the one hand, bioart exhibits our desire to explore the border “between torment and death, life and joy for one’s self, for our nonhuman other, and for the ecosphere in general” (Zaretsky 520). On the other hand, making tangible what Zizek calls the “irreducible gap between the Real and modes of its symbolization” (107), bioart, in its exploration of the aesthetic of liminality, reveals the impossibility inherent in the idealization of the human as a closed, autonomous system. I will present how the gene-editing project by scientist He and the works created by artists such as Anna Dumitriu, Suzanne Anker and Patricia Olynyk demonstrate the fundamental traumatic fissure between the “ecological symbiosis of human and nonhuman parts of the biosphere” (Morton 13) and our social reality.

 Link to Taboo, Transgression, Transcendence in Art and Science: 

https://avarts.ionio.gr/ttt/2020/en/presentations/58/