HYSTERIA AND INTERPELLATION

Interpellation functions as the identification of the subject with the Law as symbolic order, the superego function which maintains the illusion of social cohesion; hystericization functions as the identification with the obscene side of the superego, the side which demands that we “Enjoy!” and which constitutes both subjectivization as such (as the avoidance of just this impossible demand) and the impossibility of subjectivization (as the irreducible kernel of the Real at the heart of the Symbolic which frustrates the illusion of symbolic totalization).

The hysteric is the subject which gives rise to interpellation. But the hysteric who remains despite this subjectivization is the one who refuses this symbolic mandate, who refuses to be subjectivized or interpellated. The hysteric, above all, seeks to maintain his or her desire by continually deferring its satisfaction (at which point it would no longer be desire). The hysterical response to any potential solution to the deadlock of the subject caught between the attraction to and repulsion from the Thing is to say, “No, that is not it!” The symbolic mandate conferred on the hysteric would be such a resolution and must, therefore, be resisted in deference to the object within, which this mandate seeks to displace from view. As the inverse of the symbolic mandate, however, the hysteric’s act remains tied to the Symbolic (unlike the psychotic whose total lack of identification dissolves any tie with the Symbolic whatsoever).

HYSTERIA AND HISTORY

The hysteric functions as a vanishing mediator between some pure (hypothetical) moment of historicity on the one hand and historicism on the other. Or, to turn the equation around somewhat, historicism is nothing but the path of flight out of the hysteria brought on by the traumatic confrontation with the Real. Successful interpellation indicates that we have accepted our symbolic mandate: we have taken on the identity presented to us by the big Other. But what is passed over in the theory of Louis Althusser, for example, is that the hystericization of the subject is at one and the same time the necessary condition for and the reminder of the impossibility of interpellation or subjectivization. The hysteric is both the precondition for and the resistance to successful interpellation.

Let me repeat my earlier claim: The hysteric can be seen to function as a vanishing mediator between some pure (hypothetical) moment of historicity and historicism. The hysteric experiences the dialectical paradox (of the becoming of that which always already was) as a conceptual deadlock which makes action impossible. The hysteric’s (presymbolic) domestication of this deadlock is the conversion of the deadlock into a symptom. Hysterical conversion as the staging or acting out of an inexpressible conceptual deadlock in bodily terms is the primary mechanism of figuration which Fredric Jameson identifies in his theory of the political unconscious. The political unconscious is, essentially, the unconscious of the hysteric. This hysterical moment of figuration precedes and makes way for the historicist moment of symbolization-narrativization. In Lacanian terms, then, History is the product of hysterical theater and a further evasion of the Real.

So how would an analysis of events based on the recognition of historicity differ from historicism? By pointing out that the story that we are left with in our histories is simply one among many objectively possible outcomes. A “proper dialectical account” Zizek writes, “calls into question the self-evidence of ‘what actually took place’ and confronts it with what did not take place—that is, it considers what did not happen (a series of missed opportunities, of ‘alternative histories’) [as] a constituent part of what ‘effectively happened’” (FTK 189).