行政院國家科學委員會專題研究計畫 期中進度報告
惡與真實：後現代的轉折(2/3)
計畫類別： 整合型計畫 計畫編號： NSC92-2411-H-002-014-BG 執行期間： 92 年 08 月 01 日至 93 年 10 月 31 日 執行單位： 國立臺灣大學外國語文學系暨研究所 計畫主持人： 廖朝陽 報告類型： 精簡報告 處理方式： 本計畫可公開查詢中 華 民 國 93 年 5 月 31 日
行政院國家科學委員會專題研究計畫期中進度報告
惡與真實：後現代的轉折 (2/3)
一、摘要
本年度已完成的主要工作在於理論建構部份。惡與真實的主要問題是：按 拉康派精神分析對佛洛伊德主體論的解釋，分析工作的大方向雖然是追求主體 真實的呈現與接納，但一旦主體「穿越幻見」，必須接受自己的無意識核心，這 個核心仍然是一個「根本幻見」。真實與幻見既然具有比較複雜的關係，一旦無 意識核心成為「惡」的來源，精神分析工作就有為惡背書的倫理學危機。拉康 在第七個講座「精神分析的倫理」中處理這個問題，為我們提供了初步的理論 提示 (Lacan 1992)。一開始他就引用佛洛伊德的「前精神分析」著作《科學心 理學芻議》(Freud 1966)，通過三大神經系統（ψ, φ, ω）的區分來說明快感原則 之外存在真實的快感，雖然看似要以快感為道德的根基，其實正是要確立真實 快感屬於另一系統，不可等同於續發過程的快感。由三大神經系統的區分出 發，本計畫將由兩個方向探討拉康理論對文學與文化研究產生的意義。一是所 謂「結構性創傷」與真實快感的關係：透過創傷與倫理的糾葛，易於由主題、 政治性入手，將精神分析主體倫理的立場導入文學及文化研究。其次，佛洛伊 德的 ψ 系統與 φ 系統之分也可以關連到翻譯理論裡可譯性、不可譯性的問題， 從而與班雅民的語言理論互相印證，附帶結合文化研究與翻譯研究，形成新的 思考方向。目前尚須究明者應在佛洛伊德的中介系統 (ω) 對創傷理論、精神分 析倫理的意義何在？其中涉及由量（神經系統的負載）轉質的機制（快感與道 德的共同基礎）是否能在不可譯性的理論中找到可以互相比擬的部份？當這部 份有初步解答出來，就可以進行數篇相關論文的寫作。 關鍵詞：惡、真實、主體、不可譯性、創傷、快感原則Abstract
Work in this year’s project has been primarily focused on the construction of a theoretical scheme. We begin with the main problematic linking evil and the real: According to the theory of the subject presented in the Lacanian elaboration of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, analysis, while seeking to bring the subject into closer acquaintance with what is “real,” has to face the moment when the “traversing of fantasy” has taken place and the subject has reached the kernel of the unconscious, but this very kernel is found to be without the certitude usually associated with reality but in essence a “fundamental fantasy.” In other words, the real and the fantasized are not simple antitheses but are paradoxically both linked and opposed. Hence the ethical
aporia faced by psychoanalysis when the “kernel” of the unconscious takes the form of an instigator of evil and may have to be pronounced to be without blame and without a viable solution. Lacan deals with this problem in his seventh seminar, The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1992), which provides us with a preliminary framework.
Here Lacan begins his seminar by referring to Freud’s “pre-psychoanalytic” work, the
Project for a Scientific Psychology (1966), using what Freud proposed as the three
neuronal systems (φ, ψ, and ω) to establish the existence, “beyond the pleasure principle,” of pleasure in the real (jouissance). This move may strike one as an attempt to situate the moral in blind pleasure, but a closer look reveals the other side of the coin: The Lacanian short circuiting pleasure and good also sets up a dividing line between ψ system and φ system, primary process and secondary process, pleasure
per se and pleasure beyond pleasure. Returning, with Lacan, to the Freudian
elaboration of the tripartite organization of neurons, the present project takes up two related issues to pursue cross fertilization and to open up Lacanian theory for the study of literature and culture. First, it will be most important to expound the close connections between “structural trauma” and jouissance. The study of trauma has often been associated with ethical pitfalls, which are precisely indicative of the aptness of the psychoanalytic position in the study of thematics and politics in literary and cultural productions invested with similar ethical interest. Second, the division between ψ system and φ system is strongly reminiscent of the strange demarcating line between translatability and untranslatability in translation studies, which would lead us to a consideration of Walter Benjamin’s theory of language and translation. This appeal to Benjamin may provide fresh insights for both sides and point to a way to bring cultural studies and translation studies into better alignment.
Keywords: evil, the real, subjectivity, untranslatability, trauma, pleasure principle
二、緣由與目的
Paul Verhaeghe observes that in the “traumatic era” of today, traumatized patients tend to be reduced either to malingerers or to passive victims, both of whom, without subjecthood, are devoid of clinical significance or hope for change: “in both cases, the patient is rejected. Either they are simulators, or they are just poor victims, who have to be treated politically correct” (2001: 49f). The ethical stance of psychoanalysis, for Verhaeghe, consists in accepting the patient as a subject endowed with “at least a minimal element of freedom and choice” (50). Verhaeghe’s account makes it clear that the problem of false patients or false analysis will remain: Not only is fantasy itself considered by Lacanian theory to be a necessary elaboration determined by drives from the real, but the end of analysis may be indefinitely postponed since every subject is affected by an inherent, structurally determined
trauma, so that externally inflicted trauma does not enter a neutral ground but finds itself interacting with structural trauma in complicated ways (see 52-58).
This has to do with the usual criticism of psychoanalysis for failing to provide a way to “falsify” its analysis, i.e., to distinguish between true and false clinical situations. Lacan’s seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis grapples with the same kind of problems. For example, the problem of distinguishing between the true and the false looms in the background when two kinds of pleasure are conceived. First there is a blurring of distinctions between pleasure and the moral:
pleasure appears in many cases to be the end which is in opposition to moral effort, but that the latter has nevertheless to locate its ultimate point of reference there, a point of reference to which the good that is supposed to orient human action is finally reduced. (1992: 36)
Then Lacan redraws boundaries; it is true that a profound analogy exists
between, on the one hand, that search for an archaic－one might almost say a regressive － quality of indefinable pleasure which animates unconscious instinct as a whole and, on the other, that which is realized and satisfying in the fullest of senses, in the moral sense as such. (42)
But the presence of this analogy testifies to a division: both the “archaic,” “indefinable” pleasure and the newly analogized pleasure of the moral sense is being distinguished from the pleasure of the pleasure principle, which Verhaeghe defines as “phallic pleasure” (2001: 60). This move points to the necessity to separate (phallic) pleasure as imaginary or symbolically determined pleasure and the strange pleasure (jouissance) of the real. Lacan takes up Freud’s Project as the foundation for his ethics seminar precisely because the Project would provide a firm speculative scheme stipulating the separation of the real from the requirements of the reality principle.
This separation would enable us to seek interpretive procedures to define and test the boundaries not only between true and false trauma, but between evil and the demand of the real.
In recent years, translation, in the metaphoric and untheorized sense of understanding (and accepting) alterity through some representational transport, has become a common reference point in critical discourse, usually used to accentuate respect for difference and cosmopolitan tolerance. The slightest attempt to literalize the metaphor, however, would reveal a hidden problem: such multiculturalist sophistication implies a globalizing valuation of the cosmopolitan stance, in the sense that translation may become a pretext to elevate a universl target language at the expense of local source languages which now need not be used except in translation as far as the high discourse of global critique is concerned.
The naïvete of such usage is belied when one considers the fact that translation has historically been known to subltern cultures less as a transparent technology than as a site of deceit and manipulation. In Taiwan, for example, the early legend of Wu Feng is already a case of contested translation: both Taiwan aborigines’ view of Wu as
exploiter and later the myth-making by Japanese as well as Chinese occupiers of the island are based on the critical moment inhering in the encounter between alien cultures and epitomized in Wu’s role as the imperial interpreter who was supposed to help minimize alterity when the governing and the governed needed to know each other. Later on, Taiwanese fiction presents this old model in two ways: as the interested exploiter (to be inverted by the patriotic business escort in Huang Chunming’s “Sayonana, Good Bye”) and the bilingual intellectual trapped in absurdity by the excess of his knowledge over his strength (the English teacher in Wang Zhenhe’s fiction). Both types are present in the recent film Buddha Bless
America.
At first sight, the negative representation of the translator reminds one of the Western wisdom of traduttore, traditore. In fact, the situation is quite different. Since failure in translation here is caused not by inhering impossibility but by personal selfishness or systematic injustice, the underlying belief still seems to be that, once the pathology is removed, “ideal” translation will be possible. This seemingly simple-minded bifocal ethical judgment provides a surprising link to psychoanalysis. There is a sense in which the ideal, perfect, or just proper translation resides in the primary process of communication in the real. For the colonized, linguistic experience seems to start with a structurally constituted traumatic denail of, and hence fascination with, such transparency. Here an appeal to Walter Benjamin’s theory of language and translation will help us theorize this realm of the untranslatable.
三、結果與討論
The Project for a Scientific Psychology occupies a special position among Freud’s works. It was abandoned before Freud even published it, but it lays out a clear plan for the entire Freudian system, and its “neuroscience of the mind” continues to interest and inspire brain researchers even today (Kitcher 1992, Pribram and Gill 1992, Geerardyn 1997, Pribram 1998). Its neurological terminology was dropped but its framework continued to be present in the economic account of energy and the topological systems of the unconscious, the preconscious and the conscious in later “metapsychology,” testifying to the fact that the “mechanistic” language of neuroscience and the “language of psychology” are only different ways of explaining the same mental apparatus (Brooks 1998: 66f).
For the present purpose, there are a few points of interest in Freud’s early neuroscience model. First, the Lacanian paradox is alread present in Freud choice of the “language” of explanation: Although the neuroscientific view is extremely “mechanistic,” its reliance on quantification ensures a generality which is absent in the concreteness required in the description of psychological states. This is already a “translation” of the Lacanian relocation of the moral in “archaic” pleasure: the most abstract reappears when thought fully embraces the material. Such “quantumizations” are possible when the separation of diametrically opposed but complementary systems introduces the limit-case possibility of the crossing of boundaries between them: in
the same way quantum physics is positioned vis-a-vis classical physics, the unconscious is positioned vis-a-vis consciousness, jouissance vis-a-vis pleasure, moral imperative vis-a-vis symbolic normativity.
The usefulness of this systematic separation and complementarity becomes clear when we consider the problem of untranslatability in Walter Benjamin’s theory of translation. Benjamin’s conception of translatability and untranslatibility (Benjamin 1996; see 廖朝陽 2002) not only reminds us of the permeability of the φ system and the impermeability of the ψ system, but comprises a kind of textual unconscious which can be further elaborated in several ways.
四、計畫成果自評
In recent years, translation, in the metaphoric and untheorized sense of understanding (and accepting) alterity through some representational transport, has become a common reference point in critical discourse, usually used to accentuate respect for difference and cosmopolitan tolerance. The slightest attempt to literalize the metaphor, however, would reveal a hidden problem: such multiculturalist sophistication implies a globalizing valuation of the cosmopolitan stance, in the sense that translation may become a pretext to elevate a universl target language at the expense of local source languages which now need not be used except in translation as far as the high discourse of global critique is concerned.
The naïvete of such usage is belied when one considers the fact that translation has historically been known to subltern cultures less as a transparent technology than as a site of deceit and manipulation. In Taiwan, for example, the early legend of Wu Feng is already a case of contested translation: both Taiwan aborigines’ view of Wu as exploiter and later the myth-making by Japanese as well as Chinese occupiers of the island are based on the critical moment inhering in the encounter between alien cultures and epitomized in Wu’s role as the imperial interpreter who was supposed to help minimize alterity when the governing and the governed needed to know each other. Later on, Taiwanese fiction presents this old model in two ways: as the interested exploiter (to be inverted by the patriotic business escort in Huang Chunming’s “Sayonana, Good Bye”) and the bilingual intellectual trapped in absurdity by the excess of his knowledge over his strength (the English teacher in Wang Zhenhe’s fiction). Both types are present in the recent film Buddha Bless
America.
At first sight, the negative representation of the translator reminds one of the Western wisdom of traduttore, traditore. In fact, the situation is quite different. Since failure in translation here is caused not by inhering impossibility but by personal selfishness or systematic injustice, the underlying belief still seems to be that, once the pathology is removed, “ideal” translation will be possible. This seemingly simple-minded bifocal ethical judgment provides a surprising link to psychoanalysis. There is a sense in which the ideal, perfect, or just proper translation resides in the primary process of communication in the real. For the colonized, linguistic experience seems
to start with a structurally constituted traumatic denail of, and hence fascination with, such transparency. Here an appeal to Walter Benjamin’s theory of language and translation will help us theorize this realm of the untranslatable.
At the present, work still need to be done about the precise nature of the ω system in Freud’s account and its significance for theories of trauma and the ethics of psychoanalysis. Also, further consideration should be given to details of comparison with translation. For example, how the mechanism of the conversion of quantity (neuronal excitation) to quality, as described by Freud, may find its counterpart in accounts of untranslatability. When we have the initial results of such inquiries, work for the project will proceed to the writing of several papers.
五、參考文獻
Benjamin, Walter. 1996. “The Task of the Translator” (1923). Trans. Harry Zohn.
Selected Writings. Vol. 1, 1913-1926. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W.
Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. 253-63.
Brooks, Andrew. 1998. “Neuroscience versus Psychology in Freud.” Neuroscience of
the Mind on the Centennial of Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 843: 66-79.
Freud, Sigmund. 1966. Project for a Scientific Psychology [1895]. The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James
Strachey. Vol. 1. London: Hogarth Press. 283-397.
Geerardyn, Filip. 1997. Freud's Project: on the Roots of Psychoanalysis. London: Rebus Press.
Kitcher, Patricia. 1992. Freud's Dream. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lacan, Jacques. 1992. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960. The Seminar of
Jacques Lacan. Book 7. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. London:
Routledge.
廖朝陽。2002.〈可譯性與精英翻譯：談〈譯家的職責〉。《中外文學》31.6: 19-40。
Pribram, Karl H. 1998. “A Century of Progress?” Neuroscience of the Mind on the
Centennial of Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 843: 11-19.
--- and Merton M. Gill. 1976. Freud's 'Project' Re-Assessed: Preface to
Contemporary Cognitive Theory and Neuropsychology. New York: Basic Books.
Verhaeghe, Paul. 2001. Beyond Gender: From Subject to Structure. New York: Other Press.
