Indifference, the Vital Force
On the death of desire in psychoanalysis
Michelle Rada
Despite it being his most famous saying, there is no evidence Freud ever uttered the words “a cigar is sometimes just a cigar.” And yet this line gets stuck in our heads. It answers a wish as old as psychoanalysis itself: for something, anything, to escape its line of sight, to be exempt from examination by its ruthlessly infiltrating gaze. We so badly want this exception to exist—an object so inexorably literal, so categorically void of latent motives and meanings that it is of utter indifference to psychoanalysis—that we had to make it up. We’ve had to stage and restage Freud conceding a limit to the force with which desire shapes our world, or to what the hermeneutic apparatus of psychoanalysis can claim is, actually, a dick. To fulfill this wish is to safeguard against what to some might feel like an invasive, even paranoid vision of the world wholly engorged with desire.[1] Without carving out an exception, there is no guarantee that any old carcinogenic cylinder, designed to slide in and out of our mouths so we can intermittently grip it with our lips and suck on it, seen in the wrong light, or by the right analyst, won’t in the end turn out to be a dick—or a death wish, or, why not, both. It’s a brilliantly bad example. For Freud, a cigar is not and could never, not even sometimes, have been just a cigar: a meaningless throwaway detail, a matter of complete indifference. It is the object of the compulsion that literally killed him.
The enduring fable of the cigar that is a cigar that is not a phallus that is most definitely not a pipe shatters the psychoanalytic order of things. It effectively exempts two subjects from the dickful depths of desire: the subject matter at hand (a cigar so unequivocally self-identical it is immune to interpretation) and the subject of psychoanalysis, us; without qualifying for whom the cigar is what it is and what it certainly is not, Freud’s fabled catchphrase interpellates us all. A conceptual limit point of desire—the basic psychoanalytic index of meaning and of affect—is drawn, an outside of desire imagined. The fiction appeals and thus survives because it allows us to fantasize the existence of something that psychoanalysis notoriously, and for many quite exasperatingly, renders impossible: indifference. Indifference in all its speculative, absolute negativity—not as a symptom or sublimation of some other feeling, the placeholder for some deeper meaning—captures a particular form of nothingness that psychoanalysis cannot abide: it negates desire, tout court.
In psychoanalysis, nothing is always something. Forget the image of the cigar. That it apparently came from nowhere, from nothing Freud said or wrote: that must mean something. Parapraxes—meaningful errors, ever interpretable for traces of unconscious desire—point to a fundamental psychoanalytic resistance to indifference. Everything means something, even (especially) nothing. Behind the most unevocative silence, the least suggestive slip of the tongue, the most distorted detail from a half-forgotten dream, the flattest punchline, and the corniest social blunder looms the wishing subject, teeming with desire and its ineluctable promise to infuse even the tritest slivers of her life with meaning. As it is often historicized, the stage for the talking cure’s primal scene—Freud’s analysis of hysterics—was set by his unique refusal to dismiss patients’ words and to treat their inexplicable, contradictory, often unverifiable symptoms as matters of indifference to medical science. Under the banner of psychoanalysis, nothing—no word or lack thereof, no symptom, no psyche, no cigar—is indifferent.
In psychoanalysis, nothing is always something.
For however many intellectual breakups and institutional rivalries comprise the history of psychoanalysis, the Freudian gamble rests on one constant: the ever-renewable energy of unconscious desire. The lynchpin discovery (or invention, pick your poison) of psychoanalysis, the unconscious guarantees a permanent, constitutive antagonism at the heart of the subject: a part of us alien to us, whose cryptic messages we can only halfway and erroneously decipher, a certainty that on some level we contain contradictory, inscrutable, disturbingly overdetermined multitudes. Not unlike Freud drawing a smoke from his cigar, we are irrevocably at odds with ourselves—with our own words, our bodies, our beliefs, our milieus—and, per psychoanalysis, there is no cure for that. As captured in Freud’s reading of the generative porosity between heimlich (homely, familiar) and unheimlich (un-), the unconscious installs an unfamiliarity—a difference, a gap in knowledge, an incompleteness—at the heart, or in the home, of being. We are never wanting for lack.
From the Latin indifferentia, or want of difference, indifference delineates a horizon of impossibility for psychoanalysis: a lack of differentiation, or a lack of lack, coterminous with the death of desire. Per psychoanalysis, we are driven by a ruthless, unstoppable affirmation of the energetic thrust of our own desire (recall Freud’s adage that “we never discover a ‘no’ in the unconscious”). However irreconcilable our desires may appear to be with everything we consciously know and love—however badly we may want to negate, or say no to, desire—we are never wanting for wanting. In psychoanalysis, subjectivity is coextensive with the unconscious, which is coextensive with desire. That want (lack) and want (desire) cozily share a signifier is catnip for Lacanians; want is predicated on want. Psychoanalysis cannot abide indifference.
And yet, indifference courses through the subject of psychoanalysis.
Surfacing at critical yet fleeting moments in Freud’s writing, indifference functions as a kind of asymptotic limit for the psychoanalytic project that, in turn, guides its inquiries and desires. The notion of “indifferent psychical energy” (indifferente psychische Energie)—pure energy without an objective, without object—appears in Freud’s writing as early as 1914. While at times uncomfortable with the purely speculative nature of this concept, Freud also realized it was indispensable for his developing theory of desire, which radically departed from the bounds of biological necessity (the reproduction of the species) and utilitarian self-interest (individual survival). Even if it pushed him off the cliff edge of speculation, the notion of “indifferent psychical energy” also pushed Freud to understand desire beyond its objects, affect beyond attachment. This was a strange but somehow crucial idea that stuck with Freud through the introduction of the death drive in 1920—as he further pursued the possibility of objectless desire—and later, too, as he developed an expanded theory of the drives. Via drive theory, Freud incorporated his notion of energetic “indifference” to deliver what was perhaps the final death knell in psychoanalysis to an account of desire (and, relatedly, of sexual difference) in some way destined to map onto anatomy. Paradoxically, indifference—the negation of desire—was fundamental to the construction of desire in psychoanalysis.
A friend and colleague of Freud’s, Ernest Jones felt that theorizing the impossible, the annihilation of desire, was both intellectually and ethically vital for psychoanalysis. When he introduced the term aphanisis in 1927, Jones was hoping to capture an obliteration of the subject so extreme that it fashioned a universal: a death beyond anatomy’s part-objects, beyond what he saw as the “partial” and “phallo-centric” threat of castration. Jones wanted psychoanalysis to incorporate into its theory of psychical development the fear of the impossible—the dissolution of desire, aphanisis. Aphanisis, which Adam Phillips describes as a since “repressed concept,” was Jones’s attempt to course correct for what he saw as an exclusionary, sexist understanding of the ethical dimension of the subject in psychoanalysis, or of the superego, which for Freud depended on the onset and intensity of castration anxiety and the internalization of the authoritative, castigating image of the father through the traversal of the Oedipus complex. Yet Jones ultimately failed to traverse and transgress his own biases around sex and, specifically, the moral faculties of women. The possibility opened up by aphanisis for an expanded psychoanalytic account of the ethical subject—one not structured by the sadistic prohibitions and excisions of a castrating superego but, instead, by the threat of the annihilation of desire, or the lack of lack—remains untapped.
Jones was on the mark to intuit that indifference posed a crucial ethical problem, one that would loom ever larger for psychoanalysis and its subjects. Events of our own century have only borne this out, perhaps driving a revived critical and popular interest in varieties of indifference.[2] Vicky Lebeau has returned to Jones’s term, finding in its account of indifference culture-wide relevance: “The world itself, then, can be afflicted by aphanisis, a fundamental loss of opportunities for meaning and pleasure, that puts the possibility of living on hold.” Lebeau understands aphanisis beyond the individual psyche, as an apt descriptor for the kind of indifference rife under capitalism’s “culture of austerity.” In this culture of systemically inflicted anhedonia, ever-increasing power imbalances are perpetuated in part through a generalized “loss of interest” and pleasure in what makes life worth living, a form of indifference manufactured by those in power through the depletion of material support for social structures that nourish “our wish to find meaning in being alive.”
Writing in Lux, Natalie Adler diagnoses the signs of a “deep malaise” expressed as a generalized “denial of feeling” that characterizes the present moment. Adler’s catalogue of anhedonic trends includes recreational Ozempic use (along with its attendant cults of thinness and starvation) and the reactionary tradgirlies saturating social media with their galaxy-brained version of personal choice feminism, to which we might add, among other things, the continued chokehold minimalist-bleak greige continues to exert on clothing and design. “It’s giving,” Adler quips of our moment with perfectly online pitch, “nothing.” Yet if it is indeed giving nothing, it does not follow, as Adler stresses, that we should give nothing in response.
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One figure in particular stands out for confronting Freud with the possibility of not giving a fuck about anything. The narcissist, indifferent to the world because she’s satisfied with a singular attachment to the vacuum-sealed image of her self, appears to want (for) nothing.
In the 1914 essay “On Narcissism: an Introduction,” Freud pursues his developing theory of ego instincts and sexual instincts, which designate different forms and sources of desire with varying, often opposed aims. In brief, this division of the instincts provided an initial alternative to the unsatisfying explanations of self-preservation and the reproduction of the species as the springs of all desire—for what was turning out to be an increasingly complex psychoanalytic theory of the subject. Despite his initial instincts on the matter (Freud thought this would get him closer to biology—not so!), differentiating between the instincts eventually allowed Freud to think beyond a strictly utilitarian account of desire via the drive. The sexual instincts gave Freud the conceptual space to play with the idea of a form of desire that exceeds the individual, that contradicts the one-track goal of avoiding unpleasure for the sake of survival (the domain of the ego instincts) and the blatantly incomplete teleology of procreation (only partially the domain of the sexual instincts) in search of something else—or of nothing at all.
Freud’s problem (an evergreen one for the non-science of the unconscious) is that he builds this theory on equally shaky, speculative ground. Freud’s theory of ego/sexual instincts, as he passingly mentions in the narcissism essay, depends on the presumed existence of “an indifferent psychical energy” more primordial than object-based libidinal instincts, categorically untethered to any discernible object or goal. Freud characterizes this energy as indifferent because it doesn’t appear to care about where it’s headed, what it destroys along the way, what comes of the sheer force of its thrust, or about the specific content with which it is expressed. This is the narcissist’s insight: desire precedes and exceeds the objects to which it eventually attaches. Even though in secondary or symptomatic narcissism the subject effectively reifies her self into the object of her own desire (meaning there is an object attachment, it just happens to be the ego), this torsion of libidinal energy, manifested primarily as indifference to the external world, reveals to Freud the possibility of desire without object attachments or expressive content.
A year later, in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” Freud returns to indifference as the best yet still stubbornly speculative descriptor for a form of desire primary to affective life, which only later develops into object-based libido. Although the cliché probably precedes him,[3] Freud declares that indifference is the true opposite of love. He considers that while one opposite of love takes on the active-passive distinction (loving vs. being loved) and another adapts the semantic opposition of pleasure and unpleasure (love vs. hate), a third polarity of love designates the primary, essential antagonism around which the subject of psychoanalysis emerges: “Subject (ego)— Object (external world),” or love vs. indifference.[4] Indifference negates love writ large, or the entire structure of affective life and its ambivalent attachments: “loving and hating taken together” constitute the true polarity of indifference.[5] While Freud allows that indifference often appears simply as “a special case of hate or dislike” (in its symptomatic or partial sense), in its developmentally primary dimension (as “indifferent psychical energy”) it signifies the negation of affective life as characterized by object attachments. Indifference is coextensive with all that is fundamentally external to—yet pulsates within—the subject. In Freud’s writings, the term seems to characterize a version of desire distilled to pure form, of energy divested of thematic expression through specific objects.
Freud’s concept of “indifferent psychical energy” eventually makes its way into the theory of the drives. By 1920—in the wake of the First World War, faced with his own personal losses and patients suffering the psychical repercussions of surviving relentless detonations from technologies of mass death and humanity’s bottomless capacity for cruelty—Freud was in need of a new concept. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he introduces the death drive, a serious challenge to his own theory of the wish-fulfillment–bound subject. With the death drive, Freud envisioned, among other things, a boundless force surging not forward toward any imaginable death but backward, pulsating in circuits of return to inorganic matter, to nonbeing. To capture the abstracted, crystalline oblivion of the horizon of the drive’s returns, Tracy McNulty offers the Siberian steppe: “Against the usual idea of death as a breaking down of organic life, which is then destined to become fuel for other organisms, the frozen steppe figures a death that is not entropic, a death from which the very possibility of decomposition has been eliminated.” While this image of glacial stillness might at first appear to contradict the drive’s unbound energy, McNulty’s insight is that rather than “heat or movement,” the drive “relies upon what may be characterized as a mathematical rather than physical understanding of energy, which is virtual, immanent, and purely formal.” Literal death is far too noisy, too organic, too concrete, too thematic a condition to convey the kind of annihilation Freud was circling.[6]
Observing his grandson’s game of Fort/da, which serves as an initial diagram for the repetitive motions of the death drive, Freud reasons that little Ernst invents the game in the aftermath of a traumatic shock (what the child experiences as the loss of his mother, even if her disappearance is temporary), because he “cannot possibly have felt his mother’s departure as something agreeable or even indifferent.” Enacting a return to the traumatic moment in order to supposedly master it—to experience it as he never could, to avoid trauma’s psychically shattering affective implosion—the game momentarily stages an otherwise impossible, counterfactual experience. It acts out not a direct reversal in order to find the newly controlled loss “agreeable” rather than horrific, but the antithesis to the traumatic loss of a loved object—the truly impossible option, indifference. The death drive aims for silence, for nothing. For Freud the object of the drive, as Lacan puts it in Seminar XI, “is a matter of total indifference.”
The drive, as Lacan emphasizes, also stops at nothing. And it is precisely “the constancy of the thrust” of this objectless, unrhythmic energy of the drive that, per Lacan, “forbids any assimilation of the drive to a biological function, which always has a rhythm. The first thing Freud says about the drive is, if I may put it this way, that it has no day or night, no spring nor autumn, no rise and fall. It is a constant force.”
That in the relentless constancy of its indifference the drive cannot be reduced “to a biological function” is an insight of Freud’s vital for any liberatory understanding of sexuality in psychoanalysis. The idea of indifference as abstracted, contentless force allows Freud to think desire via the drive—beyond both its functional objectives (such as self-preservation and the reproduction of the species) and normative object attachments. Without this fundamental break with utilitarian and biological accounts of desire, there is no “psychoanalysis on the left.” Indifference, a death of desire coterminous with the annihilation of the subject, is crucial to Freud’s account of desire as the undying, relentless energetic thrust that drives the subject beyond the destiny of anatomy. In other words, desire harbors the inexorable force of its own negation: indifference.
Indifference, a death of desire coterminous with the annihilation of the subject, is crucial to Freud’s account of desire as the undying, relentless energetic thrust that drives the subject beyond the destiny of anatomy.
In 1923, in the wake of his foray into the mythical dimension of the drives, Freud returns to the initial notion from 1914 of “indifferent psychical energy” with renewed conviction and redoubled doubt. In The Ego and the Id, Freud integrates a revised drive theory into his account of the economy of affects,[7] noting that for any of it to hold he must assume—speculatively, beyond any reasonable expectation of proof—the existence of a force of indifference that precedes the psyche’s object-bound affective structure. “I am only putting forward a hypothesis,” Freud admits, “I have no proof to offer.” And yet, “we have reckoned as though there existed in the mind—whether in the ego or in the id—a displaceable energy, which indifferent in itself, can be added to a qualitatively differentiated erotic or destructive impulse, and augment its total cathexis. Without assuming the existence of a displaceable energy of this kind we can make no headway. The only question is where it comes from, what it belongs to, and what it signifies.”[8]
No answers ensue. Freud sits with the contradiction that even though he has “no proof to offer,” he must pursue an abyss of his own making as if emboldened by the deepest certainty: “It seems a plausible view that this displaceable and indifferent energy, which is no doubt active in both the ego and the id, proceeds from the narcissistic store of libido—that it is desexualized Eros.” With reference to the pleasure principle, the domain of Eros, Freud observes “a certain indifference as to the path along which the discharge takes place.” Using the example of analytic transference, which emerges in the consulting room regardless of its original object, Freud discerns that in erotic attachments “a peculiar indifference in regard to the object displays itself.” The force of indifference turns out not to be the sole domain of the death drive, as somehow differentiated from or opposed to Eros, but, as Lacan also emphasizes, it fundamentally grounds the Freudian theory of the drives. When he momentarily returns to the notion of indifferente psychische Energie in 1923, Freud can only reassert its vitality for the field, while repeatedly coming up against the limits of psychoanalytic knowledge.
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It’s as if annihilation was haunting the project of psychoanalysis itself, but, accordingly, any psychoanalytic concept for the annihilation of desire must remain a mythical one—indefinitely poised on the speculative edge of the field’s conditions of possibility. As other psychoanalysts inherited and contended with Freud’s myth of the drives, strangely, even symptomatically, this specter of annihilation passed through questions of gendered desire and its ends. With the introduction of his concept, aphanisis, Ernest Jones sought to enshrine equality between the sexes into psychoanalysis with a bold new program: anxiety for all. To do this, he proposed not merely an egalitarian redistribution of anxiety but a radical reframing of the terms of anxiety itself, from anxiety about castration to what he deemed its more gender-inclusive correlate—anxiety about the death of desire.
Jones lifts the term from Greek, where it appears in astronomy texts to describe fading stars. Rooted in aphanes, meaning “disappearance”—the negation of phane, or “having an appearance,” from bha, “to shine” or “to bring light”—aphanisis evokes both as a state of lacking brilliance and the process of an object’s disappearance or dissolution. Jones introduces his new concept in a paper entitled “The Early Development of Female Sexuality,” delivered in September 1927 at the Tenth International Congress of Psycho-Analysis, in the period of the “great debates.” During the 1920s and ’30s, analysts were openly questioning psychoanalytic concepts like castration anxiety and penis envy, which were seen as imposing heterosexist biases and relegating feminine sexuality to a conspicuously (even if often metaphorically) masculine, anatomically reductive model of sexuality. Aphanisis was intended to contribute a truly universal version of anxiety to the language of psychoanalysis, free of the biological and ideological trappings of the castration-based alternative. “Women suffer from dread,” Jones observes, aptly, “at least as much as men.”
What most bothered Jones was the decisive role castration anxiety played in the formation of the ethical dimension of the subject. In the Freudian narrative of psychosexual development, the onset of castration anxiety directly spurred the resolution of the Oedipal stage, which had to be overcome for the superego to crystallize and deliver its castigating, cruel brand of moral conscience. In other words, castration anxiety was a prerequisite for overcoming the Oedipal complex, which was a prerequisite for the emergence of the superego: voice of conscience, perennial psychical frenemy.
Two years before Jones presented his theory of aphanisis, Freud published a paper rather tellingly titled “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes.” “The difference between the sexual development of males and females” in the Oedipal stage, Freud argues, “is an intelligible consequence of the anatomical distinction between their genitals and of the psychical situation involved in it; it corresponds to the difference between a castration that has been carried out and one that has been merely threatened.” While in the normative masculine course of development the Oedipal complex is, Freud ventures, “literally smashed to pieces by the shock of threatened castration,” on the feminine side this process becomes compromised because castration has allegedly “already had its effect”; hence, anxiety around castration is weaker, less effective for smashing Oedipus to bits.
However we wish to cut it, Freud at least provisionally outlined an anatomically deterministic account of psychosexual formation, which was not without its due dose of misogyny. In the following passage from his 1925 essay, Freud momentarily reaffirms this conclusion, building up to a critical reversal in which he rebuts his own previous claim (even if he retroactively displaces the blame for crude biologism onto “the feminists”):
“I cannot evade the notion (though I hesitate to give it expression) that for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men. Their super-ego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men. Character-traits which critics of every epoch have brought up against women—that they show less sense of justice than men, that they are less ready to submit to the great exigencies of life, that they are more often influenced in their judgments by feelings of affection or hostility—all these would be amply accounted for by the modification in the formation of their super-ego which we have inferred above. We must not allow ourselves to be deflected from such conclusions by the denials of the feminists, who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth; but we shall, of course, willingly agree that the majority of men are also far behind the masculine ideal and that all human individuals, as a result of their bisexual disposition and of cross-inheritance, combine in themselves both masculine and feminine characteristics, so that pure masculinity and femininity remain theoretical constructions of uncertain content.”
While he supposedly hesitates to say it, Freud first doubles down on the idea that women’s moral development is inherently compromised as an anatomical necessity. Yet in a concluding 180° turn, he projects the error of biological essentialism—suddenly identified as an error—onto the feminists and their unnuanced demands for equality. Freud reasons that the sexual binary is not an empirical fact but an inherently unstable “theoretical” and social construct, approaching something closer to the idea that sexual difference as such (not reducible to anatomical difference) is constitutive of psychical life. “For Freud,” as Juliet Mitchell puts it, “it is of course never a question of arguing that anatomy or biology is irrelevant, it is a question of assigning them their place. He gave them a place—it was outside the field of psychoanalytic enquiry.” As Lacan spent his entire career repeating to anyone who would listen, only bad, unrigorous, unpsychoanalytic readers of Freud—opponents and followers—thought otherwise, and it was their mistaken understanding that so plagued and threatened the field from all sides. It was in this conceptual minefield of error and contradiction surrounding Freud’s biologism vis-à-vis castration anxiety that Jones announced his intervention at the Tenth International Congress.
Duly, Jones affirms that psychoanalytic theory imposes an “unduly phallo-centric view” on questions of anxiety and sexuality. He boldly proposes that, because of the “all-important part normally played in male sexuality by the genital organs,” psychoanalysts (mostly men) uncritically perpetuated a “fallacy” around castration anxiety that “make[s] us equate castration with the abolition of sexuality altogether.” As exceptions to this specious phallic rule, Jones offers men who “wish to be castrated” for sexual and other reasons (and whose “sexuality certainly does not disappear with the surrender of the penis”) and women, for whom “the whole penis idea is always partial and mostly secondary in nature.” As Jones saw it, analysts had failed to account for the fact that “in both sexes castration is only a partial threat, however important a one, against sexual capacity and enjoyment as a whole.” Jones grounded his critique on the claim that castration, like “the whole penis idea,” was structurally partial. He, on the other hand, craved a universal.
Jones was after a concept that captured the total annihilation of desire. For this he required an account of sexuality beyond biology, such that decimating desire would deliver a kind of death not reducible—not even metaphorically—to anatomy’s part objects. For Jones, this concept had to encompass an absolute threat to sexuality as that which is precisely lacking in the subject (even if Jones eventually fails to stand by the implications of his own conceptual desires, he and Lacan were at moments closer than either of the two might have wished). Enter aphanisis: “the total, and of course permanent, extinction of the capacity (including opportunity) for sexual enjoyment.” Jones posits that anxiety surrounding this form of death originates with adults’ negation of the basic existence of sexuality in children, imposing a sense of “indefinite postponement” that for children translates to “permanent refusal.” In this way, aphanisis constellates a differently dreadful horizon for the anxiety-inducing fantasy that instigates the development of guilt and conscience in children: the annihilation of the capacity for sexual enjoyment from within the subject, or the death of desire.
While Freudian castration anxiety is spurred by external prohibitions on sexual acts and fantasies—whose transgression results in sexual impotence and social exclusion—aphanisis stems from an absolute negation of sexuality that threatens the subject with the extinction of desire. Castration anxiety is rooted in a threat that, however devastating, is formally partialized—from penises to teeth to eyes, limbs, noses, nails, fingers, hair, and so forth—and functions by expanding this partial object to signify the traumatic site of an earlier loss. Aphanistic anxiety, on the other hand, describes a negative threat, a loss of nothing in particular—or nothingness in particular—that threatens to extinguish the subject’s internal difference, sexuality in all its abyssal abstraction. Aphanisis spells total, permanent indifference: the annihilation of the subject as a desiring subject.
But Jones ultimately fails to chart a course for the psychoanalytic subject not run aground by anatomy. While his explicit aim was to provide an alternative to castration anxiety abstracted from the body and its vicissitudes, Jones concludes that the structure and symptomatology of aphanisis varies according to biological sex. Jones finally abandons his initial search for a universal and returns to the security of (what he understood to be) Freud’s domain. “It is well known that the morality of the world,” Jones rehearses the opening of the passage by Freud above, “is essentially a male creation, and—what is much more curious—that the moral ideals of women are mainly copied from those of men.”
Even though the “great debates” were influenced by feminist thought and motivated by the wish to expand psychoanalysis beyond its phallic myopia, the master debaters largely failed to see beyond theirs. As Mitchell points out, they limited the scope of their critiques to uncovering “the nature of female sexuality” rather than turning to “the construction of sexual difference.” “Women,” Mitchell notes, echoing the concluding reversal from Freud’s essay, “had to have something of their own. The issue subtly shifts from what distinguishes the sexes to what has each sex got of value that belongs to it alone.” Herein lies the great mistake of the great debates, and Jones’s contribution was no exception. Hence, aphanisis suffered the ironic fate, as Adam Phillips describes it, of a “repressed concept” in psychoanalysis.
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Of all the people to retrieve aphanisis from repressed oblivion, it was his nemesis—Lacan, whom Jones in 1936 dismissed offstage ten minutes into his talk on the mirror stage—who gave Jones’s term renewed relevance in an evolving psychoanalytic lexicon.
In his lecture on the subject of “alienation” from 1964, collected in Seminar XI, Lacan plots the formation of the subject as a process of confronting an irreparable loss. In this process, the subject faces a lack that is at once inherent to him but also situated within the field of the Other, upon whose elusive desire the subject’s desire depends. This lack harkens back to an even “earlier lack” of being trapped in a body whose reproductive function falls short of immortality. It is, of course, quite the opposite; we will all die, and no amount of procreating can change that. Understandably, because the subject exists in this state of irreparable lack—because he is fundamentally incomplete—he latches onto myths of love as the solution to the trauma of loss. Such fables allow him to fantasize a complimentary love object that could make him whole again, and that, in this transcendent state of narcissistic totality, death might cease to encroach on every waking second of his constitutively deficient existence. But this doesn’t come to pass. The subject cannot transcend his loss because it is his subjecthood; he exists in the field of the Other’s desire, and he will die. The process of this perpetual, agonizing confrontation with lack is, broadly, what Lacan calls alienation. Aphanisis, then, names the horizon of total death that alienation reveals to the subject. “I have called this movement,” Lacan writes of aphanisis, “the fading of the subject.”
Lacan was, understandably, quite willing to shine a light on Jones’s misstep and on the perfect irony of Jones, in error, succumbing to the authority of his own phallic figure (Freud) while explicitly trying to depose the phallus. He presents Jones’s term anew:
“One analyst felt this at another level and tried to signify it in a term that was new, and which has never been exploited since in the field of analysis—aphanisis, disappearance. Ernest Jones, who invented it, mistook it for something rather absurd, the fear of seeing desire disappear. Now, aphanisis is to be situated in a more radical way at the level at which the subject manifests himself in this movement of disappearance that I have described as lethal.”
Aphanistic oblivion names a state of total indifference.
Despite lightly mocking Jones, Lacan stresses the significance of aphanisis. Yet he rejects the premise of Jones’s inquiry, of finding an anatomically inclusive or positive, empirically universal analogue to castration. Correcting for Jones’s biologism, Lacan sees how the disappearance of desire might be a theoretically expansive, even necessary concept for psychoanalysis. With the notion of fading—the total disappearance of the subject, including the disappearance of the subject’s lack—Lacan turns Jones’s positive universal into a negative one. Because for Lacan sexuality is precisely not reducible to biology, the death of desire entails the fading of the subject through the subtraction of that which is lacking in the subject, the annihilation of the subject’s constitutive difference. Aphanistic oblivion names a state of total indifference.
Situated as she is within the field of the Other, the subject can only disappear for someone else. Yet with his reboot of aphanisis, perhaps wishing to further oust Jones from his own concept, Lacan rejects the dimension of aphanisis explicitly linked to the structure of sexual difference (for Jones, specifically, to femininity). Because he sees Jones erroneously reproducing a naturalized, unpsychoanalytic account of sexuation—because Jones got his critique of castration anxiety, or of Freud, wrong—Lacan dismisses the connection between aphanisis and the desire for a feminine superego that was at the center of Jones’s inquiry. Per Jones: “What precisely in women corresponds with the fear of castration in men?” Answering this was the pursuit, if not fulfillment, of Jones’s original wish to establish an ethical necessity for psychoanalysis, yet this might not be exactly the question to ask. Or it could be asked, differently. After all, why must there by a perfect and equivalent superegoic castration anxiety for men and women alike? For Lacan, the way the subject appears or disappears for someone else turns exactly on the difference—between men and women, as you like—in how that subject’s desire appears, singularly and exquisitely.
At the close of her field-defining book from 1994, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, Joan Copjec agrees. Copjec observes how the failure to produce a compelling account of the superego not singularly linked to the onset of castration anxiety has left psychoanalytic theory with a glaring problem. To shed light on this theoretical gap, Copjec works with Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, which delineate the two ways we exist in relation to the Other, or the two ways the sexual relation falters and falls short of making the subject whole. Here, crucially, there is no question of biological (or any) complementarity between feminine and masculine polarities. To account for the two ways sexuality is fundamentally in error according to Lacan, Copjec assigns each side of the formulas its own mode of inauthenticity or failure: she aligns the masculine side with “imposture” and the feminine with “masquerade.” On the masculine side, castration anxiety organizes the universe of impostors, threatening impotence and social exclusion upon the subject’s inevitable failure to meet the superego’s cruel demands and unbearable prohibitions. Alternately, the feminine universe is defined by the evident emptiness of masquerade: it coalesces around the impossibility of establishing its own existence and enforcing any exclusionary limits, or of demarcating an outside (this is why Lacan describes this universe with the compound “not-all,” pas-tout). “Lacan defines man,” Copjec explains, “as the prohibition against constructing a universe and woman as the impossibility of doing so. The sexual relation fails for two reasons: it is impossible and it is prohibited.” But while the masculine structure of prohibition (castration anxiety) is also that of the superego, the feminine formulas, as Copjec concludes, contain no such theoretical analogue linking them to the development of the ethical dimension of the subject:
“For we now appear to lend support to the notorious argument that presents woman as constitutionally indisposed to developing a superego and thus susceptible to an ethical laxity. In response to this, all we can suggest at this point is that the field of ethics has too long been theorized in terms of this particular superegoic logic of exception or limit. It is now time to devote some thought to developing an ethics of inclusion or of the unlimited, that is, an ethics proper to the woman. Another logic of the superego must commence.”
Thus, in this indirect way, Copjec returns to the very problem that preoccupied Jones: the possibility of a structuring logic for the ethical subject of psychoanalysis other than that of castration anxiety.
Like love, indifference and its psychoanalytic supplement, aphanisis, are concepts through which psychoanalysis finds desire energetically pulsing beyond the lone subject.
As Copjec suggests, following Lacan’s formulas allows us to at least begin to fantasize about an ethical order beyond that of castration. Because the feminine formulas fail to delineate a universe in the first place, or because a lack of borders renders any totality impossible, all subjects are included insofar as all also inevitably fall outside of the nonexistent limits of the world—meaning, paradoxically, that inclusion is predicated on mutual, collective exclusion. When all are excluded, castration’s punishing logic of “exception or limit” disintegrates. If the lethal horizon of castration anxiety is exclusion from a real limit demarcating the collective, then in order to pursue Copjec’s moving formulation—“an ethics of inclusion or of the unlimited”—we must also imagine a differently dreadful axis of inexistence with which to structure it. What, then, constitutes the annihilation of the subject under a symbolic logic that substitutes prohibition with impossibility? Lacan’s formulas and Copjec’s unparalleled engagement with them suggest this anxiety-inducing horizon should represent an impossible form of nonbeing for the subject of psychoanalysis—the lack of lack (per the feminine formulas, exclusion from the constitutive exclusion that structures the universe) or, in a word, indifference. A possibility presents itself in Lacan avec Jones: aphanisis. If we recover the detail of Jones’s aphanisis Lacan suppressed from his account of “the fading of the subject”—of aphanisis as the feminine analogue of castration—while following Lacan’s critique of Jones’s biologism, we can at least begin to pursue Copjec’s closing mandate from Read My Desire.
Jones was, after all, onto something: the only fate worse than castration, in psychoanalysis, is indifference. To repeat Freud’s now clichéd formulation from 1915, indifference is the true opposite of love. As a defining impossibility for the psychoanalytic subject, indifference also constitutes her: we find this in Freud’s account of “indifferent psychical energy,” the speculative principle undergirding a psychoanalytic theory of desire that surpasses (and divests us of normative fantasies related to) biological and utilitarian essentialisms. And while psychoanalysis similarly strips us of the fantasy of love—as the union through which two complimentary opposites repair the gaps left by their losses and become whole again—it sustains love, like indifference, as a vital condition of impossibility.
In psychoanalysis, all roads to the unconscious are paved by desire. Like love, indifference and its psychoanalytic supplement, aphanisis, are concepts through which psychoanalysis finds desire energetically pulsing beyond the lone subject. As the philosopher Georges Bataille speculates in his 1955 monograph on Édouard Manet, clearly channeling (and coming up against) the language of the drive, “it often happens that indifference is revealed as a vital force, or the vehicle of a force, otherwise held in check, which finds an outlet through indifference.” Freud in part held onto the notion of indifferent energy as desire’s primordial form because he saw it as a theoretical guarantee that the subject in some way fundamentally, vitally exceeds herself. Indifference and its differently impossible polarity, love, asymptotically orient the psychoanalytic subject as a desiring subject and, not unrelatedly, as an ethical subject—as less-than-one, among others.
[1] In this vein, I consider “a cigar is sometimes just a cigar” a kind of phantasmatic precursor to the equally puzzling example of impenetrable literalness—ghosts—from Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s prominent “surface reading” essay, which argues for an explicitly anti-psychoanalytic modality of just reading for literary and cultural studies: “Just reading sees presences, not absences, and lets ghosts be ghosts, instead of saying what they are ghosts of.” Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 13.
[2] See, for example, Hannah Wang’s “The Age of Anesthesia,” in Post45 for an analysis of the various iterations of what Wang calls the “anesthetic feminism” of our time. Recent scholarly monographs have also taken up indifference, broadly conceived, to analyze political and social contours of our time, notably Frank Ruda’s Indifference and Repetition; or, Modern Freedom and its Discontents (Fordham University Press, 2024), Naisargi N. Davé’s Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023), and Madhavi Menon’s Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
[3] While I have found no definitive origin of the cliché, iterations of it were published before Freud’s 1915 essay. In George Bernard Shaw’s 1897 play, The Devil’s Disciple, for example, Minister Anderson constructs a similar formulation of the relationship between love, hate, and in-difference (where love and hate are linked, and indifference signifies the opposite of both): “The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity. After all, my dear, if you watch people carefully, you’ll be surprised to find how like hate is to love.” Project Gutenberg: www.gutenberg.org/files/3638/3638-h/3638-h.htm.
[4] While Freud initially numbers indifference third among love’s polarities, he subsequently bumps it up to first, lending, per James Strachey, “indifference the first place as being the first to appear in the course of development.”
[5] Freud, “Indifferenz oder Gleichgültigkeit,” Gesammelte Werke, 10:225.
[6] In later works, Freud will describe the death drive as “mute” in nature (The Ego and the Id) and as working “silently within the organism” (Civilization and its Discontents).
[7] The shift at this juncture in Freud’s economic theory of the affects is best captured by the changing concept of ambivalence. In the initial economic theory, ambivalence names a transformation within a single affective cathexis from, say, equal parts love to equal parts hatred. Once Freud develops the theory of the drives—which involves the simultaneous, intertwined existence of the drives of death and Eros—he proposes distinct but interwoven sources of affective energy. With this shift, ambivalence entails competing yet concurrent forces of attachment and destruction, rather than a single energetic stream that turns into its opposite in an economically fixed system.
[8] As James Strachey points out in a footnote, in the previous, uncorrected English version of the volume, “indifference” was erroneously translated as “neutral,” though “indifferent” is true to the German and references the same concept from “On Narcissism.”