The Silence of the Galaxy
The Chilean psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco, based on his observations of schizophrenic patients, has envisioned a kind of topographical map of the psyche consisting of a structure interspersed with five strata. While these strata run along an axis, they are dynamic in the sense that they are superimposed upon one another. The first stratum is equivalent to ego consciousness and rational thought and is predominated by asymmetrical thinking. This is a kind of thinking that is characterized by its high degree of organization: indeed, we might claim that it is defined by categorical organization alone—what Matte Blanco designates Aristotelian logic, and that is, in my view, the logic of difference.
Subsequent strata are characterized by increasing degrees of symmetrical thinking: this is the logic of the unconscious and the primary process respectively—based as it is on the dream logic of association, condensation, and displacement. The deepest strata is described as having “pure indivisibility,” where “the endless number of things tend to become, mysteriously, only one thing.” This region is characterized as having what Matte Blanco calls the “peace of the depth.” He claims that while many assume, wrongly, that the feelings of schizophrenics are characterized only by their intensity, he finds that past a certain degree of symmetrical thinking, “schizophrenics tend to feel at ease” and “frequently are quiet, ‘serene’ people.” There is little aggression in these strata; for “Intense aggression requires a good amount of asymmetry.”
What are we to make of this?
While I am unaware that Jean Laplanche ever mentions Matte Blanco, his own vision of Freud’s economic drive theory bears some remarkable similarities to Matte Blanco’s strata of symbolic logic, where on the one hand there is bound energy, that energy proper to the ego and to asymmetrical thinking, and on the other hand unbound, free flowing energy, the symmetrical logic of the unconscious. Like Matte-Blanco’s strata, the ego and the unconscious are superimposed on one another. Laplanche: “The ego comprises elements which are both more and less bound, in the same way that in the deepest layers of the id there is more that is unbound, but also, closer to the surface, there are some more bound elements.”
Likewise, Laplanche, based on his life-long translation and close reading of the Freudian corpus, posits one drive—the sexual drive—and finds that this drive, in its most radical form as the so-called death drive, is not a drive of destructive rage, as the Klienians (and perhaps the Moderns) like to imagine: but is rather the exact opposite—the drive towards zero. The death drive is “the movement towards Nirvana; no longer death wrought by the drive, but the death of the drive, the negation of desire. It is towards that vision that we are drawn by an expression like ‘the silence of the death drive’ which evokes, once more, the silence of the galaxy”
While on the one hand a foray may be made downwards into the timeless, amorphous slipstream movement of the furthest reaches of psyche, that zone, or faculty, ruled by the nirvana principle, we may also travel upwards into the categorical asymmetries of the specular ego and its attendant aggressions; while always keeping in mind of course that an abysmal tranquility surrounds us and inhabits us at all times. The drive, in this conception, can be imagined as a contiguous pressure (a demand for work, as Freud says), against which the ego is always struggling. The ego is run-through with this drive energy; the continual gravity of the drive is precisely what gives form to the ego. Like those fish who live in the deepest reaches of the ocean, the ego is formed by the constant pressures of the drive. The deep-water fish, when removed from its high-pressure environment, loses all coherence, is reduced to a formless mass.
We might say then that there are two forces at play, the unbinding force of the drive—symmetry—and the binding force of the ego’s attempt to maintain its coherence against the drive—the forces of asymmetry operating against a difference that is found within and without. This force of the ego has no definition outside of its sea of drive forces; the ego defends against the drive (pure difference) while also being animated and determined by it. From out of the unilateral determination by the drive, the ego concocts duality as a means to organize what seems like chaos.
In the process of defense the ego simulates the pure indivisibility of the unconscious and polices this false state of unity with aggression; this unary state is otherwise known as narcissism (Or what Laruelle terms the Principle of Sufficient World).
Nevertheless, the struggle of the ego-self to maintain its own self-sufficiency is, in the end—as it says in the book of Ecclesiastes—vanity of vanities. All is vanity, for despite all the ego’s desperate clinging to asymmetry, despite the ego’s seeming autonomy, the ego is riven by the drive at every point, and must inevitably collapse back into symmetrical indivisibility again, retuning once more to the living silence of the galaxy.
