Ethics of the Tangent

Though language may be useless, for

No words men write can stop the war

Or measure up to the relief

Of its immeasurable grief,

Yet truth, like love and sleep, resents

Approaches that are too intense,

And often when the searcher stood

Before the Oracle, it would

Ignore his grown-up earnestness

But not the child of his distress,

For through the Janus of a joke

The candid psychopompos spoke.

Letter to Elizabeth Mayer (January 1, 1940) by W.H. Auden

Lamenting the impotence of language brings Auden to distinguish between an  approach to truth that is “too intense” and something different. The intense approach is a direct address that fails in part because of the ways words fail. “No words men write can stop the war” ...this however does not imply that we should stop writing. Likewise, we don’t give up on truth, love, or sleep simply because we can’t make them obey through sheer force of will. Instead, the oracle is invoked, along with the kind of speech that embraces discernment, paradox, humor, and equivocation. A less intense, less direct approach allows for a relation to what is essential without “scaring off” the truth. For the purposes of the psychoanalytic clinic, the truth at stake is, of course, the truth of the unconscious, which we can only ever approach in a less direct way. Lacan writes in Seminar 16 (p.208) that “...to run straight at the obstacles placed before you is to behave just like a bull. The point is to find a different path ... not to be especially interested in the obstacles.” The prototypical example of the indirect approach in psychoanalysis is the fundamental rule. The patient’s free association is an act of speech that is not “too intense” and the analyst’s evenly suspended attention is an act of listening that specifically prioritizes the indirect.

In Seminar 11 (p.102) Lacan makes a brief reference to the Arago phenomenon, a concept linking the optical and astronomical fields that refers to the experience in which stars of a certain brightness can only be seen using peripheral vision, and that they functionally disappear when stared at directly. When we, as analysts, look towards the unconscious, the clearest image we have access to is not direct; it is by looking “to one side.” However, further discernment is necessary because the signifier “indirect” is problematic. Direct and indirect appear far too binary; indirect being nothing more than a negation of direct. Furthermore the analyst must direct the treatment! In order to pursue a dialectic between these poles I chose a new signifier: the “tangent”.

In conversational terms a tangent is a digression or a divergence that is deemed to be irrelevant or off-topic. Taken to an extreme this reaches the definition of what psychiatry would call a symptom named “Tangential Speech” which is “a communication disorder in which the train of thought of the speaker wanders and shows a lack of focus” Abrupt digressions and superficially irrelevant topics are precisely the avenues the analyst seeks. In this sense psychoanalysis is a practice of tangential listening. Tangent comes from the Latin tangere (meaning “to touch”). The same root is present in the words TANGIBLE, TACTILE, and CONTACT. The essence of free association is that ideas, affects, and experiences are allowed to touch, to establish links and re-establish repressed links. The psychoanalytic frame sustains the possibility of unplanned contact between distinct and ostensibly unrelated elements of experience. Touch is also linked with several of the mathematical definitions of the word tangent. A line that is tangent to a circle is by definition perpendicular to the radius of the circle, in other words the tangent always sustains a particular geometric orientation in the direction of the center of the circle.

Although the “grown-up earnestness” (as Auden puts it) is not completely ignored by the analyst, it is a decidedly lower priority. Any listening that could be called tangential does not prioritize the conscious narrative, but instead keeps the treatment oriented always in the direction of the unconscious while the conscious narrative is reduced to a reference point. A line that is tangent to a curve touches that curve at exactly one point but does not cross the curve or intersect it. If a line intersected a curve at more than one point then it would define a shape within that curve as opposed to defining only one single point of contact.

A prototypical example of a tangential intervention on the part of the clinician would be to select and repeat a single signifier from the speech of the patient, which is a tangent in that it insists on a single point of contact (a signifier) without going beyond a certain boundary (eg: asserting a specific signified for that signifier) which would, in other words, define a shape. In this sense the tangential is also linked with abstinence, because it avoids a certain kind of imposition or impingement.

The possible failures of abstinence help clarify the concept of the tangential as a dialectic between direct and indirect, and also help place it in the context of ethics. The failure of abstinence might take the form of the analyst as colonizer, planting the flag of signified and surrogate. In “Observation on Transference Love” Freud has not made Lacan’s more refined distinctions between need, demand, and desire, and he does not use the word Wunsch, but desire is undeniably present in the idea Freud offers of allowing the consequences of lack to persist in the patient’s experience as an engine for the work. Addressing this lack directly would be both futile and disingenuous. The tangential path outlines a space in which desire may unfold and be further articulated. The ethical task of analysis is to preserve the space of desire and the tangential is entirely in accord with this effort. Another form that the failure of abstinence may take is the descent into a caricature of neutrality, a jouissance of the indirect, an unethical obscurantism. Colette Soler takes up the term “indifference” under the heading of "Benevolent Neutrality” in her explanation of the thematic axes for the upcoming international meeting. The concept of the tangent responds productively to the problem of indifference insofar as it sustains a specific orientation towards the “center of the circle”, which is the unconscious, or the Real in other variations. The tangential approach requires attention and interest to its direction and surroundings. Lacan says in Radiophonie that “The approach to the Real is narrow. And it is from haunting it that psychoanalysis defines itself.” Haunting perhaps in the sense of frequenting, but also in the sense of taking an intense interest. This narrow approach is the tangential approach and a psychoanalytic ethic emerges by moving away from indifference and finding a path that retains its focus without mistaking the obstacle for the goal. These problematic vicissitudes of abstinence are useful as reference points, but only as pitfalls to avoid. Lacan’s axiom of directing the treatment and not the patient gives us something to avoid and something to aim for. The tangent offers the possibility of stating our aims in positive terms.

Directing the treatment requires the analyst to pay with his judgement, he must risk an interpretation. In order to intervene tangentially the analyst must discern by, eg: selecting a signifier from those presented by the patient in a given session and this moment of selection carries the work beyond indifference and into action. This discernment is necessary for a tangential act. To be a tangent, the line can only touch the curve at exactly one point, and choosing that point is the cut that sustains desire by allowing the subject to encounter lack. The tangential can only be ethical insofar as it prioritizes desire, not just in the abstract, as a static moral position, but desire in motion. The ethics of the tangent is grounded in the distinction between a dynamic act and a deadening fixity. Desire is metonymic, and movement is its natural state, and in particular it circles around Das Ding. It does not approach directly, for then it risks falling into jouissance, but instead it keeps its distance. Therefore: the tangential is ethical in the same way sublimation is ethical. Sublimation represents a tangential approach to Das Ding that sustains the velocity of desire while leaving the veil over the Real intact. The tangential relation describes the way that sublimation is zielgehemmt ("aim-inhibited") or "diverted from its aim” while still maintaining a relation to that aim. Colette Soler highlights Lacan’s link between an ethics of desire and an ethics of silence, silent because desire is fundamentally unconscious and unspeakable. Naturally, this silence is not total silence; the analyst speaks, but tangentially. In the direct approach the unconscious remains silent. In the state of indifference the analyst is reduced to silence. Either way we hear only superficial chatter. However, if we approach tangentially then we allow the gravity of the unconscious to pull us into its orbit, and we can elevate the superficial chatter to the status of Das Ding and speech becomes rich with allusion.

In his book “5 Concepts Proposed to Psychoanalysis” François Jullien dedicates a chapter to the concept of Allusion. He describes how, in a certain tradition of Chinese painting, the everyday is elevated to a more dynamic status. He writes: “when commissioned to paint a temple, the scholar's brush refrained from depicting its architecture, its walls and its spires: for to paint it as an object would be to limit (from the outset)” a certain dimension that it embodies. Instead “the artist sketches... "mountains" and "waters"—the tensions animating the landscape—with, barely standing out, on the path that zigzags up the hillside or in the shade of a leafy valley, the discreet figure of a monk chopping wood or carrying water: an indication that a temple is nearby, which it would be futile to try to depict and define—to appropriate. But this fleetingly glimpsed silhouette gestures towards it, even in its most mundane labor, referring to it without referring, without freezing it into a "something"—significant and definite—which would, consequently, lose its charge.” Jullien specifically opposes Allusion to Allegory in part because Allegory requires a rupture between the story itself and what it is intended to mean (its moral). The very fact that there is a moral to the story makes Allegory incompatible with the tangential approach. Allusion is aligned with a tangential approach but is not sufficient. Jullien describes the proliferation of allusion as a slippery slope that risks avoiding all possibility of contradiction. He dedicates a separate chapter to a concept (or group of concepts) close to what I am calling the tangential. The chapter is called, in French, “Le biais, l’oblique, l’influence” Oblique and influence are relatively simple cognates with their English counterparts, but the link between biais and bias is more complex. In the 16th century the English language borrowed the word from French and the meanings (at the time) overlapped in the concrete physical sense of cutting “on the bias” to indicate a diagonal slant, cutting, eg, against the natural grain of wood, fabric, or food. The tangential intervention cuts against the grain of the Imaginary. This is the act of discernment required in order to remain ethically oriented to the Real.

In the preface to the second edition of The Lord of The Rings (published in 1966) J. R. R. Tolkien clearly states that the books are NOT an allegory for World War II. He writes:

...I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

Allegory as described here is precisely unethical by Lacanian standards because it endorses the sovereign good, and becomes complicit in the attempts of morality to dominate interpretation. On the other hand, the “freedom of the reader” sustains the “varied applicability” of history, which is ethical in its support of the play of desire. This variability embodies metonymy and allows desire to continue in its trajectories. History in this sense is also tangential in that it does not impose a signified and insists on the necessity of discernment instead. On the side of the patient, although the doom of choice is heavy, it is accompanied by the freedom to genuinely examine one's own history. This does require a cut from the allegories about life with which patients begin the treatment. History is not something we can hold onto. Freud makes this clear in Screen Memories when he writes that: “There is ... no guarantee of the data produced by our memory.” We cannot engage with history without the flow of interpretation. On the side of the analyst, the “varied applicability” of history is the case-by-case determination of how theory might be relevant in the clinic. The allegory then is the nonexistent sexual relation, it is the menu in a time of famine, it is the joke explained before it is told. The tangential, in contrast, is like the martial artist in motion, taking himself off the direct line of an attack in order to choose a response from an angle that allows for ongoing evolution, as opposed to stalemate, which is where we find ourselves when we approach obstacles bullishly.

The stalemate is a situation defined by the impossibility of any movement that is of the order of competition. Other kinds of movement might still be possible. The concept of the tangent expands on the link Freud made between Education and Psychoanalysis as “impossible professions”. The tangent is nothing less than a way to navigate that precise impossibility. For several years I have been teaching psychoanalytic theory using a text called “The Mushroom at the End of the World”. The book contains no direct references to psychoanalysis, psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic theory, or the clinic, and yet the book is deeply psychoanalytic. The material in this book is related to psychoanalysis in innumerable ways, and by placing the material of the book in provocative contact with psychoanalytic theory, the students in the class are able to generate many new and productive links. It has been my experience that this tangential approach to teaching provides something unavailable through a direct and explanatory approach. I recently found retroactive support for these efforts in a letter (27 July, 1916) of Freud’s to Lou Andreas-Salomé where he writes of an “indirect approach which educates rather than lectures the reader.” By aiming for the transmission of psychoanalysis via a tangential approach it becomes possible to lose interest in the obstacles that made Freud deem it impossible.

I’ve been slowly working on a translation of the François Jullien book, and I would like to propose translation as yet another impossible profession! Although Walter Benjamin is not psychoanalytic theory, it is tangentially related. In his essay “The Task of the Translator” Benjamin makes reference to the tangent:

Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point, with this touch, rather than with the point, setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity, a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux.

In this essay Benjamin used the concept of the tangent as a way to work towards a dialectic between freedom and fidelity, which is notably resonant with the definition of the ethics of the tangent as I have proposed them here. What is at stake is again a dialectic between movement and stasis. Benjamin creates an idiosyncratic definition of “sense” here, which I won’t try to explain but the general idea is that a rigid fidelity to signification constitutes a position that is problematic in the way allegory is problematic, like a moral stance that is founded on the sovereign good. Instead he offers “sense” as a point of orientation that allows something other than the literal to be transmitted. Benjamin’s version of freedom is one that does not collapse into indifference, but sustains a tangential orientation to the truth of the original. If, as Freud puts it, the unconscious is like a "foreign language" (SE XIX, p. 112) that consciousness (or the ego) cannot understand, then the project of translation comes into better focus. Benjamin’s allergy to the literal is akin to the psychoanalytic position that truth can never be fully spoken and that it is only through the act of speaking that unconscious truth is created and becomes legible at all. For Benjamin there is a renunciation of the comforts of the literal for the sake of transmission, and for Lacan sublimation is ethical insofar as direct access to the Real is renounced. The sovereign good can be seen as a fantasy of literal translation that clings desperately to the reference point of normality and that fails because words fail. Sublimation, on the other hand, disdains normality and succeeds precisely because words fail. It operates like a prism, diffracting the literal into multifaceted truth. In terms of geometry and calculus, the line that is perpendicular to the tangent line at a given point on a circle and that is oriented directly towards the center of the circle (one might correctly call it the opposite of a tangent) is known as a “normal”.