Once purpose is settled, calm becomes possible.1
Kokoro Connect tells the story of the five members of the Cultural Research Club at the private Yamaboshi High School. They face a succession of impossible, mysterious phenomena orchestrated by Heartseed: body-swapping, the release of impulses, time reversal, emotion transmission… As they work through these extraordinary events, their friendship gradually grows.
The part of Kokoro Connect that hurts the most is probably the emotion-transmission arc. Emotion transmission means that the five club members can randomly hear one another’s unspoken thoughts and feelings. Its most obvious effect, of course, is that we have no privacy whatsoever, and so confront the reality of the neighbor as an abyss. But what deserves greater attention here is the collapse and reconstruction of Iori Nagase’s self.
Iori grew up in a single-parent household, and her mother remarried several times. Faced with a complicated, shifting environment and a stepfather who had shown violent tendencies, Iori adopted a strategy of role-playing. Playing the different roles others expected of her in different settings immediately brought her a measure of liberation and allowed a self to take shape. She did not have to think about who she was, what kind of person she was, or what she was going to do. She needed only to occupy different positions in the intersubjective symbolic network through role-playing for a self to come into being. What matters here is that the roles we play and the self are not opposites. Playing a role means occupying a position in an intersubjective symbolic network, and it is precisely through this performance, through something external, that the self enters our inner life. We first pretend to be something; only then do we really become it.
As Hegel puts it, the pure I, this empty inwardness, must first enter into existence and become an object: inwardness must in turn become externality before the I can acquire determination. Yet a difference always remains between the ego and the “true self.”2 In everyday life, the ego merely conceals this difference through an illusory identification with a continuous self. Lacan describes an ego that, to display the distinctive character of its existence, goes so far as to disguise itself, creating an illusion in which it no longer recognizes itself. Emotion transmission tears open this fissure between the ego and the “true self.” It constantly sends the big Other information about this discrepancy, so playing symbolic roles no longer works as a way for Iori to construct her ego. This failure means that the big Other no longer supports her ego, which consequently collapses.
(The big Other is an Other with whom we cannot identify through projection; the big Other is an ideal order we presuppose; the big Other is what gives us desire.)
Let us return to the mirror stage, which Lacan uses to describe how human beings constitute the ego. During the mirror stage, an infant aged six to eighteen months sees its reflection in the mirror of intersubjectivity as a complete, whole image. This contrasts sharply with its inability, at this point, to control its body fully: it experiences its body as fragmented. The wholeness of the image makes the subject feel threatened with dismemberment. From the outset, then, the infant sees its relation to the image as a Hegelian life-and-death rivalry. To ease this anxiety, the subject identifies with the mirror image and forms an ego through it. At the same time, the memory of fragmentation continually threatens this anticipation of wholeness: any feeling of disunity threatens the illusion of a unified whole that constitutes the ego. In other words, the mirror image—the object that fixes the ego’s form—gives the ego its wholeness on the very basis of threatening its existence.
At this stage, Iori faces the risk of losing that object. Early in the emotion-transmission arc, she keeps trying to maintain the role she plays, while emotion transmission keeps selectively broadcasting feelings from within her, making the performance fail completely. As a result, the object through which she had constituted her ego begins to disappear, and her ego grows increasingly indistinct. Emotion transmission deprives her of the big Other’s guarantee. Sometimes she becomes aggressive; sometimes she falters halfway through a sentence; sometimes she abandons symbolic guarantees altogether. All these are expressions of the pressure she bears at this stage.
What the mirror stage describes does not happen only in infancy. Mirror-stage identification is a permanent structure of the subject, persisting throughout its life. It reveals that our ego is in fact a product of misrecognition, the site of the subject’s self-alienation. What, then, are we to do when confronted with the gulf between the ego—an imaginary product with a myth-like continuity—and the subject’s true desire? Iori offers us something close to a model answer.
When Iori expresses her helplessness over the mismatch between herself and the role she plays—the position she occupies in the intersubjective symbolic network—she seems to face an impasse imposed by the big Other: either be assimilated by it or exclude it. The latter is the position of the psychotic. Through foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, the psychotic becomes a “free person” in society, no longer bound by that Name—but at the cost of sacrificing their soul. This is plainly unacceptable.3
The first alternative is what Iori initially encounters: the acceptance and understanding of friends in the Cultural Research Club who have endured hardships together and trust one another deeply. Yui and Inaba resolve to be wholly accepting and understanding toward Iori. Convinced that the cheerful, lively Iori of the past is the real Iori, they want to save that former Iori. What she faces at this moment is, in fact, an ultimate temptation. This temptation is really a choice: if she simply relies on her friends’ trust and ignores the cry from within, she can still be the cheerful presence who knows how to lighten the mood, still enjoy her friends’ unconditional support and trust. Everything can stay as it was. But she does not. She chooses to hold fast to her desire. She chooses to question—to question whether it is really her that her friends like, to question whether her feelings and theirs are really real, and finally to question every symbolic identity on which she has built her ego. There is no doubt that this is a nearly suicidal stance. Iori chooses to accept the risk of suspending the socio-symbolic network that guarantees our identity as subjects. She deliberately places herself outside the community. She knows perfectly well what the consequences will be: being despised by her classmates, not being understood by her closest friends, even having to watch as others misunderstand her. She is willing to bear it all. In order to “live,” she would rather “die.”
This almost perfectly illustrates why psychoanalysis is an adventure. For psychoanalysis, no ethical stance is more right or more daring than holding fast to one’s desire. To hold fast to our desire, we have an obligation to keep a certain distance from our “most authentic dreams,” from the moral myths that guarantee our symbolic universe. The ultimate realization of this ethic lies precisely in fully accepting this “being-toward-death,” which plainly suspends the social dimension for us.
References
- Jacques Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego”.
- Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out.
- Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.
Editor’s Note
