Mars is the war god in Roman mythology and the planet Mars is associated with aggressive energy in astrology. The domiciles of Mars are Aries and Scorpio.

The symbol of Aries (♈︎) represents the horns of a ram but it also looks like a fountain of water springing forth, appropriately initiating the springtime [1].

This association lets us explore the neighbors of Aries in Lacanian lalangue:

Aries: Arise! A rise! I rise!

If one recollects the springtime in past tense, the horns (♈︎) look like a flower:

Arose: A rose! Here Rhodes!

Of course this recalls Hegel’s exploration of lalangue in Latin [2]:

Hic Rhodus, hic saltus! Here is Rhodes, jump if you can!
Hic rhodon, hic salta! Here is a rose, dance if you can!

Notice that “Aries: I rise!” refers not to Moi but to Je: It’s not the Ego that is rising (subject of statement: Me as an object), but rather the Id (subject of enunciation: I as a subject).

Aries authorizes the interlocutor so that “the letter will always arrive at its destination.”

This recalls another wonder of lalangue:

Authorize! Auto-rise!

These phrases stage an ironic contradiction:

1) Authorize is the act of permitting someone to “rise” (become a legitimate interlocutor).

2) Auto-rise implies that someone can only “rise” by and through their own will and desire.

In brief, “authorize” sounds like “auto-rise” because real authorization can only be self-authorization [3] and every astrologer will confirm that this is a very Arien trait.

Melanie Klein was an Aries, Slavoj Žižek is an Aries and Jacques Lacan himself was an Aries too [4]. Remember his analytic principle:

The analyst is only authorized by her/himself.
L’analyste ne s’autorise que de lui-même.

When people “institutionalize”, they let some higher agency (like IPA or whatever) to “authorize them” (!), and this brings us to the other Mars sign (with a little shuffle of letters):

Scorpio: Superego!

I put “authorize” in scare quotes with an exclamation mark: Due to the irony of “auto-rise” it is impossible to be authorized by the Superego (as Žižek always emphasizes).

Let’s call this barrier (between Aries and Scorpio, between “I rise!” and Superego) the Ironic Curtain.

The Superego commands you to “enjoy and be happy” but always with a “knife behind its back” [5] and Scorpio (♏︎) is the one who is aware of and sometimes willing to use this dirty sting. Remember Freud’s dream about Irma’s injection:

We were directly aware, too, of the origin of the infection. Not long before, when she was feeling unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection of a preparation of propyl, propyls … propionic acid … trimethylamin (and I saw before me the formula for this printed in heavy type) … Injections of this sort ought not to be given so thoughtlessly … And probably the syringe had not been clean.

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “Aries in Astrology: Meaning and Traits” The Astrology Podcast, “Jesse and Celine Shall Bring Us the Horns of Wilmington’s Cow”

[2] Marx confused the two and invented the notion of “dancing in Rhodes”: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! (www.marxists org) More about this: “Hegel ve Marx: İşte endeks, o zaman zıpla! İşte simge, o zaman dans!”

[3] See “Symbolic Authorization of Fetishes and Real Authorization of Symptoms”

[4] Jacques-Alain Miller claims in Lacanian Ink 39 that Lacan was a Capricorn. His Saturn and Jupiter are in Capricorn (chart).

[5] It’s ironic that when a questioner compliments Slavoj Žižek, he always asks for the “knife behind his/her back” and it’s even more ironic that it was a Scorpio who equipped herself with a Superego (“critical psychology”?) and attempted (but failed!) to expel Žižek from his own book. See “Beware of the superego virus! Don’t excuse your erasure!”, “The Psychorevolt Liberration Manifesto: Žižek With A Human Face Or Scrubbing Intersectional Politics With The Psychoanalytic Detergent”