“I confess that I am quite dissatisfied – apart from a few exceptions –
with philosophies that fully take up some of Lacan’s concepts referred to as
post-structuralist or as French Theory.”
Sergio Benvenuto
There will be something spurious about what I will say here on the subject of Lacan and philosophy, because I practice as a psychoanalyst. That is, I think I know how psychoanalytic concepts are constructed and used, I do not take them as ready-to-wear concepts. I am close to the philosophical movement that seeks the sense of concepts in the way they are produced. The true meaning of a concept is the form of life it expresses (Wittgenstein[1]).
I confess that I am quite dissatisfied – apart from a few exceptions – with philosophies that fully take up some of Lacan’s concepts referred to as post-structuralist or as French Theory. Paradoxically, I find the critical analyses of both Freud and Lacan by philosophers ranging from Wittgenstein to Derrida, from Borch-Jacobsen to Nancy and Roustang, far more interesting. In short, I prefer to deconstruct Lacan rather than use him as an accomplished construction. This is because I have long since overcome transference towards Lacan, and transference – as he said himself – is based on the sujet supposé savoir [the subject supposed to know]. I do not suppose Lacan’s knowledge, nor do I suppose Freud’s. I do not take their doctrines to be revelations. My reading of these authors is laïque, lay, not ecclesiastical; there are no sacred texts involved.
I smile when I see philosophers taking as gospel every word psychoanalysts say, as if a clinical practice were enough to conceptualise the unconscious. It would be like saying that because a couple has given birth to several children, they have special knowledge about the biology of reproduction. Theorising a practice is an entirely different thing from the theory that describes a practice.
Too often we are seduced by the theoretical talent of certain thinkers – and Lacan’s theoretical talent was remarkable – and believe that they ipso facto speak the truth. Aristotle’s Physics is one of the most brilliant intellectual constructions in the history of thought, but today we think that it was rather the atomists who stated the truth about the structure of nature. The intellectual seductiveness of a theory does not guarantee its truthfulness. The music of concepts is not actual proof of truth. There is a deviation between truth and enjoyment.
Though I no longer have a transference towards Lacan, I do find some of his concepts extremely useful, not only for understanding analytic practice but also for formulating certain speculative problems acutely.
1.
Much of the ‘Lacanian’ philosophy that flourishes in the sheltered garden of university campuses leads Lacan back into the tradition of German idealism and of Marx. A Hegelian-Marxist-Freudian-Lacanian thought, from which I feel estranged, thrives today. In fact, Lacan was very much influenced by Kojève’s seminars on Hegel in the 1930s, and his originality consists in having transferred what I would call the standard idealist argument to psychoanalysis.
This argument already began with bishop Berkeley, who intended to exclude matter from a philosophical ontology (and Lacan acknowledged his debt to Berkeley[2]). Berkeley said: our only contact with reality is through perceptions, we can therefore conclude, following Occam’s conceptual economy of sorts, that reality is the totality of perceptions: esse est percipi. German idealism took up this argument in a much more sophisticated key: given that we always understand the world through concepts, we can conclude that we can see the world as a dialectical set of concepts, themselves moments of a single Geist, spirit. This idealist argument is irrefutable. If someone, such as the Kantian philosopher Krug[3] says “how can I deduce the pen with which I am writing through a historical phenomenology of spirit?”, the idealist will always have an easy time saying that Krug is talking about a pen because he already has the concept of a pen, without which he would not be able recognise that specific pen. And the pen is contingent because it already possesses the concept of contingency. In the end, everything is resolved in concepts, even pure chance.
Lacan thought of applying the following argument to psychoanalysis: psychoanalysis is always a logotherapy, i.e., it acts essentially through words. We can hence conclude that the unconscious itself is logos. Words have an impact on the unconscious because it is of the same stuff of which they are made. But, on the other hand, Lacan knows that the Freudian unconscious is not made up of concepts, it is something material, which can, for example, produce somatic effects. For him, therefore, the logos that counts is not the concepts but the signifiers, that is, the opaque, the material side of the concepts. The signifier, concretised as the letter, is an ambiguous entity, a centaur, which has something of the logos and something of thingness. Hence Lacan’s physiognomic slogan: “The unconscious is structured as a language”. Language replaces the Hegelian Geist.
Derrida criticised Lacanian theory as logocentric, which is another way of saying idealistic. Some also pointed out that not everything in language is structured. It is strongly structured at the two extremes of phonology and syntax[4]. In between we have the chaos of the lexicon, which Saussure had already put on the tab of diachronic linguistics and geographical linguistics. At the unstructured level of words and sounds, fluid processes operate in space and time. Two opposite categories dominate current thinking: system versus flows.
But what Lacan meant to say was: “the unconscious is as structured as a language is”, hence not everything in language and not everything in the unconscious is structured. And here the problems begin. Lacan put the unstructured or weakly structured part of the unconscious on the tab of the imaginary. For him, the imaginary is the animal, i.e. non-log-ical, part of subjectivity; it is what properly concerns psychology. For Lacan, psychology is always animal psychology, even when it deals with humans.
“The unconscious is structured like a Language” should therefore be taken in a weak, philosophical, sense: the unconscious is signification. And it is a non-analogue signification, it is essentially digital. Yet the logos introduces the negative and time into the world. How to put this in agreement with Freud’s ‘analogical’ image of the unconscious, as something without negation and without time? The logic-ization of the unconscious leads to a reversal of original Freudianism.
In any case, I reject what most Lacanians ascribe to Lacan: having de-naturalised our relationship to the body and to the drives. For the simple reason that I have ceased to believe in the nature versus culture binarism, which amounts to their opposition. In my view, the distinction/opposition nature versus nurture is the modernist form of the old metaphysical opposition of matter versus spirit. In fact, culture is seen as a collectivisation of the spirit. I think it is time to finally overcome this opposition, and to think of culture as the non-deterministic unfolding of nature, and a part of nature as already fully penetrated by negation and time, inventions of the logos.
Today we de facto label as natural anything that resists our plans. If we try to teach a child mathematics, for example, and he absolutely refuses to learn it, then we simply give in and say that “the child has a natural learning deficit”. But the symptom formed by the unconscious is precisely that which resists the subject’s project, so in this sense we can consider the Freudian unconscious part of nature. Unless we completely abandon the nature/nurture opposition.
2.
The fact that the idealist argument is irrefutable does not ipso facto imply that we must accept it. I personally do not. It is an argument that glorifies philosophical narcissism to the utmost, as it makes the real world appear entirely homogeneous to the philosopher’s essential medium, which is language/thought. Idealism is the seductive professional bias of the philosopher, like that of a mason is to see the whole world as a construction (see Freemasonry) or like that of musician is to see the whole world as sound vibrations… Philosophers feel hurt when they have to admit that something is unthinkable and yet real. Hegelian philosophers assume that all the real is rational (the principle of sufficient reason, nihil est sine ratione, nothing is without a reason) and all the rational is real. They perceive an extra-rational real as the troublesome Gallic village of Asterix, which manages to evade the domination of the Roman empire. The empire of thought – the acme of which is philosophical – admits no pockets of resistance. It excludes the possibility of thinking that something is unthinkable, that we can say that something is unsayable. But to name the unsayable is not to say it… Just as being able to say “I shall die” does not at all mean to have defeated our death.
This does not mean that in rejecting idealism we must ipso facto return to a naive form of realism, whereby the effort of thought has to be that of describing the real relations between things outside ourselves. Relations are products of our systems of thought, particularly our languages (in the plural), and the relations between things are relations that depend on different systems of thought.
The real-ism I intend to uphold against idealism is not therefore a return to positivism, according to which reality is something that language/thought can describe more and more faithfully. It is not a question of seeing language/thought as a more or less faithful mirror of the world. The historiographic reconstruction of scientific thought itself, mainly by the Austro-American epistemological current (Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend), shows that knowledge about nature proceeds discontinuously according to a paradigm shift. That is, the relationship between language/thought on the one hand and nature on the other is by no means linear or specular. To put it brutally, the image we have today of scientific knowledge is not that of a mirror but rather of a biological organism that more or less manages to survive in a natural environment. Theories fight for survival like beasts running to arms. Rather than representing, science survives and reproduces itself, and it helps us survive and reproduce ourselves. It is a conception of knowledge that I would call bio-pragmatist.
The whole so-called post-structuralist season has been dominated by a profound historical relativism. In The Order of Things, Foucault[5] tried to show that words are not the mirror of things, but that things are formatted, as we would say today, by words. Are we then sliding back into idealism? No, a third way between speculative idealism and positivist realism is possible. To say that facts are always interpreted as facts does not imply the conclusion that “there are no facts, only interpretations”, as per the slogan of hermeneutic nihilism. We always interpret, true, but what do we interpret? Facts, even if these are in turn interpreted facts.
I believe that in the course of time Lacan increasingly distanced himself from his Hegelian roots, and his admiration for Heidegger is a trace of this detachment. Significantly, in Lacan a gentle shift would occur from the primacy of desire, which evokes the philosophical tradition of the primacy of eros (Plato’s Symposium), to the primacy of jouissance, which is something accomplished. Above all, an increasing primacy of the register of the real over that of the symbolic would occur. His later reference would therefore be less and less linguistics and more and more a mathematical topology, which is a structure of real space. For the late Lacan, the unconscious was topologically structured. But we have no room here to analyze this shift in depth.
3.
In my opinion, the important cues for philosophy in Lacan’s thought are the following:
- The power of the signifier
- The cause as après-coup
- The primacy of difference
- The real as correlative to the symbolic
- The jouissante essence of the human
- The ethical and political nature of psychoanalysis
A. What follows may seem contradictory. In other words, on the one hand it is necessary to overcome Lacan’s logocentrism, on the other it is important to apply to fields even very different from psychoanalysis a power that has largely been ignored: the power of the signifier in society and in history.
Two fundamental readings of society have emerged in modern culture, the Marxist and the liberalist, which share an essential axiom: that the key to explaining human history is ultimately economic. The struggle between economic classes for Marxism, the freedom or non-freedom of the market for liberalism. These are two sides of the same theoretical coin that places the production, reproduction and distribution of goods as the primary cause of historical fortunes. Liberalism and socialism see the social being essentially as a producer.
Instead, Lacan prompts us to see in history the extraordinary power of signifiers. The human community is largely désoeuvrée, inoperative, as Jean-Luc Nancy called it[6]. Human beings become excited, sacrifice themselves, kill and are killed for signifiers. For signifiers like the nation or democracy, socialism or fascism, or like their religious faith or ethnic ‘identity’… But, as Ernesto Laclau[7] would say, all signifiers are empty deep down.
Over the years I have had the opportunity, having taught regularly in Kiev for over 20 years, to follow the development of Ukrainian patriotism. Early on, being Ukrainian or Russian was irrelevant; they spoke the same language; having ended up within Ukrainian or Russian borders was purely coincidental. But then, over time, the Ukrainian signifier began to fill with meaning, as did being Russian, to the point that both sides engaged in a horrifying war. It’s not as if a flag represents the country to which we belong, it’s the flag itself that gradually creates a country that recognises itself behind it.
The signifier has a semantic opacity. For example, when we say ‘Ukraine’ or ‘Ukrainianness’, what is the sense of the terms? Sense is one thing; the referent is another. We can certainly say what Ukraine refers to – a certain portion of territory, a portion of population, mostly Slavic… – but not its sense. Of Ukraine, at least initially, we can only say that it can be distinguished from Russia and its neighbouring countries… Even though, given what is happening, the term is filling with meaning. But the sense here is an effect of the signifier, it is not the signifier that is summarising a sense. I would say that Ukraine has become a massive signifier precisely insofar as other signifiers – primarily Russia – have not recognised it as such.
By this I am certainly not trying to say that the resistance of the Ukrainians against the Russians is futile, that it is a struggle between mere symbols. Symbols constitute our cause, something for which we can give up our lives; making signifiers our cause gives meaning to our lives.
Since structural linguistics points out that signifiers are defined by oppositions, political conflict is very often a consequence of the oppositional character of signifiers.
This by no means reduces the importance of economic conflicts in history, but they are mostly effects of signifying oppositions rather than being the matrix of even armed oppositions.
Perhaps the most terrifying case of the power of the signifier is the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when the Hutus killed over half a million Tutsis in three months. What was the difference between Hutu and Tutsi? A purely signifying difference. Had it not said ‘Hutu’ or ‘Tutsi’ on their identity cards, it would have been very difficult to exterminate the latter.
The will to power certainly explains much about politics. But whose will to power? Always that of subjects identified with certain signifiers.
The power of the signifier reveals, in my opinion, the essentially transcendentalist nature of the human being, who never lives in mere immanence. We all live for the Other, for example by having children. Our values survive us, because they are always the values of the Other.
B. Lacan had a merit for which even his most ardent opponents give him credit: emphasising in Freud’s thought the notion of nachträglich, après-coup, afterwardness, one that readers of Freud before Lacan had not seen. Now, après-coup is interpreted in various ways. For me, après-coup is a crucial concept in psychoanalysis, the one around which its plausibility is at stake.
The après-coup consists of two scenes: an earlier one and a later one, with the second scene seemingly giving a traumatic meaning to the first. In The Wolf Man, for example, the scene of the dream with the wolves in the tree, which the subject had at the age of four, reveals as traumatic a scene that Freud supposes to be an earlier one, that of the vision of his parents’ coitus when he was one and a half.
Now, Lacan’s highlighting of the Freudian après-coup has given this notion, après coup, a disturbing sense. That is, après-coup gives substance to a ‘coup’ that would not exist without the après-coup.
There are at least four interpretations of après-coup, which I would call positivist, hermeneutic, relational and magical-mythological. The positivist sees the two scenes in a line of cause and effect: the après-coup is like a bomb that explodes at a later time. The hermeneutic interpretation is based on the idea that the present re-signifies the past on a line of backward projection of meaning. The relational line makes the second scene a reinterpretation of what another (an adult) wanted in the first scene: the subject thus questions what the other wanted of him. “Après-coup is a phenomenon that is not played out within the intrapersonal but within the interpersonal”[8]. It is the enigma of the other’s desire that presents itself again afterwards.
The magical-mythological explanation (sometimes illustrated through sophisticated philosophical tools) relies on the inversion of the cause-and-effect relationship in time, as in certain science fiction stories (the Back to the Future series, for example): that is, a posterior effect can act retroactively on the anterior cause by inverting the arrow of time[9]. This thesis puts psychoanalysis completely outside scientific rationality.
I proposed a further reading.
The inversion of the arrow of time means that the nachträglich is a process thanks to which the sense of a later event gives a previous one a causal force. There is a causal primacy of the later scene, in the sense that its sense makes an earlier scene the aetiology of later symptoms. Now, this feedback of the present on the past is only possible in a human world.
An imaginary example: a subject crosses a bridge and then reads that years earlier that bridge had been destroyed; but this doesn’t trouble him much. Years later he witnesses a house collapse in an earthquake, after which he develops a phobia of… bridges. He cannot cross them, because he fears they will fall. In this case, the first experience of crossing the bridge only became the cause of the phobia through the meaning that the second event gave to the first: collapsing. An event 1 becomes a cause through a sense given après coup by an event 2.
This is indeed an inversion of the arrow of time, but not of the magical or miraculous sort, because the previous event is not modified in its reality: it is its power that is modified.
The après-coup is a special case of sense causing events: it is not the sense of an event that is directly causal, but it causes a previous event, with a different sense, to take on causal force.
The way Lacan promoted the concept of après-coup had something scandalous about it: that the cause does not come before but after, by a recalling of the past. In this way, there is no longer any primacy, in the sense that there is no absolute before.
In any case, this uncertainty about cause and meaning seems to place psychoanalysis in a marginal space of knowledge and action. But we could show that the après-coup also characterises other human activities such as politics, education, the law… Cause and sense are entangled in a way that is not only complex but open: causal effects and effects of sense intertwine in an often uncanny way.
Psychoanalysis therefore occupies a space, which some find impossible, between positive realism, hermeneutics and intersubjectivism, without ever reducing itself to any of these.
Psychoanalysis becomes banal when, in order to overcome its perplexities, it opts for one of the three interpretations of its knowledge and power. Psychoanalysis is neither positive science (something Lacan often repeated), nor interpretation in the sense of hermeneutics (re-significations of the world that can change the world), nor interpersonal dialectics, but something that seeks a space situated at the crossroads of all these concepts. At the constant risk of being identified as, downgraded to, a magical and superstitious practice. This is the extraordinary importance of Lacan’s insistence on après-coup.
Even if Lacan does not say so explicitly, the après-coup reveals that every analytic reconstruction hangs on a crucial uncertainty: with my analysand have I, the analyst, reconstructed the subject’s original experiences, or have I constructed them today, projecting them into a past history that in this way ipso facto takes on the form of a myth? It is this uncertainty, or conditionality, that lies in every future perfect. Rather than saying “Like everyone else, I’ve had my Oedipus”, I ought to say ‘If I do analysis, I will have had my Oedipus’.
In fact, the concept of après-coup is fundamental precisely because that of which the après-coup is an after refers back to a before that remains suspended, an unknown. The paradox of après-coup is that there is an after at the beginning, never a prima-cy. It is an after without a before. It does not lead us to the primacy of the other like in Laplanche, but to the primacy of the after.
C. Lacan does not aim at the systemic character of subjectivity, but on its differential grain. It is often said that Lacan’s thought is an aspect of the philosophical turn that had its epicentre in France, that of the primacy of difference. A primacy taken up by Saussure when he says that signifiers are not full realities but distinctions: the essence of logos is to hinge on distinctions, not on full concepts. (Saussure does however set forth a theory of language as a system that Lacan does not take up). From ‘distinction’ the philosophers of that season slid towards a primacy of Difference.
Difference, as we said, is intrinsic to signifiers. What identifies a Ukrainian and a Russian? The fact that the Ukrainian signifier is distinct from the Russian signifier. Nothing more.
This means that there is no primum movens in human affairs, be it the will to power, or modes of production, or the alienation of nature in culture, or the need to survive, or the optimisation of biological fitness… History flows because differences emerge everywhere; randomly, I would say, blindly.
But if difference is at the root of all human reality, this means that any homogenisation of humans is doomed to failure: differences continuously reproduce, as, after all, they do in biological life. All biological evolution is differentialistic: a life history exists because there is a continuous stochastic production of differences. But this wrecks any egalitarian ideologies: formal equalities between human beings are certainly possible (equal rights and opportunities), but the formal equalities produce actual differences. Differentiation is the very dynamic of life; it is the tragic side of life that no political Glad Tidings will ever be able to erase.
And it is a strange coincidence (but is it really a coincidence?) that the most modern cosmology reaches a purely differentialistic hypothesis of the origin of the universe, according to which our universe originated from a sudden rupture in the symmetry of the void; in other words, the void divides itself, thus producing fullness. The whole that makes up the universe is a differentiation of nothingness.
D. Today, Lacanians tend to confer more and more value to the register of the real, to the detriment of the register of the symbolic. This expresses a general slant of Western thought in recent decades: going beyond the linguistic turn with a ‘return to the real’. Today, for example, biological metaphors are more intellectually appealing than linguistic ones. Hence the success of categories such as biopolitics (taken up by Foucault) or the concept of bare life (taken up by Agamben).
But what is the Lacanian real? Should we think of it in idealistic terms as something that the symbolic itself posits as its own other-than-oneself? In the same way as Fichte said that the I posits the non-I (external reality), we could say that language posits non-language as the real. In this way Lacan’s doctrine would be reduced to an idealistic reading of psychoanalysis.
What I think, instead, is that the real should be seen as a topological place correlative to the symbolic, but not created or posited by the symbolic. There is no before and after between the real and the symbolic. The difference between the two is primal. The real is what every discourse supposes as other-from-discourse; and let us also add that it is the transcendence of every discourse. But not the transcendence of intentional consciousness in Husserl’s sense: it is a transcending that always misses that towards which one is transcending. Like an ostension with no object. This real, therefore, unlike the reality of positive realist thought, is not something to be symbolised, to be reproduced in human knowledge: it is something that will always be topologically other from human knowledge, other from rationalising comprehension. It is like what lies beyond any horizon of mine… Of course I can widen my horizon out of all proportion, but there will always be a horizon, a line beyond which… there is nothing for-me. What we see within a horizon always assumes something that is beyond it and that by its structure will never be within that horizon.
The Lacanian theory of psychosis, according to which what is foreclosed (forclos) in the symbolic appears as a hallucination in the real, would seem to refute this. The voices the schizophrenic hears are symbolic snippets that subjects can only know to the extent that they find them in their own real, i.e., in a topological space of the non-subject. So, we each have our own real; that is to say, a point from which our own thinking and our own ‘own’ are interrupted to make way for an unthinkable. It is in this sense that Lacan, I believe, understands Freud’s ‘primal repression’ (Urverdrängung): an original division from which each subject constitutes itself in a fundamental difference from the non-subject; that is, from the real.
This approach essentially contradicts the Hegelian ‘what is rational is real, and what is real is rational’[10], which radicalises the principle of sufficient reason (nihil est sine ratione, there is nothing without a reason). Here, instead, the real is precisely what evades rationality, what threatens and limits it, what I would call a principle of insufficient reason. Scientific thought certainly relegates the real, it tends to rationalise everything in ever more sophisticated ways, using the calculation of probabilities and accepting indeterminacy… but, while being relegated, the real perseveres and insists in questioning us. Something that makes knowledge an infinite process: being itself is at the bottom of every possible explanation, the fact that things are as they are and not otherwise. We can even say that the real is the pure event. But the totality of the being is always pure event.
Hence Lacan’s provocative assertion that “the real is the impossible”, which overturns all philosophical common sense. The Lacanian desire to provoke common sense was linked to the idea that essential truths can be told through paradoxes. What he means is that if something is real, it is so because it contradicts… what is it that it contradicts? I would say the pure necessity of logic. After all, according to logic the real is not possible, yet it is there.
E. The way Freud described the origin of his doctrine – as the result of objective unbiased clinical research – is a self-misconception of his work caused by his positivist prejudices. Instead, I think Freud directed his clinical practice, albeit unconsciously, through a genealogy of human singularity.
For Freud, the essence of the human is die Lust, which in English becomes lust. The term is ambiguous in German, because it means pleasure and enjoyment as well as desire and drives. In other words, for Freud the human being is an organism that seeks enjoyment above everything else. Even when it is merely trying to survive, it seeks to continue to enjoy life.
Lacan grasped this Freudian essence of humanity, even though he never made it explicit. But the guiding concepts of Lacanian thought, desire and enjoyment, merely articulate the two possible slopes of the German die Lust. Human beings are desiring beings, or rather, insofar as they derive pleasure from their desire, they desire to perpetuate their pleasure. Lustprinzip should therefore be translated as ‘desire-pleasure principle’ and not simply, as has been done, ‘pleasure principle’.
Thus, Freud’s doctrine separates itself ab initio from the current cognitive sciences, according to which human beings are instead the result of subsequent adaptations, according to the strictly neo-Darwinian view. The human being that interests Freud is not the adaptive human being, but the desiring and enjoying, pleasure-seeking, human being. Psychoanalysis is interested in what Gould and Lewontin – biologists who wished to correct rigid Neo-Darwinism – call, by analogy, spandrels, the left-over spaces of evolutionary construction[11]: a part of the organism that means nothing, yet stands there as a zero-degree by-product of adaptive history. The spandrels are actually a slice of wall left behind by the arch structure.
Spandrels of the Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington D.C., sculpted by Bela Lyon
Spandrels are an example of noise in any meaningful construction, even if we disguise them with wonderful and meaningful figures.
Can we believe in the Freudian genealogy today? Should we prefer it to other meta-anthropologies, such as the Darwinian (the most influential today), or the Marxist, or the phenomenological and ‘empathic’ (see the mirror neuron theory), or the existentialist? We can in any case say that Lacan, unlike most psychoanalysts, is more purely Freudian precisely because for him die Lust, desire and jouissance, is the essential element of human subjectivity. Even if this Lust is always articulated, he believed, in the differential terms of symbolism.
In Freud and Lacan, objects are essential insofar as they are Lust-Objekte, objects of desire and pleasure. The difference between Freud and Lacan on this point is that for the former the Objekt is what every drive or desire finds on its path, often incidentally, whereas for Lacan the object a (the object-other) is the cause of desire. In other words, for Lacan what attracts us comes from the world and not from the internal dynamics of our psychic organism. What rouses us comes from the real. Lacan most probably took this idea from phenomenology. Sartre said that “if we love a woman, it is because she is lovable”[12]. It is a case of eliminating any analysis of love as a profound interiority, it is a case of seeing my love in the woman I love and not as if didn’t concern that woman but only me.
I believe that the human being is not just lust, desire and enjoyment. There are various other ‘psychological’ functions to take into account. But beyond the social and biological variables, the analyst’s interest tends to concentrate on just one thing: understanding in what way the subject derives pleasure. It is only a spandrel, but the essential one for the analyst. This seems to me the bone of Lacanian clinic practice. Understanding how an individual derives enjoyment also therefore means understanding the origin of their suffering, because to suffer is the price to pay for something in them that derives enjoyment.
The point is that for Freud affects are always conscious, whereas the representations related to affects are unconscious, except… pleasure. Pleasure is something that lies between the subjective and the objective, between affect and process, between perceiving and being.
The great initial paradox of Freud’s doctrine is that die Lust, desire and pleasure, can be unconscious. Unlike all other affects, desire and pleasure are the arché of the psyche; what came first and is commander. Lacan does not resolve this primal paradox, he inhabits it to the fullest. But we should say that jouissance is still an affective metaphor, that what has been called unconscious pleasure is the very fact of repetition as such. Lacan rightly included repetition among the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (but not desire and jouissance): human beings tend towards repetition as if they were unable to detach themselves from a certain pleasure… But is then the unconscious as a whole just repetition?
The point is that the unconscious, in both Freud and Lacan, is also the creative matrix of humans – think of the jokes and quips. Art and literature are creative when they come from the unconscious, that is, when they break a repetition. Deriving pleasure lies in repetition, but also in breaking a repetition.
I believe that the fundamental problem of analytic thought and practice lies in this glitch; a problem that is still completely unsolved, but one which Lacan had the merit of making manifest.
It is also important to grasp social and political conflicts, and within cultural conceptions, the economics of pleasure as well as the power of the signifier. Even when we follow scientific protocols, what is ultimately decisive is the way we derive pleasure. Even objective research is a way of deriving pleasure. Of course, the will to power counts too, but also the fact that power is a source of pleasure.
For some time, I have decided to stop saying “I reject that philosophy” or “that psychoanalytic theory states the truth” and saying instead “that philosophy gives me no pleasure” or “that psychoanalytic theory gives me pleasure”. What then becomes extremely interesting is to understand why certain theories afford more or less pleasure than others. And to understand why they afford me that pleasure.
But if finding pleasure amounts to breaking a repetition, we could say that the theories that give us authentic pleasure are the ones that break the repetition of what has been said and thought again and again… and instead open us up to the real.
Here arises the unsolved problem of what makes it possible to link the desire and pleasure of power to what I would call the desire or need for unveiling; that is, for truth. From where does this strange tropism of humans towards the real, i.e. towards the unthinkable, arise?
F. Freud said that there are three impossible professions: politics, education and psychoanalysis. To which I would add administering justice. What do all these ‘impossibilities’ have in common? That none of them tend towards truth as science does, but towards a certain effectiveness. Towards an effectiveness that is not technological but instead stems from what Lacan calls, using a Greek word, tuké, the good encounter[13].
Psychoanalysis is not essentially a technique, just as politics, education and the administration of justice are not (exclusively) techniques. They are all ethical activities, something that does not exclude that they need to be realistic; Realpolitik, Realbildung, Realgerechtingkeit… Psychoanalysis too has to be a Realpsychologie. It lies between art and science, between construction reconstruction and deconstruction.
Though I still find an overly mythical way of looking at psychoanalytic practice in Lacan (he believed that the right theory led to good clinical practice, which is not the case), his way of looking at psychoanalysis seems to me quite correct. One that makes it futile to turn it into an Evidence Based Medicine, basically into a practice based on incontrovertible results. Psychoanalysis is not a scientific theory, it is the theory of a practice – precisely as in the case of political, pedagogical or legal theories, which never produce incontrovertible results.
Some may say: we effectively do judge the validity of political, educational or legal theories according to the results. For example, if we vote for a party that follows a certain political theory and then it governs for five years, by the end of that time we will have judged whether the conditions in our country have improved or deteriorated. This is the justification of democracy: the people are a referee called upon at the end of each term to judge whether a certain idea of politics has performed well or not. But we know that this is not the case. What is it that entitles us to say “the government has done a good job”? If things are going better or worse, we cannot say to what extent this better or worse depends on what the government in question has done. We can notice that during that term the economy of the country has improved or declined, but in either case can we really say it was due to the effects of the government’s measures? It could be that in the meantime there’s been a worldwide economic crisis that hasn’t spared the country… On the contrary, if the economy has benefited from an economic boom, that could be due to reasons involving a whole system of countries. Furthermore, certain government measures can benefit certain social classes and harm others: the assessment of these measures will then depend on the specific interests of these classes. In short, nothing is more complex than objectively assessing the effects of policies. And the same applies to educational strategies.
in the same way, there may be multiple factors leading to the improvement of an individual in analysis, something which makes any validations extremely difficult. Many patients, for example, are manifestly better after months of analysis, but often attribute this improvement to other factors. What causes what?
In other words, so-called analytical technique is inseparable from an ethical project. Lacan said that the ethical project of psychoanalysis is to ensure that subjects do not give up on their desire, on their thing. But if our thing is destructive, nefarious? My “thing” can be also sadistic. Does the Sadian hero not pursue his thing? “Ethics” in Lacan can be “the good ethics, to reject evil” but also “my ethics, which can be destructive”. Can you say that a mafioso, for example, has his own ethics? In any case, Lacan’s ethics is not a normative one. The question remains suspended, unresolved.
4
Is it possible to philosophically conceptualise the real in the Lacanian sense, so that it becomes a concept that can also be used outside of a psychoanalytic orthodoxy?
I will attempt to do this by evoking the biological approach of Jakob von Uexküll[14], which also influenced Heidegger. Here, the biologist, in a Kantian-style gesture, clearly separates the Umwelt, the environment of an animal, from the world-in-itself to which the animal has no access. Every species, and perhaps even every organism, has an environment of its own, but beyond this environment (which for the human being is also a symbolic one) there will always be a pure real, which constitutes the background noise of the living experience. There is therefore an unavoidable dose of incommunicability between organisms.
Information theory distinguishes between signal and noise. In a vinyl record the signal is the music recorded on it, the noise is the annoying sounds produced, for example, by warps on the surface of the record. Psychoanalysis is interested precisely in noise, in what breaks the meanings of a signal, as in the case of the spandrels. Humans have always tried to integrate noise into a wider field of signals. For example, in the case of records, the practice of scratching in music. But no matter how much one tries to enrich the world of signals by integrating noise, the possibility and interference of noise always remains. I believe that what Lacan calls the real is precisely this unavoidable residue of noise, “that which has gone wrong”. The very moment Lacan says that the unconscious is structured like a language, he is suggesting that the unconscious is just what the structure has dismissed as pure noise.
The transcription of idealism in biological terms would be “there can be no real beyond our environment”. Whereas what I would call negative realism – to distinguish it from the usual positive realism – acknowledges this rift between the environment and the real, the paradoxical dimension of the human trying to ponder its own human limit. We can then say that philosophy lays bare the Epimenidean fate (from the Cretan Epimenides) of the human relationship to being.
And it is insofar as for Lacan psychoanalysis loves the real like an amateur that it cannot be a science; and analysis is not a technology either. Science seeks to be an ever more adequate mirror of nature, but the real always lies beyond the mirror. It is a hole in the mirror, which evades knowledge and calls us to a praxis.
If Lacan ceases to be Hegelian, then he somehow accepts Kantian assumptions. In Western philosophical culture the ridge between Kantianism and Hegelianism is represented by Anselm’s ontological argument, even in its most modern and ‘pragmatistic’ forms: those who accept it are Hegelian, those who reject it are Kantian.
Lacan’s seminar that marked a turn towards a broader Kantianism is the seventh, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Lacan said that in his doctrine the real is not the Kantian thing-in-itself, yet the ethics Lacan describes is an entirely Kantian ‘categorical’ ethics, and it is in this seminar that Lacan speaks of das Ding (the thing). Note that Lacan would develop the concept of the Thing exclusively in this seminar; it was a conceptual butterfly that was to fly only for one year. It is as if the Ding of pure reason had been transferred into practical reason: this Thing can only be represented through a void; in other words, it is not representable, yet it directs all our objects of desire. Indeed, the Kantian thing today cannot simply be the unknowable, what today we call an event, but a transcendental condition by which all objects are arranged before us as objects-for-us, i.e. invested by our desire and occasions for enjoyment.
Unlike positivism, Lacan does not think that everything in the world is positive. Positivism radically separates the world from the logos, and negation is only a thing of the logos not of the world, even though from another point of view the logos is part of the world. There is no ‘not’ in things. After all, for physics there is no such thing as time even in nature[15]. When Freud said that there is neither negation nor time in the unconscious, it is because he ultimately considered it a fact of nature. But this cannot be true for the processes of human life related to language. If we look at nature as an all-positive entity, we can at most use the metaphor of ‘conflict’ to explain some of its processes. But we can never say that nature contradicts itself. Contradiction is uniquely a logical thing. Now, since the human world is permeated by the logos, we need to see the negative and the lack in the human world. We can say that Lacan added the following to what Freud said: that what the latter describes as conflicts is rewritten by the former as contradictions. The original contradiction can be described as that between being and sense.
Does admitting negation and contradiction – and thus time – as part of the world then mean being Hegelian? I do not think so. The fact that logos, and hence negation, are part of the world does not imply that all being is log-ical. We must admit that logos somehow divides being, at least as far as we human beings are concerned: on the one hand the Welt, the world, on the other das Ding, the thing that exceeds the world.
5.
Most Lacanians have remained tied to a Marxist-libertarian left, to which I adhered myself in my youth. The model is Louis Althusser, a Marxist-Leninist, a structuralist and a Freudian through Lacan. Yet one fact is incontrovertible: neither Freud nor Lacan were Marxists, neither believed in socialism. Why do then some of Freud’s followers and most of Lacan’s identify with the radical left, the sanctuary of which is the Ljubljana School?
Like Freud and Lacan, I, who am neither Freudian nor Lacanian, do not believe in the communist gospel. Certainly, there are affinities between Marx’s thought and Freud’s – both understood that certain reasons are rationalisations, that behind the discourses certain drives need to be reconstructed – but there are also extraordinary differences that should not be ignored. One essential difference is that whereas Marx proposes a solution to the dramas of humanity in a millenarian vision, when everyone will have according to their needs, Freud sees no solution to subjective dramas, only a sober way of living with them. Freud is a reformist, not a revolutionary, of psychism. A reformism as well-known as his pessimism. Pessimists can never believe in a final Revolution, they can only hope that certain reforms will bring some relief.
Like Freud, Lacan too thought that Marxism was a gospel; fascinating, but full of illusory promises. And for the same reason Lacan thought Marxism was a lesser substitute for religion: for him, the real challenge to psychoanalysis came from religion. Well before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Lacan understood that communism had proved to be a historical failure, and that we would return to the original Hope, not its secularist facsimile.
We always find the same figures in mass political discourse, which we can see as fixed topological locations: The Persecutor, the allied Friend, the Liberator, the Führer, the Plotter, the manipulating Exploiter. These characters are predetermined in concrete political dynamics, and need therefore to be considered as signifiers, that is, as positions of the Other. Lacan could never have believed in socialism because he did not believe that the Other exists. Hence, what functions as the Other in politics does not exist, even though I define myself through it. The power of the Other is not to be demolished, because it is an imaginary power. Political revolutions are always, to some extent, masquerades.
Edited By Alireza Taheri, Chris Vanderwees, Reza Nader, Routledge, 2024
NOTE
[1] L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Macmillan, 1953.
[2] J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XX. Encore, Seuil 1975, ch. p.
[3] Wilhelm Traugott Krug, Schelling und Hegel oder die neueste Philosophie im Vernichtungskriege mit sich selbst begriffen (1835).
[4] The phonetic system of different languages has been described by structural linguistics, the syntactic structure of language in general has been reconstructed by Chomskyan transformational grammar
[5] M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Pantheon Books, 1970.
[6] J.-L. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
[7] E. Laclau, On Populist Reason, Phronesis, 2005.
[8] J. Laplanche, Après-coup, The Unconscious in Translation, 2017.
[9] Effects certainly do retroact on causes in a complex networked system: the relationships between cause-points and effect-points are relative, because in a network there really is no before and after. But the individual histories with which psychoanalysis deals do not concern networked systems, but stories, which must necessarily follow the arrow of irreversible time. Any reversibility of time is a fairy tale.
[10] G. W. F. Hegel, Preface to the Philosophy of Right, Berlin, June 25th, 1820. Translated by S W Dyde, 1896.
[11] S.J. Gould and R.C. Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme”, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, vol. 205, no. 1161, 1979, pp. 581-598.
[12] Sartre, La transcendance de l’Ego et autre textes phénoménologiques, Vrin, 2003, p. 89.
[13] J. Lacan, The Seminar, book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,
[14] J. von Uexküll & G. Kriszat, Streifzüge durch Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen. Ein Bilderbuch unsichtbarer Welten. Bedeutungslehre, Rowohlt, Hamburg 1934.
[15] If anyone is in any doubt about this statement, I would suggest reading the letter Einstein wrote to Michele Besso’s widow: “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion”.