- CAN PSYCHOANALYSIS SPEAK ABOUT? -
The Cunning of Knowing
___________________________________
Abstract/Introduction
Throughout the majority of his work,
Lacan purported to establish psychoanalysis not just as an autonomous
discipline with respect to empirical psychology and the philosophy of mind, but
as a clinical and theoretical practice that would reveal what underlies the
very pretensions of those disciplines. A theory of desire, advancing towards
the point of scientific formalization, promised to simultaneously explain and
underdetermine conceptions of subjectivity, consciousness, knowledge, and being
that preoccupied both philosophers and psychologists for centuries. The
question about whether psychoanalysis is a science therefore can be said to
supervene on whether it can position itself as a theory of the libidinal undergirding of philosophy and psychology. Whether
psychoanalysis can indeed fulfill the promise it set itself with Lacan remains
as much of an open question as if the one about its scientific status. This
essay examines how psychoanalysis attempts to constitute itself as a theory.
In
what follows, I set myself two aims. First, following Alain Badiou, I seek to
clarify the way in which Lacanian psychoanalysis appropriates and challenges
philosophy, following the characterization of Lacan as an 'anti-philosopher'. Second,
I suggest that an answer to this question reveals a fundamental quandary in the
psychoanalytic edifice, ultimately rendering dubious both the status of
psychoanalysis as a theory and as a clinical practice. More specifically, I
argue that this predicament results from the attempt to elide the referential
relation between mind and world, signifier and signified, that characterizes representational
thought, in favor of the structuralist relation between signifiers that theorizes
desire's inscription into the symbolic order, wherein philosophical
propositions are negotiated as well. This alternative account is then coupled
to a subtractive notion of the Real that refuses incorporation into the
linguistic order. In short, Lacan’s subject of desire attempts to deflate the
ontological-epistemological valences from his theory by supplanting the
structuralist articulation between signifiers for the representationalist
relation of reference between words and things.
It is this re-articulation between the Real and the conceptual-linguistic order of the signifier that I seek to evince as problematic, in its purported demotion of representation and the philosophical task proper. I therefore propose to read Lacan's account of the unconscious as a bold, but nevertheless failed attempt to supersede empirical conceptions of the subject, epistemological accounts of knowledge and desire, and ontological conceptions of objective being. I claim that as a result psychoanalysis fails not only to secure its scientific status, but more generally its theoretical status as well.
It is this re-articulation between the Real and the conceptual-linguistic order of the signifier that I seek to evince as problematic, in its purported demotion of representation and the philosophical task proper. I therefore propose to read Lacan's account of the unconscious as a bold, but nevertheless failed attempt to supersede empirical conceptions of the subject, epistemological accounts of knowledge and desire, and ontological conceptions of objective being. I claim that as a result psychoanalysis fails not only to secure its scientific status, but more generally its theoretical status as well.
(a)
The Oedipus Complex and the Imaginary - A Mythical Prelude
But in order to make our contention
clear, a few preliminaries are well in order. First, we must understand
precisely in what way Lacan's account of the symbolic and the Real purports to
hijack traditional philosophical attempts to describe consciousness and
knowledge, subjectivity and objectivity. This proximity to philosophical (and
not just psychological) problems, remains a remarkable feature that sets Lacan
apart from Freud's germinal psychoanalytic endeavor. For as Alain Badiou (2010)
brings to attention, it is only in Lacan's work that we see psychoanalysis routinely
reference, address and challenge the great Western philosophical tradition[1].
And yet, Badiou also reminds us, this
relation is not one of continuation or of the integration of psychoanalysis into
the philosophical itinerary. Rather, Lacan deploys the term 'anti-philosophy' to
characterize his position vis a vis
philosophy, and wages against the latter, as every anti-philosopher attempts, hijacking
from within the framework of questions and concepts that philosophy negotiates.
In its Lacanian guise, the usurping of philosophical concepts is carried forth in
the name of a theory of desire, which includes the philosophical desire for
knowledge and truth, both about the subject and the world. Badiou writes that,
"It is typical of anti-philosophy that its purpose is never to discuss any philosophical theses...
since to do so it would have to share its norms (for instance, those of the
true and the false). What the anti-philosopher wants to do is to situate the
philosophical desire in its entirety in the register of the erroneous
and the harmful." (WAP; Pg. 77; emphasis added). Only once we have
understood the grounds for the psychoanalytic attempt to simultaneously reveal
and challenge the feasibility and propriety of the philosophical desire as a desire will we be in a position to
assess psychoanalysis' own "position of enunciation" with respect to
philosophy. In order to do this, I propose first to briefly exegetically
examine how Lacan carries forth his re-elaboration of the classical
philosophical concepts outlined above, so as to articulate them anew in a theory
of desire that would suffice to characterize not only philosophy, but yield a
structural understanding of how discourse emerges and is entangled with desire
in different ways, and according to general structural principles.
In this regard, the point of departure
is, nevertheless, already the Freudian one: to supplement an understanding of
conscious psychic life, by way of an account of the unconscious dimension that
animates subjective life. Crossbreeding the structuralist avowal of the primacy
of the signifier with the Freudian account of the unconscious, Lacan proposes thus
to articulate a theory of subjective desire around the singular idea that “the
unconscious is structured like a language”[2]. This
enigmatic formula is to be understood by way of Lacan's re-construction of the
Freudian Oedipal myth, which leads to thinking of the subject as constitutively
affected by loss, that is, seeing its
being as lacking in relation to an ideal image. Lacan writes: "The domain of the Freudian
experience is established within a very different register of relations. Desire
is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly
speaking. It isn’t the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the
being exists. This lack is beyond anything which can represent it. It is only
ever represented as a reflection on a veil. The libido, but now no longer as
used theoretically as a quantitative quantity, is the name of what animates the
deep-seated conflict at the heart of human action…."[3]
The "lack of being" or the idea of being-as-lack condenses the
idea that the Real of the subject is
never commensurate to the ideal identities that representation yields for
conscious thought. Yet, as we shall see, this eventually leads Lacan to fully
separate the ontological domain of being proper to philosophy and ontology, still
engrossed in the symbolic commerce of the signifier, from the domain of the
Real desire, which subtracts itself from the symbolic and which it falls to
psychoanalysis to examine. Philosophy, according to Lacan, masks the vacuity of
a Real subjectivity in the name of knowing, through the objective seal of the
signifier and the idealities it projects.
But how does the Real of this voided subject, incommensurate to any substantive identity, relate to the signifying order, if not by way of gaining traction before being in representation? And similarly, how does the subject come to misapprehend or think itself in the guise of the signifier, as having a fixed identity? Finally, what kind of operation or place of enunciation does psychoanalytic discourse carry out in order to be able to speak about this formal subjectivity and the libidinal structure in which language becomes nested in; wherefrom does psychoanalysis issue its address? How does one produce a theory about the articulation between the symbolic commerce of the signifier along its imaginary-ideal envelopments, and the Real, without claiming we do so by representing the latter, as philosophers and psychologists purport to do? It is towards answering these questions that we are headed in what follows.
But how does the Real of this voided subject, incommensurate to any substantive identity, relate to the signifying order, if not by way of gaining traction before being in representation? And similarly, how does the subject come to misapprehend or think itself in the guise of the signifier, as having a fixed identity? Finally, what kind of operation or place of enunciation does psychoanalytic discourse carry out in order to be able to speak about this formal subjectivity and the libidinal structure in which language becomes nested in; wherefrom does psychoanalysis issue its address? How does one produce a theory about the articulation between the symbolic commerce of the signifier along its imaginary-ideal envelopments, and the Real, without claiming we do so by representing the latter, as philosophers and psychologists purport to do? It is towards answering these questions that we are headed in what follows.
The Lacanian answer to the
first two questions come of a piece. First, for Lacan, the subject finds and
identifies itself outside of itself,
in the form of an object for thought or an ideal correlate, that it intends
towards and seeks to become equal to. It is this ideal unity which
simultaneously forms the basis of what the subject identifies itself as, but
also of what positions it in the course of an impossible desire for 'reconstitution'.
This decentered (mis)identification of the subject with an-other, indicates
that the ideal identity of one's individuated identity emerges from a
structural alienation of the subject
from itself, a lack that makes subjectivity not fully coincide with the
ideality thus projected. It is insofar as the subject is never equal to its
projected identity that desire, as an infinite tendency, hovers asymptotically
around an impossible object-cause (which Lacan famously calls objet petit a): " …. Desire, a function central
to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same
time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being
were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes
into existence as an exact function of this lack. Being attains a sense of self
in relation to being as a function of this lack, in the experience of
desire."[4]
The ideality of whatever the subject imagines and explicitly relates to
is then nothing but the symptom or point in its psyche, wherein the empty reality of the impossible object-cause
fixes itself.
But what is the relation between this underlying
object-cause, or the impossible Real object of desire on the one hand, and the
also impossible ideal-investments which make up the objective figurations of
the subject, and which constitute its illusory identity as an individual?
Lacan's will answer by explaining the intentionality of consciousness and
explicit "knowing" towards illusory ideals in terms of the intentionality
of unconscious desire, as oriented towards the impossible Real object. We could
tentatively propose that Lacan's initial coup against philosophy and psychology
consists in positing that the libidinal intentionality
of the unconscious founds the cognitive intentionality of consciousness by way
of alienation. But in order to distinguish the Real dimension object from the
imagined semblances that the phantasy of the subject projects, Lacan is forced
into both identifying former with its formal dimension (as opposed to
'substantive' or ontological dimension), and subtract it from the commerce of
the signifier wherein discourse tethers itself symptomatically. We shall first
focus on the latter question, which provides the answer to how psychoanalysis
attempts to trump philosophy, only then to move towards setting up a
controversy as made evident by considering the second question.
Psychoanalysis must hold this prerogative
as the study of desire, since it is desire that evinces itself as the motor for
any kind of intentional comportment towards being or entities. Lacan's account seeks
to reveal how the objectivation of intentional consciousness is underdetermined
by the psychic split that follows from the Oedipal castration-complex, and in
which the subject is wrested from the immanent
symbiosis with maternal body and into the order of the transcendental Law or language, thereby intending towards the recovery
of the non-alienation which is thought to be lost. Insofar as every knowledge
intends towards an object, all epistemological or phenomenological
investigation into consciousness and its contents are uniformly treated as
iterations implicating the same structure of psychic splitting or alienation.
And it is on the basis of this shared libidinal structure that Lacan seeks to
frame psychoanalysis as a theory that
accesses the libidinal kernel behind philosophy and psychology.
The core of the account involves
tracing how the specular images that the subject builds an identity from support
desire by being correlated to "the signifying chain" the symbolic or
language, i.e. how the subject enters the "defiles through the
signifier" within which the subject will circulate around the (impossible)
object of desire: "There
are in the unconscious signifying chains which subsist as such, and which from
there structure, act on the organism, influence what appears from the outside
as a symptom, and this is the whole basis of analytic experience.[5]"
Following Zizek, we can call the
splitting of the subject symbolic
castration, to describe how the division and articulation between the
subject and its imaginary identifications is relative to how the subject
becomes enjoined and invested from an impersonal cultural-linguistic order. Or,
to quote Zizek, symbolic castration obtains where the "...gap between what I really am' and the symbolic mask
that makes the subject into something. The subject is thus castrated from the
'real' "I" by projecting something else."[6]
(Zizek, HRL, Pg. 34)
The basic idea is that who the subject thinks it is or should be, its placing, so to speak, is determined on the basis of a language that
he acquires by external conditioning, and never immediately or transparently as
phenomenologists surmise. For Lacan, the self-alienation of the subject founds
the notion of an ontologically consistent individual, identical to itself,
thereby veiling the (unbridgeable) gap between its immediate (non)-being (or
the void of its formal subjectivity) and its imaginary-symbolic figurations
(which yield 'empirical' content). Because
self-relation and self-constitution is paradoxically grounded in this moment of
self-alienation, it is both the moment of narcissism and that of absolute
estrangement: "One can sense, one can pick up that narcissism is involved
somewhere, and that this narcissism is involved at this moment of the Oedipus
complex." (S6, L6, pp. 92)
The "great outdoors" coveted
by the philosophers turns out on this account to be a function of a subject that
by virtue of desiring is split between the object it identifies itself with,
and the formal void which subtracts itself from every such identification. Lacan's
contentions against philosophy and psychology converge here, radicalizing the Kantian
separation between the transcendental and empirical subject, that Zizek
characterizes as a decisive mark of the modern breakthrough[7].
Lacan's appropriation of this split, however, defuses any attempts to reify the
transcendence of the subject in terms of a consciousness furnished with a priori cognitive structures to
individuate its contents[8].
This entails that the unity and emergence of
what Freud called the "perception-consciousness system" that
characterizes thinking beings is to be explained by placing it in contrast to a
notion of subjectivity that is recalcitrant with that of the ego qua decentered other. Consciousness is
of the order of the ego, since it thinks that it is the imaginary projection of
itself outside of itself that does the thinking, i.e. it identifies itself with
what it thinks. But Lacan's point is
precisely that the desiring subject is never such identical to what in intends
towards as its objective pole, but precisely the contrary, and against
Descartes, it thinks where it is not.
This marks accordingly the foreclosure of all attempts to think of the subject
of the unconscious as topic for "empirical" investigation. Desire
entails, in short, a Gestalt,
conditioning the entire field of the visible world; the individuated world of
things and persons actually presupposes
the structure of the subject of desire. As a result, the imaginary that furnishes
the disclosure or revelation of being to man, the ideal investments, so dear to
the philosopher, are suddenly made to appear as the ploy of desire's interminable
ruse for the subject's self-reconstitution.
Alienation therefore effectuates a
commensuration between the images projected from the perspective of the subject's
alienation, and the 'visible world' of things. It serves simultaneously as the
germinal point of entry for both the epistemological
myth of a fully consistent subject or
self, as well as for the ontological myth of a fully consistent object or other; that is, for both philosophy and empirical (ego) psychology.
In other words, the subject-object
dichotomy, from which both philosophy and psychology depart, begins in the
infant's (mis)identification and de-centering: the idea that one's being lacks any unified substantiality or 'selfhood'
(the pure membra disjecta) emerges as
a result of the identification with a subsistent image. It is my primary identification with an image
that locates a gap between the reality of the subject as the agent of thought and as an object of thought. This seems to be the meaning behind the cryptic
statement from Lacan that the ego, in its narcissistic stupor, constitutes
"...a vital dehiscence that is constitutive of man" (E, pp. 4)
But if the philosophical quest for knowledge and consciousness are unknowingly
submitted to the rule of desire, then it what sense does psychoanalysis escape
this fate? How does psychoanalysis prevent itself from trying to know in accordance to its own
figurations, to the own reified individuality of the analyst, to occupy the
position of being an observer of discourse? Indeed, is there room to speak of knowledge
of desire, once we have demoted the
idea that consciousness apprehends in
representational terms? It is at this juncture that Lacan must reconstruct the
traditional philosophical relation of representational congruence between words
and things for the structuralist flattening relations that hold between
signifiers in 'chains'.
Thus, the next step, for us, is to
explain how the imaginary functions of the ideal ego are at the same time mediated
by the cultural order of language, the "(big) Other", which signals
that it constitutes a decentered
place of identification, like the other
of the imaginary, but also an impersonal
field constituted by the community into which one is inserted[9].
By tethering the subject of the unconscious to the symbolic Lacan means to say
that language is in a sense a transcendent authority that ordains and issues
the injunctions before which desire sets itself. Desire is the desire of the Other precisely insofar as it is
mediated by an order or Law which pre-exists and determines its organization[10]. Or,
put differently, one never desires what one sees or imagines immediately, but only
through particular prescriptions and normative injunctions issued from the
impersonal order of language. Chiesa explains that "...the specular,
alienating identification of the subject with the imaginary other necessarily
presupposes an earlier, original - and perpetual- alienation in the Other qua language." (Chiesa, 2009, pp.
25)
In
order to understand the (anti)-philosophical significance of this move,
consider the following classical statement from Pufendorf, issued at the
beginning of the Enlightenment, on the institution of norms by the rational
adherence of individual agents: "[W]hen a man of his own accord consents
to the rule of another, he acknowledges by his own act that he must follow what
he himself has decided."[11]
The same idea is later found in Kant, for whom it is the rational capacity for
individuals to bind themselves to linguistically articulated norms that
simultaneously subject them to authority and assessment, but also are the
condition for their freedom and choice. Rationality endows the subject the
capacity for freedom insofar as it reckons its power for adhering to the
prescriptions issued as linguistic norms or laws. Ye who is it that binds
itself freely, in advance of all prescriptions?
Lacan's point is that in order to
'freely' bind oneself to a norm one
must, already be bound by the Other, and that therefore, strictly speaking,
there is no 'free' binding. For an individual to recognize itself as bound to a norm he/she must be already in possession of
an inherited language in terms of which
he/she formulates his/her identity. This individual who presumably binds itself
freely is then, to use an Althusserian expression, always already interpellated by the big Other, rather
than the condition for the institution of the big Other. One always chooses
that which has already been chosen; it is always from within language that one formulates the fantasy of a 'free' binding,
or of the individuality required thereof. It is not a conscious
self-recognition which allows one to bind oneself to linguistic norms; one must
be already implicitly and unconsciously bound to norms in order to desire and
think of a possible self-recognition. This individual who 'recognizes itself as
free to bind itself' is thereby supplanted, by Lacan, for a subject who cannot
but fail to recognize itself in the identity that is prescribed to him from the
big Other. There is no meta-language, no position of an observer: "The subject is nothing other
than what slides in a chain of signifiers, whether he knows which signifier he
is the effect of or not. That effect- the subject – is the intermediary effect
between what characterizes a signifier and another signifier, namely, the fact
that each of them, each of them is an element. "[12]
This leads us to question, then, about
what possible role could psychoanalysis occupy within the 'sliding chain of
signification', as it mediates the clinical intervention of the analyst by way
of a corpus of theoretical claims that describe and prescribe the very subject
matter for psychoanalysis? Indeed, what is the ethics of this peculiar
discursive enterprise that warns against the temptation to position oneself as
an external observer before the parade of signifiers? Who is, after all, the subject
of psychoanalysis, and from what position does it issue its address? This
question becomes pressing the more we realize that the very clinical practice
psychoanalysis enacts is itself mediated by the series of principles,
statements and formulas that comprise the 'theory' of psychoanalysis, and
without which its practice in the clinical setting would be impossible. How
does the 'binding' to these principles take place' in accordance to what rule,
if not that prescribed by the big Other? In order to see how this problem becomes
particularly acute we must see how the Lacanian conception of a voided
subjectivity in tandem with his adherence to a immanent structuralism within
the order of the signifier leads to the problematic assessment of
psychoanalytic claims, and finally to a quandary concerning its position of
address. This becomes evident once we realize Lacan's liquidation of
representation is the very condition for his claim that there is no
meta-language. Let us examine the details involved in Lacan's account.
As we have seen, the logical priority
of the symbolic entails both that the self-identification of the subject with
the imago occurs as the subject is
inserted into language, and that the identification of others as others (both individuals and objects,
persons and things) is conditioned by the linguistic order of the signifier,
i.e. individuation is a function of language, and this articulates both the
epistemic-psychological dimensions of self-understanding, as well as the
ontological dimensions of understanding others and the world[13]. This forms a necessary corrective the myths
of knowledge and thinking that located desire at the level of explicit
consciousness, since for them "... it seemed that consciousness was
inherent to what the subject had to say qua signification" (SV, pp. 105).
Redoubling the earlier distinction
between individual ego and subject, at the level of the symbolic we can map the
distinction between the subject of the
statement and the subject of
enunciation. The former is expressly formulated in speech or writing, individuated
by the inclusion into the symbolic order and grammatically objectivated within
the sequences of signifiers and sentences that structure discourse. The subject of the enunciation, on the other
hand, is the slippery index for the
subject of the unconscious, which
remains forever subtracted and incomplete from desire’s imaginary-symbolic
operations, and from the statement. Lacan reverses Descartes dictum accordingly:
"I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think" (Lacan 1977: 166).
However, the most important point we
must underline here is that the subject of enunciation does not stand to the
subject of the statement as signified stands to signifier, or represented to
representing. Lacan is adamant to insist in that the individuating function of
the big Other is not merely representationalist in the sense that it 'tracks
down things' through words or signs; it refuses to be ontologised or
positivized. This constitutes the kernel of Lacan's flattening of the
Saussurian relation of signification
as holding between signs and things, to one where signification obtains between
signifiers exclusively: "The signifier doesn't just provide an envelope, a
receptacle for signification. It polarizes it, it structures it, and brings it
into existence." (SIII, pp. 224), and "...the sign does not take its
value with respect to a third thing that it represents, but it takes on its
value with respect to another signifier which it is not." (Ibid; pp. 7) Or
yet again: "The signifier is a sign that doesn't refer to any object... It
is a sign which refers to another sign, which is as such structured to signify
the absence of another sign, in other words, to be opposed to it in a
couple." (SXI, pp. 167)
What I
would like to suggest is that it is not only the subject of the unconscious which
becomes delivered from the empirical pretences of ego-psychology or
transcendental philosophy into the order of language, but also the intended
objects of consciousness which become delivered from the empirical pretences of
metaphysicians and ontologists to the delirium of the signifier. As a result,
the unconscious is crucially neither the subject, nor an object; it has no
determinate ontological or epistemic status: "...what still becomes
apparent to anyone in analysis who spends some time observing what truly
belongs to the order of the unconscious, is that it is neither being, nor
non-being, but the unrealized." (SXI, pp 30)
As a result, the disjunction between psychoanalysis and philosophy is total since "the gap of the unconscious seems to be pre-ontological... it does not lend itself to ontology" (Ibid. 29) The psychoanalytic relation to the non-ontologizable reality of the unconscious is not the search for a pre-linguistic positive content hidden behind the signifying chain, which would constitute the ‘real subject’ after sublating and shedding off its feeble illusions[14]. Whereas the subject of knowledge is an illusion, the subject of the unconscious is not merely a myth: "the subject [of knowledge] correlative to the object, the subject around whom turns the eternal question of idealism, and who is himself an ideal subject...he is only supposed." (S6, L2, pp. 18). It is not the ideal subject that underlies the signifier, but the pure formal placement of signifiers that comprises the subject: " The subject is nothing other than what slides in a chain of signifiers, whether he knows which signifier he is the effect of or not".[15] As a result, both subject and object are delivered to a structure of signification, void of any ontological status, and to relations between signifiers, void of epistemological status.
As a result, the disjunction between psychoanalysis and philosophy is total since "the gap of the unconscious seems to be pre-ontological... it does not lend itself to ontology" (Ibid. 29) The psychoanalytic relation to the non-ontologizable reality of the unconscious is not the search for a pre-linguistic positive content hidden behind the signifying chain, which would constitute the ‘real subject’ after sublating and shedding off its feeble illusions[14]. Whereas the subject of knowledge is an illusion, the subject of the unconscious is not merely a myth: "the subject [of knowledge] correlative to the object, the subject around whom turns the eternal question of idealism, and who is himself an ideal subject...he is only supposed." (S6, L2, pp. 18). It is not the ideal subject that underlies the signifier, but the pure formal placement of signifiers that comprises the subject: " The subject is nothing other than what slides in a chain of signifiers, whether he knows which signifier he is the effect of or not".[15] As a result, both subject and object are delivered to a structure of signification, void of any ontological status, and to relations between signifiers, void of epistemological status.
And yet, does this leave it open that something
like being-as-such may nonetheless subsist in the order of consciousness, along its much vaunted intentionality? For if
indeed, as Lacan puts it, "the Freudian world isn't a world of things, it
isn't a world of being, it is a world of desire as such", then couldn't
the relation of knowing in which
things, and not just words, come into mind, be said to subsist at some level?
(S2, pp. 222) Yet insofar as the relation between words and things is flattened
to the relation between signifiers, ontology could only be said to subsist trivially
at the price of subordinating it to the structure of desire. This weakens the
ontological valence of 'beings' or 'being' to merely ideal poles for the
phantasies of philosophers, which does not so much deny ontology as much as it suspends
its purported prerogative when securing our access to the "world of
being", understood as that of a mind independent reality. It thereby
flattens the philosophical pretence of gaining traction before the world to the
uniform register of an unconscious desire which, like every other, is supported
in nothing else than in the signifying chain and its metonymic inscriptions. As
Alain Badiou puts it: "An important consequence of this situation is, in
this instance, the fact that the void is not
presupposed in signification from the perspective of its universality. It is presupposed under signification, at the back of signification, as the
slipping, the sliding, the streaming and the channel of our being, in the unpresented that doubles
the signifying chain" (Badiou, Umbra, Pg. 28)
This answer seems to preemptively defang
ontology from its capacity to prey on the world, after which its peculiarity
becomes a matter of organization at the level of signifier. In this regard,
Badiou's reading of Lacan as an anti-philosopher stresses how, once demoted to
one more discursive practice among others, psychoanalysis would carry out
"a deposing of the category of philosophy to constitute itself as
theory... philosophy is an act, of which the fabulations about 'truth' are the
clothing, the propaganda, the lies." (Badiou, 2010, pp 75) I will later
suggest why it is not clear, however, that psychoanalysis can legitimize itself
as a theory without reactivating the kinds of distinctions it takes to be
proper of philosophico-scientific discourse, and will proceed to ask what
consequences follow for the formal
coherence of psychoanalysis, as well as for its purported content. That is to say, we shall ask how psychoanalysis relates to
its subject matter.
Since
there is no substantive content proper to the voided, barred subject and no
statement which predicates its 'proper being', Lacan consistently claims that there
is no Other of the Other: that there is no subject to be captured ‘outside’ of
the Otherness of language or, what amounts to the same, that “…there is no
metalanguage.” (E, 688) Put differently, one never "reaches out"
outside of language, either directly onto an other subject, or, what amounts to
the same, to being as an object, since "...what characterizes the demand
is not just that it is a relationship of a subject to another subject [or
between a subject and an object], it is that this relationship is made through
the mediation of language, through the mediation of a system of
signifiers." (SVI, L3, pp. 27) The movement of the Real occurs by and
through the order of the signifier, not as a foreign transcendence. The
primitive individuation of the imaginary realm, which as we saw constitutes the
entire field of the visible, traverses the order of the signifier constituting
the vain phantasy to regain the impossible object which would endow its void
with an integral consistency.
(c) The Cunning of Being or the Being of
Cunning?
If the subject of the reality unconscious
is indeed structured like a language, and desire is nothing but that which
slides in the articulation between signifiers, then the much vaunted Freudian
'world of desire' is an idealized world populated by phantasms; not a world as
much as the height of narcissistic alienation, the nightmare which is nothing
but a dream come true. At this point we should ask again: does this mean that
even if the relation of knowing
between words and things does not hold good for the structure of the unconscious, it might nevertheless be
thinkable within the realm of consciousness?
In this stronger formulation, I
believe that the question must be answered to in the negative. For it is clear
that the "Freudian world" isn't just another world which, in dualist metaphysical spirits, would neatly
leave the innocence of the world of knowing to its own operations, untouched.
Indeed, Lacan is adamant to show not only that the world of desire is not the
world of things, but that the unconscious conditions
the operations of consciousness and seals its every pretence within the economy
of desire: "Relations between human beings are really established before
one gets to the domain of consciousness. It is desire which achieves the
primitive structuration of the human world, desire as unconscious." (S2,
pp. 224) More dramatically still, it's precisely desire's undermining of
consciousness that makes the explicit conscious claims to the universality of being subordinate to the
unconscious singularity of the
symptom, or as Lacan reminds us: "...don't forget that consciousness isn't
universal." (Ibid). If this is so, then the ontological independence of
the 'realm of things' could at best be an epiphenomenal illusion, a veil under
which the iterations of desire and the symptom displace themselves in the order
of the signifier.
In fact, Lacan explicitly subordinates the object of knowledge to the object of desire, and claims that in the vector leading from the barred subject to its decentered other, the small impossible object of desire, one finds the (illusion) of knowledge: "$ [stands] in the presence of o and which we call the phantasy, which in the psychic economy represents something that you know." (Ibid, pp 214). This is why it is, paradoxically, desire that is the metonymy of being in the subject, insofar as it is through the self-alienating insertion into the impersonal Other of language that the subject releases its intentionality, and not from the realm of "Being" that offers itself 'as a gift' to immediate experience. What philosophers reify as knowledge of being is in truth the knowledge of the Other, insofar as it is attributed to and assumed by the subject as individuated in the impersonal symbolic order: ""What is it that knows?" Do we realize that it is the Other?... as a locus in which the signifier is posited, as without which nothing indicates to us that there is a dimension of truth anywhere, a di-mension, the residence of what is said, of this said whose knowledge posits the Other as locus." (SXX, pp. 96)
In fact, Lacan explicitly subordinates the object of knowledge to the object of desire, and claims that in the vector leading from the barred subject to its decentered other, the small impossible object of desire, one finds the (illusion) of knowledge: "$ [stands] in the presence of o and which we call the phantasy, which in the psychic economy represents something that you know." (Ibid, pp 214). This is why it is, paradoxically, desire that is the metonymy of being in the subject, insofar as it is through the self-alienating insertion into the impersonal Other of language that the subject releases its intentionality, and not from the realm of "Being" that offers itself 'as a gift' to immediate experience. What philosophers reify as knowledge of being is in truth the knowledge of the Other, insofar as it is attributed to and assumed by the subject as individuated in the impersonal symbolic order: ""What is it that knows?" Do we realize that it is the Other?... as a locus in which the signifier is posited, as without which nothing indicates to us that there is a dimension of truth anywhere, a di-mension, the residence of what is said, of this said whose knowledge posits the Other as locus." (SXX, pp. 96)
The philosophical questioning that
aims at knowledge is thus to be understood as the subject's depositing of his
speech within the punctuation of the symbolic, rather than by corresponding to
the Real. The power of the question brings us closer not to a palpitating realm
behind the order of the signifier, but only to the demand issued from within this order; thought must
subordinate its positivity to it, and find itself always-already lost in it.
For the subject, "what he is questioning himself about is far from being
the response, it is the questioning. It is effectively 'What is this signifier
of the Other in me?" (S1, L9, pp. 132). By fixating itself into the order
of the signifier, ruminating in search for the impossible lost object, the
quest for self proves, ironically, an inversion of the philosophical genealogy
of thought, a predecessor of the quest for being as such: "... the bar is
the hidden signifier, the one that the Other does not have at its disposition,
and which is precisely the one which concerns you: it is the same one that
makes you enter the game in so far as you, poor simpletons, since you were
born, were caught up in this sacred logos
business." (Ibid; L16, pp. 207). And indeed it is telling that the quest
for being should be of no concern for the psychoanalyst, but that he rather
makes of desire that which deserves to be called "the essence of
man", signaling its logical, if
not chronological, priority (S6, L1,
pp 4)[16].
However, this predicament forces
psychoanalysis into a quandary. For if the subject of knowledge is indeed subordinate
to the unconscious, and if the relation between signifier and signified is
flattened to the chains in the former, how are we to understand what for Lacan,
indeed for psychoanalysis, must be a
theory of desire? That is, how can
Lacanian psychoanalysis, in erecting its formidable conceptual structure,
proclaim to give a structured theory and
not just constitute an improvised practice,
i.e. how is it to become a discourse in which the structural features of desire
are outlined and articulated? For if there is no relation between words and
things, then what relation do the theoretical statements formulated in
psychoanalysis purportedly bear to its presumed subject matter? What is the
role of the peculiar signifier "desire"
in the economy of psychoanalysis, if there is, strictly speaking, nothing 'out
there' to be spoken of, no 'thing' populating the world which can escape the
latency of the phantasy? And similarly
for 'unconscious', 'signifier', "subject", the entire roster of concepts that psychoanalysis deploys continuously, when claiming to
explain the generality of desire as a
structure, and not just as manifesting
one more iteration of desire as a symptom, like every other.
Preemptively, one might answer that indeed
because psychoanalysis elides the priority of the referential relation it is
never trying to 'reach out' onto things or to give an ontology, peeking behind
the words, but is rather consigned to survey the latent content in which the signifying chains become deployed and
used. Thereby, the analyst is not a knower,
claiming to access the 'things behind the appearances', since that would
performatively contradict the purported demotion of epistemology/psychology and
philosophy by reifying the subject supposed to know into a kernel for empirical
investigation. Rather, the analyst is concerned with the reality of appearances
only, with how they find their place within
the structure of signification as such.
But this is simply to inflect the
issue into the order of language. For if psychoanalysis is not just one more phantasy caught around its impossible
object, then this is because what Lacan is effectively doing is not simply
writing/speaking to us qua analysands, addressing the particularity of our (paradoxically)
universal symptom. Rather, he is outlining the general structure of desire. In other words, the statements issued
by psychoanalysis allegedly pertain not just to one more discourse in the same
footing before desire as all others, but must rather gain traction before desire as such. If not, then the
artifice of psychoanalytic claims and formalizations would do nothing but make
of the signifier "desire"
its very own symbolic fiction, another specular symptom fixing the localization
of an impossible object, in an attempt to wage against the organization of the
purported hegemony of philosophers and psychologists. Yet Lacan repeatedly
insists on both the preponderance of a Real that is radically recalcitrant to
any symbolization on the one hand, and which is also the subject of
psychoanalsysis itself. How are we to understand the relation between the
claims of psychoanalysis and the Real that it comports itself towards? From
where can psychoanalysis issue an address about the Real without reifying an
epistemological relation between knower and known, which would depend on an
ontologized conception of subjectivity?
First, it is clear that the position of
enunciation that corresponds to the analyst's theoretical statements and formalizations cannot be rendered
equivalent to the position he/she occupies as an analyst in the clinical
setting[17].
But wherein is this theoretical meta-discourse
to be located then? How does it escape the impersonal pretences of the University
discourse, or the hegemonic address of the Master discourse? How does it
function in abstraction from the commerce of the symbol?
These questions are pressing, since the
theoretical claims of psychoanalysis function as the transcendental condition
for the division between the different formalizations of discursive positions,
and so also for the delineation of the analyst's role apropos the other three
positional registers. It seems to be, in this sense, functioning as a kind of
exception to the discursive hegemony of signifiers circling around the
object-cause with respect to the place of the signifier. But this is precisely
the kind of meta-linguistic position that Lacan seemingly wants to avoid at all
costs, and it is not clear on which methodological grounds one could purport to
occupy such an exceptional position while denying the valence of transcendence
which conditions epistemological investigation. The transcendental regulation
by the theoretical, however, seems function as the condition for the
displacement of philosophy, by assuming the epistemic rights before desire as a
structure, and against being and ontology. Thus, the theorerical claims of
psychoanalysis condition both the typology of subjective positions fro outside,
as well as the variegated semantic valences that give meaning to its own claims
about the Real.
I would suggest that, if as Badiou insists,
Lacan is an anti-philosopher, it is insofar as in waging war against the
ontological phantasy, he nevertheless remains within its confines; where the position
of enunciation of the University and the claim to objective knowledge, that is,
the "cohort of being", is typified within psychoanalytic theoretical
statements themselves. It is crucial to note that this theoretical operation is
not only external to the clinical practice of the discourse of the analyst, but
also that it conditions the separation of the analyst's discourse from the rest
of discourse. For what could the deliberate intent to subvert the 'dominating
discourse' that symptomatically evinces an instance of phantasy in analysis
mean for someone who is addressing the psychoanalytic community itself? From
which position of enunciation could the theoretical statements of
psychoanalysis be issued from, if it is neither a form of the presumed
neutrality of objective knowledge proper to University discourse, but neither
an instance for the discourse of the analyst? What could psychoanalysis claim
to be doing if, as Lacan has repeatedly insisted, there is no meta-language,
and if "there is no Other of the Other? " (Ibid; L16, pp. 206). Yet if knowledge of desire can be obtained or localized from the vantage point of
psychoanalytic theory, there seems nothing to keep the philosopher from claiming
that what Lacan is doing is effectively ontologizing
desire and thus the subject of the unconscious as the libidinal variant of
the realm of appearances, and that therefore Lacan has merely supplanted
philosophy and psychology with its own prescriptive ideational framework, apt
for empirical investigation, i.e. the realm of the unconscious that is "structured
like a language"[18].
Indeed, Lacan himself seems to have been aware
of this crucial paradox within his theoretical register from very early on. In
what I take to be a decisive statement, Lacan claims with regards to the
conceptual status of the psychoanalytic theoretical endeavor: "There is a
fundamental ambiguity in the use we make of the word 'desire'. Sometimes we
objectify it- and we have to do so, if only to talk about it. On the
contrary sometimes we locate it as the primitive term, in relation to any
objectification." (S2, pp. 225) This ambiguity is not trivial whatsoever.
For if desire must be objectified in
order to be spoken about, in what sense is it any different than any of the
other terms that philosophers or scientists purportedly use to describe
phenomena of all kinds, desire included? How are we to understand the claim that
desire is simultaneously of the order
of signifier and that which conditions
any objectification whatsoever? How to address the Real of the libidinal subject
and its Real of the object if, like Zizek insists, "There is no ontology of the Real: the very field of ontology, of
the positive order of Being the Real are mutually exclusive: The Real is the
immanent blockage or impediment of the order of being, what makes the order of
Being inconsistent..." (LTN; Pg. 958).
This problem is particularly acute: Lacan
insists that desire cannot be ontologised.
But then what is it that psychoanalytic theory is doing when they 'objectify'
desire "if only to speak of it"? How could such an act constitute anything
but the making of an ontological valence? Despite his precautions, by
flattening the symbolically enveloped epistemological relation between knowing
individual and known object into the relation between the Real of the
unconscious subject and the impossible object, Lacan seems to be effectively ontologizing the relation between the
desire and its object-cause. The deflection of the transcendental relation
between words and things at the level of the symbolic is coupled to a
reification of the relation between the desiring subject and desired object, at
the point where the Reality of both becomes indiscernible. The Real of desire appears thereby as the
ontologization of the relation between the Real subject and the Real object, as
the distinction between them becomes a nullity.
Yet to claim that desire is not just one
more signifier in the commerce of the symbolic, but rather the enabling condition for signification and
objectivation, is once again to reactivate the relation between signifier and
signified, only this time in terms of desire as Real precondition for objects
understood as linguistically individuated posits. In other words, although Lacan has done away
with the transcendental relation of reference at the level of the symbolic, he
must still covertly depend on the connection between the Real of desire as
condition of possibility for the symbolic individuation of the signifier. This is
to covertly ontologise desire as an Aristotelian 'first mover', as the 'ground
of being', as Ineffable Being stripped even of the honor of the name. And since
symbolic objectification occurs on condition of the Real unobjectifiable cause,
it follows that even the theory of desire, that psychoanalysis purports to
advance, is conditioned on separation between the claims and formulas about desire, and desire itself. In other words, if Lacan claims that the
objectification of desire relates to a pre-objectified desire, then he has
reactivated the referential relation between signifier and signified, sign and
referent, in the dichotomy between objectual desire-for-us and unobjectifiable desire-in-itself.
This surrenders Lacan to a bizarre, libidinal paradox of Kantianism. But to do
that he must once again rehabilitate not just the ontological valence of desire as such, but the epistemological valence of the relation between desire's
objectification in language and the depths of the desire that it bridges us to
in the act of theorizing it, that is, in the making of claims and formulas that
express it or which are about it. It
is impossible to understand Lacan's claim that desire is a 'precondition' for
its objectification unless one reenacts this philosophical cunning of the original
psychoanalytic coup against philosophy and science.
Alternatively, Lacan can insist that
the objectification in question needs of no such relation, and consistently
maintain that the signifier "desire"
is, like every other, merely in relation to other signifiers, but never aiming
towards anything like an ontologically generative 'in-itself'. Thus the terms
of psychoanalysis would escape the faith of standing as signifiers for signifieds, and so avoid tacitly
playing the role of a 'meta-language'. Indeed, this is what at some point Lacan
himself seems to want to claim when he says that "Desire emerges just as
it becomes embodied in speech, it emerges with symbolism." (SII, pp. 234).
In this reading, the original ambiguity is resolved in favor of a pure
objectification of something which, strictly speaking, does not preexist the
act of objectification itself.
Nevertheless, this raises the question about
how there could ever be a theory of desire (indeed of anything) having done
away with the Real. Without distinguishing how its theoretical statements
fulfill a descriptive role without becoming one more instance of the University
discourse, but neither falling into the other three forms of discourse, this
route ultimately undermines the theoretical status of psychoanalysis. The purported
connection to the phenomenon of
desire, however enveloped by the signifier, becomes in principle proscribed,
and psychoanalysis ends up depriving itself of any authority when describing
the subordination of knowledge to desire in theoretical terms. For there could
be no categorical distinction between those signifiers that will play the role
of "mere signifiers" in their discursive operation according to the
four forms, and those of psychoanalytic theory
which may unravel their conditions of possibility, lest we return to the
philosophical vocation of distinguishing empirical terms from transcendental
terms which condition the former, or occupy once again the position of the
University discourse by prescribing a kind of knowledge. In the light of such
exigency, psychoanalysis must accept that its attempt to objectify desire, if
only to speak of it is finally led by the proto-philosophical urgency to know, despite its protestations to the
contrary.
More dramatically, if psychoanalysis cannot
validate itself as a theory, neither can the structure of desire it purportedly
formalizes and describes as being intractable to knowledge be used to undermine
itself in relation to other theories
and discourses in general. In other words, psychoanalysis couldn't even
surrender its rights to desire without already having 'spoken that which can't
be spoken', that is, without already assuming a theoretical position claiming
to know of desire as that which slides through everywhere but is nowhere. The
result is a fundamental paradox whereby psychoanalysis ceases to be a theory
because the exigencies of desire undermine it, and where desire ceases to be
the structural phenomenon psychoanalysis describes because the latter is not a
theory[19]. Needless to say, this paradox threatens to
jeopardize even the clinical practice
of psychoanalysis, insofar as once the theoretical valence of its claims and
principles have been rendered dubious, so are the practices articulated and
prescribed on the basis of those claims and principles suddenly in a precarious
position.
Two scenarios appear possible at his
point, as the necessary correctives to psychoanalytic theory. Yet, as we shall
see, that the ambiguity of desire as a term
and as a condition is ultimately
irresolvable. Lacan claimed to have superseded the pretences of philosophy but
in turn seems to be forced into the choice between a variant of transcendental
idealism and sophistry. The former scenario has itself two possibilities: a) a
kind of negative-theological epistemic understanding of the foreclosure of Real
desire as that which resists objectification and meaning, and b) a variety of
textual idealism where desire is immanent to the signifier, while admitting of
a typology of signifiers. Let us assess each of these .
First, a possible answer is to
leave it open that psychoanalysis may gain traction with respect to Real desire,
via the objectification of the signifier. That is, the signifier might grant
access to desire as an unknowable,
unobjectifiable, but nevertheless thinkable
condition of possibility for signification (a variety of 'weak correlationism'[20]).
Under this light, Lacan's account of desire as Real precondition begins to
startlingly resemble the minimal realism of Heidegger, for whom the opaqueness
of the Earth qua unobjectifiable
being stands as necessarily refractory to the variegated structure of Worldhood,
with its populating entities and individuations at the ontic level. Real desire
would be the proto-ontological motor conditioning, ironically, the merely ontic
register of being and the symbolic investment of symptoms. The early Lacan seems
to indicate this much when he claims in a rather cryptic passage:
"Desire... is the desire for nothing namable... this desire lies at the
origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is there
wouldn't be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact
function of this lack." (SII, pp 223). This is the direction in which the
later Lacan, through his idea of the Real as that which resists symbolization,
seems to have succumbed, as we shall see below[21].
Alternatively, in this first re-philosophizing
scenario, the structure of desire remains epistemically accessible without
residue, but confined to the signifying order, in which case Lacan is involved
in a bizarre structuralist parody of textual idealism. Yet as we surmised
above, this cannot be done, strictly speaking, without a qualitative
distinction that vitiates the structural uniformity of the signifier. In other
words, it requires a qualitative distinction within the order of the signifier, a typology that sets those signs
which map the structure of desire from those which are merely within the
libidinal commerce of phantasy, and so those which are theorized by the former
in expressing their conditions of possibility. Both options in this scenario rehabilitate
the philosophical spooks that Lacan took to have demoted, at the price of
reactivating the possibility of a special kind of reference or relation between
signifiers, apart from the articulation of the four discourses, and with it one
must accept the neutral possibility of attaining the status of a
'meta-language' to save psychoanalytic theory from itself.
The second alternative, foreclosing the
explanatory purchase on desire, and leaving the exteriority of Real desire unthinkable, shuns the status of
psychoanalysis as a theory and surrenders it to a sophistic endeavor marking
its internal contradiction (a variety of strong correlationism). This is the
tragedy that we surmised above, when showing that psychoanalysis couldn't even
surrender its rights to knowledge if it fully relinquishes its epistemic
vocation, and the possibility of distinguishing between Real desire and its
theorization. For in this scenario, the Lacanian edifice ends up undermining
itself, rendering the conceptual endeavor it pursues into utter incoherence,
the knowledge of desire undermining its theorization, and the theorization of
desire undermining the possibility of knowledge of it[22].
As we suggested above, however, Lacan
seems to have progressively realized that he couldn't do without explaining how
a theory of Real desire relies on
such a conceptual envelopment, as evinced in a particularly telling passage: "[Our]
conception of the concept implies that the concept is always established in an
approach that is not unrelated to that which is imposed on us, as a form, by
infinitesimal calculus. Indeed, if the concept is modeled on an approach to the
reality that the concept has been created to apprehend, it is only by a leap a
passage to the limit, that it manages to realize itself. We are then required
to say in what respect- under what form of finite quantity, I would say- the
conceptual elaboration known as the unconscious may be carried out." (SXI:
pp. 19) The metaphor is that of an asymptotic
approach to the Real via the matheme,
forever removed from the concept's touch.
Yet
at this point, signaling both the beginning of a mathematical obsession and
that of a poetic escape, Lacan begins to opt for the first horn of the dilemma
and to surrender psychoanalysis to what appears under all lights to be a
re-philosophizing of its fundamental task, along with the valence of knowing. A
passion for the purity of formalization and the inscription, which begins sliding
down to the notion that the matheme
is closest to the Real. The matheme becomes
the receptacle of a pure transmission, insofar as formalization subtracts
writing from its conceptual envelopment, prizing it free from any semblance of
meaning or intention. This is why, for Lacan, "The mathematical
formalization of signifierness runs counter to meaning." (SXX, pp. 93)
The matheme is said to be closest to the Real insofar as it formalizes while symbolizing nothing: it has a Real status insofar as it cannot be positivized in a representation. The Real subtracts itself from all positive content and all imaginary-symbolic envelopments; it is delivered only to the pure act of transmission, the transference of the analyst's intervention which opens the promise for the traversal of the phantasy. Just like the subject, there can be thus no theoretical knowledge of the Real: the latter cannot be totalized or unified by a predicate, or thought of consistently through definable properties. Therefore, it cannot be qualitatively determined so as to be tractable conceptually: "If there is a notion of the real, it is extremely complex and, because of this, incomprehensible, it cannot be comprehended in a way that would make an All out of it."[23] What formalization enables, Lacan wants to say, is not a representation of desire and so of a knowledge about the Real, but rather an experience or 'act' with respect the Real, a possibility for transference in analysis: "Truth cannot convince, knowledge becomes act.[24]" (Ibid; Pg. 104)
The matheme is said to be closest to the Real insofar as it formalizes while symbolizing nothing: it has a Real status insofar as it cannot be positivized in a representation. The Real subtracts itself from all positive content and all imaginary-symbolic envelopments; it is delivered only to the pure act of transmission, the transference of the analyst's intervention which opens the promise for the traversal of the phantasy. Just like the subject, there can be thus no theoretical knowledge of the Real: the latter cannot be totalized or unified by a predicate, or thought of consistently through definable properties. Therefore, it cannot be qualitatively determined so as to be tractable conceptually: "If there is a notion of the real, it is extremely complex and, because of this, incomprehensible, it cannot be comprehended in a way that would make an All out of it."[23] What formalization enables, Lacan wants to say, is not a representation of desire and so of a knowledge about the Real, but rather an experience or 'act' with respect the Real, a possibility for transference in analysis: "Truth cannot convince, knowledge becomes act.[24]" (Ibid; Pg. 104)
And yet, as we saw, as much as the matheme itself remains recalcitrant to
the symbolic, it is just as true that Lacan cannot dispense of the task of
deploying the matheme to formalize
psychoanalytic concepts and structures. Lacan himself says that the
formalization is the formalization of
the signifier: of whatever is articulated through the signifier, psychoanalytic
claims included. But if mathematics can operate to formalize psychoanalysis, this is because formalization operates
over the concepts and claims that
psychoanalysis deploys. But in order for psychoanalytic claims and concepts to
be any more apt for the formalization which 'touches the Real' of desire, then
the claims of psychoanalysis must be in some respect different than all others;
or else the formalization would appear arbitrarily dependant on a discursive
register. Yet the on what methodological grounds could we assess whether
psychoanalytic enjoy this priority, if not epistemological or semantic?
At this juncture, the claim that the matheme resists translation is merely to
refuse to explain how it is that it functions as a formalization adequate to the statements of psychoanalysis, and which
concern the Real as much as the symbolic or the imaginary. The matheme is said not to obey the norms of
knowledge or enter into the rule of the symbolic, but at the same time is
coordinated with a series of theoretical interpretations, granting it rights
before the Real. But what grounds this proximity between the matheme and the Real, as regulated by
psychoanalytic concepts? Without explaining this connection, psychoanalysis
fails to adequately account for the relation between the practice of
formalization and the theoretical statements which provide the semantic
interpretation for the mathematical formulas. For the psychoanalyst needs not
only the matheme which is recalcitrant to meaning, but a series of theoretical
claims explaining how the matheme
formalizes certain structures. Without this connection, any mathematical
inscription cannot count as the formalization of anything, is truly
'meaningless', and there would be nothing to distinguish pure mathematical forms
from Real psychic structures[25].
This would render psychoanalysis complicit with a kind of Pythagorean upsurge.
Just like unobjectifiable desire was 'objectified' in theory only to speak of
it, the Real non-translatability of the matheme
is translated by psychoanalytic theory since, without such a theorization, the matheme could not stand for the formalization
of anything whatsoever. The interesting paradox is therefore that although in
order for the matheme to be
non-translatable to any discursive register that operates under the symbolic it
must, paradoxically, be able to be translated into the conceptual register of
psychoanalysis, for the latter provides the interpretation without which, the
abstract terms would fail to account for anything.
What this evinces is that
psychoanalysis ultimately is forced to speak of the Real ambiguously: in one
sense it said to pertain to formalization in its untranslatable dimension, and in another to desire as the unobjectifiable condition for any
discourse. It is precisely at this juncture that the unobjectifiable Real of
desire, touched only in the act of
transference, is mediated by a tacit separation
from the matheme that ordains it, evincing
a division that psychoanalysis ultimately cannot resolve. Much like for Heidegger Being qua the unobjectifiable opaqueness of
the Earth cannot be apprehended conceptually but must be delivered to the
poetic word of the thinker and the act of the artist, the Real qua unobjectifiable opaqueness of desire
cannot be known but must be delivered to the epistemic opaqueness of the matheme and the transference occasioned
by the analyst in act. As Lacan puts it: "Mathematization alone reaches a
real - and it is in that respect that it is compatible with our discourse, with
analytic discourse- a real that has nothing to do with what traditional
knowledge has served as a basis for, which is not what the latter believes it
to be- namely, reality, but rather phantasy... The Real, I will say, is the
mystery of the speaking body, the mystery of the unconscious." (SXX; pp.
131)
However, the call for the bodily act signals
also the inevitable moment of loss for explanation,
the moment in which, no longer capable of separating the thought of the Real
from the Real itself, one must surrender all theoretical pretences and en-act
the traversal itself, a clinical pilgrimage before the inflections of the
symptom through the lessons of formalization. The
discursive access to knowing-that becomes delivered to the oblique efficacy of
non-discursive know-how. This is how we should coordinate these two
seemingly disparate statements from Lacan: "There is some rapport of being
that cannot be known" (SXX, pp. 119, TM), and "If analysis rests on a
presumption, it is that knowledge about [subjective] truth can be constituted
on the basis of its experience" (Ibid, pp. 91). The impossibility of a
knowledge of being is but the obverse
of the possibility of knowing how to speak
in bringing about the transference. Or as Badiou formulates it: "The
paradoxical position of Lacan concerning truth is that there is no knowledge of
truth, but finally there is a psychoanalytic knowledge concerning this absence
of knowledge. This is the great paradox of the unconscious...a subject can have
an experience of its proper Real only in the form of an act." (Badiou,
2010)
The levels must be clearly demarcated: the
analytic transference enjoins the traversal of the phantasy and is supported by
the formalization of the symbolic by the matheme.
But as we have seen, the operation of formalization which demarcates the
positions and structures is in turn supported by the conceptual register of
psychoanalytic theory itself. Lacan can thus claim that: "It is in the
very act of speaking that makes this formalization, this ideal meta-language,
ex-sist." (SXX, Ibid; pp 119) The two Reals glare forth in their
unresolved difference: the pure form of the mathematic
inscription, recalcitrant to incorporation within the symbolic order of
language, and Real of desire in the passage to the pure act that deposes all
representational knowledge, where the traversal of the phantasy takes place. As
Badiou stresses: "This act is like a cut in language and also a cut in the
ordinary representation of the world- a representation which is imaginary. So
the act suddenly isolates the Real from its normal collection to the imaginary
and symbolic orders." (Badiou, 2010).
And
yet we must insist, that for all its purported deflection of knowing-that, the abyss that separates the Real voided
matheme from the Real of desire
merely reproduces the dyad of signifier/signified in the dichotomy between
theoretical inscription and practical transmission. That is, Lacan reproduces
the problem between thought and reality that he takes to be emblematic of the
philosophical forms of 'knowing' in the tacit distinction between the formal
ideography of the matheme in its
presentation, and the singular act of speech in which transference finally
takes place and Real desire 'moves'. For Lacan cannot conflate the speciousness
of the formulaic writing of the
matheme with the act of speech
through which the subject traverses the phantasy, nor with the desire in the subject itself. That this
distinction is ultimately unexplainable, that the connection between the Real qua formalized matheme and the Real qua act cannot be justified but merely presupposed
by psychoanalysis, reveals the latter's internal gulf, delivered as it is, both
to the requirement to forego knowledge, and yet also to ordain it by yielding
knowledge of its own. This separation ultimately makes the status of the Real
undecidable, or fatally ambiguous, i.e. playing the role of a pure inscription
without exteriority (the Real of the matheme
as formalization), or a pure exteriority without symbolization (the Real is
that which resists symbolization). With the Real subtracted from the traction
of knowing, it becomes a noumenal phantasm suspended between the void of an
empty formalism, or a mystical surrender to the ineffable Otherness that
animates the act.
And so one notes also, alongside the
obliqueness of the matheme, a desperation against the threat of the
"dialectic" and a helplessness evinced toward the poetic rumination,
thinking from a distance the untouchable purity of an Otherness so unblemished
that it does nothing but subtract itself from the signifier and its operations.
Such is the sliding down to the identification of the Real with that which is
ultimately beyond all capacity for individuation, rendering the conditioning of
the Real of desire excised from its pseudo-objectifications[26]. Unfortunately
then, the question about the legitimacy of desire as a suitable structure to
explain to ontogenesis of thought and being, returns into the market of
theories negotiating an unnamable void for their founding gesture. Perhaps this
is why Lacan struggles, refusing to fully embrace the prospect of ontologizing
the unconscious and desire, to the point of reverting into the desperation of
sophism: "the gap of the unconscious is pre-ontological... it is neither
being nor non-being, but the unrealized." (SXI: pp. 29)
We
hear echoes of Heidegger's attempts to reconcile himself with his own theory,
trying to save the Great Outdoors from the clutches of Dasein's world-producing
prerogative (claiming animals have and do not have worlds by saying they are
'poor in them', for instance). Lacan, scavenging for the Real, this being without
the honor of the name, urges the separation between psychoanalysis and
philosophy, much like for Heidegger poetic thought could only free itself by separating
itself from the loudness of metaphysics. A scission, to be sure, that appears as
the uncompromising desire for desire,
stubbornly clinging to its own impossible object, its own unrequited passion.
For the Real does not speak, after all, putting an end to the disguised
epistolary confession of the philosopher and the scientist, as well as the
analysand. Is this not where the tormented psychoanalyst geared towards the
interruption of the symptom by the act and the matheme, and the disillusioned provincialism of the poetic philosopher
traversing metaphysics through poetry meet again: in the desire for silence?
Ultimately, the Real anchor of desire
and its object, this 'indivisible remainder', does not absolve Lacan from the
faith of the philosophical dictum, but rather delivers him back into what Badiou
has called 'the effects of skepticism': "The
effects of this kind of frenzied upsurge, in which the real rules over the
comedy of our symptoms, are ultimately indiscernible from those of skepticism.[27]"
(LOW: Pg. 563) And indeed, I think Badiou is correct here: Lacan's cryptic
statement from 1977 that "truth can only concern the Real" is perhaps
the point of the unique symptom, the torsion where, suspended between the
choice between being and nothingness, Lacan nods for the all-too-familiar
philosophical maneuver, and proceeds to identify them. The sliding void of the
object names the passion for the unnamable stain that, repudiating the
stringency of the symbolic demand, refuses to extirpate itself from thought,
however elusive to its feeble touch. The Real nothingness of Being, and so
philosophy, appears now as the stain for psychoanalysis, refusing to let the
words come to an end. That is, without ever traversing its own fantasy,
absolving the tormented analyst from his own confessional delirium.
Index of Abbreviations
E = Ecrits
SII: Seminar II
SIII: Seminar III
SVI: Seminar VI
SXX: Seminar XX
SXI: Seminar XI
SII: Seminar II
SIII: Seminar III
SVI: Seminar VI
SXX: Seminar XX
SXI: Seminar XI
[1] The attempt to define and restrict the scope of the
thinkable in terms of fixed categorical determinations already presupposes the
libidinal core of the subject as void of any content, as it passes through the
experience of alienation by becoming integrated into language: "If what Freud discovered, and
rediscovers ever more abruptly, has a meaning, it is that the signifier’s
displacement determines subjects’ acts, destiny, refusals, blindnesses,
success, and fate, regardless of their innate gifts and instruction, and
irregardless of their character or sex; and that everything pertaining to the
psychological pre-given follows willy-nilly the signifier’s train, like weapons
and baggage" (E, Pg. 30)
[1] This
explains Jacques -Alain Miller's formulation apropos Lacan's teachings during
1955 under the title "From the small to the big Other", which also
marks Lacan's more pronounced reworking with the structuralist tradition in
linguistics, and thus with the problematic of language in general.
[1] It is
clear that, at least in the 1950's, Lacan's concept of the unconscious is
deeply influence by the Hegelian-Kojevian notion of desire as the desire of
recognition of the other.
[1]
[1] Seminar
XX, p.50
[1] This structure is simultaneously that which provides
thus the condition for consciousness as consciousness of something, and that which eludes the explicit 'aboutness' of
conscious intentionality. It is insofar
that the subject constitutes its unconscious as a result of this alienating
operation of 'symbolic castration' that the latter is not a mere myth to be allotted alongside the
inventions of philosophers and psychologists alike: “...what is not a myth,
although Freud formulated it just as early on as he formulated the Oedipus
myth, is the castration complex” (E; Pg. 695).
[1] More
subtly, it attempts to find within
the signifying chain itself those symptomatic points of capture and torsion,
the anomalies and ruptures which locate the subject’s unconsciously articulated
desire, i.e. its metonymic points of torsion and articulation. Thus Lacan
emphasizes the “…the radical role of metaphor and metonymy, substitution and
combination of signifiers in synchronic and diachronic dimensions" (Ibid).
[1] - Seminar XX,
p.50
[1]
Indeed, the word "ontology" is not mentioned once in Seminar VI.
[1] For
the development on the four discourses, see especially Seminar XII, Norton
2007.
[1] It is
obvious at this point that Lacan cannot mean that the unconscious is determined
by a language, since this would make it a kind of signified upon which the
signifier would work. Rather, the unconscious is the very process of
signification: You see
that by still preserving this ‘like’ [comme], I am staying within the
bounds of what I put forward when I say that the unconscious is structured like a language. I saylike so as not to say – and I come back to
this all the time – that the unconscious is structured by a language. The unconscious is
structured like the assemblages in question in set theory, which are like
letters" Seminar XX, p.48
(Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, W.W. Norton, 1999) Although the appeals to set
theory here are obviously metaphoric, they point to the idea, emphasized by
Badiou that, just like sets are not multiples of anything, language is not of
the unconscious; the latter would be to reconstitute the relation between
signifier and signified that Lacan is in the process of dismantling.
[1]
MEILLASSOUX, Quentin, After Finitude, translated
by Ray Brassier, Continuum, 2006.
[1]
Roughly, from Seminar XI onwards.
[1] Even
if we agree with Badiou that psychoanalysis is indeed closer to politics in
seeking the singularity of the individual symptom rather than the repetition of
the scientific thought, it must be stressed that, irrespective of the clinical
practice, the theoretical endeavor carried out by psychoanalytic thought cannot
but be subject to the norms of conceptual consistency which binds scientific
thought. If this is the case, then the way that psychoanalysis shields itself
against the dogmatism of embracing alienation in the signifier to its fullest
extent would not be to simply listen to the 'affirmative' vocation of political
thought, but also to the scientific vocation for what renders its theoretical
posits possible, i.e. formal coherency of its ideography.
[1] Lacan, J., Le triomphe de la religion, précedé
du Discours aux catholiques, Paris: Seuil 2005, p. 96, 97.
[1] Accordingly, the object-cause of desire as a Real is
thought through the formalization of a vanishing object, non-identical to
itself, always alienating the subject from the place of enunciation. This is why the phallus, as the mask hiding
the displacement of the object, constitutes the metonymy of the subject in being: the object of desire is 'subjectivized'
insofar as it refuses to ever coincide with the phallic semblances under which
it appears or is formulated. This 'becoming subject of substance', to speak
Hegelese, is what makes the meaningless formalism 'nearest' to the Real object
and so to the unconscious desire.
[1] This
is why Zizek calls "the scientific Real" that "...of a
formula which renders the nature's meaningless functioning." (Zizek, How
to Read Lacan, http://www.lacan.com/zizalien.htm)
[1] It is
not only the structure of unconscious desire that is beyond recalcitrant to
ontology: the object of desire itself is, paradoxically, unobjectifiable
insofar as it remains impossible, non-self identical, never coincident with
a being with fixed qualities and
properties. This indicates another level of the fundamental coincidence between
the non-symbolic inscription of the object, and the object itself. This is
because objet a is both resolutely material (it is localized) and a formal index signaling that which is
never localizable, but which functions as an impasse for meaning, and so which
indexes the asymptotic horizon of the subject's intentional desire. The object
of desire is neither being (it resists objectification or self-identity, thus
enacting the infinity of subjective
desire) nor non-being (it must nevertheless be indexed as impossible object cause, 'if only to speak of it',
as that which consists as inconsistent, subtracting itself from the signifying
chain). The Real object can only be Real insofar as it is also, and paradoxically, a
'non-object', that is, insofar as it is on the side of the formal stringency of
the matheme and not of the
symbolic-imaginary operations of the signifier. Only the pure matheme
approaches it in its barren formalism by ordaining it to the act of analytic
transference facilitating the traversal of the phantasy: "[Objet a] would have us take it for being, in
the name of the following- that it is apparently something. But it only
dissolves, in the final analysis, owing to its failure, unable, as it is, to
sustain itself in approaching the real." (SXX: Pg. 95)
[1] In
this regard, I would emphasize that, in spite of Badiou's commendable attempts
to characterize psychoanalysis as a candidate for thinking but perhaps not a science,
where the latter term is understood as "the unity of a theory and a
practice", does not help solve the issue. This can be easily seen if we
realize that the incapacity to separate theory and practice is not something we
can straightforwardly allot to science; even if psychoanalysis is thought as
closer to politics, the question about the relation between the statements of such a thought and the
thing itself remains. To stipulate an absolute inseparability between thought
and world is to surrender to idealism; to claim such a distinction is possible
is to rehabilitate the valence of knowing within a philosophical thought. I
believe, for reasons that Ray Brassier has pointed out, following Wilfrid
Sellars, that the methodological
separation between the space of reasons and the space of causes is the
condition of possibility for the ontological
unity between thought and being, reason and nature. The consequence, against
Badiou's depiction, is not a thinking of the articulation between a theory and
a praxis, but rather how such an
articulation is to be understood as that between world that is not thought and
thought that thinks the world.
