Lacan and Philosophy
No writer in the history of psychoanalysis has done more to bring
Freudian theory into dialogue with the philosophical tradition than Jacques
Lacan. His work engages with a dauntingly wide array of thinkers, including not
only his near contemporaries (Saussure, Benvˇniste, Jakobson, Bataille,
Merleau-Ponty, Lˇvi-Strauss, Piaget, Sartre, Koj¸ve, Hyppolite, Koyrˇ, and
Althusser), but also other figures reaching back to the Enlightenment
(Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx, Hegel, and Kant) and beyond, from Spinoza,
Leibniz, and Descartes, to Pascal, Saint Augustine, Aristotle, Plato, and the
pre- Socratics. His references, moreover, are not limited to the familiar
landmarks of the post-Structuralist tradition who have so often been used to
interpret him (Koj¸ve and Hegel, Saussure and Lˇvi-Strauss), but include
numerous figures from the British tradition (Bertrand Russell, Jeremy Bentham,
Isaac Newton, Jonathan Swift, and George Berkeley), as well as from the history
of science and mathematics (Cantor, Frege, Poincarˇ, Bourbaki, Moebius,
Huyghens, Copernicus, Kepler, and Euclid). While some of these references are
no doubt merely grace notes, introduced to embellish a notoriously labyrinthine
and Gongoristic style, it is impossible to ignore the fact that his engagement
with a large number of these figures is serious, focused, and sustained over
many years.
"Lacan
and philosophy." By Charles Shepherdson, The
Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Ed. Jean-Michel Rabatˇ. Cambridge University
Press, 2003. Cambridge Collections Online. Cambridge University Press. 04/11/2008,
<http://cco.cambridge.org/extract?id=ccol0521807441_CCOL0521807441A009>
Academic
year 2008/2009
©
a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forˇs L—pez
©
Belˇn Garc’a Castiglioni
Universitat
de Val¸ncia Press