It would
be fair to say that there are few twentieth century thinkers who have had such
a far-reaching influence on subsequent intellectual life in the humanities as
Jacques Lacan. Lacans return to the meaning of Freud not only profoundly
changed the institutional face of the psychoanalytic movement internationally.
His seminars in the 1950s were one of the formative environments of the
currency of philosophical ideas that dominated French letters in the 1960s and
70s, and which has come to be known in the Anglophone world as
post-structuralism. Both inside and outside of France, Lacans work has also
been profoundly important in the fields of aesthetics, literary criticism and
film theory. Through the work of Althusser (and more lately Ernesto Laclau,
Jannis Stavrokakis and Slavoj Zizek), Lacanian theory has also left its mark on
political theory, and particularly the analysis of ideology and institutional
reproduction. This article, which seeks to outline something of the
philosophical heritage and importance of Lacans theoretical work, is divided
into four parts, each of which has subsections.
It would be fair to say that there are few
twentieth century thinkers who have had such a far-reaching influence on
subsequent intellectual life in the humanities as Jacques Lacan. Lacans
return to the meaning of Freud not only profoundly changed the institutional
face of the psychoanalytic movement internationally. His seminars in the 1950s
were one of the formative environments of the currency of philosophical ideas
that dominated French letters in the 1960s and 70s, and which has come to be
known in the Anglophone world as post-structuralism. Both inside and outside
of France, Lacans work has also been profoundly important in the fields of
aesthetics, literary criticism and film theory. Through the work of Althusser
(and more lately Ernesto Laclau, Jannis Stavrokakis and Slavoj Zizek), Lacanian
theory has also left its mark on political theory, and particularly the
analysis of ideology and institutional reproduction. This article, which seeks
to outline something of the philosophical heritage and importance of Lacans
theoretical work, is divided into four parts, each of which has subsections.
Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will
take you to those parts of this article)
1. Biographical and General
Introduction
2.
Lacan's Philosophical Anthropology: Human-Being as a Decentred Animal
b. Desire is the Desire of the Other
c. The Oedipal Complex, Castration, The Name of
the Father, and the Big Other
d. The Law and Symbolic Identification
f. Lacan's Diagnostic Categories
3. Lacan's Philosophy of Language
b. Psychoanalysis as Interpretation: the
Unconscious Structured Like a Language
c.
The Curative Efficacy of the 'Talking Cure'
4.
Lacanian Psychoanalysis and The Philosophy of Ethics
a. Master Signifiers, and the Decentred Nature of Belief
b. Lacan's Conception of Fantasy
c. The Lacanian Subjects, and Ethics
1. Biographical and
General Introduction
Biography
Jacques-Marie-mile Lacan was born in Paris
on April 13 1901 to a family of solid Catholic tradition, and was educated at a
Jesuit school. After completing his baccalaurat he commenced studying medicine
and later psychiatry. In 1927, Lacan commenced clinical training and began to
work at psychiatric institutions, meeting and working with (amongst others) the
famous psychiatrist Clerambault. His doctoral thesis, on paranoid psychosis,
was passed in 1932. In 1934, he became a member of La Societe
Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP), and commenced an analysis
lasting until the outbreak of the war. During the Nazi occupation of France,
Lacan ceased all official professional activity in protest against those he
called "the enemies of human kind". Following the war, he rejoined
the SPP, and it was in the post-war period that he rose to become a renowned
and controversial figure in the international psychoanalytic community,
eventually banned in 1962 from the International Psychoanalytic Association for
his unorthodox views on the calling and practice of psychoanalysis. Lacan's
career as both a theoretician and practicioner did not end with this
excommunication, however. In 1963, he founded L'Ecole Freudienne de Paris (E.F.P.), a school devoted to the training of analysts and the
practicing of psychoanalysis according to Lacanian stipulations. In 1980,
having single-handedly dissolved the EFP, he then constituted the Ecole for "La
Cause Freudienne", saying: It is up to you to be
Lacanians if you wish; I am Freudian. Lacan died in Paris on September 9,
1981.
Intellectual Biography
Lacan's first major theoretical publication
was his piece "On the Mirror Stage as Formative of the I". This piece
originally appeared in 1936. Its publication was followed by an extended period
wherein he published little. In 1949, though, it was re-presented to wider
recognition. In 1953, on the back of the success of his Rome dissertation to
the SPP on "The Function and Field of Speech in Psychoanalysis",
Lacan then inaugurated the seminar series that he was to continue to convene
annually (albeit in different institutional guises) until his death. It was in
this forum that he developed and ceaselessly revised the ideas with which his
name has become associated. Although Lacan was famously ambivalent about
publication, the seminars were transcribed by various of his followers, and
several have been translated into English. Lacan published a selection of his
most important essays in 1966 in the collection Ecrits. An abridged version of this text is available in an English-language edition.
(see Bibliography).
Theoretical Project
Lacan's avowed theoretical intention, from
at least 1953, was the attempt to reformalise what he termed 'the Freudian
field. His substantial corpus of writings, speeches and seminars can be read
as an attempt to unify and reground what are the four interlinking aspirations
of Freud's theoretical writings: (1.) a theorisation of psychoanalytic practice
as a curative procedure; (2.) the generation of a systematic metapsychology
capable of providing the basis for (3.) the formalisation of a diagnostic
heuristic of mental illness; and (4.) the construction of an account of the
individual and specie-al development of the 'civilised' human psyche. Lacan
brought to this project, however, a keen knowledge of the latest developments
in the human sciences, drawing especially on structuralist linguistics, the
structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, topology, and game theory.
Moreover, as Derrida has remarked, Lacan's work is characterised by an
engagement with modern philosophy (notably Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger
and Sartre) unmatched by other psychoanalytic theorists, especially informed by
his attendance at Andre Kojeve's hugely influential Paris lectures on Hegel
from 1933-1939.
2.
Lacans Philosophical Anthropology: Human-Being as a Decentred Animal
Lacan's article "The Mirror Stage as
Formative of the I" (1936, 1949) lays out the parameters of a doctrine
that he never foreswore, and which has subsequently become something of a
post-structuralist mantra: namely, that human identity is 'decentred'. The key
observation of Lacans essay concerns the behaviour of infants between the ages
of 6 and 18 months. At this age, Lacan notes, children become capable of
recognising their mirror image. This is not a dispassionate experience, either.
It is a recognition that brings the child great pleasure. For Lacan, we can
only explain this 'jubilation' as a testimony to how, in the recognition of its
mirror-image, the child is having its first anticipation of itself as a unified
and separate individual. Before this time, Lacan contends (drawing on
contemporary psychoanalytic observation), the child is little more than a 'body
in bits and pieces', unable to clearly separate I and Other, and wholly
dependant for its survival (for a length of time unique in the animal kingdom)
upon its first nurturers.
The implications of this observation on the
mirror stage, in Lacan's reckoning, are far-reaching. They turn around the fact
that, if it holds, then the genesis of individuals' sense of individuation can
in no way be held to issue from the 'organic or 'natural' development of any
inner wealth supposed to be innate within them. The I is an Other from the
ground up, for Lacan (echoing and developing a conception of the ego already
mapped out in Freud's Ego and Id). The
truth of this dictum, as Lacan comments in "Aggressivity and
Psychoanalysis", is evident in infantile transitivity: that phenomenon
wherein one infant hit by another yet proclaims: 'I hit him!', and visa-versa.
It is more simply registered in the fact that it remains a permanent
possibility of adult human experience for us to speak and think of ourselves in
the second or third person. What is decisive in these phenomena, according to
Lacan, is that the ego is at base an object: an artificial projection of subjective
unity modelled on the visual images of objects and others that the individual
confronts in the world. Identification with the ego, Lacan accordingly
maintains, is what underlies the unavoidable component of aggressivity in human
behaviour especially evident amongst infants, and which Freud recognised in his
Three Essays on Sexuality when he stressed the primordial
ambivalence of children towards their love object(s) (in the oral phase, to
love is to devour; in the anal phase, it is to master or destroy ).
b. Desire is the
Desire of the Other
It is on the basis of this fundamental
understanding of identity that Lacan maintained throughout his career that
desire is the desire of the Other. What is meant by him in this formulation is
not the triviality that humans desire others, when they sexually desire (an
observation which is not universally true). Again developing Freud's
theorisation of sexuality, Lacan's contention is rather that what psychoanalysis
reveals is that human-beings need to learn how and what to desire. Lacanian
theory does not deny that infants are always born into the world with basic
biological needs that need constant or periodic satisfaction. Lacan's stress,
however, is that, from a very early age, the childs attempts to satisfy these
needs become caught up in the dialectics of its exchanges with others. Because
its sense of self is only ever garnered from identifying with the images of
these others (or itself in the mirror, as a kind of other), Lacan argues that
it demonstrably belongs to humans to desire- directly- as or through another or
others. We get a sense of his meaning when we consider such social phenomena as
fashion. As the squabbling of children more readily testifies, it is fully
possible for an object to become desirable for individuals because they
perceive that others desire it, such that when these others' desire is
withdrawn, the object also loses its allure. Lacan articulates this
'decentring' of desire when he contends that what has happened to the
biological needs of the individual is that they have become inseparable from,
and importantly subordinated to, the vicissitudes of its demand for the
recognition and love of other people. Events as apparently 'natural' as the
passing or holding back of stool, he remarks in Ecrits, become episodes in the chronicle of the child's relationship with its
parents, expressive of its compliance or rebellion. A hungry child may even refuse
to eat food if it perceives that this food is offered less as a token of love
than one of its parents' dissatisfaction or impatience.
In this light, Lacan's important recourse to
game theory also becomes explicable. For game theory involves precisely the
attempt to formalise the possibilities available to individuals in situations
where their decisions concerning their wants can in principle both affect and
be affected by the decisions of others. As Lacan's article in the Ecrits on the "Direction of the Treatment" spells out, he takes it
that the analytic situation, as theorised by Freud around the notion of
transference (see Part 2), is precisely such a situation. In that essay, Lacan
focuses on the dream of the butcher's wife in Freud's Interpretation of
Dreams. The said 'butchers wife thought that she had had a
dream which was proof of the invalidity of Freud's theory that dreams are
always encoded wish-fulfilments. As Freud comments, however, this dream becomes
explicable when one considers how, after a patient has entered into analysis,
her wishes are constructed (at least in part) in relation to the perceived
wishes of the analyst. In this case, at least one of the wishes expressed by
the dream was the woman's wish that Freuds desire (for his theory to be
correct) be thwarted. In the same way, Lacan details how the deeper unconscious
wish expressed in the manifest content of the dream (which featured the woman
attempting to stage a dinner party with only one piece of smoked salmon) can
only be comprehended as the coded fulfilment of a desire that her husband would
not fulfil her every wish, and leave her with an unsatisfied desire.
c. The Oedipal
Complex, Castration, The Name of the Father, and the Big Other
The principle that desire is the desire of
the Other is also decisive in how Lacan reformulates Freud's theory of the
child's socialisation through the resolution of its Oedipal complex in its
fifth or sixth year. Lacan agrees with Freud that this event is decisive both
in the development of the individual, and in the aetiology of any possible
subsequent mental illness. However, in trying to understand this stage of
subjective development, Lacan distances himself from Freud's emphasis on the
biological organ of the penis. Lacan talks instead of the phallus. What he is
primarily referring to is what the child perceives it is that the mother
desires. Because the child's own desire is structured by its relationships with
its first nurturer (usually in Western societies the mother), it is thus the
desire of the mother, for Lacan, that is the decisive stake in what transpires
with the Oedipus complex and its resolution. In its first years, Lacan
contends, the child devotes itself to trying to fathom what it is that the
mother desires, so that it can try to make itself the phallus for the mother- a
fully satisfying love-object. At around the time of its fifth or sixth desire,
however, the father will normally intervene in a way that lastingly thwarts
this Oedipal aspiration. The ensuing renunciation of the aspiration to be the
phallic Thing for the mother, and not any physical event or its threat, is what
Lacan calls castration, and it is thus a function to which he thinks both boys
and girls are normally submitted.
The child's acceptance of its castration
marks the resolution of its Oedipal complex, Lacan holds, again shadowing
Freud. The Oedipal child remains committed to its project of trying to fathom
and fulfil this desire. It accordingly (and famously) perceives the father as a
rival and threat to its dearest aspirations. Because of this, in a maverick
theoretical conjunction, Lacan indeed likens the father-child relation at this
point (at least as it is perceived by the child) to the famous 'struggle to the
death for pure recognition' dramatised in Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit. In this struggle, of course, the child invariably loses. But
everything turns, according to Lacanian theory, on whether this loss
constitutes a violent humiliation for the child or whether, as in Hegel's
account of 'Lordship and Bondage, its resolution involves the founding of a
pact between the parties, bound by the solemnification of mutually recognised
Law. If the castration complex is to normalise the child, Lacan argues, what
the child must be made to perceive is that what satisfies or orders the desire
of the mother is not any visible (imaginary) feature of the father (his
obviously better physical endowments, and so on). The child must come to see
that the whims of the mother are themselves ordered by a Law that exceeds and
tames them. This law is what Lacan famously dubs the name (nom) of the father, trading on a felicitous homonymy in French between nom (name) and non (the 'no!' to incestuous
union). When the father intervenes, (at least when he is what Lacan calls the
symbolic father) Lacan's argument is that he does so less as a living enjoying
individual than as the delegate and spokesperson of a body of social Law and
convention that is also recognised by the mother, as a socialised being, to be
decisive. This body of nomoi is what Lacan calls the
big Other of the child's given sociolinguistic community. Insofar as the force
of its Law is what the child at castration perceives to be what moves the
mother and gives the father's words their 'performative force (Austin), Lacan
also calls it the phallic order.
d. The Law and
Symbolic Identification
The Law of the father is in this way
theorised by Lacan as the necessary mediator between the child and the mother.
A castrating acceptance of its sovereignity precipitates the child out of its
ambivalent attempts to be the fully satisfying Thing for the mother. As Lacan
quips, when the child accedes to castration, it accedes to the impossibility of
it directly satisfying its incestous wish. If things go well, however, it will
go away with 'title deeds in its pocket' that guarantee that, when the time
comes (and if it plays by the rules), it can at least have a satisficing
substitute for its first lost love-object. What has occurred, in this event, is
that the individual's imaginary identifications (or 'ideal egos) that
exclusively characterised its infantile years have been supplemented by an
identification of an entirely different order: what Lacan calls a symbolic
identification with an 'ego ideal'. This is precisely identification with and
within something that cannot be seen, touched, devoured, or mastered: namely,
the words, norms and directives of its given cultural collective. Symbolic
identification is always idenification with a normatively circumscribed way of
organising the social-intersubjective space within which the subject can take
on its most lasting imaginary identifications: (For example, the
hysterical-vulnerable female identifies at the symbolic level with the
patriarchal way of structuring social relations between sexes, outside of which
her imaginary identification would be meaningless).
So, to repeat and summarise: Lacan's
philosophical anthropology (his answer to the question: what is it to be
human?) involves several important reformulations of Freudian tenets. By
drawing on Hegel, game theory, and contemporary observations of infant
behaviour, he lays greater systematic emphasis than Freud had on the
intersubjective constitution of human desire. In this feature at least, his philosophical
anthropology is united with that of philosophers such as Levinas, Honneth and
Habermas. Equally, since for Lacan human desire is 'the desire of the other',
what he contends is at stake in the child's socialisation is its aspiration to
be the fully satisfying object for the mother, a function which is finally (or
at least norm-ally) fulfilled by the Law-bearing words of the father.
Human-being, for Lacan, is thus (as decentred) vitally a speaking animal (what
he calls a parle-etre); one whose desire comes to be
'inmixed' with the imperatives of, and stipulated within, the natural language
of its society. [see Part 2] Particularly, Lacan picks up on certain cues
within Freud's texts (and those of Saint Paul) to emphasise the dialectical
structuration of human desire in relation to the prohibitions of Law. If the
Law of the father denies immediate access to what the child takes to be the
fully satisfying object (as expounded above), from this point on, Lacan argues,
(at least neurotic) desire is necessarily articulated in the interstices of
what is permitted by the big Other. And it is characterised by an innate and
'fatal' attraction to what it prohibits as such, which is why he placed such
central emphasis throughout his career on the enigmatic Freudian notion of a
death drive.
f. Lacan's Diagnostic Categories
Finally, it should be noted that, because of
Lacan's reformulations of several of Freuds key notions, Lacans diagnostic
heuristic differs markedly from Freud's. For Lacan, what is decisive in
understanding mental illness is not the conflict between the embattled ego and
its two more 'irrational' psychic bedfellows, the superego and the id. It is
how the subject bears up vis--vis the condition of being a castrated animal
forced to pursue its desire on 'the inverted ladder of the signifier', within
the phallic order of its societys big Other. The question to be asked, for
Lacan, is: how fully has the subject acceded to its symbolic castration?, and-
as such- how fully has it overcome the transitivity and aggressivity characteristic
of the earlier infantile stages of its development?
As in Freud, Lacan stipulates three major
classes of mental illness, all of which are situated by him vis--vis the terms
of this question, and which (as such) are elevated by him to something like
three existential bearings towards the condition of being a decentred
socialised animal. According to the Lacanian conceptualisation, the neurotic is
someone who has submitted to castration, but not without remainder. His/her
symptoms stand testimony to a lasting refusal of, and resentment towards, the
castrating agency of the big Other. The pervert is someone who has only
partially acceded to castration. For him/her, the Law does not function wholly
to repress or render inaccessible what s/he deeply desires (the maternal body).
Because of this, this Law comes itself (either in its prosecution, or in its
sufferance) to function as the object of her/his desire. Finally, the psychotic
is someone who has never acceded (or been drawn to accede) to the symbolic
order of social interchange bound by the name of the father. For him/her, this
order of the big Other, in which people follow the Law 'because it is the Law'
can thus only ever appear to be a semblance. As is most clear in the delusions
of paranoiacs, s/he will thus permanently be prey to the delusion that there
must be some 'Other of the big Other' (eg: aliens, the CIA, God) behind the
scenes, pulling the strings of the social charade.
3.
Lacan's Philosophy of Language
Perhaps the component of Lacanian theory for
which it is most famous, and which has most baffled its critics, is the
emphasis Lacan laid on language in his attempt to formalise psychoanalysis.
From the 1950's, in complete opposition to any Jungian or romantic conceptions,
Lacan instead described the unconscious as a kind of discourse: the discourse
of the Other. There are at least three interrelated concerns that inform the
construction of what I am terming Lacan's 'philosophy of language':
- The first is the central argument that the
child's castration is the decisive point in its becoming a speaking subject
- The second is his taking very seriously
what might be termed the 'interpretive paradigm' in Freuds texts, according to
which Freud repeatedly described symptoms, slips and dreams as symbolic
phenomena capable of interpretation.
- The third is Lacan's desire to try to
understand the efficacy of psychoanalytic interpretation as a curative
procedure that relies solely on what Freud called in The Question of Lay
Analysis the 'magical' power of the word.
In Part 1, in recounting Lacan's view on the
resolution of the Oedipal complex, one reason why Lacan allocated language such
importance was touched upon. For Lacan, it is only when the child accedes to
castration and the Law of the father, that s/he becomes fully competent as a
language-speaker within his/her given social collective. By contrast,
individuals suffering from psychosis, Lacan stresses (in line with a vast
wealth of psychological research), are prone to characteristic linguistic
dysfunctions and inabilities. Already from this, then, we can outline a first
crucial feature of Lacan's 'philosophy of language'. Like the later
Wittgenstein, Lacans position is that to learn a language is to learn a set of
rules or laws for the use and combination of words. Accordingly, for him too,
'learning is based on believing' [Wittgenstein]. Particularly, Lacan asserts a
lasting link between the capacity of a subject to perceive the world as a set
of discrete identifiable objects, and his/her acceptance of the unconditional
authority of a body of convention. I will return to this below.
b.
Psychoanalysis as Interpretation: the Unconscious Structured Like a Language
Lacan's contention concerning human-being as
a parle-etre, put most broadly, is that when the subject
learns its mother tongue, everything from its sense of how the world is, to the
way it experiences its biological body, are over-determined by its accession to
this order of language. This is the clearest register of the debt that Lacan
owes to phenomenology. From Heidegger, he accepts the notion that to be a
subject is to experience the world as a meaningful totality, and that language
is crucial to this capability. Aligning Freud with the theories of
Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, Lacan developed a psychoanalytic conception of how the
body is caught in the play of meaning-formation between subjects, and
expressive of the subjectivity that 'lives' through it, as well as being an
objectificable tool for the performance of instrumental activities. For Lacan,
that is, 'the unconscious' does not name only some other part of the mental
apparatus than consciousness. It names all that about a subject, including
bodily manifestations and identifications with others and 'external' objects
that insist beyond his/her conscious control.
Freud had already commented in the Introductory
Lectures to Psychoanalysis that the unconscious can be
compared to a language without a grammar. Lacan, using structuralist
linguistics, attempted to systematise this contention, arguing that the
unconscious is structured like a language, and that 'it speaks'/ ca parle. A symptom, Lacan (for example) claimed, is to be read as a kind of
embodied corporeal metaphor. As Freud had argued, he takes it that what is at
stake within a symptom is a repressed desire abhorrent to the consciously
accepted self-conception and values of the subject. This desire, if it is to
gain satisfaction at all, accordingly needs to be expressed indirectly. For
example, a residual infantile desire to masturbate may find satisfaction
indirectly in a compulsive ritual the subject feels compelled to repeat. Just
as one might metaphorically describe one's love as a rose, Lacan argues, here
we have a repressed desire being metaphorically expressed in some apparently
dissimilar bodily activity. Equally, drawing on certain moments within Freud's
papers "On the Psychology of Love", Lacan argues that desire is
structured as a metonymy. In metonymy, one designates a whole object (eg: a
car) by naming one part of it (eg: 'a set of wheels'). Lacans argument is that,
equally, since castration denies subjects full access to their first love
object (the mother), their choice of subsequent love objects is the choice of a
series of objects that each resemble in part the lost object (perhaps they have
the same hair, or look at him/her the same way the mother did ).
According to Lacan, the unconscious uses the
multivalent resources of the natural language into which the subject has been
inducted (what he calls 'the battery of the signifier') to give indirect vent
to the desires that the subject cannot consciously avow. Lacan's Freudian
argument is that a directly comparable process occurs in formations of the
unconscious as in jokes. As Freud detailed in Jokes and Their Relation to
the Unconscious, the 'punch line of jokes pack their punch
by condensing in one statement, or even one word, two chains of meaning. The
first of these is what the previous words and cues of the joke, and our shared
norms for interpretation, lead us to expect. The second is a wholly different chain
of associations, whose clash with what we had expected produces our sense of
amusement. In the same way, Lacan observed that, for example, when an analysand
makes a 'slip of the tongue', what has taken place is that the unconscious has
employed such means as homonymy, the merging of two words, the forgetting or
mispronunciation of certain words, or a slippage of pronoun or tense, etc., to
intimate a whole chain of associations which the subject did not intend, but
through which his unconscious desire is given indirect expression.
Lacan argues that what the consideration of
jokes, symptoms and slips thus shows are a number of features of how it is that
human beings form sense in language. The first thing is that the sentence is
the absolutely basal unit of meaning. Before a sentence ends, Lacan notes, the
sense of each individual word or signifier is uncertain. It is only when the
sentence is completed that their sense is fixed, or- as Lacan variously put it-
'quilted'. Before this time, they are what he calls floating signifiers, like
to the leading premises of a joke. The sense of this position can be easily
demonstrated. One need only begin a sentence by proferring a subject, but then
cease speaking before a verb and/or predicate is assigned to this in accordance
with linguistic convention. For example, if I say: 'when I was young I' or
its not like , my interlocutor will be understandably want to know what it
is that I mean. At the end of the sentence, by contrast, the sense of the
beginning words becomes clear, as when I finish the first of the above
utterances by saying 'when I was young I ran a lot', or whatever.
This understanding of sentences as the basic
unit of sense, and of how it is that signifiers 'float' until any given
sentence is finished, is what informs Lacan's emphasis on the future anterior
tense. Sense, he argues, is always something that 'will have been'. It is
anticipated but not confirmed, when we hear uttered the beginning of a sentence
(see transference below). Or else, at sentence's end, it is something that we
now see with the benefit of twenty twenty hindsight to have been intended all
along. This is why, in Seminar I, Lacan
even quips that the meaning of symptoms do not come from the past, but from the
future. Before the work of interpretation, a symptom is a floating signifier,
whose meaning is unclear to the analysand, and also to the analyst. As the
analytic work proceeds, however, an interpretation is achieved at some later
time that casts the whole behaviour into relief in a wholly different light,
and makes its sense clear.
c. The Curative Efficacy of
the 'Talking Cure'
Lacan's emphasis on language is also
over-determined by an elementary recollection that, if Freuds intervention
promised anything, it is that speaking with another person in strictly
controlled circumstances can be a curative experience for people suffering from
forms of mental illness. The analysand comes to the analyst with his troubling
symptoms, and the analyst, at certain decisive points, offers interpretations
of these behaviours that retrospectively make their meaning clear. And this is
not simply an intellectual exercise. As Freud stressed, there is knowledge of
the unconscious, and then there is knowledge that has effects upon it. A
successful psychoanalytic interpretation is one that has effects even upon the
biological reality of the body, changing the subject's bearing towards the
world, and dissolving his/her symptoms.
The need to explain this power of words and
language is a clear and lasting motive behind Lacan's understanding of
language. His central and basal hypothesis concerning it can be stated in the
following way. In a symptom, as we saw above, an unconscious desire seeks to make
itself manifest. The symptom is recounted to the analyst, or else repeated in
the way the subject responds to the analyst in the sessions. Then an
interpretation is offered by the analyst, which recognises or symbolises the
force of the desire at work in the symptom, and the symptom disappears. So here
the recognition of a desire at the same time satisfies the desire. What this
can accordingly only mean is that the unconscious desire given voice in the
symptom is itself, from the start, at least in part a desire for recognition.
This is an absolutely central Lacanian
insight, wherein he again shows the influence of Hegel's Phenomenology of
Spirit upon his most central concepts. It synchronises
exactly with the philosophical anthropology recounted above, and Lacan's
stricture concerning how human desire is always caught up in the dialectics of
individuals exchanges with others. But, for Lacan, it also shows something
vital about the language in or as which the subjects' repressed desires are
trying to find a vent. This is that language is above all a social pact. As
Lacan wrote in the Ecrits:
"As a rule everyone knows that others
will remain, like himself, inaccessible to the constraints of reason, outside
an acceptance in principle of a rule of debate that does not come into force
without an explicit or implicit agreement as to what is called its basis, which
is almost always tantamount to an anticipated agreement to what is at stake...
I shall expect nothing therefore of these rules except the good faith of the
Other, and, as a last resort, will make use of them, if I think fit or if I am
forced to, only to amuse bad faith..." [Lacan, 2001: 154-155]
Lacan's idea is that to speak is to
presuppose a body a conventions that ensue that, even if my immediate auditor
doesnt 'get it', the true meaning of what I wish to convey always will emerge,
and be registered in some Other place. (Note that here is another meaning of
the big Other touched upon in Part 1. The big Other is the place, tribunal,
collective or single person which we presuppose will register the truth of what
we say, whenever we speak).
This is why Lacan's philosophy of language
is to be read in strong opposition to any philosophical account (whether Lockean,
descriptivist or phenomenological) which argues that meaning is formed prior to
the communicative act. Lacan defines speech as a process in which the subjects
get their meanings back from the Other in an inverted form. Think once more of
what is involved in psychoanalytic interpretation. Here the meaning of a
symptom is rendered by the analyst. What this means, for Lacan, is that the
symptom not only bears upon the subject's past relations to others. If it can
be dissolved by an Others interpretation, this is because it is formed with an
eye to this interpretation from the start. To quote Slavoj Zizek on this
Lacanian notion of how the symptom is from the start addressed to an Other
supposed to know its truth:
"The symptom arises where the world failed,
where the circuit of symbolic communication was broken: it is a kind of
'prolongation of communication by other means': the failed, repressed word
articulates itself in a coded, ciphered form. The implication of this is that
the symptom can not only be interpreted but is, so to speak, formed with an eye
to its interpretation in the psychoanalytic cure the symptom is always
addressed to the analyst, it is an appeal to him to deliver its hidden message
This is the basic point: in its very constitution, the symptom implies the
field of the big Other as consistent, complete, because its very formation is
an appeal to the Other which contains its meaning " [Zizek, 1989: 73]
Even the key meaning of transference, for
Lacan, is this supposition that there is an Other supposed to know the truth of
my communicative acts, even down to the most apparently meaningless 'slips' and
symptomatic behaviours. In terms of the previous section, transference is the
condition of possibility for the quilting of the meaning of floating signifiers
that occurs even in the most basic sentences, as we saw. What occurs in a
psychoanalytic interpretation is simply one more consequential version of this
process. The subject, by speaking, addresses himself to some Other supposed to
know her/his truth, and at the end of this process, the signifiers he offers to
the Other are quilted, and return to him 'in an inverted form'.
What has occurred at this point, on Lacan's
reckoning, is that the previously unquilted signifiers finding voice in the
manifestations of his unconscious are integrated into the subject's symbolic
universe: the way s/he understands the world, in the terms of his/her
community's natural language. They have been subjectivised; which means that
now s/he can recognise them as not wholly alien intrusions into his/her
identity, but an integral part of this identity. Lacan's stress is thus always,
when he talks of psychoanalytic interpretation, that this interpretation does
not add new content to the subject's self-understanding, so much as affect the
form of this understanding. An interpretation, that is, realigns the way the
s/he sees her past, reordering the signifiers in which his/her
self-understanding has come to be ordered.
A crucial Lacanian category in theorising
this process is that of the 'master signifier'. Master signifiers are those
signifiers to which a subject's identity are most intimately bound. Standard
examples are words like 'Australian, 'democrat', decency, genuineness.
They are words which will typically be proffered by subjects as naming
something like what Kant would have called ends in themselves. They designate
values and ideals that the subject will be unwilling and unable to question
without pulling the semantic carpet from beneath their own feet.
Lacan's understanding of how these 'master
signifiers function is a multi-layered one, as I shall expand in Part 3.. It
is certainly true to say, though, that the importance of these signifiers comes
from how a subject's identification with them commits them to certain orderings
of all the rest of the signifiers. For example, if someone identifies himself
as a 'communist', the meanings of a whole array of other signifiers are ordered
in quite different ways than for someone who thinks of himself as a 'liberal'.
Freedom for him comes to mean freedom from the exploitative practices
enshrined in capitalism and hidden beneath liberal ideological rhetoric'.
'Democracy comes to mean the dictatorship of the proletariat'. 'Equality
comes to mean something like what ensues once the sham of the capitalist
"equal right to trade" is unmasked'. What Lacan argues is involved in
the psychoanalytic process, then, is the elevation of new 'master signifiers
which enable the subject to reorder their sense of themselves and of their
relations to others. Previously, for example, a person may have identified with
a conception of 'decency' that has led him to repress aspects of his own
libidinal makeup, which then return in neurotic symptoms. What analysis will
properly lead him to do is identify himself with a different set of 'master
signifiers', which re-signify the signifiers he had unconsciously been
addressing to the Other in his symptoms, reducing their traumatic charge by
integrating them into his symbolic (self-)understanding.
4. Lacanian
Psychoanalysis and The Philosophy of Ethics
Whereas Freud never systematically spoke on
the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan devoted his pivotal seventh seminar (in
1959-1960) to precisely this topic. Seminar VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis goes to some lengths to stress that the
position on ethics Lacan is concerned to develop is concerned solely with the
clinical practice of psychoanalysis. Its central topic, in line with what we
examined in Part 1 concerning the intersubjective structuration of subjective
desire and identity, is the desire of the analyst as that Other addressed by
the patient and implicated in the way s/he structures his/her desire through
the transference. Nevertheless, it remains that Lacan develops his position
through explicit engagement with Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, as well as Kants practical writings, and the texts of Marquis de
Sade. Moreover, Lacan's ethics accord with his metapsychological premises,
examined in Part 1, and his theorisation of language, examined in Part 2. In
this Part 3, accordingly, I want to present Lacan's understanding of ethics as
a sophisticated position that, disavowals notwithstanding, can be read as a consistent
post-Kantian philosophy of ethics. Part 3 is divided into three sections. The
first two sections develop further Lacan's metapsychological and philosophical
tenets. Section i. involves a further elaboration of the Lacanian conception of
the 'master signifiers'. Section ii. involves an exposition of Lacans notion
of the 'fundamental fantasy'. Section iii. then examines Lacans later notion
of traversing the fantasy as the basis of his ethical position.
a. Master Signifiers,
and the Decentred Nature of Belief
As I stated at the end of Part 2, Lacan
assigns great importance in his theorisation of the psychoanalytic process to
what he calls 'master signifiers'. These are those signifiers that the subject
most deeply identifies with, and which accordingly have a key role in the way
s/he gives meaning to the world. As was stressed, Lacan's idea about these
signifiers is that their primary importance is less any positive content that
they add to the subject's field of symbolic sense. It is rather the efficacy
they have in reorienting the subject vis--vis all of the other signifiers
which structure his/her sense of herself and the world. It is precisely this
primarily structural or formal function that underlies the crucial Lacanian
claim that master signifiers are actually 'empty signifiers' or signifiers
without a signified.
As with all of Lacan's key formulations, the
notion that the master signifiers are 'signifiers without signified is a
complex one. Even the key idea is the following. The concept and /or referent
signified by any 'master signifier' will always be something impossible for any
one individual to fully comprehend. For example, 'Australian-ness' would seem
to be what is aimed at when someone proffers the self-identification: 'I am an
Australian'. The Lacanian question here is: what is 'Australian' being used by
the subject to designate here? Is Australian-ness something that inheres in
everyone who is born in Australia? Or is it a characteristic that is passed on
through the medium of culture primarily? Does it, perhaps, name most deeply
some virtues or qualities of character all Australians supposedly have?
However, even if we take it that all 'Australians' share some basic virtues,
which are these? Can a closed list everyone would agree upon be feasibly drawn
up? Is it not easy to think of other peoples who share in valuing each
individual trait we standardly call 'Australian' (eg: courage, disrespect for
pomposity)? And, since 'Australian' would seem to have to aim at a singular
entity, not a collection, or else some grounding quality of character that
could perhaps unite all of the others, which is this? And is this 'essential
quality- again- simply biological, perhaps genetic, or is it metaphysical, or
what?
What Lacan's account of 'master signifiers
thus emphasizes is the gap between two things. The first is our initial
certainty about the nature of such an apparently obvious thing as
'Australian-ness'. (We may even get vexed when asked by someone). The second
thing is the difficulty that we have of putting this certainty into words, or
naming something that would correspond to the 'essence' of Australian-ness,
beneath all the different appearances. What Lacan indeed argues, in line with
his emphasis on the decentred self, is that our ongoing and usually
unquestioning use of these words represents another clear case of how the
construction of sense depends on the transferential supposition of 'Others
supposed to know'. Though we ourselves can never simply state what
'Australian-ness', etc. is, that is, Lacan argues that what is nevertheless
efficient in generating our belief in (and identification with) this elusive
'thing' is a conviction that nevertheless other people certainly know its
nature, or seem to. Just as we desire through the Other, for this reason
Lacanian theory also maintains that belief is always belief through an Other
(for example, in the Christian religion, priests would be the designated Others
supposed to know the meaning of the Christian mystery vouchsafing believers'
faith).
At this point, it is appropriate to recall
from Part 1 Lacan's thesis that castration marks the point wherein the child is
made to renounce its aspiration to be the phallic Thing for the mother. A
subject's castration amounts at base, for Lacan, to the acceptance that it is
the injunctions of the father- and through his name the conventions of the big
Other of society- that govern the desire of the mother. The 'master signifiers'
are also what Lacan calls phallic signifiers. The reason is exactly that-
despite the difficulty of locating any simple referent for them- they
nevertheless are the words that seem to intimate to subjects what 'really
matters' about human existence. While no Christian believer may know what God
is, nevertheless s/he will be in no doubt of the transcendent importance of
whatever It is that this word names. Lacan thus is drawing together his
philosophical anthropology and his theorization of language when he defends the
position that it is the consequence of 'castration' that subjects are debarred
from immediate knowledge of what it is that the phallic signifiers signify.
He is also arguing, in the psychoanalytic field, a position profoundly akin to
the Kantian postulation that finite human subjects are debarred from immediate
access to things in themselves. Lacan's argument is that it is this lost
'signified', which would as it were be more real than the other things that
the subject can readily signify, that is what is primordially repressed when
the subject accedes to becoming a speaking subject at castration. When the
subject accedes to the symbolic, he repeats, the Real of aspired-to incestuous
union, and the sexualized transgressive enjoyment or jouissance it would afford, is necessarily debarred.
b. Lacan's Conception
of Fantasy
If the neurotic subject does not to forego
the Oedipal supposition that there is some Thing that would fully satisfy the
desire of the mother, it is because s/he constructs fantasies about the nature
of this lost Thing, and how s/he stands towards it. The primary means s/he
deploys in this process is what I recounted above, when I noted how the
difficulty in knowing the referent of the phallic master signifiers obliges
subjects to construct their beliefs concerning it in a 'decentred' manner,
through the Others. While the subject accepts that the Real phallic Thing is lost
to him/her, that is, in his/her fantasmatic life s/he yet supposes that there
are Others who do know what it is that phallic signifiers refer to, and have
more direct access to the Real of jousissance. In
line with this, Lacan's further argument is indeed that the deepest fantasmatic
postulation of subjects is always that the Real Phallic Thing that s/he has
been debarred from must be held in reserve by the 'big Other' whose law it is
that discernibly structures the mothers desire.
What follows from this is the position that
the manifestations of the unconscious represent small unconscious rebellions of
the subject against the loss that s/he takes him/herself to have endured when
s/he acceded to socialization. They are all under-girded by the more basic fantasmatic
structuration of identity as constituted by the loss endured at castration.
This is why Lacan talks of a fundamental fantasy, and argues that it is above
all this fundamental fantasy that is at stake in psychoanalysis. Lacan strived
to formalize the invariant structure of this 'fundamental fantasy' in the
matheme: $ <> a. This matheme indicates that: '$', the barred subject
which is divided by castration between attraction to and repulsion from the
Object of its unconscious desire, is correlative to ('<>') the fantasised
lost object. This object, designated in the matheme as 'a', is called by Lacan
the object petit a, or else the object cause of desire. Lacan holds that the
subject always stabilizes its position vis--vis the Real Thing by constructing
a fantasy about how the debarred Thing is held in the big Other, manifesting
only in a series of metonymic or partial objects (the gaze or voice of his/her
love objects, a hair style, or some other 'little piece of the Real') that can
be enjoyed as compensation for its primordial loss of the maternal Thing.
Lacan's argument is that the fundamental
psychological 'gain from the fundamental fantasy is the following. The
fundamental fantasy represents what occurred at castration in the terms of a
narrative of possession and loss. This fantasm thus consoles the subject by
positing that s/he at one point did have the phallic Thing, but that then, at
castration, it was taken away from him/her by the Other. What this of course
means is that, since the Thing was taken away from the subject, perhaps also It
can be regained by him/her. It is this promise, Lacan maintains, that usually
structures neurotic human desire.
What the fantasy serves to hide from the
subject, then, is the possibility that a fully satisfying sexual relationship
with the mother, or any metonymic substitute for her, is not only prohibited,
but was never possible anyway. As I recounted in Part 1, the Lacanian view,
which is informed by observation of infantile behavior, is that the mother-child
relationship before castration is not Edenic, but characterized by imaginary
transitivity and aggressivity. This is why Lacan quips in Seminar XX that 'there is no such thing as a sexual relationship' and elsewhere
that the Woman, with a capital W, 'does not exist'. Note then that the
deepest logic of castration, according to Lacan, is a profoundly paradoxical
one. The 'no!' of the father prohibits something that is impossible. Its very
prohibition, however, gives rise in the subject to the fantasmatic supposition
that the Thing in question is one that is attainable but only being debarred.
Lacan thus asserts that the fundamental
fantasy is there to veil from the subject the terminal nature of its loss at
castration. This is not simply a speculation, however. It is supported by
telling evidences that he adduces. The key point that supports Lacan's position
is the stipulation the objet petit is an
anamorphotic object. What this means can be seen by looking at even the most
well-known exemplar of the Lacanian objet petit a: the 'object gaze'. Contrary to how it is sometimes read, the Lacanian
'gaze' is anything but the intrusive and masterful male gaze on the world. For
Lacan, gaze is indeed a "blind spot" in the subject's perception of
visible reality, disturbing its transparent visibility". [Zizek, 1999a:
79] What it bears witness to is the subject's inability to fully frame the
objects that appear within his/her field of vision. The classic example of the
object-gaze from Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis is the floating skull at the feet of Holbein's Ambassadors. What is singular about this 'thing is that it can literally only be
seen from 'awry', and at the cost that the rest of the picture appears at that
moment out of focus. From this point on the canvas, Lacan comments, it is as if
the painting regards us. What he means is that the skull reminds us that we,
and with us our desires and fantasies, are implicated in how the scene appears.
Here then is another meaning to $ <> a: the objet petit a, for Lacan, as something that can only operate its fascination upon
individuals who bear a partial perspective upon it, is that object that
're-presents' the subject within the world of objects that it takes itself to
be a wholly 'external' perspective upon. If a subject thus happens upon it too
directly, it disappears, or else- as in psychosis and the well-known filmic
motif of what happens when one encounter one's double- the cost is that one's
usual sense of how the rest of the world is must dissipate. What this indicates
is that the object petit a, or at least the fascinating
effect the object which bears it has upon the subject who is under its thrall,
has no 'objective' reality independently of this subject. The logical
consequence of this, though, as Lacan stipulates, is that this supposedly
'lost' object can never really have been lost by the subject, since s/he can
never have possessed it in the first place. This is why Lacan argues the
apparently chimerical position that the objet petit a is by definition an object that has come into being in being lost.
c. The Lacanian
Subjects, and Ethics
Lacan argues that the subject is 'the
subject of the signifier'. One meaning of this claim at least is that there is
no subject proper that is not a speaking subject, who has been subject to
castration and the law of the father. I shall return to this formulation below,
though, for its full meaning only becomes evident when another crucial claim
that Lacan makes concerning the subject is properly examined. This is the
apparently contradictory claim that the subject as such, at the same time as
being a linguistic subject, lacks a signifier. There is no subject without
language, Lacan wants to say, and yet the subject constitutively lacks a place
in language.
At the broadest level, in this claim Lacan
is simply restating in the language of structuralist linguistics a claim
already made by Sartre, and before him Kojeve and Hegel (and arguably Kant).
This is the claim that the subject is not an object capable of being adequately
named within a natural language, like other objects can be ('table', chair,
or so on). It is no-thing. One of the clearest points of influence of Kojeve's
Heideggerian Hegelianism on Lacan is the emphasis he places on the subject as
correlative to a lack of being (manqu-a-etre /
want-to-be), especially in the 1950's.
Lacan articulates his position concerning
the subject by way of a fundamental distinction between the ego or 'moi' / 'me', and the subject intimated by the shifter je / I. The subject is a split subject, Lacan claims, not only insofar
as- Freud dixit- it has consciousness and an unconscious. When Lacan says the
subject is split, he means also that, as a subject of language, it will always
evince the following two levels. The first is the ego, or subject of the
enunciated. This is the self wherein the subject perceives / anticipates its
imaginary unity. Since the ego is an object, according to Lacan, it is capable
of being predicated about like any other object. I can say of myself more or
less truthfully that 'I am fat', or honest, or anything else. What my
enunciated sentence will speak about in these cases, for Lacan, is my ego. But
this is to be distinguished from a second 'level' of subjectivity: the subject
of the enunciation. Here as elsewhere, Lacan's position turns around his
philosophy of language examined in detail in Part 2. The distinction between
the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated follows from
Lacan's understanding of what 'speech-act' theorists like Austin or Searle
would call the performative dimension to language. Speech-act theorists
emphasise that the words of given speech-acts are never enunciated in a vacuum.
They are always uttered in a certain context, between language speakers. And
through the utterances, subjects effectively do things (hence Austin's title How
to Do Things With Words). This is particularly evident
in cases like commands or promises. When I make a promise (say: 'I promise I'll
meet you at 5:15) I do not primarily make a claim about an existing state of
affairs. It is what I have done that matters. What I have done is make a pledge
to meet you at some future time.
Lacan's key argument, alongside that of
Austin here, is that all linguistic acts have two important dimensions. The
first is what Austin would call the constative dimension. Lacan calls this the
level of what is enunciated. Words aim to express or represent factual states
of affairs in the world. The second is the performative dimension, that Lacan
calls the level of the enunciation. The subject of the unconscious is the
subject of the enunciation, Lacan insists. This is one way he expresses the
elementary Freudian hypothesis that, in symptoms and parapraxes, the subject
says more than s/he intended to say. What s/he intended will usually be
captured in the explicit content of what s/he has enunciated. Nevertheless, in
his/her body language, or in a second chain of signification indicated by
her/his mispronunciation (etc.), something other than what s/he intended will
be conveyed to the analyst. This second chain of signification as it were
'happens'- it is performed for the 'Other supposed to know' before it can be
explicitly and consciously enunciated by the speaking individual.
Lacan's distinction between the subject of
the enunciated and the subject of the enunciated can be exposed further through
examining his treatment of the liar's paradox. This is the paradox of someone
saying: 'I am a liar. The paradox is that, if we suppose the proposition true
('person x is a liar'), we at the same time then have no reason to believe he
is telling the truth when he says: 'I am a liar'. As a liar, he can only be
lying when he says this. But what this means is that we must suppose that he is
a sincere truth-telling person. Lacan argues that this is a paradox only
insofar as we have wrongly collapsed the distinction between the subject enunciated
in the sentence, and the subject of the enunciation. A better understanding of
the meaning of this utterance can be garnered by presenting the speech-act in
both its two dimensions, as a case wherein (to formalise): 'person x says:
"I am a liar"' The point is that the I in the spoken sentence here
is what Lacan calls the subject of the enunciated. Of this ego, it may (or may
not) be true that s/he is a liar. Yet, this ego is in no way to be identified
with what I have called 'person x' in the above formalisation. Person x here
is not the subject spoken about. S/he is the person speaking. And Lacan's point
is that it this subject of the enunciation that addresses itself to the Other
supposed to know in analysis, despite whatever egoic plays and ploys the
analysand might masquerade before his/her analyst in what s/he enunciates. The
hysteric, Lacan thus says, is someone who tells the truth about his/her desire
(at the level of enunciation) in the guise of lying or at least being
indifferent to the factual truths of which she speaks (at the level of the
enunciated). The obsessional, by contrast, lies or dissembles the truth of
his/her involvement in what s/he speaks about (at the level of enunciation) in
the guise of always telling the truth (at the level of what s/he enunciates).
Lacan's position is that, when subjects wish
to speak about themselves, the subject of enunciation is always either
anticipated- at the beginning of the speech-act; or else missed- at the end of
the speech-act, whence it has come to be falsely identified with the ego. In
line with his prioritisation of the future anterior, he comments that the
subject always 'will have been'. In philosophical terms, we can say that the
Lacanian subject is a presupposition of any speech-act (someone will always be
speaking), yet impossible to fill out with any substantial content. It is for
this reason that Slavoj Zizek has recently drawn a parallel between it and
Kant's unity of apperception in The Critique of Pure Reason. Lacan himself, in
his seminar on the logic of fantasy, strove to articulate his meaning by a
revision of Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum: 'I am
not where I think'. The key to this formulation is the opposition between
thinking and being. Lacan is saying that, at the point of my thought and speech
(the subject of enunciation), there I have no substantial being that could be
known. Equally, 'I am not where I think' draws out the necessary
misapprehension of the nature of the subject in what s/he enunciates.
If Lacan's subject thus seems a direct
psychoanalytic restatement of Sartre / Kojeves position, however, it needs to
be read in conjunction with his doctrines concerning the 'master signifier' and
the fundamental fantasy. Lacan says that master signifiers 'represent the subject
for other signifiers'. Given his identification of the subject with a lack of
being, a first register of this remark becomes clear. The master signifiers, as
examined above, have no particular enunciated content or signified, according
to Lacan. But the Lacanian position is precisely that this lack of enunciated
content is correlative to the subject. In this way, his theorisation of the
subject depends not only on a phenomenological analysis, as (for example)
Sartre's does in Being and Nothingness. If the
subject is the subject 'of the lack of the signifier, Lacan means not only
that it cannot be objectified at the point of its thinking, as I examined
above. The subject is- directly- something that emerges at the point of- and
because of- a lack in the field of signification, on his reckoning. This was
already intimated above, in the section on the 'logics of the fantasy', which
recounted Lacans position concerning how it is that subjects develop regimes
of fantasy concerning what Others are supposed to know in order to ground their
own belief in, and identification with, the master signifiers. The point to be
emphasised now is that these master signifiers, if they are to function, cannot
do without this subjective investment of fantasy. Lacan's famous claim there is
no metalanguage is meant to imply only this: that there is no field of sense
that can be 'quilted', and attain to a semblance of consistency, unless
subjects have invested their partial, biased perspective upon that field.
This is even the final and most difficult
register to what Lacan aimed to express in the matheme: $ <> a. As I
showed in Part 3, ii., the subject is correlative to the fantasmatically posed
lost object / referent of the master signifiers. We can now state a further level
of what Lacan implied in this matheme, though. This is that in fantasy what
subjects misrecognise is not simply the non-existence of the
incestuous-maternal Thing. What subjects primordially repress is the necessity
of subjects' implication in the play of signification that has over-determined
the symbolic coordinates of their lives. The archetypal neurotic
subject-position, Lacan notes, is one of victimisation. It is the Others who
have sinned, and not the subject. S/he has only suffered. What is of course occluded
by these considerations (which may be right or wrong from a moral or legal
perspective) is how the subject has invested him/herself in the events of
his/her life. Firstly, there is the fantasmatic investment of the subject in
the 'Others supposed to enjoy', who are supposed not to have been made to
undergo the castrating losses that s/he has undergone. As Lacan reads Freud's
later postulation of the superego, this psychical agency is constructed around
residual fantasies of the Oedipal father supposed to have access to the
sovereign jouissance of the mother's body denied to
the child.
Secondly, what is occluded is what Freud
already theorised when he spoke of subjects' adaption to and 'gain from their
illness, as a way of organising their access to jouissance in defiance of the demands of the big Other. Even if the subject has
undergone the most frightful trauma, Lacan argues, what matters is how this
trauma has come to be signified subsequently and retrospectively by the subject
around the fundamental fantasy. S/he must be made to avow that the
subject-position they have taken up towards their life is something that they
have subjectified, and have an ongoing stake in. This is why, in Seminar II, Lacan quips that the injunction of psychoanalysis is mange ton
dasein!- eat your existence! He means that at the close of
the analysis, the subject should come to internalise and so surpass the way
that it has so far organised your life and relations to Others.
It is this point, accordingly, that the
ethics of Lacanian psychoanalysis is announced. Lacan's name for what occurs at
the end of the cure is traversing the fantasy. But since what the fantasy does,
for Lacan, is veil from the subject his/her own implication in and
responsibility for how s/he experiences the world, to traverse the fantasy is
to reavow subjective responsibility. To traverse the fantasy, Lacan theorises,
is to cease positing that the Other has taken the 'lost' object of desire. It
is to accept that this object is something posited by oneself as a means to
compensate for the experienced trauma of castration. One comes to accept that
castration is not an event with a winner (the father) and a loser (the
subject), but a structurally necessary factum for human-beings as such, to
which all speaking subjects have been subjected.
What equally follows is the giving up of the
resentful and acquisitive project of trying to reclaim the objet petit a from
the Other, and 'settling the scores'. This gives way to an identification with
the place of this object that is at once within the fabric of the world, and
yet which stands out from it. (Note that this is one Lacanian reading of 'where
It was, there I shall be'). The subject who has traversed the fantasy, for
Lacan, is the subject who has not ceded on its desire. This desire is no longer
fixed by the coordinates of the fundamental fantasy. S/he is able to accept
that the fully satisfying sexual object, that which would fulfil the sovereign
desire of the mother, does not exist. S/he is thus equally open to accepting
that the big Other, and/or any concrete Other supposed by the subject to be its
authoritive representative(s), does not have what s/he has 'lost'. Lacan puts
this by saying that what the subject can now avow is that the Other does not
Exist: that it, too, lacks, and what it does and wants depends upon the
interventions of the subject. The subject is, finally, able to thereby accept
that what it took to be its place in the order of the Other is not a finally
fixed thing. It can now avow without reserve that it is a lacking subject, or,
as Lacan will also say, a subject of desire, but that the metonymic sliding of
this desire has no final term. Rather than being ceaselessly caught in the lure
of the object-cause of desire, this desire is now free to circle around on
itself, as it were, and desire only itself, in what is a point of strange final
proximity between Lacan and the Nietzcheanism he scarcely ever mentioned in his
works.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits trans.
Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2001).
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book
I trans. John Forrester. Edited by J.A. Miller
(Cambridge: Cambridge Uni. Press, 1988).
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book
II trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. Edited by J.A. Miller
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book
III: The Psychoses trans. Russell Grigg. Edited by
J.A. Miller (W. Norton: Kent, 2000).
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book
VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis trans. Dennis Porter
(New York: Norton, 1992).
Lacan, Jacques. SeminarXX: Encore! Trans. Bruce Fink (W. Norton: New York, 1975).
Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object Of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989).
Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to
Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge: Mass.: MIT Press,
1991).
Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in
Hollywood (London and New York, 1992).
Author Information:
Matthew Sharpe
Email: matthew.sharpe@dewr.gov.au
Department of Philosophy
University of
Melbourne.
2006
"Jaques
Lacan," by Matthew Sharpe, The Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/, 2008.
<http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/lacweb.htm
- SH2a>
Academic year 2008/2009
a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Fors Lpez
Beln Garca Castiglioni
Universitat de Valncia Press