300 Words About “Science and Truth”

How to close the July (and August) of Jacques Lacan? I can offer no better than the last essay of his Écrits: Science and Truth. In it Lacan stresses the need for science and structuralist philosophy, which separate subjects from objects, as the only reliable means to truth.

Simply put, structuralist science discards humanism, its perpetual blind spots and limitations. Chief among these flaws is the unspoken but very Platonic natural relationship between subjects and knowledge. In the field of psychoanalysis, Lacan targets Jung and his transcendent universe of psychological archetypes. Theories like Jung’s make subjects inappropriately assume that the subject has an essence and makes the subject incorrectly responsible for their own content. These theories ignore the multitude of forces which determine subjects and subjectivity and, in doing so, submit to them.

Structuralists all study some sort of world of “apparatus” whose operations exceed subjectivity. Lacan talks at length about his philosophical kinship with anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, seeing his psychoanalytic work as a partner theory. This kinship comes from Lacan and Levi-Strauss’ common focus on subjects as part of immortal, autonomous structures (language and kinship groups respectively) which determine the subject according to their own rules. Since humans cannot create “metalanguage” free of these structural powers, truth must be found obliquely through ordinary speech.

While Lacanian psychoanalysis studies meaning, it stays faithfully anti-humanist and unconcerned with meaning for its own sake. What psychoanalysis must study to become scientific is not object a, the thing which is desired and which causes desire, but rather the function of object a: what makes object a play the role it does in organizing the subject’s psychology. A scientific psychoanalysis cannot stop with what desire and desired things mean to subjects. It needs to go beyond the human to find what shapes and causes desire.

300 Words About “Kant With Sade”

This essay is mostly about the nature and power of fantasy, but its sizable set-up is provocative and profound enough to earn three-hundred words. In it Lacan links Immanuel Kant, champion of dignity and rationality, with the Marquis de Sade, who wrote philosophical plays advocating beating off onto the tortured bodies of recently deflowered virgins. Specifically, Lacan sees de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom as filling out a gap in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason.

De Sade’s laissez-faire ethical philosophy revolves around pursuing pleasure. For Kant, such a project is doomed. No sensation, emotion or appetite constantly provides the same pleasures. Therefore, no universal law can be formulated in regards to pleasure, except perhaps to its avoidance. De Sade, writing six years after Kant’s Critique, was not dissuaded. De Sade argues for a categorical right to work one’s will upon and to receive satisfaction from the bodies of others.

To Lacan, de Sade’s categorical imperative is necessary to make Kantian ethics possible. Kant purges all contingencies from human life, which he calls pathological. To replace them: the dictates of pure reason. These pathologies, however, are still part of living in the world. What Kant insists is that subjects experience and legislate themselves as though they were Other. Morality, to Kant, demands we hijack someone else’s (our own) body and force it to obey external demands, rather than its own desires.

This leads Lacan to explain desire as fundamentally transgressive. Desire, as a temptation to experience impossible heights of pleasure (jouissance), rejects all law- natural and moral. Desire is just as impractical as Kant’s imperative. Both Kant’s unshakeable honesty and self-denial and de Sade’s torture orgies demand enormous, stupid sacrifices. Referring to the mirror stage, one’s desire always seeks to un-split their subject and achieve the impossible perfection of their ego-ideal.

300 Words About “On the Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”

The July of Jacques Lacan has spilled over into late August. Real-life summer school reading aside, this doorstopper of an essay is to blame.

Lacan defends his own theory against other psychoanalysts and their critics. Lacan’s teaching, according to Lacan, fills in a gap in psychoanalysis: the relationships between fantasies, symbols and desire.

If Lacan’s idea of frustration makes his Hegelian influence obvious. Frustration is the feeling a Hegelian slave has for its master: the slave works and the master enjoys the products of that work. Psychologically, the master is the fantasy image that enjoys while the subject doesn’t, or who enjoys more than the subject is able to bear or get away with.

Our dreams enjoy what and how we ourselves cannot. Symbolically, dreams behave like sentences (Lacan uses Freud’s term “rebus” several times) where different elements give one another meaning. This meaning, however, is not the subject or patient’s meaning. Dreams are fundamentally Other. What dreams mean to a subject comes through in his or her retelling them. As they retell the dream, they also relate to it. A skilled enough analyst interprets both the desire of the Other from the dream and the desire of the patient subjected to that dream’s desires.

Symbols purge themselves of being. A symbol represents its signified even when the signified isn’t present. Because of this emptiness, symbols drift from site to site in psychology. This makes the Oedipus complex possible. The symbolic conflict between son and father over the mother determines the subject’s behavior in other aggressive conflicts. Disputes with authority figures, for example, inappropriately conjure up old emotions and behaviors used to deal specifically with one’s father.

Of course, Lacan prances from topic to topic and this essay contains much more. The remaining two selections will hopefully cover this excess.