Arendt and Lacan
22 June 2024
[NOTE: This is the third in a series of articles about Lacanian psychoanalysis and free speech. For the previous article, click here. For the next article, click here.]
If you’ve read my previous two articles on free speech and philhellenism, you may have suspected that they were leading up to something. Both pieces mentioned Lacan only in passing but hinted at a larger thesis. In this article, I will try to make good on those promissory notes.
My thesis is that Hannah Arendt provides a framework that can help us to deepen our understanding of Lacan. More specifically, her framework suggests a way of understanding psychoanalysis as a novel form of free speech — one that is the only rightful heir to the Athenian concept of free speech as it was embodied, first in politics, and then in philosophy.
In The Human Condition, Arendt elaborates a tripartite analysis of our ontological predicament in which labour forms the foundation, work the ground floor, and action/speech/thought the upper level. It is in the upper level that we become fully human — where we realise our telos, so to speak.
Arendt stresses that there are certain necessary conditions for action/speech/thought. The human condition consists precisely in that we require these conditions in order to be fully human. And the sad fact is that these conditions have only been met but very rarely in the course of human history. They were met in Athens in the fifth century BCE, but only for the citizens — that is to say, for adult property-owning males. Women, children, slaves, and barbarians were excluded from the upper level and thereby deprived of the conditions for free speech. (Some women — the daughters of citizens — were technically citizens too, but theirs was a distinctly second-class form of citizenship, so for the purpose of this article I am reserving the term citizen to those who enjoyed full citizenship, with all of its attendant rights and privileges, and these were exclusively male.)
In Ancient Athens, free speech first took the form of politics, in the sense defined by Aristotle: citizens meeting in the agora to discuss public policy and to vote. But the flowering of politics in the aftermath of the Persian Wars was all too brief; the sophists soon persuaded the citizens to trade dialectic for rhetoric, which is the opposite of free speech.
Had political speech maintained its integrity — such as we see, for example, in the funeral oration of Pericles — then there would have been no need for Socrates to invent a second kind of free speech: philosophy. And, had he invented it anyway, there would have been no need to execute him.
After the death of Socrates, twenty three centuries would elapse before Freud finally invented a third kind of free speech: psychoanalysis. Unlike politics and philosophy, which are no longer possible, psychoanalysis is still possible today — but only just. It survives in the Lacanian clinic, though only occasionally and sporadically even there. Yet these rare moments are diamonds — brilliant sparks in which free speech once again flares up for the first time since Socrates.
There have probably been other brief periods, at other times and in other cultures, when free speech has also been possible. But in the West, only Ancient Athens and Lacanian psychoanalysis have ever furnished the necessary conditions for action/speech/thought.
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Each iteration of free speech appears at first to be a digression or a diversion, but later turns out to be a deepening — a burrowing more deeply into the heart of the matter.
We can picture the public and private spheres as concentric circles, with the private sphere enveloping the public sphere (see fig.1). Most human beings throughout most of history, before the rise of mass society in the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth centuries, lived exclusively in the private sphere. Ancient Greece was unusual — perhaps unique — in carving out a public sphere, distinct from the private: the agora (Αγορά), in the centre of the polis. In figure 1, the agora is symbolised by the blue circle in the centre, which is surrounded by the private sphere of the households (οἶκοι), symbolised by the larger green circle (green thus designates the private sphere, while blue designates the public sphere, which is here coextensive with the realm of politics). Only a few privileged individuals (the citizens) were permitted to step into the agora to conduct politics — though at the end of each day even they would have to return to the private realm of the household to eat and sleep.
The death of politics is symbolised in figure 2, where agora is no longer coextensive with the public sphere (as indicated by the intrusion of green into the formerly blue circle of the agora, whose boundaries are now designated by a dotted rather than an unbroken line). When politics was corrupted by sophistry, and ceased to be distinct from the realm of private necessity, Socrates managed to carve out another space in the agora in which free speech could once again flourish by going beyond politics in the form of philosophy. The public sphere was no longer co-extensive with the agora, but had retreated to the area within the agora in which Socrates conversed with his peers. When Socrates died, and Plato set up his Academy, philosophy was also corrupted (by metaphysics), and it too ceased to be distinct from the soulless and prosaic business of private life.
Some deluded individuals went on calling themselves philosophers for 2,300 years, mistaking their rhetoric for dialectic. It was not until Freud succeeded in going beyond philosophy — by burrowing down still further into the heart of things — that a new space opened up for free speech in the consulting room of the psychoanalyst. This is symbolised in figure 3, in which the realm of philosophy has now also been colonised by the private sphere, and the public sphere has retreated still further, from the realm of philosophy to the even smaller domain of psychoanalysis. The appearance of a new kind of public space in what seemed to be the most private of all private spaces is only a paradox in appearance, for by the time of Freud the possibility of private space had long since ceased to exist. As Arendt astutely observes, the rise of mass society collapsed even the theoretical distinction between public and private, with the consequent erasure of both. In their place arose those mere semblances of the public and the private — the social and the intimate — which are in fact never truly distinct, for the social always intrudes upon the intimate, and the intimate is always thoroughly social.
The Lacanian clinic, by clearing a new space for free speech — that is to say, for public discourse — simultaneously restores the possibility of privacy. By reinstating a symbolic barrier between the public and the private, Lacanian psychoanalysis recreates both of these spheres, and frees the participants — both the analyst and the analysand — from the tyranny of the social and the loneliness of the intimate.
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In my next article, I will try to make all this clearer by mapping these four terms — the public and the private, the social and the intimate — onto the four corners of Lacan’s Schema L. In the meanwhile, those readers who enjoy a challenge may like to entertain themselves by guessing how I will go about this.
