Arendt, Lacan, and schema L
25 June 2024
[NOTE: This is the fourth in a series of articles about Lacanian psychoanalysis and free speech. For the previous article, click here. For the following article, click here.]
In my previous article, I promised that I would try to make the ideas articulated there somewhat clearer by mapping the four key terms of my argument onto the four corners of Lacan’s schema L. I also invited readers to guess how I would go about this. Did you have a go? If so, take a look at my mapping and let me know whether it agrees with yours or not (see fig.1).
Now, of course, I must justify my mapping. So here goes…
Let’s begin by delving more deeply into the pair public/private, which I have assigned to the symbolic axis, A — S. Both of these terms have Latin roots, which is problematic, since I’m trying to articulate the world described by Aristotle in his Politics, which was of course written in Greek. When Roman writers discussed politics in Latin, they translated Aristotle’s politea as publicus, which is where we get our word public from. The word publicus is a blend of poplicus (“of the people”) and pubes (“adult”), but the Greek word politeia — from which we get the words polity, politics, political, etc. — derives from the word polis, which means city-state. The connotations of politeia and publicus are quite different, therefore. The polis, as we saw in the previous article, is not just the whole city-state, but also and especially that part of the city (the town square or agora) where adult male citizens congregate to debate state policy and engage in dialectical conversation (free speech).
The Latin word privatus, from which we get our word private, means “withdrawn from public life.” It is derived from the verb privare, which means “to bereave” or “to deprive.” Our word private shares this etymology with the English words deprive, deprivation, and privation. The private sphere — the inner world of the household, the oikos (Greek: οἶκος) — is thus the sphere where humans are deprived of the best things in life — the conditions for achieving our telos and realising our nature as “speaking beings” (Aristotle’s λόγον ἔχον [lógon échon], which was misleadingly rendered in Latin as animal rationale). These conditions can only be found in the public domain of the agora. It is thus only in the agora that truly free speech is possible; the private realm of the household is one of despotism. The Greek word despótēs (δεσπότης) means literally “lord, master, the head of the household, the father of the family” — who of course rules the roost with an iron rod.
The Greek word which the Roman authors translated as privatus is idiōtēs (ἰδιώτης) which has a range of meanings: ‘a private person, an individual’ (as opposed to the state or polis), ‘a private citizen’ (as opposed to someone with a political office), ‘a common man’, ‘a person lacking professional skill, a layman’, later ‘unskilled’, ‘ignorant.’ The idiōtēs is uncultured, uncouth, uncivilised, brutish, awkward, clumsy; they have never had the opportunity to develop the arts of civil discourse and dialectical conversation because they have never been allowed out of the house on their own, and certainly never permitted to set foot in the agora. This was the condition of women in Ancient Athens, which resembled modern day Saudi Arabia in this respect, only worse.
The citizen would leave the cares of the household behind him when he went to the agora. The domestic space of the household was where he met his bodily needs — where he ate and slept, where he had sex with his wife, where his children were born, and where he died. One did not discuss such merely natural things in the cultured realm of the agora. The dark indoors was where things like sex and death were hidden away, sequestered, repressed. But it’s hard to keep such matters entirely private, locked up in the secrecy of the home; the Woman speaks, and though her words are censored their echos are still heard in the agora.
The unconscious is the discourse of the Other, says Lacan. This is represented in schema L by the unbroken line that extends from A (the big Other) to the middle of the diagram. There, it encounters the imaginary wall formed by the relationship between the ego (a) and the specular image (a’):
[NOTE: in schema L the real is absent; neither a nor a’ is the objet petit a. At this point in Lacan’s development, he had not yet elaborated that concept.]
The discourse of the Other can only pass through this imaginary barrier (which Freud calls censorship) in the distorted, inverted forms known as the formations of the unconscious: dreams, symptoms, jokes, slips of the tongue. It is only in such forms that the discourse of the Other reaches the subject, S.
Now let us turn to the other pair of terms — the pair which Hannah Arendt introduces in The Human Condition: the social and the intimate. Her discussion of how the rise of mass society in the nineteenth century led to the final collapse of even a theoretical distinction (let alone a practical one) between the public and the private, and the replacement of this pair by their imaginary simulacra, the social and the intimate, is extremely complex, and I’m not sure I fully understand it myself yet, so I will postpone a proper discussion of these terms to a later article. Suffice it to say here that the social is a mere simulacrum of the public, and the intimate a simulacrum of the private, and the elision of the public/private by these simulacra is what lies at the heart of the pathologies which were the original focus of psychoanalysis. It is for this reason that I have assigned these terms to the imaginary axis, a — a’.
I hope that it is now slightly clearer what I meant, in the previous article, by saying that Lacanian psychoanalysis works by reinstating a symbolic barrier between the public and the private — between the agora and the oikos: by replacing, in other words, the imaginary barrier, which is all too porous, with a symbolic one, which is less so. In so doing, Lacanian psychoanalysis frees the participants — both the analysand and the analyst — from what Arendt identified as the tyranny of the social and the loneliness of the intimate.
Obviously, I’m doing a lot of handwaving here. Nothing in these articles so far really amounts to an argument, strictly speaking. At this point, I’m merely gesturing towards a more developed thesis — one which I hope to elaborate in the not too distant future. As things currently stand, I have neither the time, nor enough familiarity with the relevant texts, to embark on such an arduous task right away. I beg my readers, therefore, to be patient with me while I attempt to provide, if not yet the finished book, at least the chapter headings, and leave it to them to write the chapters themselves.
In the next article in this series, I will say something more about the problems that have arisen, for modern discourse in English, from the fact that Aristotle’s legacy has largely come down to us via the intermediation of Roman writers and their infelicitous rendering of Greek terms like politeia into Latin ones like res publica, from which an enormous number of misunderstandings have arisen. I will argue that the Latin terminology has, in a sense, functioned analogously to the imaginary barrier through which the thought of Aristotle has reached us in a distorted, inverted form.
For the next article in this series, click here.
