Placing Lacan Deeper in his Historical Context

If we follow the hypothesis that Sartre is the vanishing mediator between Lacan and Heidegger then I think we can make some headway in understanding the relation between Lacan via Zizek in the context of Heidegger. But we need to step back and get some perspective by understanding the breakthrough that Heidegger made into the realm of Dasein, i.e. the realm prior to the distinction between Subject and Object, a realm not entered before in Western Philosophy. All the problems of the split between Subject and Object, or more personally between mind and body were most evident in the work of Husserl who tried to radicalize Kant’s philosophy by peering into the functioning of consciousness itself via the method of phenomenology. Heidegger set out to not just solve these problems but to radicalize phenomenology itself by looking at the factic life, i.e. life beneath not just the level of abstraction, but also beneath the level of essence perception as defined by Husserl which gives us the What of the object independently of our abstract representations of it. As Crowell points out Heidegger always stayed true to the project of phenomenology as a search for the realm of meaning. But for Heidegger as we learn from Kisiel the search for the understanding of life itself in its facticity was the ultimate aim of his phenomenology from the beginning. Heidegger was a very clever philosopher and brought to bear many innovations in order to move beyond Husserl’s phenomenology of essences into a phenomenology of religion which searches into the facticity of life. He develops the concept of the formal indication as a way at getting at the factic beyond the essences. The factic is the arena of the uniqueness of a given life prior to any kind of abstraction or generality. Heidegger approaches this through the work of Emil Lask as applied to Duns Scotus. Heidegger in his course work is seen to reinvent his terminology and approach to the material over and over again attempting to get closer to the facticity of life itself. Eventually Being and Time would be the result of this search for a way into the description of life as lived prior to the advent of the Subject/Object distinction. Heidegger starts off after the First World War in his first class with the idea that he is studying the Human Situation which is composed of the environment, the self-world and the with-world. Eventually the term Dasein (Being There) is developed as the formal indication of being-in-the-world situation prior to Subjects and Objects being distinguished. In B&T Dasein and things within the world are distinguished by using completely different vocabularies to talk about Existenz-Existenitals-Existentiells human situations verses Ontos-Categories-Ontic things found in situations. Part of what Heidegger does is develop the modalities of dasein’s being-in-the-world that are divided into ready-to-hand (Process Being, essences, Heraclitus) and present-at-hand (Pure Being, abstractions, Parmenides). The key point is that these ways of dealing with things encountered in the world, are different from the ways of dealing with other dasein encountered in the with-world of mitsein. We can treat other dasein in these degenerate modes for instance in Aristotle’s ideas of friendship which has the degenerate modes of friendship based on pleasure and usefulness. But true friendship is between equals and is based on requiting the other with good not expecting anything in return.
For Lacan who was always interested in Surrealists works you can see how existentialism would be appealing, but it was only when he discovered Structuralism and Semiotics that he felt he had the tools to rethink Psychonanalysis given to him by Freud. We must be clear that in B&T itself Structuralism of Dasein as a whole and Semiotics are combined with hermeneutics and phenomenology. This gave a clear interpretive framework of daseinanalysis which would unite the various strands that Lacan sought to use to reinterpret the Freudian vision of psychoanalysis in terms of existential phenomenology. But there is a problem which is for Heidegger the Subject has been abandoned due to all the philosophical problems it causes. But for the patients of Lacan there was still the struggle to be subjects, ultimately the struggle with madness or neurosis. So how do we look back at the subject from the position gained by Heidegger prior to the arising of Subject and Object, to understand Subjects and their Desire for Objects? Here enters Sartre who is the major interpreter of Heidegger in France, who produces from his reading of Heidegger a Humanist form of Existenitalism. Sartre’s descriptions of consciousness were always more intriguing than the descriptions of dasein which tend to seen inhuman even though they are mean to be more true to the human situation. And this is because we are expected to see ourselves as subjects by the big Other, i.e. the They (Das Mann). Sartre inverted Heidegger’s idea of Process Being (taken from Husserl) and produced the idea that consciousness was like a black hole and that not only was it nothing but it was a dynamic self negating nothingness, and things fell into the singularity of the black hole of consciousness on a regular basis. This view of consciousness as revolving around nothing and things falling into nothingness at the core of consciousness was very persuasive because it allowed us to use the terminology of Hegel to describe the activity of consciousness captured by phenomenology. Sartre talks about being-in-itself of objects in consciousness, and being-for-itself of self-consciousness, and being-in-and-for-itself in which through a dynamic negation of negation consciousness produces itself as a synthesis even though there is literally nothing there and that nothing is self-negating in its dynamics. Since it has been a long time since I read Being and Nothingness I don’t pretend that this is an accurate summary. But the key point is that Sartre’s vision can be used by Lacan to understand how the subject might look from the point of view of daseinanalysis and that gives a framework for reinterpreting Freud using Structuralism and Semiotics within the rubric of existential phenomenology as it was understand in France before and during the war as well as sometime after up until Letter on Humanism where Heidegger broke the spell of Sartre’s interpretation of Heidegger in France. Meanwhile there was the work of Merleau-Ponty which was truer to the work of both Husserl and Heidegger that was a counter point to the work of Sartre. Merleau-Ponty genuinely extended the kinds of Being that Heidegger had discovered, and added to them Hyper and Wild Being. Derrida worked on comprehending Hyper Being as Differance and later Deleuze worked on comprehending Wild Being. Lacan seems to have understood Derrida and used part of his work within his own work, while Deleuze coming later took parts of Lacan’s work as the basis for his own works. There was a lot of cross-fertilization going on in France through these years which was a renaissance in Philosophy. Basically French Continental Philosophy rediscovered the meta-levels of Being and explored them fully. Deleuze and Guattair used Wild Being as a basis to try to create an anti-Lacanian psychoanalysis called schizoanalysis. Derrida read texts and Lacan read people. But of the two Lacan was the most laconic and obscure. Derrida though difficult to read and understand was at least potentially understandable with the right type of background in Heidegger that comprehended the move that produced Heidegger’s Being (crossed out).
Zizek is quick to point out that we should forget Derrida and Deleuze. But Zizek has lost Sartre in Oblivion as far as I can see, and because of that it is very difficult to fit Lacan into the historical context that he deserves to be understood within. The reading of Lacan via Hegel and Hegel via Lacan is not all that helpful. It merely lends authority to Zizek’s interpretation without clarifying where Lacan stands himself, except that we learn that he was right about everything, just as Hegel was before him, and that Lacan was basically just saying what Hegel had said before in terms of psychoanalysis which we can apply to all kinds of cultural objects nowdays, especially to movies. Badiou gives us more of a model of Lacan’s thought. Where Lacan has the registers Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic, Badiou gives us Event, Multiple, and Set Ontology. In Lacan the Symbolic order is produced by the big Other. And the subject is basically a self-negation, hole within that order. The subject uses the Imaginary to fend off being overwhelmed by the Real. The key point is that the nothingness (negation of nothing) of Sartre is similar to the desire of desire of the Lacanian subject which finds its locus clasicus in the place where Heidegger talks about the nullifying of nullity that is at the core of Dasein. Instead of considering the Subject as a Form as Aristotle did in De Anima which has always been standard in the Western tradition, Lacan considers the subject structurally and based on semiotics both at the pattern level of the schemas below the form level. These more sophisticated methods allows Lacan to devour Freud using Hegel as the master template for understanding psychosis and neurosis, and reinterpreting everything in psychoanalyses on this new more modern basis.
What is interesting to us is that Lacan and Jung are very similar and not really at odds with each other. I understand that Lacan actually worked under Jung at some point in his career. Jung until Hillman’s deconstruction was getting really boring. But Hillman’s deconstruction of Jung is very dissatisfying, like deconstructionism in general due to its inherent nihilism. The mixture of Jung’s theory of Archetypes and the rooting of that theory in Alchemy gives a basis for understanding the psyche more deeply, in a similar way that Lacan’s structural semiosis does standard psychoanalysis. If we combine Jung and Lacan and understand Lacan within the context of daseinanalysis augmented by the antimony of nothingness developed by Sartre to the Process Being of Heidegger, then I think we have a much more interesting view of the possibilities of Psychoanalysis. Let me add to that a crucial point that we also need to consider the psychology of Nietzsche as being the dual of that of Jung. The influence of Nietzsche on Lacan is not so clear. Nietzsche’s psychology is Dionysian (Shiva) while that of Jung is Apollonian (Brahma) and we can see Heidegger’s Daseinanalysis as nondual between these because it abandons the idea of the distinction between subject and object, while all the various psychoanalysis programs cling to the subject because it is a well-established part of the big Other (They, Das Mann). And obviously patients also cling to the subject as well as they consider the functioning of subjectivity in terms of the ego’s coherence as normalcy. Heidegger did not develop his metontology that would explore the level of existentiells. So we don’t know what that would have been like. But Lacan provides a view of what it might be like as a field given the idea that the Subject is a gap or hole in Being, and the desiring of desire is a negative but reflexive process like nothingness in Sartre. I am thinking that Lacan is probably closer to Sartre than Hegel. And it is by the rooting of both Lacan and Sartre in Hegel that Zizek can make the case that Hegel is the source of Lacanian insight. There is a chance that Sartre is the closer source of that insight and that the Hegel connection is mediated by Kojeve and Sartre. Sartre however did not attend the Kojeve seminars on Hegel and so his access to Hegel was different from that of other contemporaries. As I said I think that perhaps Sartre is the vanishing mediator between Lacan and Hegel, and the connection is not at direct as Zizek makes out.
Our point is that if we understand Lacan in this historical context rather than merely in direct relation to Hegel, then we get a better picture of what Lacan might have been up to than we get through Zizek. Although I have to admit without Zizek I would not have come close to understanding Lacan at all. However, the co-reduction of Lacan to Hegel and Hegel to Lacan seems somewhat artificial. Going back to Hegel, reinterpreting him in relation to Lacan, then saying Lacan was really only interpreting Hegel all along . . . all this is not going to save Marxism from the dustbin of history. Rather if we want to save Marxism (I am not saying we do) then the route taken by Sartre in Critique of Dialectical Reason is better, i.e. rethink dialectics dialectically rather than mechanically as did Marxism. The Lacanian interpretation of the Ideological epiphenomena is interesting, but not fundamental. The irony is that Zizek is a lightweight compared to Sartre in Critique of Dialectical Reasonbut unfortunately no one reads that book by which Sartre tried to redeem himself after Being and Nothingness. But we are not sure that book needs to be redeemed. At a fundamental level Sartre was not a Nazi, or a collaborator, but a resistance fighter, and that demands our respect over and above the Nazism of Heidegger. Sartre was a Communist but he did not fall for Stalinism as did many others. Sartre is the very model of integrity in a philosopher. Bernard-Henri Levy attempts to give us a picture of what we should resuscitate Sartre instead of relegating him to Oblivion as Zizek seems to do.
By placing Lacan back in context and recognizing the other influences on him other than Hegel which is emphasized by Zizek, then we can begin to get a better picture of a road forward in our attempting to understand the relations between these various figures and the ways of thinking they championed. Lacan looked back from the place that Heidegger created prior to subject and object called daseinanalysis toward the Subject via the ideas of Sartre. In many ways like Foucault who admitted that he used Heidegger’s thought as a template for his own, substituting Power and Knowledge for Being, and by going back to Nietzsche’s idea of Genealogy we received many innovative works. We can see Lacan as secretly doing something similar but more complex. Once the way is opened up to Daseinanalysis that gives us a road to structuralism and semiotics which we can then combine with phenomenology and hermeneutics to produce a very powerful analytic regime that does not have the problems of Husserl’s phenomenology, and which has a bridge to Hegel. But Daseinanalysis without the promised but undelivered metontology is baren, and so Lacan probably used the existentialism of Sartre and its antinomic reversal of Process Being in Heidegger in order to look back on the Self as negating negation as a process, i.e. nothingness. This is hinted at in Heidegger as a possibility for understanding Dasein. Thus Heidegger’s attempt to distance himself from Humanism of Sartre’s interpretation is somewhat ingenuous. The difference is really that Sartre upheld the idea of freedom against all odds, while Heidegger believed in Fate, and also National Socialism. Sartre even as a communist rejected Stalinism. In other words when it came to standing by his principles when they became politically inconvenient he had the integrity to follow his own principles unlike Heidegger who capitulated to the Nazis and did their dirty work. Knowing about the They did not save his own Dasein, he and his thought became sullied by the association with Nazism. Lacan in later years distances himself from Heidegger, saying that his work is not essential to his own insights. I think this is wrong. Heidegger was essential for all the French Existentialists. It is just that what Heidegger was after was deeper than anyone imagined. We are still trying to come to terms with what he meant, after all this time. Being and Time has hardly yet been understood in spite of all the scholarly effort so far, and we have not even begun to scratch the surface of the later Heidegger’s unpublished works like Contributions. But Heidegger did something essential which was to define the origin prior to the split between subject and object as Dasein, and then shows that we can conceive of there being structure there and semiotics. Lacan seized that as the basis for his bringing structuralism and semiotics to bear on Freud’s texts and the practice of psychoanalysis. But to do that Lacan needed the subject still, but reinterpreted at the level of pattern rather than form, and it was via Sartre that he found a way to gain that perspective by making use of the idea of Nothingness as the desire of desire, i.e. the reflective process of desire by a subject who is merely a gap, hole, lacunae.
Once we understand this connection with Heidegger and Sartre then we can put the interpretations of Zizek into context and understand his elucidations of Lacan better. The fundamental dialectic is Sartrean and only by that mediation Hegelian. But Lacan is understanding Sartre based on Structuralism and Semiotics and reading Freud in this light. All the anomalies in Freud are then given a meaningful theoretical context. But in that reinterpretation of Freud via this hermeneutic Lacan moves closer to Jung than Freud. Hillman’s deconstruction of Jung is entirely negative. What is much more interesting is to consider the Lacanization of Jung’s archetypal psychology, especially now that we have the Red Book as a fundamental authentic basis for his practice, as it was expressed in relation to himself. And when we bring this into conjunction with the psychology of Nietzsche as the dual of Jung then we get an extremely interesting field of exploration. Where Jung is more influenced by Nietzsche than Freud, Lacan is more influenced and is a reader of Freud, correcting the errors and providing a structural and semiotic underpinning for psychoanalysis, even if it was somewhat eccentric and steeped in narcissism and arrogance. Jung is definitely the more human of the three and thus in many ways goes deeper. But archetypal psychology has become a genetically distinct island in which intellectual dwarfism has occurred. Basically Jungians only know Jung and no one else. But I suppose the same is true of Freudians and Lacanians. But at least Jung and Lacan knew the tradition and were not intellectual lightweights like Freud. And I think the fact that Lacan and Jung knew the tradition of their generations is what made their works deep. When we combine them with the even deeper Nietzsche in his role as psychologist of the world then we get some really interesting concepts that do not appear otherwise taking these thinkers separately, especially when we recognize the profound influence of Nietzsche on Jung as seen in the Red Book, his attempt to write something like Zarathustra. Zizek plays a key role in making Lacan accessible. But his playing down other influences than Hegel does not help us. Heidegger also plays a key role not only because of his influence on Lacan, but I think there is also an unacknowledged influence on Jung in terms of his idea of individuation. Lacan does not have a similar idea, he seems to have not taken seriously the idea of dasein attempting to become authentic and individualized from the They as a Self. But Jung does take that process seriously. Lacan is looking back at the subject from the viewpoint of Dasein, and seeing it in terms of Sartre’s nothingness. But Jung is looking at the idea of individuation in a way very similar to that of Heidegger, who has a deeper view of that process in many ways. But by appealing to archetypes and bringing in the idea of the collective unconscious Jung develops this individuation process in ways that Heidegger could not have imagined. And of course we have in Nietzsche the perfect example of someone who completely individuated within his time and culture and went deep into the ailments of the worldview. Jung tried to make the same journey in his Red Book, but does not reach the same depths as Nietzsche displays in Zarathustra. One interesting addition to the Archetypal Psychology camp is the work of Wolfgang Giegerichwho is a Hegelian.
Our hermeneutic circle that considers these thinkers who have been mentioned, to which we should add Bataille and Plotnitski casts a wide net. But there is a lot of work to be done to come to terms with the various contributions of these thinkers concerning psychoanalysis. And to come to terms with them we need some idea of their relations to each other, which unfortunately Zizek obscures. There are really only three thinkers in his universe Lacan, Badiou, and Hegel. And that is unfortunate. But at least he makes Lacan make some sense. And for that we thank his interpretative efforts. But Zizek does not go far enough, he does not situate Lacan in his historical period and thus he forgets the influences of Structuralism and Semiotics on Lacan as well of that of Heidegger mediated by Sartre. Once we correct that difference then we can understand better where Lacan is coming from, in the sequence of the thinkers that contributed to the richness of Continental Philosophy. Really it was Deleuze that made Lacan great by taking his ideas seriously from a philosophical point of view. For all that Zizek would like us to forget Deleuze and Derrida, he does not measure up to them in terms of the innovation of thought. Zizek sees himself as a puppet that mouths the words of Hegel in the vernacular of Lacan based on the model developed by Badiou. All he claims for himself is the Anamorphic swerve.