Sartre the vanishing mediator between Heidegger and Lacan

The oblivion of Sartre for Zizek

Reading Zizek’s Less Than Nothing (LTN) and then going back to read Ticklish Subject (TS) I think I am slowly getting the picture of how this view via Lacan and Hegel relates back to Heidegger’s Being and Time (B&T). Lacan drew from Heidegger via the class on Hegel of Kojeve. But Lacan was immersed in Surealism and eventually when Structuralism and Semiotics appeared saw how Psychoanalysis could be transformed by incorporating these into the interpretation of Freud, and by that route the interpretation of symptoms in psychoanalysis. Heidegger to solve the problems of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology found a way to talk about Dasein (being-in-the-world) as a point prior to the They, One, (big Other). Sartre seized on the difference between Being and Nothing, to propose Nothingness as the antipode of Process Being that is distinguished from Pure Being. Lacan seems to have taken this anti-pode seriously as the way to understand what happened to Subjectivity from the perspective of Dasein. In other words, it is not just that consciousness is the process of everything disappearing down the black hole of nothingness proposed by Sartre, but the Subject is the trace of that is left of that Nothingness operating at the center of consciousness. Zizek does not mention Sartre, but I think Sartre is a key figure in this transformation by which Lacan could turn around and see the traces of the subject from the viewpoint that Heidegger opened up in Being and Time, i.e. from the point of view where the difference between Subject and Object has not arisen yet. Zizek makes a good point that Heidegger does not deal with Madness, and Zizek basically says that Hegel recognized that Madness has to be the ground of subjectivity. So when we look back at the subject from the perspective of Dasein, prior to the difference between Subject (ego) and Object (thing) what we see is the fundamental confusion of the two with each other in a paradoxical way. But Heidegger does not give us the language to talk about this paradoxicality the way Sartre does by identifying the fundamental process occurring in Consciousness as Nothingness. Once we understand that Subjectivity will arise and Objects will be differentiated through the mediation of the big Other (They, Das Mann), in which we have a they-self as Heidegger discusses frequently, in relation to constituted they-objects for which the they-self has desire. Then we need to understand the fundamental dynamics of the inauthentic they-self within the field set up by the Dasein/They existential structures. It is Sartre that Lacan seizes on to supply this fundamental dynamic which is the Nothingness of Consciousness, i.e. everything disappearing down the blackhole at the center of the existential consciousness. Commentators have pretty well agreed that Sartre did not understand Heidegger, but Lacan thinks that Sartre better understood the ‘subject’ in the field consciousness in terms of existential phenomenology. Once we accept that this antimony between Process Being and Nothingness exists within the Continental Tradition, misinterpretation or not, then it can be used as the missing piece to transform from Heidegger to Lacan. Lacan is dealing with madness, i.e. the struggle of subjects that are no longer consistent, complete, clear, verifiable, validatable or coherent. The fact that the subject is barred, i.e. crossed out, because it is Nothing, but a hole in the field of things means that it is trapped in a world of Hyper Being, i.e. Differance as described by Derrida. Merleau-Ponty goes on to define Hyper Being as the Difference between (Process) Being of Heidegger and Nothingness of Sartre. Then Merleau-Ponty points out that it has an opposite that is Wild Being in The Visible and Invisible. Deleuze and Guattari go on to define Wild Being in terms of rhizomes of desiring machines (partial objects) where there is no individual, but only the desiring machines in a rhizomatic network in the Socius. Deleuze and Guattari attempt to define a non-Lacanian form of Psychoanalysis which they call Schizoanalysis.
It is difficult to situate the reduction of Lacan to Hegel because he leaves out several of the major transformations that make his thought possible. He is trying to distinguish himself form Derrida and Delezue, and so he uses them as strawmen for his argument, but he does not even mention Sartre. However, it seems that Sartre is the key transformation that was operative for Lacan himself in his attempt to look back at the disintegrated mad subject from the point of view of daseinanalysis. Once we get free of the difference between Subject and Object in terms of our analysis of dasein, we are still constantly falling back into that distinction via the They, or Big Other. What we need is a way to understand how to think about consciousness phenomenologically once we have placed ourselves within the realm of dasein. Sartre provides a perfect answer, the old realm of subjectivity can be understood in a Hegelian way via the reversal of Process Being into Nothingness. Once we understand that consciousness is a black hole with nothing at its center and everything is falling into that black hole then we can understand the dynamics of consciousness with regard to the arising of madness. Heidegger leaves out so much humanity, in Being and Time. He never actually makes the turn to Metonotology that he promises in which he would deal with the existentiell as a whole, as a field of ontic differentiation within dasein’s existenz. Instead all he has done is given us the existential categories by which to understand dasein and to which the existentiells have to conform. Heidegger does not take the turn to attempt to comprehend madness that Zizek says is so essential both in Kant, Hegel, and Lacan. The approved Daseinanalysis of Medard Boss just seems to incipid to handle the strange landscape of madness and its perverse logic. Lacan uses semiotics and structuralism to try to bridge this gap. Zizek makes Lacan almost intelligible. But Zizek seems to leave out some essential steps for understanding how Lacan got to where he ultimately found himself. While we are asked to forget Derrida and Deleuze, Sartre is lost in Oblivion as never mentioned by Zizek. But his influence was very strong in France as the first interpreter of Heidegger as Humanist. Of course, that was shattered by the Letter on Humanism, and Sartre’s penance was Dialectic of Enlightenment. But his influence on Lacan must have been very great, but at that time what Sartre was talking about was conflated with Heidegger as both were seen as existentialists. If we resurrect Sartre and the Antinomy of his reversal of Heidegger and ascribe that to the means of understanding the subject by Lacan, and the basis on which to understand structuralism and semiotics for the re-interpretation of Freud, and when we consider that Lacan’s introduction to Heidegger was via the class on Hegel by Kojeve then we can I think comprehend a bit better how we get from Heidegger to Lacan, it must be via Sartre the missing name that Zizek never speaks. Or at least I have not seen him mention Sartre explicitly as playing any sort of key role for the understanding of Lacan. I think this is why Zizek’s Lacan as Hegel seems so unconvincing. The reduction of Lacan to Hegel, and in the process the production of a Lacanian Hegel seems to me an extremely inauthentic move, a violation of the integrity of the thought of Lacan. What I like about it is that it makes Lacan seem to make sense. What I don’t like about it is that Zizek is always explaining things in terms of Lacan, or Hegel, and he explains Lacan in terms of Hegel and Hegel in terms of Lacan so that ultimately we have no idea what is really meant by any of these figures of thought. Zizek seldom advances a thought of his own, except perhaps in Parallax View where he seizes on Anamorphism as his own method.
I prefer a way of thinking that tries to be at least a bit historical, in the sense that we can understand the sequence of thinkers and how they relate to each other as they react to one another each in their own generation. I think my fascination with Lacan and the way that Zizek presents him is that it violates this seemingly neat order by which the kinds of Being are discovered within the Continental tradition. First Pure and Process Being are distinguished in Heidegger’s B&T as present-at-hand and ready-to-hand. Then Heidegger discovers Hyper Being as Being (crossed out). Derrida takes this up as Differance (differing and deferring). Merleau-Ponty independently discovers it in Phenomenology of Perception as the expansion of being-in-the-world. Then in the Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty distinguishes Hyper Being (The hyper dialectic between (Process) Being of Heidegger and Nothingness of Sartre, from Wild Being. Deleuze then takes this as his point of departure for creating a philosophy based in Wild Being, just as Derrida had based his philosophy in Hyper Being. Zizek and Badiou are working on attempting to understand Ultra Being. This is the story of the progressive discovery in Continental Philosophy of the meta-levels of Being. But Lacan does not fit into this narrative, as Zizek points out. Lacan takes his own departure from Heidegger, I think now via Sartre, in order to understand subjectivity within the context of structuralism and semiotics, i.e. at the level of pattern rather than form. Zizek contrasts Lacan with Derrida as what Heidegger in Contributions would call the ‘Other Beginning’. Lacan so clearly adopts the They (Anyone, Das Mann) from Heidegger calling it the big Other. But Lacan is not looking for authenticity but rather is looking back at the big Other and attempting via structuralism and semiotics to understand how it produces madness and neurosis ala Freud, introducing the Unconscious that Heidegger following Husserl following Kant has forgotten which was opened up by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. How Heidegger can ignore the Unconscious is mind boggling. Lacan is one of the first to try to close that gap. And of course the way he does that is to use daseinanalysis as a reference point to look back at subjectivity not as reified infrastructure of the psyche as assumed by Freud and Jung but as de-reified in terms of structuralism and semiotics, i.e. at the pattern level rather than at the formal level. It is interesting that Deleuze uses concepts of Lacan as the basic ideas explored in many of his books. Our theory here is that Lacan used Sartre’s concept of nothingness as the intensification of Nothing, just as Process Being (becoming) is the intensification of Pure Being. This takes its departure from the point in Being in time where Heidegger says that Nullity is nullified as the internalization of the groundlessness of Being in Dasein. On the one had we have daseinanalysis as the positive field of Existenz where the subject has not yet formed. But when we look into the reflection of that field in Nothingness as shown to us by Sartre then we can see the Subject as the singularity in the center of the black hole of consciousness. Between these two we get Hyper Being as the Subject (crossed out) which is explored by Lacan while Derrida explores the Differance of Being. Once we make this fundamental move then the de-realized subject can be seen as reflected in the patterns beneath the level of form in terms of structuralism and semiotics and this generates the insights that Lacan pulls out of his structural semiotic reading of Freud. Lacan is constantly trying to find a formalism to capture his insights into how this field of the unconscious operates between the registers of the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real. In this sense he is the precursor to Badiou who strives also to allow Set Theory of Logic to drive his thought. Badiou adds to Set Theory, the Multiple which is the radicalization of the Heterogeneity sought by Deleuze and the Event which seems to be taken from the later Heidegger of contributions. Badiou seeks to give a formal model of the kinds of paradoxical fields that Lacan finds at the structural and semiotic level of phenomena. Zizek merely seeks to be an interpreter of Lacan, but then he reduces Lacan to Hegel, and reinterprets Hegel in terms of Lacan producing an anamorphic object which cannot be distinguished between Lacan or Hegel. Zizek himself only claims for himself the Anamophism in Parallax View. One explanation of the failure of Heidegger to avoid Nazism is his missing the reality of the Unconscious in his thought. There was an unthinkable place in his thought from which he could be overcome, and that place was his own immersion in the collective unconscious that brought Hitler to power and produced a totalitarianism based on the romantic Volk myth. Heidegger was susceptible to this embodiment of the Spirit of his own vulnerable metaphysical race (i.e. the Germans) between the “pincers” of America and Russia.