Anti-platonism
The Two Jacques: Rancière, Lacan (b)
Lacan’s philosophical hainamoration
Lacan’s impact upon contemporary European philosophy has been huge. From Alexandre Kojève through Jean Hyppolite to Derrida, Althusser, Foucualt, Deleuze and Guattari and Badiou, reactions to Lacan’s thought have integrally shaped the philosophical landscape of continental philosophy in sometimes unexpected and also in unexamined ways.
It’s true that many of these figures and more besides have taken issue with Lacan but all acknowledge the debt to Lacan, to psychoanalysis more broadly and of course to Freud to whom Lacan’s work was consecrated as a return: the famous and axiomatic ‘return to Freud’. We can say that there is this doubling in Lacan: on the one hand, urging psychoanalysts to take greater responsibility for their concepts by having recourse to other fields, hence philosophy etc.; on the other hand, insisting that Freud’s discovery has produced a domain which must be grasped and developed as a field in its own right. In what follows, we’ll see this appear, as it were.
Alain Badiou, while taking issue with Lacan here and there, nevertheless explicitly nominates Lacan as ‘the greatest of our dead’ and as ‘the educator to every philosophy to come’. And indeed almost uniquely for contemporary philosophy, Badiou extracts from Lacan and extends doctrines regarding the status of love, science, art, mathematics and even of philosophy itself; there is hardly an article or book by Badiou, the contemporary Platonist, that does not allude to or draw upon Lacan’s work. For Badiou, however, the philosopher, this engagement is always from the side of philosophy, from the perspective of Lacan’s relation to philosophy; that is to say, to the other side of Lacan, and, as he notes, such an engagement is ‘perilous,’ not least because Lacan could never finally clarify his own non-relation to Plato and thus philosophy. Indeed, as is well known Lacan considers his position to be that of an anti-philosopher – a term which has a long use but Lacan probably picked up from Tristan Zara, the Dadaist.
Before going too far, it’s worth marking the several charges Lacan makes against philosophy – just to formalise what we’ll explore below. Really, for Lacan, philosophy is a criminal enterprise:
1) it is a discourse of the master, i.e., one that exploits the practice of workers by transforming savoir-faire into savoir (thus it’s a crime of power)
2) an ancient discourse fixated on the whole, and therefore incapable of dealing with the challenges of modern, post-Galilean science (a crime of knowledge)
3) for the most part incompetent to deal with the problematics of desire and enjoyment (a sex-crime). Moreover, most modern philosophy is also characterised by its stupidity; above all, its capture by what Lacan called ‘the discourse of the university’ and a concomitant reduction of the radical particularities to which psychoanalysis attends and affirms.
Lacan’s determination that his discourse is an ‘anti-philosophy’ obviously presupposes the existence of ‘philosophy.’ Yet his engagement with philosophy is something of a secondary effect. Lacan’s entire discourse is of course grounded in clinical practice, and so engages with philosophy only insofar as what is said in the clinic can be in some sense considered to mark the place of truth – a truth that philosophy is determinedly incapable of recognising as such and yet truth is considered by philosophy to be finally it’s object alone. Anti-philosophy, then, disputes the claims of philosophy with regard to truth. It doesn’t reject truth as such but refuses the claim that philosophy can know truth, so to speak, or that philosophy is the locus of truths.
Moreover, and relatedly, something anti-philosophy shares with sophistry for example is a rejection of ontology, that there is a thought of being, and this is directly linked to their positions on truth: for sophistry, as we have seen throughout these lessons, knowledge is all there is – nothing gives it a form outside itself and so the question of its being is always solved in its own terms – as such, there can be no place for truth outside knowledge, as knowledge has no outside. Truth if it’s anything is the rules of the game; in whatever sense it is presumed – life in Nietzsche for example – and issues in its expression. It’s an aesthetic category, profoundly.
Anti-philsophy is not so much a rejection of the category of truth as it appears in philosophy – or seems to have appeared as such – as that name for the total capture of knowledge: Absolute Knowledge.
Anti-philosophy rejects this position on the basis that no identity is possible between being and thought – the Parmenidean directive; it is the same to think as to be. The presumption of a rational relation of thought to being is philosophical hubris or rather is constitutive of it. There are different ways of saying it but anti-philosophy shares amongst its practitioners the conviction that this identity can be grounded only in an ultimately unarticulable, ultimately mysterious, first principle. Thus, following Badiou’s ariculation, ‘Lacan, in Freud’s wake, will invoke the unconscious as what disjoins the rational immediacy of any such relation. Similarly, for example, for Wittgenstein, there remains over always that of which one cannot speak or for Nietzsche, that an unspeakable will determines the limit of human reason’ and so on. Anti-philosophy posits being as ever inaccessible to thought and, as such, when philosophy proposes that it speaks the truth it is always only in Lacan’s words, ‘half-said’.
So we’ll take a tour through Lacan’s antipathy to philosophy which, as noted is the product of a hell of a lot of engagements with and references to philosophers – the list of whom he speaks is astonishing – Aristotle and Hegel top this list in terms of the number of engagements and times he returns to them and he devotes the bulk of Seminar on the Transference to a critical and extraordinary re-reading of Plato’s symposium on Love.
But first here is a not exhaustive and in no particular order list of Lacan’s serious engagements – with philosophers but also science, mathematics, linguistics, history, literature and so on: Saussure, Benveniste, Jakobson, Bataille, Merleau- Ponty, Levi-Strauss, Piaget, Sartre, Kojeve, Hyppolite, Koyre, and Althusser, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx, Hegel, Kant, Spinoza, Leibniz, Descartes, Pascal, Saint Augustine, Aristotle, Plato, and the pre- Socratics, Bertrand Russell, Jeremy Bentham, Isaac Newton, Jonathan Swift, and George Berkeley, Cantor, Frege, Poincare, Bourbaki, Moebius, Huyghens, Copernicus, Kepler, and Euclid … literally one could go on and on…
It’s true to say that for the most part the non-philosophers in this list give succour and support to Lacan’s anti-philosophy, which is perhaps not quite the same thing as his antipathy to Philosophy, which I’ll elaborate below but it’s worth noting here also what L takes from these engagements or what they open up in his own discourse. For this I’ll follow Charles Shepherdson’s taxonomy:
‘Lacan’s early seminars for example ‘are marked by a prolonged encounter with Hegel, who we know had a substantial and abiding effect not only on his account of the imaginary and the relation to the other – notions like jealousy and love, intersubjective rivalry and narcissism – but also on his understanding of negation and desire, leading to the logic of the signifier. His Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, famous for its extended reading of Sophocles’ Antigone , also contains a treatment of Kantian ethics, Bentham’s utilitarianism, and Aristotle’s philosophy, including not only the Nicomachean Ethics, but also the Poetics and the Rhetoric, and especially their discussions of ‘catharsis’ – as we know a critical term concerning the relations between art and psychoanalysis, as well as the transformation that separates modernity from the ancient world.’
As Shepherdson notes this is ‘a historical question that is repeatedly marked by Lacan, as if to suggest,’ he says, ‘that psychoanalytic theory, in order to be truly responsible for its concepts, must account for its own historical emergence as it seeks to articulate its place in relation to the philosophical tradition which it inevitably inherits’ and of course, subverts for this very purpose…
Lacan’s Seminar on Transference provides, as noted, a sustained reading of Plato’s Symposium, and his Seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis contains commentary on Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of painting, from his work The Visible and the Invisible, which had also a significant impact on Lacan’s concept of the gaze. Lacan spoke frequently also of Heidegger, starting in 1935 and continuing through in Seminar II, and in the discussion of Heidegger’s “Das Ding” in Seminar VII, in “L’Instance de la lettre,” and elsewhere, including the later ‘Rome discourse’.’
‘It would be a mistake’, Shepherdson continues, ‘to suppose that all these references merely repeat the same idea or formula, for in one case he is concerned with the temporality of the subject and the text of Being and Time, while in another he is concerned with the distinction between the “thing” and the ‘object,’ and the text of Poetry, Language, Thought. Lacan’s interest in Heidegger was such that he translated his essay ‘Logos’ for the first issue of La Psychanalyse; and the most frequently cited of these references, taken from the final pages of the ‘Function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis,’ reads almost like a manifesto’, Shepherdson says: ‘Of all the undertakings that have been proposed in this century, that of psychoanalysis is perhaps the loftiest, because the undertaking of the psychoanalyst acts in our time as a mediator between the man of care and the subject of absolute knowledge’. (E/S , p. 105 ). This, as you can see, places Freud in relation to both Heidegger’s account of Dasein (the ‘man of care’) and Hegel’s phenomenology (‘the subject of absolute knowledge’) – thus the subject vis a vis what is not and never it.’
This taxonomy or perhaps litany can be a long way extended – but let’s take up the almost paradoxical operation of Lacan’s antipathy to this very tradition – as if it provides in its own positivity the very lack that must be taken up.
To begin, as Lacan says, at the limit, is to note that Lacan’s hatred of philosophy was genuinely manifest. Aside from his long-pursued, explicit critiques of Hegel, we can simply note some of Lacan’s scabrous puns: ‘faufilosophe,’ ‘flousophie,’ etc. You hear in these puns on philosophie the subverted homophones: faux (wrong, false, fake); [il] faut (it is necessary); flou (blurry, misty, unfocussed, unclear); faufiler (to baste, to slip through); etc. To put this another way, it is the subversion of knowledge by the very language it relies upon. Lacan, over time, becomes more and more direct on the matter, to the point where he flatly states: ‘I abhor philosophy, it’s been a long time since it’s said anything of interest.’
However, it’s probably more accurate to say, as does Jean-Claude Milner, that Lacan’s engagement with philosophy took the form of hain-amoration (S XX 90-1). For, as noted, references to philosophers are endemic across the seminars and the Ecrits, and, apart from anything else, this gives currency to Badiou’s claim that antiphilosophy — of which Lacan is the exemplary contemporary figure — is a division immanent to philosophy – going back to the Plato. Further, this suggests that the method of antiphilosophy, at least in its Lacanian version, is a subtractive one. That is to say, it builds its discourse on that which, for its rival, philosophy, is impossible to say and impossible to know.
In other words, psycho-analytic discourse constructs itself as the truth of the other or the thought of the real. When, for example, Lacan claims to situate psychoanalysis in relation to ‘Science itself’ – the ‘science in which we are caught up, which forms the context of the action of all of us in the time in which we are living…’ – it is both a mocking nod at Kant, whom he will treat subversively and at length in the essay ‘Kant avec Sade’ published in Ecrits, and more potently, as a direct revision of the Cartesian subject. That which philosophy cannot think, the unconscious, is the key to this psychoanalytic revision (Sem XI, 231).
It’s not too reductive to say that this revision even has its roots in the pre-Socratics and thus it turns on the contention: ‘being thinks’ as Parmenides (Plato) insist or as Heraclitus claims, ‘it signifies’ (Sem XX 114), which is to put things in the dimension of the act. We are back then already at this old division between being and appearing or the idea and reality and so on.
In Lacan’s return to Freud the unconscious is precisely that which philosophy not only knows nothing about but actively tries to unknow as anything at all for this very reason. As Freud had already said, philosophy predicates itself on absolute knowledge but the unconscious, which exists is not knowledge insofar as it is the impossibility of some absolute, some final unity, some subject in the sense of self-knowing. The unconscious points at the philosopher’s ‘dirty little secret’, as Lacan calls it, the absolute. The unconscious means, of course, that any subject is divided and not whole. This has consequences for truth – what philosophy professes to love.
But there is a sort of a twist: Lacan’s hainamoration with regard to philosophy entails analytic discourse hating, not what philosophy professed to love, truth, but rather what the love of philosophy made of truth: ostensibly an object for its contemplation alone, thus turning the animus of truth, the real as such, or even it’s desire, into something un-lovable per se. In other words, philosophy mistakes its object for the object a, that is, the cause of its desire. Thus philosophy, the charge goes, is essentially psychotic insofar as it seeks to align the true with the whole. Psychoanalysis bring the cure as such.
Philosophy claims then, not only to ‘love truth,’ but to know the ‘all’ of truth, the whole truth. Philosophy thereby conflates truth and knowledge and, in and through this operation, truth is ultimately little more than a predicate or Ideal of the knowledge of philosophy. This is the crux for Lacan of philosophy’s general lack of appeal, of claims to its end and of its self-serving reserve. It is philosophy’s ‘love’ (of the One, we might say) that analysis hates, which is to say, the very form of its discourse — given that discourse is a social bond — because philosophy fails to see in truth anything other than its object of love, which is to say, itself.
In short, philosophy for Lacan is a sort of psychotic narcissism — to which he listens closely – hence the constant engagement. For Lacan, the great exponent of this narcissism at the limit (and thus, after a fashion not determined by it himself), is not Plato with whom Lacan compares himself – as if Freud was his Socrates in some way – but Hegel (check the index to Ecrits) whose concept of absolute knowledge, in this context, invokes the church ethic par excellence: ‘love thy neighbour as thyself,’ an ethic, as has often been remarked, which requires that what is to be loved must, above all, be what is a priori lovable. Like God, then, Lacan says, who does not hate, philosophy, caught in its own projections, is a most ignorant being’ (S XX 91&14).
Essentially, philosophy, in love with its own knowledge, cannot think that which philosophy is not, that which is not the knowledge of philosophy or that which is in excess of philosophy and so on. This insight, first of Freud vis-à-vis the unconscious, and Lacan’s vis-à-vis the sexual non-relation, ultimately guides Badiou’s Platonic return of philosophy to itself. Badiou orients his project on the Real of this Lacanian impasse, which is for Badiou, at once true and unknown – which it is possible to read as we have occasionally done as a Platonism par excellence – aporia, recommencement, not impossible. In this way, I have to say, Badiou finds a way to subvert the anti-philosophy of Lacan as necessary for philosophy itself. The struggle continues but…
Anyway, Lacan was not merely intent on philosophy’s destruction; indeed, with all irony intended, he saw that as a matter for philosophy itself. Rather, he was concerned with the subversion of philosophy and as such with the place which philosophy, mostly by its own determination, supposed itself to occupy. That place — and the topological designation matters insofar as speaking of the locus of truth is, Lacan insists, antiphilosophical — is that of truth or, more accurately, as noted, of the knowledge of truth.
Yet it’s not that Lacan wanted to render that place void so much – like our modern day sophsist – as to see it occupied by a discursive operation worthy of truth itself, one that in fact founded itself on the well-founded division of truth from knowledge and, by association, the subject from being. This meant a discourse that did not presume itself at one with that which it discoursed upon, that is to say, a sovereign discourse, a discourse of mastery, of completion, retrospectively and in anticipation of all knowledge to come. Against this eternal absolutism, so to speak, and the logic upon which it was articulated, Lacan insisted on treating the structural division of knowledge as real — that there are fundamentally two distinct and formative sites for the production of knowledge.
If there is a subject, for Lacan, the very condition of new knowledge, the goal of all analysis, then there is immediately, immanently and in-differently, that other which guarantees the very (dis)place(ment) of this subject. Philosophy, for Lacan, cannot think this subject (of love, of non-relation, thus ‘hate,’ of the two ‘universality/existence’) because of its desire for the One or the Whole.
Again, note we are looking at the indiscernibility of a double or dualism which is supposed to keep everything tight, and so for Lacan, that which escaped determination and was as such outside philosophy was the very point, the point at which philosophy, in thrall to the love of truth qua object (rather than process in the real), could no longer think.
Thus its very presumption to mastery is a veil philosophy throws over its own lack. As he says, in this sense, ‘the love of truth… is the love of castration’ (Sem XVII, 52). Mastery, in essence, is the limit of thought and not its ‘completion’. One ‘masters’, at the limit, when one can no longer think. In summary form, what Lacan shows is that truth is not mastery, and the absolute is not universality.
Moreover, what Lacan recognised was that mastery was itself inscribed in a serial chain of positions and as such was the result of a particular turn in the becoming of truth – note this – like everyone we have heard from there is a ‘change’ manifest in Plato, not for the best as it were. The problem for Lacan as with pretty much everyone we have talked about, was to force a new turn, a deposition, for Lacan, to aim truth at the real (the impossible) in the manner of Heraclitus contra Parmenides and, in a move of spectacular, speculative non-sense, Socrates contra Plato.
Analysis, then, Lacan remarks, is anything but a ‘world-view’, which is a ‘discourse entirely different from ours’ (Sem XX 30).
Note that this ‘astounding historical twist’ that Lacan affects: Socrates contra Plato; which for him is to ensure that the instance of philosophy is the closing of analysis (C 237). Thus Plato with philosophy and so its love of truth as absolute brings analysis to an end – analysis then being constituted for Lacan in the figure of Socrates, who he does indeed call the first analyst and hence the extended reading of the Symposium and the central place of love in psychoanalysis, that strange little malady which, critically for Lacan is not One.
We will get to this but note first that we have seen this before many times, expressed in many ways, this division of Socrates from Plato. Here Socrates was always already what Plato was not and that he was not it forces Plato to make of Socrates in his dialogues what he was not. He overdetermines his analysis by recourse to the absolute; he makes of Socratic analytic discourse the all of knowledge, thus veiling the division at its heart’
However, while it may be that Lacan identified with Socrates as an analyst, Lacan is not consistent on his attitude to Plato, this figure of mastery and cause of philosophy as sovereignty over truth. While Lacan is consistent with his placement of philosophy as the discourse of the master which restores the ‘unconscious’ to order, Plato shifts around in Lacan’s estimation (as he does in Nietzsche) sometimes being the cause of this great wrong turn and at other times being labelled a ‘Lacanian’ (and precisely because Plato in the guise of the idea organises a ‘tightening up’ of discourse) (See Sem XIX). Badiou puts this vacillation down to Lacan’s sharing with Kojeve – and hence with a whole raft of other French thinkers and the Straussains too (Strauss being a friend and colleague of Kojeve), the notion that Plato ‘had concealed what he thought’ (C 245). It is truly interesting and quite plain to see how useful this esoteric reading is for psychoanalysis but as always the question as to its veracity is the question.
For anyone interested the longest confrontation Lacan has with Plato, it’s in Seminar 8, Transference. He analyses the Symposium, the dialogue on what is Love. As always it’s a brilliant intervention on the scene, as it were, but as always it’s an intervention predicted on the impossibility that philosophy always inscribes within itself – that it says the all of what there is to say. Lacan thus subjects the dialogue to this form of intervention, over and again to ostensibly take the question of love, so critical for psychoanalysis, so critical for what is integral to its practice – the place of the subject in regard to knowledge; the truth of it in other words and hence the question of transference itself – in the direction philosophy wants to go or points toward.
Psychoanalysis may not be the cure of philosophy – it’s not a cure, anyway Lacan insists, just the means to return us to an ordinary unhappiness as Freud said – but it is perhaps the subjective liberation of philosophy from itself. Thus the return of philosophy to itself at the same time; to its ordinary unhappiness rather than its sovereign satisfaction. Something like this. Hence, we can finally say here that psychoanalysis is required of philosophy lest it come to its end. Which is ever the desire of the other, after all.
Texts
Justin Clemens, Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy.
A. J. Bartlett & Justin Clemens, ‘The Greatest of our Dead’.
A. J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens & Jon Roffe, Lacan Deleuze Badiou.
Charles Shepherdson, ‘Lacan and Philosophy’ in Jean-Michele Rabaté (ed.) Cambridge Companion to Lacan.