That obscure object of psychoanalysis

This essay examines how psychoanalytic conceptions of the subject and the object in the works of Freud and Lacan may contribute to a re-examination of the vexed issue of the subject–object relationship in science, philosophy and epistemology. For Freud, the ego is the essential subject, yet he regarded it as an always already objectified subject, which is objectively thinkable yet never subjectively knowable qua subject. Lacan conceptualised this Freudian principle of subjectivity with his notion of the divided (barred) subject, which he initially designated as an effect of the symbolic order of language. As to the object, both Freud and Lacan emphasized its constitutive partiality, which explains why no object is ever fully capable of providing full satisfaction and why each and every object is flawed and cracked, thus triggering desire. Extending Freud’s idea of the ‘shadow of the object,’ Lacan captured the fundamental inadequacy of the object with his concept of the object a. As such, for Freud and Lacan, the subject–object relationship is problematic, because it concerns a relationship between a divided subject and a non-object (object a). In this relationship, the subject is not purely object and the object is not merely subject (in the Kantian sense), nor is the Hegelian subject–object identity more than an idealist aspiration. For psychoanalysis, the subject is always traversed by the object, yet the object can never be fully integrated into a subjectified structure of knowledge. The only way to conceive of an adequate subject–object relationship is at the level of fantasy.     

The Cornered Object of Psychoanalysis: Las Meninas, Jacques Lacan and Henry James

Long recognised as a painting ‘about’ painting, Velázquez’s Las Meninas comes to Lacan’s aid as he explicates the object a in Seminar XIII, The Object of Psychoanalysis (1965–1966). The famous seventeenth century painting provides Lacan with a visual mapping of the ‘ghost story’ he discovers in the Cartesian cogito, insofar as it depicts the unravelling of the Cartesian representational project at the moment of its founding gesture. This article traces Lacan’s argument as he turns to art, linear perspective and topology to model how the object a persistently eludes the grasp of scientific knowledge. Following a discussion of distance-point perspective in Renaissance Italy and the role this innovation played in enabling distorted depictions of objects in space, I propose Henry James’s ghost story, “The Jolly Corner,” as the sequel to Lacan’s reading of Las Meninas. In James’s tale, we obtain a narrative account of what the figures in Velasquez’s painting might ‘see’ as they return our gaze towards us.     

Killing the father,Parmenides: On Lacan’s anti-philosophy

This paper examines the historical claims about philosophy, dating back to Parmenides, that we argue underlie Jacques Lacan’s polemical provocations in the mid-1970s that his position was an “anti-philosophie”. Following an introduction surveying the existing literature on the subject, in part ii, we systematically present the account of classical philosophy Lacan has in mind when he declares psychoanalysis to be an antiphilosophy after 1975, assembling his claims about the history of ideas in Seminars XVII and XX in ways earlier contributions of this subject have not systematically done. In part iii, focusing upon Lacan’s remarkable reading of Descartes’ break with premodern philosophy—but touching on Lacan’s readings of Hegel and (in a remarkable confirmation of Lacan’s “Parmenidean” conception of philosophy) the early Wittgenstein—we examine Lacan’s positioning of psychoanalysis as a legatee of the Cartesian moment in the history of western ideas, nearly-contemporary with Galileo’s mathematization of physics and carried forwards by Kant’s critical philosophy and account of the substanceless subject of apperception. In different terms than Slavoj ?i?ek, we propose that it is Lacan’s famous avowal that the subject of the psychoanalysis is the subject first essayed by Descartes in The Meditations on First Philosophy as confronting an other capable of deceit (as against mere illusion or falsity) that decisively measures the distance between Lacan’s unique “antiphilosophy” and the forms of later modern linguistic and cultural relativism whose hegemony Alain Badiou has decried, at the same time as it sets Lacan’s antiphilosophy apart from the Parmenidean legacy for which thinking and being could be the same.

     

The singularity of the cinematic object

In order to avoid the reduction of desire to demand and to produce a theory in keeping with the insights of psychoanalysis, Lacan had to move beyond Hegel’s theorization based on recognition. To do so, Lacan had to come up with a new form of object, an object irreducible to the signifier but with the power to arouse the desire of the subject. The theorization of the objet a enables Lacan to make an important advance on Hegel’s theory of desire, an advance that effectively reverses the priority that Hegel establishes between the object and the Other. Despite the widespread association of Lacan with the signifier and its laws, his one great theoretical breakthrough concerns what remains absolutely irreducible to signification. My central contention in this essay is that Lacan’s theory of desire allows us to understand how singularity appears in the cinema, despite the medium’s inherent resistance to it. I examine this appearance of singularity through two filmic occasions—Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Michael Mann’s Heat. It is a medium in which recognition predominates, and yet the singularity of the objet a nonetheless emerges and animates the desire of the spectator.     

Misers or lovers? How a reflection on Christian mysticism caused a shift in Jacques Lacan’s object theory

In his sixth seminar, Desire and Its Interpretation (1956–1957), Lacan patiently elaborates his theory of the ‘phantasm’ ($?a), in which the object of desire (object small a) is ascribed a constitutive role in the architecture of the libidinal subject. In that seminar, Lacan shows his fascination for an aphorism of the twentieth century Christian mystic Simone Weil in her assertion: “to ascertain exactly what the miser whose treasure was stolen lost: thus we would learn much.” This is why, in his theory, Lacan conceptualizes the object of desire as the unconsumed treasure—and, in that sense, the “nothing”—on which the miser’s desire is focused. But the more Lacan develops his new object theory, the more he realizes how close it is to Christian mysticism in locating the ultimate object of desire in God, in a sevenfold “nothing” (to quote the famous last step in the ascent of the Mount Carmel as described by John of the Cross). An analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet allows Lacan to escape the Christian logic and to rearticulate the object of desire in an ‘unchristian’ tragic grammar. When he replaces the miser by the lover as paradigm of the subject’s relation to its object of desire, he substitutes a strictly Greek kind of love—eros, not agape—for the miser’s relationship to his treasure. Even when, in the late Lacan, “love” becomes a proper concept, its structure remains deeply “tragic.”     

The other side of the canvas: Lacan flips Foucault over Velázquez

This essay suggests that the minimal 1966 exchange between Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault in Lacan’s seminar actually stood in for a much fuller debate about modernity, psychoanalysis and art than its brevity would indicate. Using their contrasting interpretations of Velázquez’s painting, Las Meninas, as its fulcrum, “The Other Side of the Canvas” discovers a Lacanian critique of Foucault’s history of modernity, circa The Order of Things. The effort here is to insert the interpretation of Velázquez into the context of both Lacan’s “Science and Truth” (originally the first session of the 1966 seminar) and Foucault’s recently published book. Our interpretation develops above all from Lacan’s contrast between the definition of a painting as a “window” and Foucault’s implicit understanding of it as a kind of “mirror”—a distinction in which Lacan discovers his seminal concept of “object a.” Pursuing the understanding of object a as the “surface” of the perspectival window allows us to understand why Lacan expands the discussion of Velázquez both into an understanding of twentieth-century paintings (Magritte, Balthus) and an implicit interpretation of the difference between philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to science and history.     

Lacan1

Jacques Lacan belonged to the second generation of French psychoanalysts which, thanks to the arrival in France of Rudolf Loewenstein, was the first to benefit from a training analysis of sufficient quality and duration. Lacan left the Société Psychanalytique de Paris and the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1953, following a controversy over the short sessions he gave his patients. For Lacan, the anxiety of being absorbed by the object is the principal anxiety from which the anxieties of separation, castration or fragmentation are derived, which may explain why he did not keep his patients for a sufficient length of time. Lacan transformed his difficulty into an advocated technique, which he justified by making a critique of the classical technique. He founded his own international psychoanalytic association, in which selection only occurs when the analyst is already at a very advanced stage in his career (‘the authorization of an analyst can only come from himself’). We are indebted to Lacan for having drawn the attention of analysts to the role of language, and especially of words with a double meaning, in the genesis of interpretation, but his theory of language, founded on the assimilation of psychoanalysis to structural linguistics and anthropology, has collapsed. Many of Lacan's other theoretical contributions, such as the renewed interest in the après‐coup, the place of mirror relations in narcissism, the distinction between what he calls jouissance and the orgasm, or between the ‘real’ and reality, have been gradually integrated by analysts who accept neither his technique nor his laxity in training.     

You never know your luck: Lacan reads Pascal

In this paper the question of the object in Freud’s metapsychology is sketched out from an economical point of view, that is in terms of pleasure and displeasure. This allows for a reading of Pascal’s wager that makes clear what interest Lacan had in discussing this one pensée at length in his Seminar on the Object of Psychoanalysis. The central issue in Lacan’s reading concerns the object a as a stake the subject has lost.     

The Disenchantment of Nonsense: Understanding Wittgenstein's Tractatus

This paper aims to argue against the resolute reading, and offer a correct way of reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus. According to the resolute reading, nonsense can neither say nor show anything. The Tractatus does not advance any theory of meaning, nor does it adopt the notion of using signs in contravention of logical syntax. Its sentences, except a few constituting the frame, are all nonsensical. Its aim is merely to liberate nonsense utterers from nonsense. I argue that these points are either not distinctive from standard interpretations or incorrect. Instead, the Tractarian elucidations help to shed light on the nature of language and logic, and introduce the correct method in philosophy. Philosophy deals with philosophical utterances and Tractarian elucidations by pointing out that they are nonsensical. By doing this, one is helped to see that what they appear to be saying is shown by significant propositions saying something else.     

The lost cause of mourning

This paper examines the evolution of Jacques Lacan’s concept of mourning from his treatment of Hamlet in Seminar 6, “Desire and Its Interpretation,” to its transformation in the tenth Seminar on “Anxiety.” It is a transformation that occurs in tandem with Lacan’s reconception of anxiety as lack of the lack and his reshaped conception of the objet a as object/cause of desire. The key point is the way that Lacan’s renovated conception upends the common sense notion of mourning, that which assumes that suffering the death of a loved one means accommodating oneself to an absence where there was previously a presence. On the contrary, says Lacan, part of what is most deeply to be mourned is the lack in the Other around which the love relation was constructed. The paper concludes by asking to what extent Lacan’s account of mourning should be distinguished from those of both Hegel and Freud.     

PHILOSOPHY AND THE STUDY OF ITS HISTORY

Abstract: This article's goal is to outline one approach to providing a principled answer to the question of what is the proper relationship between philosophy and the study of philosophy's history, a question arising, for example, in the design of a curriculum for graduate students. This approach requires empirical investigation of philosophizing past and present, and thus takes philosophy as an object of study in something like the way that contemporary (naturalistic) philosophy of science takes science as an object of study. This approach also requires articulating a sense in which philosophy might make, or might have made, progress.     

The real of the rabble: Žižek and the historical truth of the Hegelo-Lacanian dialectic

In this essay I attempt to answer a fundamental question about ?i?ek’s heterodox reading of Hegel’s dialectic: What project sustains this reading in the first place? That is, what is at stake for ?i?ek himself? The purpose of this essay is to develop in this fashion a reading of ?i?ek (since he does not programmatically answer this question), although not one that is necessarily meant to compete against other alternatives. My argument, then, is that ?i?ek’s ontological and hermeneutical project is ultimately political, that when ?i?ek says we need Hegel “now more than ever,” he has a political situation in mind. By finding an element of Hegel’s thought, the political subjectivity of the “rabble,” that resists the traditional picture of dialectical system (especially the critical picture of the post-structuralists), ?i?ek can overturn the distinction between Hegelian method and system by suggesting that there’s no comprehensible distinction at all. And by politicizing Hegel and drawing out the seeds of Lacanian thought that were nonetheless incomplete until Lacan, ?i?ek’s historiographical project takes on the character of ideological critique. As such, Hegel and Lacan reach us anew, as theoretical players in an anti-postmodern political gambit.     

冯特心理学遗产的历史重估

以从近代哲学向现代哲学转换的哲学史背景为基础,揭示冯特心理学体系的理论性质并探明其历史命运,以澄清关于冯特的各种历史的及现代的误解。指出冯特心理学体系作为哲学是一个在现代哲学氛围中建立起来的、以近代哲学精神为基础的理论体系,因而难逃被哲学自身的历史所否定的命运;这是理解冯特心理学体系并澄清关于冯特的种种误解的根本之所在。     

Modern Moral Conscience

ABSTRACT

The article challenges the individualism and neutrality of modern moral conscience. It looks to the history of the concept to excavate an older tradition that takes conscience to be social and morally responsive, while arguing that dominant contemporary justifications of conscience in terms of integrity are inadequate without reintroducing these social and moral traits. This prompts a rethinking of the nature and value of conscience: first, by demonstrating that a morally-responsive conscience is neither a contradiction in terms nor a political absurdity; second, by suggesting how a morally-responsive conscience can be informed by the social world without being a mere proxy for social power or moribund tradition.     

阅读马克思的三种方式

朴素式阅读把阅读仅仅视作一个直观地看和读的过程,似乎面对马克思的文本,无需任何理论和现实的中介,它不曾考虑过阅读本身,包括阅读者的知识储备和理论旨趣,所阅读文本的语言和风格,阅读的场景和节奏,等等。征候式阅读把阅读视作一种生产,关注文本中的空白、沉默和缺漏,认为能够看得见什么,看不见什么,不是由主体的视觉决定的。而是由问题结构决定的。互文式阅读面向未来,在文本与文本、科学与修辞、写实与象征之间自由跳跃,要求多角度的阅读和阐释,不断生发出新的意义。     

Analysing Gaze in Terms of Subjective and Objective Interpretation: Sartre and Lacan

Considering the Hegelian master–slave dichotomy over the exchange of the gaze, the paper focuses on the issue of vision and visibility, reinterpreted in Sartre’s phenomenological discussions in different ways. The Hegelian emphasis on recognition finds reflection in the treatment of vision as force expressed through visibility in Sartre and as an issue of self recognition in Lacan. Drawing the Hegelian tag with a comparative argument between Sartre and Lacan, the paper focuses on the different perspectives over the concept of gaze or look. It argues that even sharing the same Hegelian legacy regarding the notion of gaze and recognition Sartre and Lacan differs to a considerable extent in their treatment of the impact of gaze. While emphasising more on the phenomenological-existential analysis of the issue of individual recognition Sartre presents gaze as a strong alienating force released from another powerful subject affecting the intersubjective power relation, Lacan, stands on a non-reciprocal relation between seeing and seen by making a difference between the eyes of the subject that looks at and the gaze which is on the side of the object without having any capacity to become a subject. The paper concentrates on these issues over a broader argument on Sartre’s concept of intersubjective gaze.     

From the profane to the sacred: why we need to retrieve Christian bioethics.

Christianity has been crucial in the conceptualization and articulation of the moral framework of the Western tradition. The social sciences, including ethics, were modeled on physical science. However, the Enlightenment project inculcated a metaphysics and an epistemology that reduced the subject to an object and thus undermined the conditions of freedom, agency and an accessible cosmic order; all of which are essential to morality. Competing value claims were shunted into a political context for resolution, but the politicalized morality itself requires a framework for evaluating resolutions. While neither the Enlightenment nor post-modernism can provide such a framework, Christian tradition can, in fact, provide just such a framework and response.     

Love, drive and desire in the works of Freud, Lacan and Proust

Both Freud and Lacan have made love the object of scientific enquiry, which is in itself remarkable, since we usually turn this subject over to literary and philosophical treatment. This article discusses Freud and Lacan's contributions to the psychology of love through dialogue with Marcel Proust's seminal novel, Remembrance of Things Past, with special emphasis on the middle sections. The point of departure is love's manifestation in the analytical situation. Freud has described transference love as both resistance and as an extreme variant of normal falling in love, to which Lacan adds the deceptive character of transference. From transference love the investigation continues to the contradictions Freud has described in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality as love's affectionate and sensual currents. Lacan contributes the concept of desire, which must be distinguished from drive and love. The differentiation between desire, drive and love introduces the perspective necessary for a psychoanalytic reading of Proust's opus. The main objective is a reading of the protagonists, Albertine and the Baron de Charlus, as representatives of the vicissitudes of love and drive, respectively.