subjectivity – Page 3

johnston harman interview pt 5

Graham – The third chapter of your book targets what you call “neo-Spinozism.” Where can we find this philosophy today, and why is it not the path we ought to pursue?

As I describe it therein, neo-Spinozism is a big tent today, especially in Continental philosophical circles. Amongst Continentalists, much of this is to be attributed to the lasting influences of Althusser and Deleuze.

The third chapter you ask about is set up by the second chapter of Adventures in Transcendental Materialism (“For a Thoughtful Ontology: Hegel’s Immanent Critique of Spinoza”). I revisit Hegel’s various interrelated criticisms of Spinoza (and of those, such as Schelling at certain moments, who fail to maintain sufficient distance from Spinozism) with an eye to their enduring relevance. Continue reading “johnston harman interview pt 5”

johnston harman interview pt 4

Graham – Along with Žižek you have worked closely with another leading European philosopher, Catherine Malabou. What has been Malabou’s significance for you, and what is the most important thing present-day philosophy can learn from her?

Žižek was responsible for first drawing my attention to Malabou’s work— specifically, her groundbreaking 2004 text Que faire de notre cerveau? (What Should We Do with our Brain?). It was around 2006 that I read this book, which was a real experience that compelled me promptly to devour the rest of her published writings then available. Continue reading “johnston harman interview pt 4”

johnston harman interview pt 3

In short, my immanent critique consists in pitting Žižek’s dialectical/transcendental materialism against his glosses on quantum physics.

In terms of a contemporary materialist interfacing with the natural sciences, I favor biology generally and neurobiology particularly for several reasons. Continue reading “johnston harman interview pt 3”

johnston harman interview pt 2

Adrian Johnston is interviewed by Graham Harman about his new book out in May 2014, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers.

Having said all of the above, I nonetheless deliberately preserve and play upon certain senses of the (apparent) tension between the terms “transcendental” and “materialism.”

As the preceding already reveals, transcendental materialism fundamentally is preoccupied with two of the biggest of big issues in the history of philosophy, ones closely interrelated: the freedom-determinism dispute and the mind-body problem. Continue reading “johnston harman interview pt 2”

johnston harman interview pt 1

Adrian Johnston is interviewed by Graham Harman about his new book out in May 2014, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers.

Here are some important excerpts

Graham – Your title contains the phrase “transcendental materialism.” There is a tension between these two words that in some sense drives all of your intellectual work. “Transcendental” generally refers to a sort of philosophy, like Kant’s, that asks about our conditions of knowing the world rather than about the world itself. Meanwhile, “materialism” has always been a philosophy that turns in the most hardnosed fashion towards the world itself, viewing humans as a material thing just like everything else. Stated briefly, how does one reconcile the transcendental and materialist standpoints? Continue reading “johnston harman interview pt 1”

zupančič not-mother pt 2

Zupančič, Alenka. Not-Mother: On Freud’s Verneinung. E-flux Journal 2012

What is at stake in the Freudian discovery that, when dealing with the unconscious, the alternative “mother/not mother” is not exhaustive (negation of negation doesn’t bring us to the supposedly original affirmation)… It is not a “more or less mother,” nor is it a difference in intensity with regard to two extremes, or absolutes; it is a paradoxical entity of “with-without.”

The third term (or third possibility), which is included rather then excluded, is nothing other than the very point of the (onto)logical impossibility of the third.

In other words, what is included as something (as an entity) receives the very logical impossibility on which the alternative mother/not-mother is based.

The fact that it is included doesn’t mean that the impossible now becomes possible (one of the possibilities, as in the intuitionist logic); rather, it is included in its very onto-logical impossibility — hence its spectral character: as included in reality, the impossible-real can only be a specter.

This is then where a first cut is produced, the split between in and out, which also and immediately coincides with the dividing lines between good and bad, foreign, or alien, and familiar.

[In the] original pleasure-ego, these dividing lines simply coincide: the inner — the good — the familiar, on the one side, and the outer — the bad — the alien on the other. But already in the next step things become more complicated and these dividing lines fall out of joint.

but of whether something which is in the ego as a presentation can be rediscovered in perception (reality) as well

In other words, what is at stake here is the famous reality check, or “reality testing,” based on the presupposition of an original loss of pleasure.

The crucial aspect of which is the loss of immediacy: From now on, all pleasure will be a found-again-pleasure.

The same goes for all objects of reality: As objects of reality (which is thus constituted as objective reality, that is, constituted through the opposition subjective-objective) they are never simply found, but always refound, found again,

“The first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality testing is not to find an object in real
perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object, to
convince oneself that it is still there.”

So the moment we begin dealing with thinking and with certain relation to reality, both our pleasure and the existence of things are no longer immediate, but bear the mark of repetition and of the gap the latter implies.

The second repartition of the dividing lines doesn’t simply replace the first, however, but adds to it with a twist, resulting in a gap, or a third dimension, that haunts from then on the very consistency of the distinction between inner and outer, and blurs the subject-object division and relation.

We could also recapitulate the movement described by Freud like this. The first mythical difference between inside and outside is not yet a real difference, but a process of differentiating the indifferent, or the indistinct, led by the primary process of the pleasure

zupančič why P? 3

Zupančič, Alenka. Why Psychoanalysis: 3 interventions. Aarhus University Press 2008.

First let us situate on the same line the two elements that we arrived at in our discussion following different paths.

First, the surplus (of) distortion,

which at the same time disturbs and carries the relationship between the manifest and the latent content.

Second, the falloff, the leftover of the conscious interpretation,

which is not simply unconscious, but propels the work of the unconscious interpretation and is present in the unconscious formations as their ‘formal’ aspect (and not as a particular content), as the form of the distortion itself, its ‘grammatical structure.’

To these two, we can add in the same line a third element, namely what psychoanalysis conceptualised with the notion of the drive.

The drive … embodies a fundamental inner split of all satisfaction, the non-relationship between demand and satisfaction, leading to the possibility of another, supplemental satisfaction. This has the effect of de-centring not so much the subject as the Other, and the de-centring at stake could be best formulated as follows: 31

the subject never finds the satisfaction directly in the Other, yet he can only find it through the detour of the Other. This detour is irreducible. 32

The drive is something other than the supposed solipsistic enjoyment, and one should conceptually distinguish between the two. 32 Continue reading “zupančič why P? 3”

infinite of desire jouissance

Zupančič, Alenka. The Ethics of the Real. New York: Verso. 2000.

The problem of the infinite is not how to attain it but, rather, how to get rid of its stain, a stain that ceaselessly pursues us. The Lacanian name for this parasitism is enjoyment [jouissance]. 249

The death drive is not a drive that aims at death. It aims neither at life nor at death. The drive can be ‘mortal’ precisely because it is indifferent to death (as well as to life); because it is not preoccupied with death, because death does not interest it. … it is indifferent to death. 250

How, then, does the infinite parasitize the finite, our existence as ‘finite beings’ ?

there are two modes of this parasitism, each of them resulting in a different figure of the infinite: first, there is the infinite of desire, which might be described as a ‘bad infinity’

there is the infinite of jouissance (linked to the logic of the Real, and of the realization). Ethics itself can be situated in the passage from the one to the other.

This passage, however, can itself take two different paths.

The paradigm of the first is indicated by the figure of Antigone, and brings out the co-ordinates of ‘classical ethics’ .

The paradigm of the second is evident in the figure of Sygne de Coûfontaine, and constitutes what we might call ‘modern ethics’. 250

complete graph of desire

Lacan, Jacques. “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectics of Desire.” in Jacques Lacan Écrits A Selection. Trans. Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. 281-312.

12

Žižek: The complete graph is divided into two levels: level of meaning and level of enjoyment. THe problem of first (lower) level is how intersection of signifying chain and of a mythical intention (Δ) produces the effect of meaning, with all its internal articulation: the imaginary (i(o)) and symbolic I(O) — identification of the subject based on this retroactive production of meaning, and so on. The problem of the second (upper) level is what happens when this very field of the signifier’s order, of the big Other, is perforated, penetrated by a pre-symbolic (real) stream of enjoyment — what happens when the pre-symbolic ‘substance’, the body as materialized, incarnate enjoyment, becomes enmeshed in the signifier’s network.

Its general result is clear: by being filtered through the sieve of the singifier, the body is submitted to castration, enjoyment is evacuated from it, the body survives as dismembered, mortified. In other words, the order of the signifier (the big Other) and that of enjoyment (the Thing as its embodiment) are radically heterogeneous, inconsistent; any accordance between them is structurally impossible.

This is why we find on the left-hand side of the upper level of the graph — at the first point of intersection between enjoyment and signifier S(Ø) — the signifier of the lack in the Other, of the inconsistency of the Other, as soon as the field of the signifier is penetrated by enjoyment it becomes inconsistent, porous, perforated — the enjoyment is what cannot be symbolized, its presence in the field of the signifier can be detected only through the holes and inconsistencies of this field, so the only possible signifier of enjoyment is the signifier of the lack in the Other, the signifier of its inconsistency (Sublime Object 122).

or S(Ø) as written above. “It designates the fact that there is no Other of the Other, no guarantee (or guarantor such as God) of what the Other says — whether the familial, juridical, religious, or analytic Other. NO statement has any other guarantee that its very enunciation, he suggests.” (Fink Reading Écrits 122-3

Žižek: Today, it is a common place that the Lacanian subject is divided, crossed-out, identical to a lack in a signifying chain. However, the most radical dimension fo Lacanian theory lies … in realizing that the big Other, the symbolic order itself, is also barré, crossed-out, by a fundamental impossibility, structured around an impossible/traumatic kernel, around a central lack. Without this lack in the Other, the Other would be a closed structure and the only possibility open to the subject would be his radical alienation in the Other. So it is precisely this lack in teh Other which enables the subject to achieve a kind of ‘de-alenation’ called by Lacan separation: not in the sense that the subject experiences that now he is separated for ever from the object by the barrier of language, but that the object is separated from the Other itself, that the Other itself ‘hasn’t got it’, hasn’t got the final answer — that is to say, is in itself blocked, desiring; that there is also a desire of the Other.

This lack in the Other gives the subject — so to speak — a breathing space, it enables him to avoid the total alienation in the signifier not by fill out out his lack but by allowing him to identify himself, his own lack with the lack in the Other.

(more to come)

zupančič 7 subjectivation without subject

Zupančič, Alenka. The Ethics of the Real. New York: Verso. 2000.

‘Act so that the maxim of your will can always hold at the same time as the principle giving universal law’ — what is the paradox implicit in this formulation of the categorical imperative?

The paradox is that, despite its ‘categorical’ character, it somehow leaves everything wide open .

For how am I to decide if (the maxim of) my action can hold as a principle providing a universal law, if I do not accept the presupposition that I am originally guided by some notion of the good (i.e. some notion of what is universally acceptable)?

In other words, there is no a priori criterion of universality. It is true that Kant was convinced that he had found this criterion in the principle of non-contradiction. However, there is an impressive body of commentary demonstrating the weakness of this criterion. 92

Kant invents two stories which are supposed, first, to ‘prove’ the existence of the moral law and, secondly, to demonstrate that the subject cannot act contrary to his pathological interests for any reason other than that of the moral law. The first story concerns a man who is placed in the situation of being executed on his way out of the bedroom as a condition of spending the night with the woman he desires . The other story, which we have already discussed, concerns a man who is put in the position of either bearing false witness against someone who, as a result, will lose his life, or being put to death himself if he does not do so.

As a comment on the first alternative , Kant simply affirms: ‘We do not have to guess very long what his [the man’s in question] answer would be.’

As for the second story, Kant claims that it is at least possible to imagine that a man would rather die than tell a lie and send another man to his death.

It follows from these two comments that there is no ‘force’ apart from the moral law that could make us act against our well-being and our ‘pathological interests’. Lacan raises the objection that such a ‘force’ — namely, jouissance (as distinct from pleasure ) – does exist:

The striking significance of the first example resides in the fact that the night spen t with the lady is paradoxically presented to us as a pleasure that is weighed against a punishment to be undergone … but one only has to make a conceptual shift and move the night spent with the lady from the category of pleasure to that of jouissance, given that jouissance implies precisely the acceptance of death … for the example to be ruined. (Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. 1992, 189). 99

For Kant, it is unimaginable that someone would want his own destruction — this would be diabolical — Lacan’s answer is not that this is nevertheless imaginable, and that even such extreme cases exist, but that there is nothing extreme in it at all: on a certain level every subject, average as he may be, wants his destruction, whether he wants it or not. 100

Kant’s point can be formulated more generally: there is no (ethical) act without a subject who is equal to this act. This, however, implies the effacement of the distinction between the level of the enunciation and the level of the statement: the subject of the statement has to coincide with the subject of the enunciation – or, more precisely, the subject of enunciation has to be entirely reducible to the subject of the statement. 102

The am lying is a signifier which forms a part, in the Other, of the treasury of vocabulary. This ‘vocabulary’ is something that I can use as a tool, or something that can use me as a ‘talking machine’. As subject, I emerge on the other level, the level of enunciation, and this level is irreducible.

Here we come, once again, to the point which explains why the subject cannot ‘hide behind’ the Law, presenting himself as its mere instrument: what is suspended by such a gesture is precisely the level of the enunciation.

That ‘there is no deposit without a depositor who is equal to his task’, or ‘there is no (ethical) act without the subject who is equal to his act’, implies that we set as the criterion or the condition of the ‘realization’ of an act the abolition of the difference between the statement and the enunciation. 102

But the crucial question is why the abolition of this difference should be the criterion or the necessary condition of an act.

Why claim that the accomplishment of an act presupposes the abolition of this split?

It is possible to situate the act in another, inverse perspective: it is precisely the act, the (‘successful’) act, which fully discloses this split, makes it present. From this perspective, the definition of a successful act would be that it is structured exactly like the paradox of the liar: this structure is the same as the one evoked by the liar who says ‘I am lying’, who utters ‘ the impossible’ and thus fully displays the split between the level of the statement and the level of the enunciation, between the shifter ‘I’ and the signifier ‘am lying’.

To claim, as we are claiming here, that there is no subject or ‘hero’ of the act means that at the level of ‘am lying’, the subject is always pathological (in the Kantian sense of the word), determined by the Other, by the signifiers which precede him. At this level, the subject is reducible or ‘dispensable’.

But this is not all there is to it. Whereas the ‘subject’ of the statement is determined in advance (he can only use the given signifiers), the (shifter) I is determined retroactively: it ‘becomes a signification, engendered at the level of the statement, of what it produces at the level of the enunciation‘.

It is at this level that we must situate the ethical subject: at the level of something which becomes what ‘it is’ only in the act (here a ‘speech act) engendered, so to speak, by another subject. 103

However, the fact that the act ‘reveals’ the difference between the level of the statement and the level of the enunciation does not imply that the subject of the act is a divided subject. On the contrary, we know very well that when we are really dealing with an act, the subject ‘is all there in his act’.

What reveals the distinction between the statement and the enunciation, between the subject who says or does something and the subjective figure which arises from it, is precisely the abolition of the division of the subject. Of course, this does not mean that the subject of an act is a ‘full ‘ subject who knows exactly what he wants but, rather, that the subject ‘is realized’, ‘objectified‘ in this act: the subject passes over to the side of the object. The ethical subject is not a subject who wants this object but, rather, this object itself. In an act, there is no ‘divided subject’: there is the ‘it’ (the Lacanian ça) and the subjective figure that arises from it.

We may thus conclude that the act in the proper sense of the word follows the logic of what Lacan calls a ‘headless subjectivation’ or a ‘subjectivation without subject’.

chiesa chapter 2

Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. MIT Press. 2007

Lacan relates the notions of full and empty speech to his well-known dictum according to which “The sender receives his own message back from the receiver in an inverted form.”

Here I intend to demonstrate, through a close reading of this formula, that for Lacan what is really at stake in its varying significations is the gradual passage from an individual conception of the unconscious revolving around the notion of speech to a transindividual one revolving around the notion of language.

It would, however, be wrong to equate Lacan’s transindividual unconscious with any sort of quasi-Jungian archetypal unconscious—“collective” by definition. The former corresponds to a symbolic signifying structure; the latter coincides with the pregiven significationof a set of primordial images. For Lacan, the unconscious as signifying structure produces conscious signification. Jungian psychoanalysis reverses this Freudian principle: it is the unconscious as primordial signification that produces the linguistic structure.

In the final part of this section, I intend to argue that the emergence of the notion of a transindividual unconscious—as universal structure of language — renders explicit the covert paradox on which Lacan’s conception of the aim of analysis as the individual subject’s realization of his own true, unconscious desire through full speech was implicitly based.

In fact, if on the one hand Lacan repeatedly warns us against misinterpreting the unconscious as a subjective hidden substance, on the other, at this stage of his production, he does not seem to realize that the full realization of the subject’s substanceless unconscious would inevitably correspond to its utter desubjectivization into a substantial structure.

Adopting Lacan’s own contemporaneous definition of psychosis, we could argue that this would inevitably correspond to a “being passively spoken by language,” language to be understood as the transindividual locus of the unconscious.

In other words, Lacan’s notion of an individual unconscious that would be equated with full speech seems to give rise to a vicious circle: the aim of analysis is to overcome empty speech and the imaginary wall of language, but, in parallel, the more one’s individual speech is symbolized, the more it is integrated into the transindividual symbolic dimension of language.

Language is never imaginary per se: the wall is erected solely by the individual subject’s own imaginary identifications. Once these are fully revoked, the subject is absorbed by language, the transindividual unconscious.

I do not believe it is possible to reconcile this dis-identifying de-subjectivization with the optimism evoked by the pseudo-Hegelian “humanist” leitmotiv of dis-alienation as presented by Lacan in “Function and Field.” 44

The second part of Seminar III—and, above all, the article “The Agency of the Letter”—suggests that by 1956 Lacan’s return to the Freudian discovery of the unconscious no longer revolved primarily around the pseudo-Hegelian dialectical function of speech, but instead became increasingly dependent on the structuralist notion of language as initially formulated by Saussure. As Lacan states: “Firstly there is a synchronic whole, which is language as a simultaneous system of structured groups of opposition, then there is what occurs diachronically, over time, and which is discourse.” 46-47

chiesa I think where I am not

Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. MIT Press. 2007

The fact that the conscious subject is subjected to the unconscious can initially be explained by answering the following naïve question: why does psychoanalysis take the trouble to think about the unconscious in the first place?

The answer is to say that an unconscious topos separated from consciousness must exist because something which is not conscious tangibly manifests itself within consciousness.

What is more, these manifestations, the so-called “formations of the unconscious,” are far from “irrational”: they can be seen to follow certain regular patterns, which Freud had already considered to be fundamentally linguistic. 35

The key reference for Lacan here is Hegel’s dialectics as mediated by Kojève. On the other hand, a few years later, in his article “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious” (1957) — as well as in Seminars IV and V — Lacan appears to assume that alienation in language cannot be overcome. In other words, the subject’s individual speech is irremediably subjected to the universal field of language, and to its laws. Lacan’s key reference for this second phase … is Saussure’s structural linguistics, largely in the form of Jakobson’s reelaboration. 37

As we have already noted, Lacan believes that the subject is necessarily alienated in language insofar as language already exists before his birth and insofar as his relations with other human beings are necessarily mediated by language. But how is the fact that language precedes the subject — and, above all, imposes itself as an irreducible mediator of the subject’s relation with other subjects — automatically linked to the fact that he is alienated in language? 37

(1) Lacan begins from a very clear-cut empirical observation. First of all, the subject is alienated in language because he never manages to say exactly what he really wants to say. His interlocutor is unable to grasp fully what the subject actually means to tell him: words do not suffice to convey the subject’s desire appropriately, and consequently fully to satisfy it. At the same time, the subject’s individual speech — his perpetually addressing a counterpart in discourse — also always says more than the subject wants to say. The counterpart can read in the subject’s words something that he did not intend to tell him. (Furthermore, the counterpart is usually unaware of his interpreting beyond the subject’s conscious intention.)

Lacan believes it is precisely the thematization of such a surplus of speech with respect to conscious intention that led Freud to discover the efficaciousness of the “talking cure,” psychoanalytic treatment. Before Freud, Lacan argues, “intention was confused with the dimension of consciousness, since it seemed that consciousness was inherent to what the subject had to say qua signification [signification].” In simple terms: before Freud, it was assumed that the subject could consciously say what he wanted to say.

The mistaken equation between intentionality and consciousness (the fact that the unconscious was overlooked) relied precisely on the unquestioned equation between consciousness and signification. 38

(2) From the same empirical recognition of the misunderstandings caused by language in speech, Lacan comes to the conclusion that linguistics is correct in distinguishing a subject of the statement (roughly attributable to language) from a subject of the enunciation (roughly attributable to full speech). To put it bluntly, the “I” which functions as the grammatical subject of a given statement may not be identified with the “I” which carries out this act of speech. The former is nothing but the linguistic correspondent of the ego. … “the personal pronoun ‘I’ designates the person who identifies his or herself with a specific ideal image. Thus the ego is what is represented by the subject of the statement.”Lacan defines the speech of such an I as empty speech: consequently, empty speech is nothing but speech alienated in language, subjugated to its imaginary deformation. In everyday life, human beings communicate through empty speech.

(3) Lacan extends to every subject the Freudian concept of the Ich-Spaltung (confined by Freud to the pathological sphere of fetishism and the psychoses) precisely by referring to the linguistic distinction between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation. The subject undergoes a split (Spaltung) “by virtue of being a subject only insofar as he speaks.”

In speech and because of speech, the subject is never fully present to himself.

That which is not present in the statement but is presupposed and evoked by it (the enunciation) indicates the locus of “another scene” in the subject: the subject of the unconscious which, as I have already indicated, depends on specific linguistic laws, and sustains a particular “thought.”

(4) The discovery of a structural split in/of the subject subverts the Cartesian cogito while, at the same time, revealing its intimate relation to psychoanalysis. As Lacan repeatedly states, “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.”

This is to say that the unconscious I, the subject of the enunciation, really thinks at the unconscious level: it (ça) thinks where the I qua ego and qua subject of the statement is not (conscious).

Conversely, the I qua linguistic ego is (conscious) where it,the unconscious subject, does not think.

Most importantly, the subversion of the Cartesian ego shows that its illusion of unity is possible only because of its strict interdependence with the Spaltung. There is no self-consciousness without the unconscious, and vice versa.

Descartes’s formulation of a fundamental principle of self-consciousness could be said contemporaneously to decree, at the level of the history of thought, the formal birth of the unconscious (although this birth will remain implicit until Freud).

Consequently, it is strictly speaking senseless to speak of a pre-Cartesian notion of the unconscious.

(5) The strong interdependence between the Cartesian ego and the Freudian unconscious indicates, for Lacan, that the subject of the unconscious is not simply an alternative ego, concealed by repression. Neither does the subject of the unconscious correspond to any sort of “unknowable substance” that would represent the buried core of one’s repressed desires, and would simply be awaiting liberation from the constraints of Cartesian self-consciousness.

In “Function and Field,” Lacan affirms that the subject’s alienation in language — empty speech as delineated above — can be superseded by full speech. The latter’s emergence coincides with the subject’s assumption of his unconscious desire. It is also clear that, in this article, Lacan superimposes truth upon unconscious desire.

How can this realization of the unconscious be achieved? Lacan opposes the specular dialectic of a desire based on the ego’s imaginary alienation to the symbolic dialectic of a desire conveyed by the function of full speech. 39-40

To cut a long story short, full speech is able to offer the subject a different, non-narcissistic satisfaction of his desire. Beyond the emptiness of speech that accompanies ego-logical imaginary objectifications, the subject is constantly speaking with his unconscious, even if he is unaware of it.

One should then ask the following naïve question: what does the unconscious subject say, and what does he want? He (unconsciously) addresses the Other (subject) so that the truth about his speech — the specificity of his unconscious, repressed desire—may be recognized by the Other.

This is what full speech fundamentally is: more precisely, it corresponds to the subject’s full assumption of a speech which he normally utters without being aware of it. Consequently, full speech is inextricable from symbolic intersubjectivity, which is indeed in turn—as I have already outlined in Chapter 1—inseparable from mutual recognition of one’s desire and the related dimension of pact as the instauration of the Law.

To quote Lacan: (a) “[Full] speech is the founding medium of the inter-subjective relation”; (b) “We must start off with a radical intersubjectivity, with the subject’s total acceptance by the other subject”; (c) there exists a common “function of recognition, of pact, of interhuman symbol.”

It is therefore clear that, in the early 1950s, Lacan’s notion of the Symbolic is profoundly indebted to the Hegelian-Kojèvian principle for which human desire corresponds to the desire to be recognized by the Other. It should equally be clear by now why, according to Lacan, an actual return to Freud’s original discoveries entails a resumption of the often underestimated practical importance of speech in psychoanalytic treatment, in contrast to the importance bestowed on the subject’s physical reactions during the course of treatment by many psychoanalytic schools. Psychoanalysis aims to symbolize through full speech the imaginary identifications that objectify the subject in his ego.

More precisely, in the specificity of the analytic setting, the general, apparently unspecified symbolic desire for recognition — which implicitly underlies all everyday intersubjective interactions insofar as they presuppose the symbolic dimension — is transformed by the analyst into a recognition of the analysand’s particular imaginary alienating identifications that ensnare his individual unconscious desire. Psychoanalysis should therefore dis-identify the subject from his imaginary identifications.

Dis-alienation can be attained only through dis-identification. Dis-alienation — from imaginary identifications and, therefore, also from the imaginary “wall of language”— will ultimately coincide with an integration of the individual’s desire (for symbolic recognition of his unconscious desire) into the universal Symbolic.

At this stage, Lacan appears to believe that unconscious desire can be fully realized: it is enough for it to be recognized by the Other (subject). 40

A calibrated orthopedics of (mutual) recognition is thought to suffice to dis-alienate desire. As I shall soon attempt to show, such an optimistic solution seems, at least partially, to contradict Lacan’s continual warnings against ingenuously conceiving of the unconscious as a “true” substance which should be substituted for the ego. 41