{"id":12401,"date":"2013-12-16T20:50:13","date_gmt":"2013-12-17T01:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=12401"},"modified":"2015-09-07T14:59:59","modified_gmt":"2015-09-07T18:59:59","slug":"chiesa-chapter-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2013\/12\/16\/chiesa-chapter-2\/","title":{"rendered":"chiesa chapter 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan<\/em>. MIT Press. 2007<\/p>\n

Lacan relates the notions of full and empty speech to his well-known dictum according to which \u201cThe sender receives his own message back from the receiver in an inverted form<\/span><\/strong>.”<\/p>\n

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<\/span><\/strong> revolving around the notion of speech to a transindividual<\/span> one revolving around the notion of language<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

It would, however, be wrong to equate Lacan\u2019s transindividual unconscious with any sort of quasi-Jungian archetypal unconscious\u2014\u201ccollective\u201d 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.<\/strong> Jungian psychoanalysis reverses this Freudian principle: it is the unconscious as primordial signification that produces the linguistic structure.<\/p>\n

In the final part of this section, I intend to argue that the emergence of the notion of a transindividual unconscious<\/span><\/strong>\u2014as universal structure of language \u2014 renders explicit the covert paradox on which Lacan\u2019s conception of the aim of analysis as the individual subject\u2019s realization of his own true, unconscious desire through full speech was implicitly based.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong><\/em> realization of the subject\u2019s substanceless unconscious<\/strong> would inevitably correspond to its utter desubjectivization<\/strong> <\/span>into a substantial structure.<\/p>\n

Adopting Lacan\u2019s own contemporaneous definition of psychosis<\/span><\/strong>, we could argue that this would inevitably correspond to a \u201cbeing passively spoken by language,\u201d language to be understood as the transindividual locus of the unconscious.<\/p>\n

In other words, Lacan\u2019s 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\u2019s individual<\/strong> speech is symbolized, the more it is integrated into the transindividual<\/strong> symbolic dimension of language.<\/p>\n

Language is never imaginary per se: the wall is erected solely by the individual subject\u2019s own imaginary identifications. Once these are fully revoked, the subject is absorbed by language, the transindividual unconscious.<\/p>\n

I do not believe it is possible to reconcile this dis-identifying de-subjectivization<\/strong><\/span> with the optimism evoked by the pseudo-Hegelian \u201chumanist\u201d leitmotiv of dis-alienation as presented by Lacan in \u201cFunction and Field.\u201d 44<\/p>\n

The second part of Seminar III\u2014and, above all, the article \u201cThe Agency of the Letter\u201d\u2014suggests that by 1956 Lacan\u2019s 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.<\/strong> As Lacan states: \u201cFirstly 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.\u201d 46-47<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cThe 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, … Continue reading “chiesa chapter 2”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lacan","category-subjectivity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12401"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13338,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12401\/revisions\/13338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}