Lacan vs or not Hegel - Self

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From a Lacanian group - for those interested in the discourse

 

cordially,

KA

 

 

I very much like what you have to say here regarding

force and understanding in Hegel in the context of

semblance and truth for Lacan. For Hegel, the project

is to uncover the identity of substance and subject;

which is much like what takes place in the course of

analysis. Further, from a psychoanalytic perspective,

there is much to be commended in Hegel's dialectical

logic, as it presents a way of philosophically

accomodating the psychoanalytic conception of the

subject and the unconscious, while sidestepping the

primacy of philosophies of consciousness as understood

by Descartes and the phenomenologists. Here I think

Heidegger is dead wrong in assimilating the Hegelian

and Kantian subject to the Cartesian tradition, as the

Subject here is not a power of immediacy or

transparency as it is for Descartes or Husserl.

Rather, as Hegel explicitly says, the subject is a

void or emptiness, a negativity (Phenomenology,

paragraph 145, pgs. 87-88). For Hegel, of course,

appearance and essence are not to be opposed, but are

always related to one another (cf. Science of Logic,

pgs. 394-480), just as the symptom is not a

non-knowledge but a manifestation of the subjects

knowledge in externality. Perhaps it would not be too

much of a leap to think the unconscious under Hegel's

model of force and the symptom as appearance governed

by this force.

 

Late in the Phenomenology Hegel writes, " ...Spirit is

the knowledge of oneself in the externalization of

oneself; the being that is the movement of retaining

its self-identity in its otherness. This, however, is

Substance, in so far as Substance is, in its

accidents, at the same time reflected into itself, not

indifferent to them as to something unessential or

present in them as an alien elmenet, but in them it is

within itself, i.e. in so far as it is Subject or

Self " (paragraph 759, pg. 459). There is much that

is of interest from the psychoanalytic viewpoint in

this passage. The analysand comes to apprehend

himself in externality over the course of analysis in

much the same way that a Moebius Strip only has one

side while appearing to have two. This externality

isn't only the externality of one's desire as embodied

in symptoms like the slip of the tongue, the symptom,

or the dream where an alien or ex-centric

intentionality is discovered, but also in his

relations to others and his perceptions of the world.

For instance, a man might come to be obsessed with the

idea that he might have contracted a sexually

transmitted disease from his lover, despite the fact

that he possesses no evidence to support this thought.

Another person might be convinced that his

co-workers are plotting against him, despite the fact

that there is nothing to indicates that this is so.

Desire here speaks in this obsession, though in a way

that the subject refuses to hear. These are

appearances, but they is truth in these appearances.

As Hegel remarks, " Whatever it is that the individual

does, and whatever happens to him, that he has done

himself and he *is* that himself. He can have only

the consciousness of the simple transference *of

himself* from the night of possibility into the

daylight of the present, from the *abstract in-itself*

into the significance of *actual* being, and can have

only the certain that what happens to him in the

latter is nothing else but what lay dormant in the

former " (paragraph 404, pg. 242). Over the course of

analysis the subject comes to recognize his own desire

in these appearances, thus, in Hegelian terms, moving

from encountering these appearances " in themselves " to

encountering them " for themselves " .

 

It is thus not difficult to discern much that is true

of psychoanalysis in Hegel's remark that, " Spirit has

in it the two sides which are presented above as two

converse propositions: one is this, that substance

alienates itself from itself and becomes

self-consciousness; the other is the converse, that

self-consciousness alienates itself from itself and

gives itself the nature of a Thing, or make itself a

universal Self... The externalization [or kenosis] of

substance, its growth into self-consciousness,

expresses the transition into the opposite, the

unconscious transition of *necessity*; in other words,

that substance is *in itself* self-consciousness.

Conversely, the externalization of self-consciousness

expresses this, that it is *in itself* the universal

essence, or-- since the Self is pure being-for-self

which in its opposite communes with itself --that it

is just because substance is self-consciousness *for

the Self*, that it is Spirit " (paragraph 755, pg.

457). It would seem that analysis is an eminently

dialectical experience and that what Hegel explores in

his logic of the negative is a particular type of

topology. However, it is also clear that for Lacan

there is no final reconciliation or Absolute as there

is for Hegel. Where Hegel seems to hold that it is

possible to say the whole truth without falling into

the sorts of problems described by Goedel, Lacan

adheres to the position that the truth can only ever

be half-said and that there is no truth about truth to

be told. Lacan's anti-Hegelianism would be summed up

in the claim that the Other does not exist or that it

is impossible to formulate being in a complete and

consistent set. Zizek, I know, has tried to argue his

way around this by claiming that Hegel's absolute

knowledge is just the knowledge that there's nothing

else to know or that the Other is constitutively

incomplete, though I'm not sure how successful his

arguments are.

 

It appears that there are two central challenges

facing a Hegelian reading of psychoanalysis. First,

it is clear that psychoanalysis cannot advocate the

sort of teleology Hegel seems to endorse in the unrest

of reason striving after unity with its Notion. This

problem, perhaps, can be sidestepped by understanding

dialectics in terms of the logic of nachtraglichkeit.

Second, there is the issue of totalization or

completeness, rejected by psychoanalysis as is evident

in the case of the primal father in Totem and Taboo

(said father being the ex-ceptional, as elaborated in

Lacan's masculine graph of sexuation) and as is

evident in the case of the Sinthome marking the limit

of interpretation or the transition from the

unconscious as signifying desire to the unconscious as

a process. It would be interesting to discuss these

issues in more detail.