Abstract
This paper offers an intellectual portrait of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, by considering his incorporation of perspectives associated with “modernism,” the artistic and intellectual avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century. These perspectives are largely absent in other alternatives in psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. Emphasis is placed on Lacan’s affinities with phenomenology, a tradition he criticized and to which he is often seen as opposed. Two general issues are discussed. The first is Lacan’s unparalleled appreciation of the paradoxical nature of human experience, together with his treatment of paradox as (paradoxically enough) almost a criterion of truth. These points are illustrated by considering Lacan’s conceptions of the self and of erotic desire. The second issue is Lacan’s focus on the “ontological dimension,” on overall styles or modalities of what might be termed “transcendental subjectivity”: namely, what he calls the registers of the “Imaginary,” the “Symbolic,” and the “Real.” By emphasizing the incommensurable yet (paradoxically) interdependent nature of these modalities, Lacan offers a synthesis of dynamic/conflictual and formal/ontological dimensions of the human condition. This paper offers an encompassing portrait of Lacan’s major ideas that is at odds with the widespread assumption that Lacan is somehow a deeply anti-humanist thinker who derides the subjective dimension. Lacan’s most distinctive contributions are fundamentally concerned with the nature of human experience. They show strong affinities with (and the influence of) hermeneutic forms of phenomenology inspired by Heidegger, a philosopher who focused on ontological modes of Being and considered paradox as a mark of truth.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Eysteinsson (1990). “Modernism” is used in other senses as well, including in reference to the scientific revolution and its aftermath; in the latter sense, Freud’s aspirations were certainly modernist.
Husserl (1977 sec. 10, p. 24).
In his influential essay, “Modernist Painting,” Greenberg (1973, orig 1966) presents modernism as an essentially post-Kantian enterprise in which the very structure of reality (forms and categories of space, time, etc.) come increasingly to be explicit concerns. Also see the final chapters of Foucault’s The Order of Things (1994), discussed in Sass (1992, 2009).
See Sass (2001).
Rieff (1979) describes Freud as offering “…a science that is at the same time a casuistry of the intimate and everyday life.” He goes so far as to say that Freud “cannot conceive of an excess of consciousness” (pp. 300, 321).
Rieff (1979, pp. 93, 41, 306, 316).
Freud in Rieff (1979, p. 317).
Lacan: “Je dirais même que c’est sur la base d’un certain refus de compréhension que nous poussons la porte de la compréhension analytique” (1975, p. 1290: 22 fevrier, 1954).
Lacan (1977a, p. 171).
In Gutting’s French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (2001), e.g., “Part II: The Reign of Existential Phenomenology (1940–1960) is followed by “Part III: Structuralism and Beyond (1960–1990).”
Macey (1988, p. 6).
Heidegger (1996, p. 454) views Dasein as “fundamentally incomprehensible in terms of the traditional ontological categories.” Not surprisingly, he is sympathetic to Count Yorck’s view (which he quotes in Being and Time) that paradoxicality may be “a mark of truth,” in contrast with common opinion, which is characterized as “an elemental precipitate of a halfway understanding that makes generalizations” (1996, p. 403). It is true that Husserl, in his final, unfinished work, (the Crisis, 1970, pp. 170, 177), also mentions the paradoxical and enigmatic nature of human subjectivity, even quoting Heraclitus on the unknowability of the soul. But it seems obvious that Husserl’s general attitude to paradox, at least in his earlier work, is far less accepting than that of Heidegger.
“I am not a little proud of this power of unreadability that I have been able to maintain unspoilt in my texts,” wrote Lacan (2010, p. 113).
Bloom (1973).
Jameson (1984).
The definition of “paradox” in the online Oxford dictionary of American English includes: “A seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true.” “A situation, person, or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities.” (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/paradox).
Dyson (2012, pp. 9, 23).
Macey (1988, p. 151). According to Hunter (2006, p. 85), Husserl’s epoché or transcendental reduction—with its withdrawal from natural human commitment and transformation of the “pregiven world” into a “phenomenon”—can be seen as the key intellectual move for all twentieth century “theory,” whether humanist, anti-humanist, or postmodern.
It would be absurd to downplay the stylistic differences between such nineteenth century authors as Dickens, Thackeray, Zola, and Stendhal. Yet there is something different about the differences that distinguish, say, Faulkner, Woolf, Hemingway, Proust, and Kafka from one another. It is not that content ceases to matter in modernist works but that the way things are depicted takes on a certain priority: formal/ontological qualities emerge in a far more explicit and self-conscious fashion. These latter differences seem to reflect the (rather delayed) impact of the Kantian turn.
See earlier note with definitions of “paradox.”
Roustang (1986) and Slavoj Žižek (e.g., 1992a) offer antithetical assessments of Lacan’s predilection for contradictory or paradoxical statement, the first viewing it as a form of irresponsibility and intellectual terrorism (p. 12), the second viewing it as necessary and even admirable. I side with Žižek on this issue.
Lacan (2006a, pp. 76, 78).
Rimbaud (1972, pp. 248–249).
Kojève (1980, pp. 201, 200).
Lacan (1977b, p. 235).
Lacan: “Le caractère transgressif du désir est la permanence transcendantale du désir” (Cléro 2008, p. 231). Also: “…nous arrivons à la formule qu'une transgression est nécessaire pour accéder à cette jouissance, et que (…) c'est très précisément à cela que sert la loi “(Lacan 1986, p. 208). The Law is in the service of jouissance; transgression affirms the Law.
Lacan quoted in Cléro (2008, p. 86).
This is in accord with Spinoza’s notion that desire is striving combined with consciousness of striving, and that all striving is, at bottom, a striving to persevere in one’s being (LeBuffe 2010).
Freud (1957, pp. 188–189).
Freud (1964, p. 73).
Roustang (1986, p. 117): “Constituer ces impasses comme fondatrices, c’est vouer le champ tout entier à la stérilité; et le clore, s’il acceptait des limites, dans une sorte de triomphalisme de l’échec.”
Lacan (1992, p. 12).
Lacan (1991, p. 126).
E.g., Merquior (1985, p. 152).
Macey (1988, p. 5).
Marini (1992, p. 50).
Lévi-Strauss (1983, p. 12).
Examples of the ontological might include the vastly different manner in which physical reality was conceived in the Renaissance as opposed to after the Newtonian scientific revolution, or the distinct ways in which time, space, and materiality may be experienced in waking life versus in a dream, or in schizophrenic delusion versus the workaday world. Heidegger’s notion of the “ontological” emphasizes formal qualities of the world (overall structures or ways of being). These qualities are not merely formal, however (nor merely aesthetic), for they involve implications about the nature of reality, of what exists and how it manifests itself, and the general relationship between an experiential subject and his or her world.
Heidegger believed, in fact, that any use of the terms “subject” or “subjectivity” was likely to imply or encourage such a forgetting.
Quoted in Rieff (1979, p. 21).
Freud (2001, p. 46).
Lacan (1977a, p 67).
Lacan (2006a, p. 80).
Lacan (2006a, pp. 75–76).
Nietzsche (1956, orig. 1872).
Kojève (1980, p. 201).
Heidegger (1996, p. 35).
Gadamer (1984).
Merleau-Ponty (2012 p. xiii).
For discussion of a phenomenological approach to experiences that are not “self-given in evidence correlative to an intending act,” and therefore “on the edge of accessibility to a phenomenological approach to experience” (“limit-phenomena”), see Steinbock’s (2003, pp. 289, 290) discussion of Husserl’s “generative phenomenology,” which developed under the probable influence of Heidegger. This could also be conceived as “constructive phenomenology,” which Husserl’s disciple, Eugen Fink (who also attended Heidegger’s lectures), defined as “problems that go beyond the reductive givenness of transcendental life” (Fink 1995/1985, p. 59).
Obviously, more needs to be said concerning validation; this, however, is not the place for extended discussion.
Lacan (1977b, p. 203).
Quoted in Eribon (1991, p. 161).
Lévi-Strauss (1966, pp. 250, 256, 249).
Nietzsche (1979).
Lacan: The “object in desire … takes the place of what by its very nature remains concealed from the subject: that self-sacrifice, that pound of flesh which is mortgaged [engagé] in his relationship to the signifier” (1977c, p. 28).
Lacan (1988, pp. 223–224).
Lacan (1978, p. 262).
Kant quoted in Smith (1918, pp. 411, 409, 208 emphasis added).
This might place Lacan in the company of other thinkers who interpret the thing-in-itself as being somehow accessible to experience, a view found among certain German Romantics and idealists and clearest in Schopenhauer. (Thanks to Jeffery Geller for this point.)
Žižek (1992b, p. 265).
Neruda (1969, pp. 9, 23).
In this way it describes a “veritable irreducible” (in Sartre’s phrase): “an irreducible of which irreducibility would be self-evident” to us (1981, p. 27). This means grasping “the totality of [the person’s] impulse toward being, his original relation to himself, to the world, and to the Other” (2003, p. 584).
E.g., Gurewich, in Dor (1998, p. 24n).
In The Order of Things, Foucault (1994) rejects developmental or diachronic questions in favor of analyzing synchronic formations.
Macey (1988, p. 46).
Žižek (1992a).
Heidegger (1977).
Levi-Strauss (1966, pp. 250, 256).
Lacan (1977a, p. 264).
Heidegger (2008, pp. 217, 221, 225–226).
Lacan (1977a, p. 264).
Rieff (Rieff 1979, p. ix).
Lacan quoted in Cléro (2008, p. 84).
Lacan (1992, p. 311).
References
Abrams, Meyer Howard. 1973. Natural supernaturalism: Tradition and revolution in romantic literature. New York: Norton.
Allouch, Jean. 1993. Freud, et puis Lacan. Paris: E.P.E.L.
Beebe, Maurice. 1974. What modernism was. Journal of Modern Literature 3: 1065–1084.
Bloom, Harold. 1973. The anxiety of influence. New York: Oxford University Press.
Braunstein, Nestor. 2003. Goce, 5th ed. Mexico, DF: Siglo Veintiuno Editores.
Brockelman, Tom. 1996. Lacan and modernism: Representation and its vicissitudes. In Disseminating Lacan, ed. David Pettigrew, and Francois Raffoul, 207–237. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Casey, Edward, and J. Melvin Woody. 1983. Lacan: The dialectic of desire. In Interpreting Lacan, ed. Joseph H. Smith, and Walter Kerrigan, 75–112. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Cléro, Jean-Pierre. 2008. Dictionnaire Lacan. Paris: Ellipses.
Crowell, Steven. 2001. Husserl, Heidegger, and the space of meaning. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Delacampagne, Christian. 1995. Histoire de la philosophie au XXe siècle. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
De Man, Paul. 1983. The rhetoric of temporality. In Blindness and insight, 2nd edition, revised, ed. Paul De Man, 187–228. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Descombes, Vincent. 1980. Modern French philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Di Ambra, Raffaella. 2011. Réel, symbolique, imaginaire: Une lecture de la triade lacanienne. Paris: Arts Editions.
Dor, Joël. 1998. The clinical Lacan. New York: Other Press.
Duportail, Guy-Félix. 2013. L’origine de la psychanalyse: Introduction à une phénoménologie de l’inconscient. Paris: Mimesis.
Dyson, George. 2012. ‘An artificially created universe’: The electronic computer project at IAS. The Institute Letter Spring 2012(1): 8–9.
Eribon, Didier. 1991. Michel Foucault (trans: Wing, Betsy). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Eysteinsson, Astradur. 1990. The concept of modernism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Fink, Bruce. 1995. The Lacanian subject: Between language and jouissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Fink, Eugen. 1995/1985 (orig 1985 in German). Sixth Cartesian meditation: The idea of a transcendental theory of method (trans: Bruzina, Ronald). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1994. The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Random House.
Freud, Sigmund. 1957. On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (trans: Strachey, James, Vol. 11). London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Freud, Sigmund. 1964. New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (trans: Strachey, James, Vol. 22). London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Freud, Sigmund. 2001. The ego and the id and other works. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (trans: Strachey, James, Vol. 19). New York: Vintage.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1984. Truth and method. New York: Crossroad.
Greenberg, Clement. 1973. Modernist painting. In The new art: A critical anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, revised edition. New York: Dutton.
Gutting, Gary. 2001. French philosophy in the 20th century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hays, K.Michael. 1992. Modernism and the posthumanist subject. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and time (trans: Stambaugh, Joan). Albany: State University of New York Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 2008. Letter on humanism. In Basic writings, revised and expanded, 213–266. London: Harper.
Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The age of technology and other essays (trans: Lovitt, William). New York: Garland Publishing.
Hunter, Ian. 2006. The history of theory. Critical Inquiry 33: 78–112.
Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology (trans: Carr, David). Chicago: Northwestern University Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 1977. Cartesian meditations (trans: Cairns, Dorian). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Jameson, Fredric. 1984. Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. New Left Review 146: 53–92.
Kant, Immanuel. 1965. Critique of pure reason (trans: Smith, Norman Kemp (1st ed. 1781, 2nd ed. 1987)). New York: St Martin’s Press.
Kojève, Alexandre. 1980. Introduction to the reading of Hegel, ed. Philip Queneau (trans: Nichols, James H. Jr.). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Lacan, Jacques. 1956. Actes du congrès de Rome. La Psychanalyse I.
Lacan, J. 1966/1967. Le séminaire XIV: La logique du fantasme, 1966–1967. http://www.ecole-lacanienne.net.
Lacan, Jacques. 1970. Radiophonie. Scilicet 2(3): 55–99.
Lacan, Jacques. 1973–1974. Le séminaire XXI: Les non-dupes errent. http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/S21_NON-DUPES—.pdf.
Lacan, Jacques. 1975. Le séminaire I: Les écrits techniques de Freud, 1953–54, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, Jacques. 1977a. Écrits: selection (trans: Sheridan, Alan). New York: Norton.
Lacan, Jacques. 1977b. Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, 1964, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (trans: Sheridan, Alan). New York: Norton.
Lacan, Jacques. 1977c. Desire and the interpretation of desire in Hamlet (trans: Hulbert, James). Yale French Studies 55/56: 11–52.
Lacan, Jacques. 1978. Le séminaire II: Le moi dans la theorie de Freud, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, Jacques. 1986. Le séminaire VII: L’éthique de la psychanalyse, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, Jacques. 1988. Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book II: The ego in Freud’s theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (trans: Tomaselli, Sylvana). New York: Norton.
Lacan, Jacques. 1991. Le seminaire XVII, L’Envers de la psychanalyse, 1969–1970, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, Jacques. 1992. Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book VII: The ethics of psychoanalysis, 1959–60, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (trans: Porter, Dennis). New York: Norton.
Lacan, Jacques. 1998. Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book XX: On feminine sexuality, the limits of love, and knowledge, 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (trans: Fink, Bruce). New York: Norton.
Lacan, Jacques. 2006a. The mirror stage as formative of the I-function. In Écrits: complete edition (trans: Fink, Bruce). 75–81. New York: Norton.
Lacan, Jacques. 2006b. The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis. In Écrits: complete edition (trans: Fink, Bruce). 197–268. New York: Norton.
Lacan, Jacques. 2006c. The subversion of the subject and dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious. In Écrits: complete edition (trans: Fink, Bruce). 671–702. New York: Norton.
Lacan, Jacques. 2010 (orig: 1967/1968). Overview of the psychoanalytic act (trans: C. Gallagher). (Lacan’s summary of Seminar XV, 1967–68: L’acte, for yearbook of École Pratique des Hautes Études.). http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Spring_2000-OVERVIEW-OF-THE-PSYCHOANALYTIC-ACT-Translated-by-Cormac-Gallagher.pdf.
Lacan, Jacques. 2013. Le séminaire VI: Le désir et son interprétation, 1958–1959, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil.
LeBuffe, Michael. 2010. Spinoza’s psychological theory. Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2010 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, Stanford: The Metaphysics Research Lab.
Leguil, Clotilde. 2012. Sartre avec Lacan. Paris: Navarin/Le Champ Freudien.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The savage mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1983. The raw and the cooked, mythologiques, vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Macey, David. 1988. Lacan in contexts. London: Verso.
Marini, Marcelle. 1992. Jacques Lacan: The French context (trans: Tomiche, Anne). New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. The phenomenology of perception (trans: Landes, Donald A.). London: Routledge.
Merquior, José Guilherme. 1985. Foucault. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Michelman, Stephen. 1996. Sociology before linguistics: Lacan’s debt to Durkheim. In Disseminating Lacan, ed. David Pettigrew, and François Raffoul, 123–150. Albany: State University New York Press.
Miller, Jacques-Alain. 1996. An introduction to seminars I and II: (1), (2), (3). In Reading seminars I and II: Lacan’s return to Freud, ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus, 3–35. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Neruda, Pablo. 1969. Twenty love poems and a song of despair (bilingual edition). London: Jonathan Cape.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1956. The birth of tragedy (and the genealogy of morals) (trans: Golffing, Francis). New York: Doubleday.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1979. On truth and lies in a nonmoral sense. In Philosophy and truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s notebooks of the early 1870s (trans: Brazeale, Daniel). 79–97. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Phillips, James. 1996. Lacan and Merleau-Ponty: The confrontation of psychoanalysis and phenomenology. In Disseminating Lacan, ed. David Pettigrew, and François Raffoul, 69–107. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Pluth, Ed. (ed.). 2007. Signifiers and acts: Freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Rajchman, John. 1986. Lacan and the ethics of modernity. Representations 15: 42–56.
Rieff, Philip. 1979. Freud: The mind of the moralist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rimbaud, Arthur. 1972. Letter to Georges Izambard; Charleville, 13 May 1871. In Oeuvres completes, édition établie, presentée et annotée par Antoine Adam, Collection Pléiade, ed. Antoine Adam. Paris: Gallimard.
Roustang, François. 1986. Lacan de l’équivoque a l’impasse. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1981. Existential psychoanalysis. Washington, DC: Regnery.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2003. Being and nothingness (trans: Barnes, Hazel). London: Routledge.
Sass, Louis. 1988. The self and its vicissitudes: An “archaeological” study of the psychoanalytic avant–garde. Social Research 55: 551–608.
Sass, Louis. 1992. Madness and modernism: Insanity in the light of modern art, literature, and thought. New York: Basic Books.
Sass, Louis. 2001. The magnificent harlequin (book essay on Jacques Lacan). International Journal of Psychoanalysis 82: 997–1018.
Sass, Louis. 2009. Foucault et l’auto-refléxion moderne (Foucault and modern self-reflection). Les Temps Modernes 656: 99–143.
Sass, Louis. 2014. Lacan, Foucault, and the “crisis of the subject: Revisionist reflections on phenomenology and post-structuralism.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 21: 325–342.
Schechter, Madeleine. 2001. Theorizing modernism in art: Puzzles of formalist aesthetics and the heritage of romanticism. Assaph: Studies in Art History 6: 261–283.
Smith, Norman Kemp. 1918. A commentary to Kant’s critique of pure reason. London: Macmillan.
Sontag, Susan. ed. 1969. The esthetics of silence. In Styles of Radical Will, 3–34. New York: Dell.
Steinbock, Anthony. 2003. Generativity and the scope of generative phenomenology. In The new Husserl, ed. Donn Welton, 289–325. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Steiner, George. ed. 1980. On difficulty. In On difficulty and other essays, 18–48. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1975. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wicks, Robert. 2003. Modern French philosophy: From existentialism to postmodernism. Oxford: Oneworld.
Worms, Frédéric. 2009. La philosophie en France au XXe siècle, moments. Paris: Gallimard.
Žižek, Slavoj. 1992a. Looking awry: An introduction to Jacques Lacan through popular culture. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Žižek, Slavoj. 1992b. Everything you always wanted to know about Lacan (but were afraid to ask Hitchcock). London: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2012. Less than nothing: Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism. London: Verso.
Acknowledgments
For helpful suggestions on this manuscript, I wish to thank Jeffery Geller, Angela Woods, Greg Byrom, Michael Westerman, Max Malitzsky, and Shira Nayman.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Sass, L.A. Lacan: the mind of the modernist. Cont Philos Rev 48, 409–443 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-015-9348-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-015-9348-y