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Lacan: the mind of the modernist

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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.

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Notes

  1. E.g., Rajchman (1986), Macey (1988) and Brockelman (1996).

  2. 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.

  3. Lacan described his own work as an attempt to interpret even the implicit in Freud. He wanted to take into account that which determines Freud, that which, in a Hegelian sense, “fait ou non sa verité” (Cléro 2008, p. 80). Also Lacan (1978) and elsewhere.

  4. Husserl (1977 sec. 10, p. 24).

  5. 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).

  6. See Sass (2001).

  7. 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).

  8. Rieff (1979, pp. 93, 41, 306, 316).

  9. See Rieff (1979 p. 321), Taylor (1975 pp. 3–126), Sass (1988).

  10. Freud in Rieff (1979, p. 317).

  11. Lacan (2006c, 2013).

  12. 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).

  13. Lacan (2006c, p. 688, 1977a, p. 311). Macey (1988, p. 81).

  14. Lacan (1977a, p. 171).

  15. E.g., Merquior (1985), Hays (1992, p. 280).

  16. Lacan quoted in Pluth (2007, pp. 4–5). Lacan (2006a, pp. 99–100). For further discussion of this vision of French intellectual history, see Sass (2014).

  17. 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).”

  18. Leguil (2012). Duportail (2013). Sass (2014).

  19. Macey (1988, pp. 83, 103–107). Miller (1996). Phillips (1996). Leguil (2012).

  20. Macey (1988, p. 6).

  21. 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.

  22. Macey (1988, pp. 13, 102). Fink (1995, p 148).

  23. “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).

  24. Bloom (1973).

  25. Jameson (1984).

  26. 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).

  27. The classic discussion of the Romantic aspiration to synthesis is Abrams (1973). For a contrasting view, stressing self-alienation and irony as unrelieved vertigo (emphasizing Friedrich Schlegel), see de Man (1983).

  28. Dyson (2012, pp. 9, 23).

  29. See www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paradox.

  30. Kojève (1980, pp. 199, 196, 200). See also Žižek on Hegel (2012).

  31. Kant (1965). Kant: “I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori” (in Crowell 2001, p. 195).

  32. 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.

  33. 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.

  34. Beebe (1974). Schechter (2001).

  35. Discussed in Sass (1992, 2009).

  36. Lacan (1998, 1973/1974).

  37. See earlier note with definitions of “paradox.”

  38. 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.

  39. Lacan (2006a, pp. 76, 78).

  40. Rimbaud (1972, pp. 248–249).

  41. Kojève (1980, pp. 201, 200).

  42. See, e.g., Lacan (2006c); also Casey and Woody (1983), Braunstein (2003).

  43. Lacan (1977b, p. 235).

  44. 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.

  45. Lacan quoted in Cléro (2008, p. 86).

  46. 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).

  47. Lacan (1998). Žižek (1992a).

  48. Freud (1957, pp. 188–189).

  49. Lacan (1998, 1966/1967). See Cléro (2008, p. 229).

  50. Freud (1964, p. 73).

  51. 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.”

  52. E.g., Lacan (1977b: 6 May 1964). See Cléro (2008, p. 136) for other references.

  53. Lacan (1970, p. 93). Also, e.g., Lacan (1966/1967: 16 November 1966).

  54. Lacan (1992, p. 12).

  55. Lacan (1998, p. 118) and elsewhere: see Cléro (2008, pp. 174, 208); also Macey (1988, p. 81), Fink (1995, p. 129),

  56. Lacan (1991, p. 126).

  57. E.g., Merquior (1985, p. 152).

  58. Macey (1988, p. 5).

  59. Macey (1988, p. 157ff). Michelman (1996).

  60. Marini (1992, p. 50).

  61. Phillips (1996). Leguil (2012).

  62. Lévi-Strauss (1983, p. 12).

  63. 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.

  64. Heidegger believed, in fact, that any use of the terms “subject” or “subjectivity” was likely to imply or encourage such a forgetting.

  65. Quoted in Rieff (1979, p. 21).

  66. Freud (2001, p. 46).

  67. Lacan (1977a, p 67).

  68. Lacan: “Je me suis permis de qualifier d’imbéciles ceux qui ne trouvent que trop aisément, a s’y retrouver, a y voir une sorte d’autre sujet; pour tout dire de moi autrement constitué, de qualité suspecte, d’ “outlaw”, de mauvais” (1966/67: 1 fevrier 1967). In Cléro (2008, p. 50).

  69. Allouch (1993, pp. 99, 107) describes Lacan’s assertion of the Symbolic/Imaginary/Real triad as a paradigm shift, comparable to the Newtonian revolution in physics, that swept away nearly all of the “Freudian field.” On Lacan’s three registers, see also Di Ambra (2011).

  70. Lacan (2006a, p. 80).

  71. Lacan (2006a, pp. 75–76).

  72. Nietzsche (1956, orig. 1872).

  73. Kojève (1980, p. 201).

  74. Heidegger (1996, p. 35).

  75. Gadamer (1984).

  76. Merleau-Ponty (2012 p. xiii).

  77. 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).

  78. Obviously, more needs to be said concerning validation; this, however, is not the place for extended discussion.

  79. Lacan (1977b, p. 203).

  80. Quoted in Eribon (1991, p. 161).

  81. Lévi-Strauss (1966, pp. 250, 256, 249).

  82. Lacan (2006b). Žižek (1992a).

  83. Nietzsche (1979).

  84. Sontag (1969). Steiner (1980). Sass (1992 chap 6).

  85. 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).

  86. Lacan (1988, pp. 223–224).

  87. Lacan (1978, p. 262).

  88. Kant quoted in Smith (1918, pp. 411, 409, 208 emphasis added).

  89. Greenberg (1973). Foucault (1994).

  90. 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.)

  91. Lacan (1998, 1992).

  92. Žižek (1992b, p. 265).

  93. Neruda (1969, pp. 9, 23).

  94. 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).

  95. E.g., Gurewich, in Dor (1998, p. 24n).

  96. Foucault’s notion of epistemes in The Order of Things, which targets “the pure experience of order and of its modes of being” (1994, p. 366), is profoundly indebted to Heidegger (Sass 2014).

  97. In The Order of Things, Foucault (1994) rejects developmental or diachronic questions in favor of analyzing synchronic formations.

  98. Macey (1988, p. 46).

  99. Žižek (1992a).

  100. Heidegger (1977).

  101. Levi-Strauss (1966, pp. 250, 256).

  102. Lacan (1977a, p. 216). Lacan (1956, p. 25, quoted in Macey 1988, p. 46).

  103. Lacan (1977a, p. 264).

  104. Lévi-Strauss (1966, pp. 246–247). Lacan quoted in Marini (1992, p. 88).

  105. Heidegger (2008, pp. 217, 221, 225–226).

  106. Lacan (1977a, p. 264).

  107. Rieff (Rieff 1979, p. ix).

  108. Lacan (1992, pp. 319, 311, 316). Cléro (2008, p. 231).

  109. Lacan quoted in Cléro (2008, p. 84).

  110. Lacan (1992, p. 311).

  111. Lacan (1992). Žižek (1992a).

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Acknowledgments

For helpful suggestions on this manuscript, I wish to thank Jeffery Geller, Angela Woods, Greg Byrom, Michael Westerman, Max Malitzsky, and Shira Nayman.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Clinical Psychology, GSAPP—Rutgers University, 152 Frelinghuysen Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA

    Louis A. Sass

  2. Program in Comparative Literature, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 08901, USA

    Louis A. Sass

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  1. Louis A. Sass
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Correspondence to Louis A. Sass.

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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

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