Copyright © 2012

Avello Publishing Journal ISSN: 2049 - 498X

Issue 1 Volume 2: The Unconscious

UNCONSCIOUS AND SUBJECTIVITY: INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN PSYCHOANALYSIS, PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE

Nicolò Fazioni University of Padova, Italy.

1. Introduction

The Žižek – Malabou debate on the neuronal unconscious, subjectivity and trauma, could be seen

as a great occasion to discuss the philosophical effect of psychoanalysis today.

Malabou, in The new wounded (Malabou 2011), criticizes the Freudian-Lacanian view of

subjectivity and the unconscious, that she finds insufficient to explain the complex and real

traumatic experience of the contemporary subject. With the help of neuroscientists brain research,

Malabou argues that psychoanalysis is not able to understand the external/contingent nature of the

traumatic wound (1) that affects and produces the subject. For her, Freud and Lacan limit their

analysis to the psychical, logical -linguistic life of the subject. They don’t pose genuine attention to

factors which are outside of the field of sense and meaning, which are irreducible to the art of the

psychoanalytical interpretation:

there is no possibility to be present at its own fragmentation or at its own wound. In contrast to castration, there is no representation, no phenomenon, no example of separation, which would allow the subject to anticipate, to wait for, to fantasize what can be a break in cerebral connections. One cannot even dream about it. There is no scene for this Thing which is not one. The brain in no way anticipates the possibility of its own damages. When these damages occur, it is another self which is affected, a ‘new’ self founded in misrecognition. (Malabou 2011: 235)

All traumatising events tend to neutralize their intention and to assume the lack of motivation proper to chance incidents, the feature of that which cannot be interpreted. Today, the enemy is hermeneutics (Ivi: 258).

In my reading, Malabou poses an interesting set of questions to Lacanian psychoanalysis and to the

Post-Lacanian philosophers of today (Badiou, Žižek etc.): Is psychoanalysis able to understand the

trauma as a real event? Thus, is psychoanalysis able to deal with the non-representative and non-

logical/symbolic events? And again, is psychoanalysis only a thought of symbolic language (or of

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representation), perhaps only a interpretation even? Can we say that psychoanalysis is the last

chapter of hermeneutics final voyage into a pseudo – Fregean abyss?

From this point onwards, I receive this criticism of psychoanalysis as an opportunity to come back

to the Lacanian view of the unconscious and of subjectivity, and to discuss its possibilities in the

contemporary philosophical and neuroscientific debate. I take as my inspiration the stylish

Malabou’s utterance on Lacanian unconscious: “The unconscious is structured as a language only

insofar as the brain doesn’t talk” (Malabou 2011: 74).

For her, Lacanian practices of thought are an interpretative over-determination of the unconscious

that tries to reduce all the subjective existence to the logical-dialectical experience of meaning. The

impact of the real is sedated via psychoanalytical hermeneutic:

The French title of my latest work is Les nouveaux blessés. I think it would need a little bit of translation. Perhaps “the new injuries,” or “new wounds” (rather than “the new wounded” or the Newly Wounded?). So let’s call it The New Wounds. It’s about the kind of injuries or wounds or brain damage that psychoanalysis never took into account. It’s a reflection on brain lesion or pathology (Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease) but also on trauma in general (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, all kinds of what I call “social-political” traumas). To what extent neurology today helps us to enlarge the Freudian conception of the trauma and of the psychic suffering: such is the issue. It seems that in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud fails to define what might exceed the pleasure principle, what this “beyond” may exactly mean. Neurological traumas go beyond this principle, and discover something that has nothing to do with pleasure, but with every kind of serious trauma. This book is a reflection on those wounds that love and hatred or internal conflict simply cannot explain. (Vahanian-Malabou 2008: 8)

In this explanation of her book, Malabou shows (see also Malabou 2001, 2007) us that neurological

research could identify a dimension that is truly Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud 1940a,

1940b). “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” is, in the Lacanian reading of Freud (Lacan 1986), the

dimension of real, non-sense and jouissance. To say that psychoanalysis doesn’t cross the “Pillars

of Hercules” of a Pleasure Principle means to say that it is not able to work with the real: the

psychoanalysis is seen not only as a logic of sense, but as a hermeneutic of meaning.

Although my reading of Lacan (Fazioni 2012a; 2012b, Brandalise-Fazioni 2012) is quite different

from the Žižekian one, I’m inclined to agree partially with the Slovenian philosopher (Žižek 2010)

that much criticism produces a dualistic view: from one hand the logical side of sens, from the other

the external real of traumatic event:

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If we are able to admit that the difference between “material” and “psychic” is very thin and even perhaps non-existing, if we agree on the absurdity of regarding the brain and the psyche as too separate and distinct instances, then we will have moved forward a great deal…We know today that every kind of serious shock--it may be a wound on the battlefield, a shell shock, but it also can be domestic trauma or moral abuse without any physical injury--we know that every kind of serious trauma causes destruction in what is now called the ‘emotional brain,’ which is located in the frontal cortex. (Ibid.)

To anticipate, Lacan’s use of Hegelian dialectic is functional for the construction of an immanent

and non-dualistic thought, in which there is no border between the symbolic and the real. Of course,

the real is a category very different from the language or the concept, but its difference is totally

internal in the conceptual plane, its an internal Spaltung of the concept.

A second order of introductory questions regards the issue of science and reductionism. In Lacanian

thought there is a great attention to science (see Milner 1999, Glynos-Stavrakakis 2002, Laurent

2009, Johnston 2011b), which is seen as a creative practice. But at the same time, the psychoanalyst

criticizes the scientism of psychological knowledge as a form of representative reductionism of

subjective experience. Scientism is the most glamorous form of University discourse, as Lacan

points out in his L’envers de la psychanalyse (Lacan 1991). The Science that, in Lacan, equates to

the mathematical moment of formalization and of writing (Lacan 2001: 449-495) are very different

from the biologistic-scientistic psychology of his time, and in particular from the Behaviourism (2).

2. The Lacanian Unconscious and the split subject

I would love to start with the trite Lacanian aphorism on the Freudian unconscious: “The

unconscious is structured like a Language” (see Lacan 1966). From this point, I will try to underline

some interesting aspects of Lacanian encounters with science, psychology, brain research and the

theme of psychical energy.

Analyse the famous Lacanian utterance (see Miller 1981, Fink 1995, Nobus 1998):

1. The unconscious, Freud’s discovery, is interpreted by Lacan as a logical subjective structure that

works like a language. The nature of unconscious is a linguistic one: it is a system of differential

relationships of signifiers inscribed in two linguistics chains.

Therefore, the unconscious is structured like the language of Saussure and Jakobson.

The language, the opposition langue/parole, the difference signifiers/significance, are the modalities

of unconscious reality. Moreover, the unconscious manifests itself only via linguistic expressions:

the dreams, the lapsus, the Witz, that have many linguistic configurations (see Lacan 1988;

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Shepherdson 2008). For the Lacanian analyst, the unconscious is a sort of literary text that binds

rhetorical aspects and linguistics – syntactic ones: we could think here about themes of myth,

legends and history in Lacan’s thought (see De Certeau 2002; Buchanan 2000).

We note immediately that this Lacanian translation of the Freudian unconscious produces a great

interpretative leap. We have not an unconscious as a profound and irrational place inside

subjectivity (see Althusser 1993’s critique to irrational forms of unconscious).

As the famous Freud’s image of psychoanalysis as archaeology of the human being shows, the first

common sense view of psychoanalysis equates the latter with a discourse on the subjective depth,

the inner/intimate realm. This realm is consequently seen as the receptacle of animal/irrational

instincts, and it is seen as the true reality of the subject. The subject would be from one side a beam

of instincts, needs and from the other a machine that produced objective – measurable behaviour.

On a similar image of human being, flourished the scientistic (physiological and biological)

psychology and psychotherapy of ego (the ego-analysis that Lacan defines “egocracy” or ego-

orthopaedics). When Lacan elaborates his theory, the scientistic psychology is the dominant

approach to the subject that is reduced to the individual (that is only the abstract representation

produced by the external knowledge) and that is studied as an object of knowledge and

experimentation.

Post-Freudian psychoanalysis (ego-analysis, Anna Freud’s theory…) wants to look like a

general psychology of the ego; and, in its turn, the general psychology wants to become a more

objective discourse following the model of physiology and biology, taking into account the method

of anatomy etc.

For Lacan, the clearest example of this scientistic psychology is the Behaviourism and the

behaviouristic psychotherapy. Behaviourism produces an imagery reduction of the subject that

becomes a dead and intellectual representation. On this way, the subject becomes only an object

that represents the subjective life. Then, this objective image is the base, which is decomposed,

reconstructed, studied and explained from the outside by the anatomical knowledge (see Hegel 1980

; Rametta 1992) of psychologist.

Lacan underlines in his Écrits (Lacan 1960), that the subject does not correspond to the

individual (to the image of man that belongs to the humanistic and natural law tradition), but it is

the product of a process of subjectification (see Badiou 1982) that depends on the structure, i.e., the

linguistic-formal dimension of syntactic laws (the langue of Saussure) by which we could speak of

and then enter in the social and cultural world. The linguistic structure, which Lacan equates at the

unconscious level, or, structured process (the Other), determines the “split” subject, subtracting

them to their individual closure (the fantasy of ego as the centre of subjectivity) and introducing

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them into an inter-subjective space constituted by a logic-linguistic but also socio-political relations.

When Lacan speaks about symbolic dimension, he is referring to the latter structure, the plane of the

impersonal Other (or to put it into Žižekian terms, the Big Other).

The interpretation of unconscious proposed by Lacan sweeps the psychoanalysis epistemic plane

from all the image of profoundness, irrationalism and psychologism. To achieve this turning point,

Lacan uses the structuralism tools (the linguistic of Saussure and Jakobson, Benveniste and Culioli

and the ethnology of Lèvi-Strauss (see Milner).

Therefore, the first step of our reasoning is that the unconscious is not the place of irrational

instincts or our psychical inner coffer. It is a logical-dialectical system that is interpretable by the

psychoanalyst as a literary text.

2. Through his linguistic interpretation of the symbolic – theoretical mechanisms of subjectivity,

Lacan develops a theory devoid of the scientific model of psychology. He underlines psychological

and social sciences are built following the prevailing paradigm of positivistic science.

Psychoanalysis allows us to have a peculiar practice of thought that studies the structure of the

subject without sometimes bending to the model of biology or physiology. Although psychoanalysis

(Johnston) pays more attention to the latter sciences, it wants not to be homologous to them as

general psychology and Behaviourism does. Psychoanalysis is not a science of homeostatic

regulation, of objective reality (that is, for Lacan, an imagery construction): its epistemological side

is linked to another dimension of science:

a. Firstly, to the practice of formalization, the logical-mathematical side of dealing with the real (see

Badiou 1994, Brandalise 2012). b. Second, to the science as rational approach to the subject, that

eliminated each form of irrationalism and ineffable.

The connection between psychoanalysis and science that is fundamental for Lacan, does not pass

trough the neuro-biology (as in the first work by Freud), i.e., a deep insight into the mind, into the

anatomy (the plane of objective reality). Neuro-biology is at basis of a scientific approach to human

being, but is not the real concern of psychoanalysis. For psychoanalyst (as like as for a continental

philosopher), neuro-biological results are true, are not to debate; but this “true” is necessary and not

sufficient. This is the case of neuroscience. While, for Lacan, the Behaviourism and other

scientistic-cognitivistic approach to human being, are misunderstanding of the problem of subject

and of real: they are only a new form of metaphysical and naïve realism.

I would suggest that Freudian-Lacanian practice of thought have more in connection to the modern

tradition of philosophy (Lacan often draws this philosophical chain: Descartes- Spinoza-Kant-

Hegel-Freud) than to scientific psychology and its contemporary derivations. In my thought (via

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Miller 1981, Badiou 1991, 1994, Žižek 1993), psychoanalysis is not linked to scientism, but to a

modality to interrogate the science, that is the modality of philosophy, and especially of classical

Germany’s one (see, Badiou 1981; Lacoue-Labarthe – Nancy 1990; Žižek 1998, 2003, 2006; Dolar

2006, 2012; Johnston 2011a). Psychoanalysis is not a philosophy and it is a critique to philosophy,

but it is linked to the desire that originally moved many dialectical thoughts.

From the same point of view, Badiou in his seminar on Lacan (Badiou 1994) shows that

psychoanalysis is a form of critique of philosophy that has built itself inside of philosophy (see

Alèman 2000), inside the realms of concept and rationality. The thought of Freud and Lacan

develops a specific dialectical manner to rework German classical philosophy’s outcomes, that is

diametrically different from the irrational thought of “feelings against concept”, “intuition against

reason” of the Romantics.

Lacan thinks that dialectical philosophy, in particular Hegel’s one, could have another chance

against its systematic closure. This chance needs a radical critique of each doctrinal / university

aspects of Hegel’s creative discourse: this critique has the function to re-activate the desiring core

of dialectics as a thought of difference that is able to deal the negativity and the contingency

without eliminating them.

3. If it is so, we can understand why Lacan argues in his Le quatre concepts fondamentaux de la

psychanalyse (Lacan 1974) that the unconscious is involved in the genesis (in the Transcendental

meaning) and the theoretical dynamics of thought.

For Lacan, Freudian psychoanalysis introduces a new theory of subject that ends the tradition of

modern - Cartesian philosophy (i.e., the Ego as foundation). Although, the Cartesian turn in

philosophy, the central focus for the theme of subjectivity, is necessary for the birth of

psychoanalysis, it is not sufficient. The psychoanalysis criticizes the foundation of Cartesian subject

because it is linked to a rejection of the unconscious. With this refusal, the subject of modern

philosophy is founded upon the ego assured by the cogito as the first and central principle of

knowledge.

While in the Lacanian perspective, the unconscious stresses the instability of the ego and its lack of

identity (as Lacan puts it in his famous theory of the mirror). As a matter of fact, the identity is the

product of the signifier and linguistic action of the unconscious on the subject; however, the

unconscious is not a new foundation but the differential chain of language.

The Lacanian subject is a split subject (sujet divisé): it is not the individual of modern philosophical

anthropology (see Foucault 1966, Cesaroni 2008), but a non-representable process of subjectivation

produced by the structure. A subject exists only when he has access to the linguistic and social

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plane of symbolic/structure (the step of subject’s “production”). But the inscription of the subject in

the latter plane coincides with his alienation, his lack of his supposed “entirety”.

As is well known, Lacan poses a difference between the individual ego (the moi, that is an

imaginary representation) as bearer of rights and centre of juridical charge, and the subject (the Je,

which is the structural process, that combines the conscience mechanisms and the unconscious

dominant symbolical elaborations). Lacanian theory eliminates the role of the ego as the first

Cartesian step in the definition of subjectivity. The ego is only an imaginary and illusory

production. As Lacanians say, the ego is the result of our intersubjective foundation: in our

relationships with the others (in our external, social, political relationships) the ego is built as the

outcome of the identification to the others.

The ego is an image produced by another image (the image of the other, that Lacan defines as the

small other in opposition to the big Other of structure). Therefore, the subjectivity has not an

original identity or a substantial plenitude as in a philosophical tradition.

For psychoanalysis when the subject comes – i.e., when he is inscribed in the symbolical Other of

social and linguistic life -, he is originally alienated, lacked by his deficiency and his necessity of

something (the Language, the plane of otherness) that is external from him.

After Saussure, we know that the language, that is fundamental for our social life (as developmental

psychologists have to know), is never a production of the single but it is a network of syntactical

norms that we have to practice if we want to express ourselves. The Language is independent from

me, but I (while I’m writing to be understood by readers) I am too dependent from the possibilities

of Language’s structure, that I have to use. On this way, Lacan could say that Language produces

and gives shape to the subject. Moreover, the great part of our linguistic production is, for

psychoanalysis, conditioned by the unconscious (that is structured like a language).

To resume, the subject is produced and at the same time alienated by the Language. Therefore, there

is not an original moment of identity, that is later disrupted by the difference as in the scholastic

dialectics (that is not the Hegelian’s one). Furthermore, this lack of original identity proves that the

subject is not something substantial. This is a point of great exchange between Lacan and Sartre,

taken either as two great moments of the “Hegel legacy in French”.

Lacan objects to philosophy for its fantasy of suturing the lack and the split, occupying its truth with

elements of foundation and logics of representation. In Lacan’s words “philosophy” often equates to

“metaphysics”, that is, in accord with Heidegger, the history of an oblivion. For Lacan it is the

oblivion of a original and pre-ontological split within each ontological construction, the real (réel)

element of lack.

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Metaphysics, therefore is the imaginary attempt to suturing the real-symbolic split, the effort of

trying a principle (the foundation, the Gründ of German classical philosophy) that holds the entire

philosophical system as a Whole, where truth is completely representable (Vorstellung). The

Lacanian reworking of Freudian unconscious allows us to deal with the traditional philosophical

issue of foundation and representation (3).

If the unconscious is not a profound place or the centre of the subjective’s truth, it is not a new form

of foundation, a form perhaps more fashionable then metaphysical ones. This use of the

unconscious as a new foundation is reproached by Lacan to Jung (see Recalcati 2003).

The Freudian view has the radical force to deconstruct the place both of the foundation and the

logical principles (identity, non-contradiction) of traditional metaphysics. Freud develops a

displacement of the consciousness (the ego or the foundation) in connection with the work of the

unconscious in each process of subjectification.

As a consequence of the unconscious, the split subject has no centre, no foundation, and no given

identity. As Žižek and Badiou show, this Lacanian “theorem” is interesting not only in philosophy

but also in political and cultural studies (4). Indeed, we have to note that the Lacanian unconscious

is a radical critique of the modern individualism (from naturalism to liberal democracy and human

rights theory) because it implies that what determined the subject (the linguistic unconscious) is not

an inner – intimate property of the subject. We have seen that Lacanian unconscious is a network of

differential, intersubjective and external relationships: to put it in Deleuzian terms, we could say

that the Lacanian unconscious is a superficial and immanent phenomena. The dimension of dualism

(profoundness essence versus superficial manifestation) is perhaps erased: this is one of the great

Hegelian legacies in Lacan’s thought. The manifestation (or with the Science of Logic - Hegel 1978

-: the Offenbarung) of unconscious is not different from the unconscious itself: it is only a linguistic

expression and work.

Lacan anticipates the Deleuze-Guattari critique of Milles plateaux (Deleuze-Guattari 1980) and He

argues, in his pivotal seminar on La logique du fantasme, that “l’inconscient c’est la politique”

(Lacan 1967: 10/05). This utterance doesn’t mean that politics is an unconscious dimension but that

unconscious is structured as an external plane of relationships that are constitutive for the subject,

that are not only closed to the family (5). Our psychoanalysis teaches us that the subject is a non-

individual category, linguistically but also socially and politically produced:

Cette réference de l’individu à chacun de tous les autres est l’exigence fondamentale de la logique de la collection, et notre exemple démontre qu’elle est loin d’être impensable [...] Nous dédions cet apologue à ceux pour qui la synthèse du particulier e de l’universel a un sens politique concret (Lacan 2001: 98-99)

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To clarify, in the Lacanian way of thought there is no place of foundation, and the identity is a

secondary and abstracted principle. With a joke, we have to say not that the place of foundation is

empty but that the place of foundation is the empty.

Then, the second step of our reasoning is that the unconscious is structured like a language

produces a theory of subjectivity that is free from any metaphysical category: the subject is not a

substance, as in the classical traditions of philosophy.

As Freud had already pointed out, the subject is a complex relationship of differential instances (Es,

Ego, Super-Ego) and not of substances (see Freud 1923). We have to note that the psychoanalytical

critique of substance is located in the path opened by the great Hegelian approach of

Phenomenology’s Vorrede (Hegel 1980), and the Kantian’s rational psychology (Kant 1974). To

conclude this step, I want to suggest that Lacan realizes a theoretical point, that is just realized in

Fichte’s and in Hegel’s philosophy, which is the priority of difference, of Spaltung upon the identity

(6). In order to propose a philological reading of Lacan, the unconscious is not an individual and

psychological dimension, only directed by inner factors (as in Malabou’s critique): the unconscious,

in particular in the last seminars of Lacan, is open to real Spaltung, and external, intersubjective

experience.

4. Therefore, the symbolic is the realm of language and the structure of the subject’s determination.

But, if all is significance and interpretation, Lacanian thought could be only the last and sly form of

hermeneutics, as in the Ricoeur’s (1967) prediction. But, are we sure that the introduction of an

external and meaningless force (as in the energetic, neurologic tradition) represents a clear

advantage?

I am finding slightly more interesting to develop Deleuze’s thesis on unconscious. In his

Différence et répétition (Deleuze 1968), the author opposes a differential unconscious (the tradition

opened by Leibniz) to an inner unconscious. While the first is a plane of relationships more linked

with a practical transformation of philosophical thought (that culminates in the social-political

unconscious of Deleuze-Guattari 1980), the second is a substance, an ineffable principle.

To summarize, Lacan develops a definition of psychoanalysis that is external from the two sections

of Ricouer’s interpretative device of hermeneutic and of energetic: psychoanalysis as a

practice/ethics of the subject and of his desire. This is the outcome of Seminar VII (see Macola-

Brandalise 2004): psychoanalysis is neither hermeneutic nor energetic. It is a practice of thought,

i.e., an attempt to break the intellectual opposition between practice and theory. Psychoanalysis is a

modality of thought in which the thought produces transformations inside the subject, inside the

relationship among the latter, the language and the real.

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Accordingly to this practical definition of analysis, Lacan draws the conclusions from his theory of

the unconscious and its determination of the subject.

a. As we have seen, the unconscious is not resolved in an energetic engine: Lacan stresses the

translators misunderstanding of the German word “Triebe” (the drive, linked to the relationships

between language and real, linked to the desire) and the English “instinct”, that is the main psycho-

biological mechanism of animal functioning. Lacan combines here Freud and the Kojèvian-

Hegelian (Kojéve 1947) analysis of the difference between Begierde (animal need) and the

Anerkennung (the humanizing desire to be desired as the subject, the value of the other’s desire).

Lacan replaces the dimension of instinct with the signification and the signifiers. We are in front of

a logic of sense: that points to a necessary revaluation of the theoretical relationships between Lacan

and Deleuze.

b. Nonetheless, Lacan doesn’t claim that all is symbolic and signification. He introduces the

category of real (réel), that is different from reality (reality), i.e., the imaginary devoid construction

of an original objectivity disconnected from the Language. The real, that becomes a pivotal

category in the later theory of Lacan, is the impasse of the formalization process.

The basic idea is that the symbolic represents the logical formalisation (“la structure est la logique”

as said in Lacan 2011: 40), through which psychoanalysis deals with the real. In Lacan, the

formalisation encounters its impasse in the real, that is the element (immanent to the structure)

genetics of sense. The real is, in the meantime, not be represented, not be formalised. Therefore the

real is the internal space inside the logical/symbolical construction, that is not anything of ineffable,

but that is subtracted at every opportunity of calculation. This reveals the contingency that is tied

with the emergence of real:

le réel […] s’affirme dans le impasses de la logique […] Nous touchons là du doigt, en un domain en apparance le plus sûr, ce qui s’oppose a l’ènitiere prise du discours dans l’exhaustion logique, ce qui y introduit une béance irréductible. C’est là que nous désignons le réel. (Lacan 2011: 41)

Therefore, the real is an element that produces an exception, a hole, a wound inside the symbolic.

The real is the wound of a conceptual-linguistic theoretical process. The real is not a noumenal

reality, a new profoundness external to the concept. Moreover, the subject deals with the real

through language and logic: the real is the non-representable point, genetic of the representation

itself.

Malabou’s seemingly paradoxical questions of inner-external wounds of subjectivity are already

very irrefutable and interesting, thus I will not expand or deepen them here. Perhaps we have two

main directions in the debate between psychoanalysis and the reflection on the subjectivity: a. The

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Lacanian one that is connected to the modern philosophy, or Classical German philosophy: In this

perspective, the subject is produced by a wounded that is extime (internal and at the main time

subtracted: unheimlich) to the symbolical field. b. The neuroscientist road that focuses the wounded

and their trauma as something external to the symbolic.

To conclude, the Lacanian symbolic is entered by the real (and jouissance): the symbolic is in

itself differentiated by the real. Then, psychoanalysis is not a hermeneutics of meaning because it

has its discriminating notion in the real, as non-representable, contingent encounter (as tyche).

Miller talks about a bone of the analysis that is the real and not solvable to interpretation. Lacanian

psychoanalysis replaced the idea of interpretation (also involved with hermeneutics) with the

practice of deciphering what there is other then language, or inside the language itself.

The real is the dimension introduced by trauma (Lacan 1973), that is, in the Lacanian vocabulary,

an event which belongs “beyond the pleasure principle”, from beyond the logical regulation of

homeostasis. As in the Verneinung’s processes, trauma is a form of negativity that is irreducible to

the Aufhebung, that deconstructs from the inside the possibility of a systematic synthesis and

closure of dialectical thought. This form of negativity must not be subsumed by formal, logical

universality, is the real as the internal wounded of the concept,with its internal necessity to re-new,

and to re-start the symbolical effort (we have to note the Lacanian proximity to a Transcendental-

Fichtean practice of thought). The real is the jouissance (a category beyond pleasure’s and

conservation’s principle) of the dialectique and of the symbolic - it’s lack of a stable order: indeed,

Lacan in his Seminar XX (Lacan 1975 and forward) uses the category of la langue without a sign of

separation, i.e., the osmotic and non-representative plane of mutual determination of

symbolical/linguistic element and the enjoyment as in Joyce’s practice of writing (see Lacan 2005)

(7).

I advocate that psychoanalysis deals with the “Beyond of pleasure principle” as an inner element of

the dialectics. The real and the jouissance block the closure of Aufhebung, re-new the negativity and

open the symbolic: this is a point of dialogue between Lacan and Adorno.

In order to conclude, I claim that Lacanian psychoanalysis is not a hermeneutic of meaning neither

a psychology. Psychoanalysis is connected to science and to philosophy but is not homologous to

them: the analysands refuse to be reduced to a positivistic recording of behaviour or to a scientistic

knowledge of the ego and of the subject as the dead object of measurement.

The epistemological peculiarity of psychoanalysis, as well as of the high moments in philosophy, is

its ability to work with the subject without reduced it to his representation (8): psychoanalysis

shows a radical critique to the representation, and its epistemology matches its ethics (its desire to

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work with a real subject). In this regard, the psychoanalyst (against the modern scientist) does not

work from an outside or aseptic place (although certain psychoanalysts seem to say otherwise). He

is involved in a situation where the transformations derived from his act are able to affect him.

From this point, I am not here to critique neuroscience concretely or neurobiology or its utilization

as the unique approach to subjectivity, as is proposed, for example, in the claims of Ramachandran

(2004). My philosophical concern is that cognitivism (9) and neurology could be seen as a

deterministic method to reduce the subject to an object (10), or to reduce the subject to his brain as

his essence. A Lacanian question to neuroscience is: could not be that our brains are being used by

neurologists as a new foundation, a new substance for experimentation?

This question has probably an ethical and political concern that is the concern of Lacan when he

talks about American psychology, as approval factor, or about University discourse as the mass-

production of subjects. According to Žižekian readers of Hegel, paradoxically only a neurological

approach is decisive in the study of subjectivity, as it is equal to the unproductive claim that “the

Spirit is a bone”.

Notes

(1) For a psychoanalytic study of trauma and of subjectivity see Stolorow 2007, 2011.

(2) I am not claiming that the position of Malabou is a reductionist one. Rather, I’m finding it (in particular in Johnston-Malabou 2011) that other continental thinkers are able to discuss neuroscience whilst avoiding the reductionism more lucidly.

(3) The Lacanian critique of fundament and of representation are some points of contact to Deleuze 1968. On Deleuze see Colebrook 2002, Ansell-Pearson 2007.

(4) See Badiou 1982, 1992; Žižek 1989, 2006; Stavrakakis 1999; Pluth 2007; Schroeder 2011.

(5) See the interesting Kovacevic 2006.

(6) I am referring to the deconstruction of identity principle (A=A) in Fichte (see Rametta 2012) and in Hegel (see Rametta 1992).

(7) The “late” Lacan doesn’t equate the concept of lalangue with the scientific category of language. The language is only the representative formalization of lalangue, that is produced by linguistic knowledge. The concept of lalangue is very closed to the practice of writing, in particular to the Japanese’s writing (see Lacan 2001:11-20) and the idea of litura/litoral that indicates the osmotic relationship between symbolic and jouissance. See Milner 1978.

(8)“Cognitivism is ultimately the attempt to get rid of this intruder, to re-establish the functioning of academic knowledge – “professional”, rational, empirical, problem-solving, and so on. The distinction between cognitivism and cultural studies…it is ultimately a much more radical distinction between two totally different modality, or, rather, practice of knowledge, inclusive of

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two different institutional apparatus of knowledge…It is no wonder that cognitivists like to emphasise their opposition to psychoanalysis” (Žižek 2005: 94). See also Miller 2005.

(9) It is very significant that even Derrida (the greater critique of Lacanian theory of Language: see Derrida 1975), recognizes that a Lacanian psychoanalytic approach to human theoretical structures allows to delete the scientistic psychological creed of atavism. In his Séminaire La Bête et le Souverain (vol. I: Derrida 2008), the philosopher shows that Lacan underlines the limits of a deterministic approach to human agency. I am finding interesting the quotation of French sociologist G. Tarde in Lacan 1960: in Tarde there is a critique of the deterministic approach to human behaviour developed by Italian phrenologist C. Lombroso (a pioneer of the neuroscience’s reductionism).

(10) Žižek stresses the difference between Lacanian subject and structuralist’s one: “But with Lacan, we have quite another notion of the subject. To put it in a simple way: if we abstract, if we subtract all the richness of the different modes of subjectivation, all the fullness of experience present in the way individuals “live” their subject-positions, what remains is an empty place which was filled out with this richness, and this original void, the lack of the symbolic: structure is the subject, the subject of signifiers.” (Žižek 2008)

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* The unpublished Lacanian Seminars are available at www.lutecium.fr/Psychanlyse.html or at gaogoa.free.fr/SeminaireS.html.

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