Difference between revisions of "Jacques Lacan:The Subject of the Unconscious"
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The unconscious depends upon the existence of an Other - an interlocutor, reader or analyst who can depiher its inscriptions. | The unconscious depends upon the existence of an Other - an interlocutor, reader or analyst who can depiher its inscriptions. | ||
| − | + | Simiarly the subject of the unconscious, the subject of desire, is not th esame as an indiviudal human being, but something that is constituted in the gap between the signifier and the signified. | |
The subject is the subject of the signifier insofar as it is marked by language. | The subject is the subject of the signifier insofar as it is marked by language. | ||
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[[Category:Psychoanalysis]] | [[Category:Psychoanalysis]] | ||
[[Category:People]] | [[Category:People]] | ||
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Revision as of 08:46, 22 May 2006
Contents
Introduction
In Seminar XI (1964) Lcan sought to distinguish his own conception of the unconscious from Freud's and more systematically formualte what is beyond language and structure.
He also repalced the linguistic categories of metaphor and metonymy with the new concepts of alienation and separation.
The processes of alienation and separation are closely linked to the psychoanalytic conception of desire and the drive.
Formations of the Unconscious
The unconscious for Freud is essentially representation, in the sense that it consists of the memory traces of earily infantile experiences and traumas.
Lacan developed a number of different definitions of the unconscious and the emphasis that he placed on each conceptualization changed throughout his career.
According to Lacan, psychoanalysis is a science. It is the science of the unconscious subject, and this subject first emerged in the seventeenth century with the founder of modern philosophy RenE Descartes (1596-1650). Lacan interprets the Freduain unconsicous as both the direct heir of the Cartesian subject and, at the same time, that which undermines all philosophies deriving from it. In Meditations (1642) Descartes asked how we might know the truth of our beliefs and our perceptions of reality. He suggested that we could only do this scientifically if we rejected everything that we had cause to doubt and then saw what remained with certainty as true. The difficulty with this approach, Descartes observed, is that it could lead one into more difficulties and uncertainty than the position from which one originally started. One would have to accept, as Descartes put it, that "there was nothing at all in the world: no sky, no earth, no minds or bodies."[1] Descartes concluded, then, that all we could be certain of was the existence of God and ourselves.
SKIP
From a Lacanian perspective, on the other hand, as Slavoj Zizek puts it, the only thing one can be certaint of is that one does not exist. LEt us try to clarify this.
Freud remains Cartesian to the extent that he sets out from a posiiton of doubt, but, whereas Descartes moves from a position of doubt to the certainty of conscious mind, Freud moves in the opposite direction aand places the emphasis on the doubt that support certainty.
For Freud, it is the central tenet of psychoanalysis that the vast majority of mental life and activity remains inaccessible to the consicous mind. He famously used the iamge of an iceberg to illustrate the human mind, in the sense that only a fraction of an iceberg is immediately visible and the majority of it remains submerged beneath the surface.
Lacan argues that if we take the Freudian unconscious seriously then we must reverse Descartes' formulation thus: "By virtue of the fact that I doubt, I am sure that I think."[2] The certainty of consciousness is always supported by something else: by doubt, by the unknown or unknowable, or by what Freud will designate as the unconscious.
For Lacan, thereforee, the only thing we can know with certainty after Freud is t"that the subject of the unconscious manifests itself, that it thinks before it attains certainty."[3]
In this sense the unconscious is pre-ontological; it is not a question of existence, of being or non-being, but rather of the unrealized, the unknown of Cartesian doubt.
THe unconscious is not the act of doubting as such, as this presupposes an already existing subject. The unconscious is the unknown that lies beyond doubt.
The Unconscious as Gap or Rupture
The Unconscious is Structured like a Language
The Unconscious is the Discourse of the Other
Alienation and Separation
The Lacanian Subject
The Drive
Hamlet and the Tragedy of Desire
Summary
According to Lacan we cannot know waht the unconscious is. Indeed, it is not a thing as such but a hypothesis; we cannot know the unconscious, but only deduce it from a subject's speech. We can deduce that there is "knowledge", an X, that exists elsewhere.
In this sense, the unconscious manifests itself in the symbolic order and emerges through the subject's encounter with a trans-individual symbolic order. There can be no unconscious without an Other. The unconscious depends upon the existence of an Other - an interlocutor, reader or analyst who can depiher its inscriptions.
Simiarly the subject of the unconscious, the subject of desire, is not th esame as an indiviudal human being, but something that is constituted in the gap between the signifier and the signified.
The subject is the subject of the signifier insofar as it is marked by language.
At the same time, the subject is the breach in the signifying chain - the gap that opens up between the symbolic and the real, through which the drive manifests itself.
