2-1-11 Lacan, Ecrits

“The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud”

Lacan shifts the discussion of the unconscious from biological underpinnings to linguistic ones, primarily those of metaphor and metonymy.

“The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious”

Summary: The subject and the unconscious are not unified totalities as Hegel would have us believe via the dialectic but is instead composed of a chain of signifiers.

Close Reading:


“An enunciation that denounces itself, a statement that renounces itself, an ignorance that sweeps itself away, an opportunity that self-destructs—what remains here if not the trace of what really must be in order to fall away from being?” (678)

Starting off with a series of four nouns with restrictive clauses attached, Lacan describes the utterance that brings one into being (“I can [peut] come into being by disappearing from my statement [dit].” (678)).  Yet, all of these “utterances” aren’t quite so, because of the fact that the restrictive clauses that are attached to them restrict their ability to utter.  The difference here between a noun followed by a verb and a noun followed by a restrictive adjective clause is important.  Instead of saying, “An enunciation denounces itself, a statement renounces itself, an ignorance sweeps itself away, an opportunity self-destructs,” Lacan says the above, which indicates that the utterances aren’t just doing these things, they are these things. If they are these things, then they aren’t the things we might expect them to be.  While both enunciations and denouncements are utterances, denounce gives more nuance to enunciation because it declares itself to be evil rather than just giving expression to itself.  The statement is also an abandonment, rejection, or refusal of itself, rather than just . . . a statement.  Ignorance/sweeps away is an interesting part of this series, considering that the couplet seems to reaffirm itself rather than repudiate itself as the previous couplets have done.  At first, an ignorance that sweeps itself away makes sense together because ignorance can be a lack of knowledge and sweeping away is getting rid of something.  In this sentence, though, ignorance isn’t so much a lack as a state of being, which asserts itself by getting rid of itself.  An opportunity that self-destructs is an opening or an advantage that can’t fully become one of these things because it is restricted by its tendency to destroy its own advantage.  Where it seems like these couplets negate or reverse each other, the restrictive adjective clause construction tells us otherwise.  The noun retains its qualities even though it is being restricted by the adjective clause, but it also can’t fully attain those qualities because it is restricted.  The noun’s being is simultaneous and multiple, not a totality or unity.

The dash breaks into the sentence and renames the series with emphasis, with just a bit of violence.  The interrogative sentence that follows it emphasizes itself even more; it asserts itself by asking a question, calling attention to the answer that isn’t quite there or that lies just beyond its appearance on the page.  The subject of the sentence is an interrogative pronoun, which also calls attention to the “what” or to the unanswered question.  The remainder is the “what”, which is that which is left over after the denouncement, renouncement, sweeping away, or self-destruction.  That remainder is also the trace, which echoes back to what the interrogative portions of this sentence are doing.  It is the presence that is also an absence.  The sentence gets more complicated from there, as it follows with a a barrage of layered prepositional phrases.  Trace (of what really must be) (in order to fall away) (from being).  Here, there is a trace of what really must be, which seems to indicate that there is an authentic aspect to being, considering that “really” is an adverb that modifies “be”.  The next two phrases are closely connected, as something is falling away from being.  The key here is then figuring out what that something is. 

I picked this sentence this week because I really had no clue what was going on in it.  My confusion mainly comes from its construction rather than its idea, as I think the prepositional phrase sequence obfuscates what is going on.  I do, however, recognize that it might have a lot to do with this: “Their authors are now far too concerned with obtaining a respectable position to leave any room for the irremediable ludicrousness the unconscious owes to its roots in language” (687).  It might be fair to say that this construction is ludicrous in such a way that it calls attention to the unstable being of the unconscious.  Like Lacan says, it’s not a unity, so the difficulty of putting these phrases together

points toward the difficulty of defining being in the unconscious and what exactly the trace is.

1-25-11 Lacan, My Teaching

“So, You Will Have Heard Lacan”

Lacan works through the question of Freud’s influence by arguing that Freud broke with previous philosophers with his idea that thought was embodied, that the essence of thought is not a self-transparent act; for Lacan, thought does not work hierarchically, but instead, on three different registers: Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real.

“My Teaching, Its Nature and Its Ends”

Lacan responds to charges of structuralism, saying that his theory might seem like shit at first glance, but shit actually has a lot to say about history and culture.  Lacan also subtly makes his objectors feel like shit.

“The Place, Origin and End of My Teaching”

Summary: Lacan positions himself against the way that psychoanalysis is currently practiced as a cure, which is a misreading of Freud; instead, psychoanalysis is the practice of actively thinking up a new way of talking about something we seem to know intuitively.

Close Reading:

“It seems refutable, but it is irrefutable.  And that is precisely what the unconscious is.  It’s a fact, a new fact.  We have to begin to think up something that can explain it, can explain why there are such things as unconscious thoughts.  It’s not self-evident.” (8)

Lacan uses “it” frequently in My Teaching.  We could attribute this to the slightly more informal lecture style, but in this particular passage, placing a third person pronoun as the subject of the sentence three times distances Lacan’s final point from its referent.  If we trace “it” back to the beginning of the paragraph that this passage belongs to, “it” is the objection.  The objection is objecting to the idea of the thinking unconscious.  Psychoanalysis argues for the “unconscious that thinks hard” (7), while the objection argues that “you can’t think without knowing you are thinking” (7).  Then, Lacan goes on to say that this objection doesn’t really carry any weight anymore, but no one really knows why, which indicates that Lacan is arguing that Psychoanalysis’s argument for the unconscious that thinks hard has become part of our unconscious.  This subtle argument, immediately preceding the ramped up use of “it,” points toward a more strategic use of the third person here.  The debate going on is really a debate about whether or not the unconscious is a concrete noun, something that can be perceived by the senses, or an abstract noun, something that names a quality or idea.  “It” takes the place of “unconscious” because, in this particular passage, the debate hasn’t been resolved yet.

The sentence structure that Lacan uses in this passage is also notable.  There is repetition in three sentences, which mirrors, reinforces, or reverses meaning.  There is “refutable, irrefutable,” “fact, new fact,” and “think explain, explain unconscious.”  In the first sentence, the two clauses are independent and joined by the coordinating conjunction “but.”  The first clause of the parallel structure is reversed by this use of “but” and also by the negative construction of refutable in the second clause.  A closer look at the verbs, though, makes the parallel structure a bit uneven.  “Seems” and “is” are both intransitive verbs, but “seems” indicates sensory perception, while “is” indicates essence independent of sense.  Written another way, this sentence could look like this: “The objection to the thinking unconscious seems refutable, but the objection to the thinking unconscious is actually irrefutable.”  Because this sentence is structured in a parallel way, the “it” can seem and be at the same time, even though the sentence is weighted more towards being than seeming.

In the second repetitive structure, “it” refers to a new subject, the “unconscious” in the previous sentence.  The dependent clause after the comma reinforces, renames, and revises the first independent clause.  “Fact” can mean something that is actually the case, but it can also mean something that is done or performed.  In the first clause, “fact” refers to the idea that the unconscious exists or has being (“that is precisely what the unconscious is”), and the second clause reinforces the idea that it has being.  But the addition of “new” indicates that we weren’t always conscious of the unconscious as such, which is a performance of the way the thinking unconscious works.

We have to begin to think up something that can explain it, can explain why there are such things as unconscious thoughts.

In the third repetitive structure, Lacan again reinforces the first independent clause with the second dependent clause.  The “can explain” in each clause mirror* each other, but they are separated because each “explain” refers to something different.  The first “explain” is in a restrictive clause referring to “something”.  “Something” is part of a prepositional phrase connected to an infinitive adverb clause.  In this part, we are thinking of something, which becomes the explanation for the unconscious.  In the second half of the sentence, “explain” is immediately followed by another restrictive clause.  Instead of referring to a noun, it refers to the repeated verb explain, which reinforces what exactly we are explaining.  The reason why I use “mirror” to explain what is going on in this repetitive structure is because the different uses of “explain” reflect upon each other and illuminate how this usage is reinforcing Lacan’s idea of the thinking unconscious.

I’m interested in this passage because I think it demonstrates how Lacan uses repetition with a twist to explain how things aren’t as they seem.  At first glance, we may think one way about what Lacan is saying, but upon further examination, we change our minds a bit about the nature of the sentence, what it is trying to say.  There’s a constant revision going on, which makes Lacan’s writing slightly maddening, but also fascinating and fun.

*I realize that using this word to talk about Lacan is highly loaded, but I want to go with it for now and see if further reading will shed some light on and complicate this rhetorical technique.  Then again, it might totally destroy what I’m trying to say here.

1-18-11 Freud

“Introduction” to the Penguin Freud Reader (Phillips)

Summary Sentence: Philips focuses on two levels of reading—one, of reading the works of Freud, which inevitably changes how we read in general; and two, psychoanalysis as a way of reading our lives.  Ultimately, psychoanalysis is a practice of reading that focuses on how language both examines and obfuscates the way that we experience our lives.

“Fetishism”

Fetishism comes from the belief that women have been castrated; even though the man has seen that women do not have a penis, he still retains the belief that they once did but were castrated by his father and unconsciously, he believes that the woman’s penis has been replaced by something else.

“Family Romances”

The process of distancing oneself from the family involves erotic and ambitious daydreaming.

“Note on the ‘Magic Notepad’”

Sentence Summary:  Freud tries to imagine a device that would be similar to the sensory function of memory and that would overcome the problems of exhaustible recording surface and impossibility of a lasting trace; he gets close by discussing the magic notepad, a recording device that is similar to his Pcpt-Cs system.

“Lapses”

Small, seemingly incidental slips (misspeaking, misreading, mishearing) are actually highly significant, as they reveal the speaker’s unconscious or inner thoughts or reveal an experience that came before the lapse.

“Screen Memories”

A memory’s influence on a child is complicated, because things that seem important we forget, and things that seem trivial are what we remember the most; the work of psychoanalysis involves unearthing the original impression associated with these memories that was lost during displacement.

“Wolf Man”

Wolf Man’s neurosis stems from castration anxiety and watching his parents have intercourse, which made him desire to receive sexual satisfaction from his father and also manifested itself in his fear of seeing wolves.

“Fragment of an Analysis (Dora)”

Summary: Freud works out the problem of fragmented analysis by doing work to fill in the gaps in both his (about the case) and Dora’s memory, which ultimately becomes the work of psychoanalysis in general.

In his introduction to “Fragment of an Analysis (Dora)”, Freud does three things: he responds to past criticism of his method, he anticipates new criticism to this particular analysis, and he justifies publishing an incomplete analysis.  In “Dora”, the fragmented nature of the analysis seems to be the problem at first, but it finally becomes part of the methodology of psychoanalysis in general and I think that much of the work of justification happens in the passage where Freud compares his analysis to archaeology.

“Given the incompleteness of my analytical results I had no other choice but to follow the example of those researchers who are so happy to bring the inestimable, though mutilated, remains of antiquity to light after their long burial.  Using the best models known to me from other analyses, I have completed that which was incomplete, but, like a conscientious archaeologist, I have taken care, in each case, to reveal where my construction added to the authentic parts.” (Freud, Psychology of Love 8)

Freud starts out by defining the raw data that he had after meeting with Dora as incomplete.  He recognizes that this presents a problem to his work in general, as incomplete denotes an imperfection or a defect in the analysis he ended up with after his three months with Dora.  He goes on to say that, as a result of this (“given”), he has no other choice but to follow a methodology of analysis that allows him to work with this incompleteness.  Obviously, he really does have a choice in the matter, so I read this statement as saying that he chooses the best model, that this is the best way to go.  On the other hand, he doesn’t really have a choice because he needs to follow other examples, since he is doing work that has not been done before.  This model is the archaeological one, which he uses as a metaphor to describe psychoanalytical work, where he is unearthing unconscious thoughts and piecing them together in order to make them more complete.  Far from being problematic in their incompleteness, these “thought artifacts” are “inestimable, though mutilated.”  On one hand, inestimable means that they have value, but inestimable also means that this value, essentially, can’t be determined at all.  “Mutilated” also denotes some essential incompleteness, so the analytical results are missing parts that are unable to be recovered.  Here, the analytical results are valuable because they are incomplete.  Most of the work, then, lies in merely unearthing the analytical remains and recognizing that they are valuable as fragments.

In the second sentence Freud presents the idea that the method of psychoanalysis depends upon incompleteness, or fragments, to do its work.  Taking on the role of the archeologist, Freud continues a piecing together (“using the best models known to me”) and he makes the role of the archaeologist/analyst central in this piecing together.  Then comes the “but.” The “but” sets up an opposition between the central role of the analyst (before the “but) and the nature of the work that he does.  He is careful to say that he has added to the artifact through construction (the artificial part of the work).  “Authentic parts” is a reference back to the essential qualities of the artifact in the first sentence.  But this binary between what is artificial and authentic isn’t so simple at first, as “reveals” adds a layer of complication to how Freud describes the work of analysis.  To reveal is to disclose something previously kept secret.  Freud finally reveals that what is essential, and it is not as problematic as it seemed in the beginning.

I chose this passage because I think it does two important things.  First, it demonstrates Freud’s rhetorical method of making something seem like a problem at first and then subtly walking through it to make it end up working in his favor.  As a reader, I can’t take what Freud is saying at face value, but I also have to be willing to go along with him and invest myself fully in what he is saying until he finally reveals that the essential qualities that seemed we couldn’t avoid, that were problematic, actually end up being the essential qualities that make the whole system work at all.  In a sense, I end up believing what Freud is saying because I don’t believe it literally.  I go along with Freud by not believing that everything he is says is complete and by looking for the moment he reveals what he is actually doing.  On one level, this passage demonstrates, through a metaphor, how one is supposed to read Freud.  It also demonstrates how the work of psychoanalysis is done.  The most important part of psychoanalysis is unearthing the things that we’ve forgotten.