Jacques Lacan - Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse
05.05.2024
Started this a couple weeks ago, but now that I feel more developed in how I do my reading journals, I wanted to start one for this book.
L'INCONSCIENT ET LA RÉPÉTITION
05.05.2024
Lacan strongly believes that the unconscious is structured like a language
. This was, after all, the structuralist era. There is, I think, something to it, and psychoanalysis perhaps benefitted from the thought that the mind takes on a certain form from a much broader material—it is a shame that Oedipalist structuralization was and is imposed as a given.
Interesting is his description of the difference between a cause and a law: Or again, miasmas are the cause of fever—that doesn't mean anything either, there is a hole, and something that oscillates in the interval.
The Freudian unconscious shows us this gap, which psychoanalysts of his generation have apparently forgotten in stitching it up (but is not Oedipalization already a stitching up?).
Lacan introduces the law of the signfier
. The unconscious can speak as elaborately as the subject-level conscious, which can be "discovered" such as in dreams. It can, however, slip away and be lost (Lacanian psychoanalysis obsesses over the not-there). It vacillates in a split, a lower level than repression.
(I will at some point have to read of the relationship and difference between splitting and repression. This is something new to my understanding of splitting, which previously concerned primarily conscious self (the me that is acting is not the me that is thinking) and world (the X that nourishes me is not the X that frustrates me.) Moreover, if the unconscious appears at a lower leven than repression, then there is a certain hole in my own knowledge.)
Indeed, what became apparent... to anyone... who spends some time observing what truly belongs to the order to the unconscious, is that it is neither being, nor non-being, but the unrealized.
There is something to this, and it is reminding me of statements that schizo- individuals think more in terms of possibility (the unrealized), and that they are closer with primary process (which is deeper, more unconscious). Perhaps after all there is, something to unconscious taking place where a split occurs. In fact, the following seems in relation to this somewhat to form a background for the "omnipotent" or "omnipresent" personal schizo- self in relation to impoverished connection with the common world (and consequently, or as a consequence of, absence of pleasure):
We shall come back to all this, but I would point out that I said desire, not pleasure. Pleasure limits the scope of human possibility—the pleasure principle is a principle of homeostasis. Desire, on the other hand, finds its boundary, its strict relation, its limit, and it is in the relation to this limit that it is sustained as such, crossing the threshold imposed by the pleasure principle.
Lacan argues (I think well) that the unconscious is ethical rather than ontical, as something which requires discovery. This is an interesting approach, and appreciable. It serves as a sort of personal ethic regardless of one's thoughts on broader ethics, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. To deny this really results from having made an ethic of non-ethics.
I think this explains well enough reasoning that justifies belief in the unconscious:
On a precisely similar way, Freud, when he doubts—for they are his dreams, and it is he who, at the outset, doubts—is assured that a thought is there, which is unconscious, which means that it reveals itself as absent. As soon as he comes to deal with others, it is to this place that he summons the I think through which the subject will reveal himself. In short, he is sure that this thought is there alone with I am, if I may put it like this, provided, and this is the leap, someone thinks in his place.
He state that the subject in the field of the unconscious fears not so much the deceiving Other but the deceived Other, which is still a bit opaque to me. But this is possibly something that could be understood better through further reading. It is the same with his description of logical time and time-substance.
Interesting is the thought that the subject's resistance is repetition in act.
I do like his discussion of the tuché, chance encounter with the real, as the basis for subjectivity. Experience as the basis of development.
He goes on to say that the dream is homage to missed reality, with which I don't necessarily agree, but it certainly exemplifies well his lack-based perspective.
DU REGARD COMME OBJET PETIT a
06.05.2024
Certainly a very French thing to say:
Syntax, of course, is pre-conscious. But what eludes the subject is the fact that his syntax is in relation with the unconscious reserve. When the subject tells his story, something acts, in a latent way, that governs this syntax and makes it more and more condensed. Condensed in relation to what? In relation to what Freud, at the beginning of his description of psychical resistance, calls a nucleus.
So, it seems to me, our speech is pulled towards a certain tuché (perhaps as much in attempt to communicate this to us as to the world?) regardless of our conscious intentions and pre-conscious formatting.
The following is a good explanation of his concept of the split between the eye and the gaze. He is once again very focused on lack, which I do think at least provides an interesting framework. Unfortunately this is still infected with Oedipalist phallocentrism:
The split that concerns us is not the distance that derives from the fact that there are forms imposed by the world towards which the intentionality of phenomenological experience directs us—hence the limits that we encounter in the experience of the visible. The gaze is presented to us only in the form of a strange contingency, symbolic of what we find on the horizon, as the thrust of our experience, namely, the lack that constitutes castration anxiety.
The eye and the gaze—this is for us the split in which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field.
Lacan writes that the world constantly gazes at us, which results in our self-consciousness (subjectivity as the result of being seen object). Yet it is not exhibitionistic, and a strange feelng begins when its "showing" is no longer omitted. Very phenomenological approach, which makes sense in light of his frendship wth and influence from Merleau-Ponty (whom I will have to read at some point). The question-and-answer section draws parallels between this and the psychoanalytic relationship, in which the subject develops through this gaze relation of being seen but not seeing.
He elaborates that gaze allows one to (illusorily) see oneself seeing oneself due to its inside-out structure. And yet the gaze remains elusive, it disappears, which I suppose is part of Lacan's lack-based theorization.
A bit opaque is his description of being looked at by "that which is light", by which a picture is painted in his eye, although this I take as that even perception requires that there is something beyond me which is interactive with me. It does allow him to say: The picture, certainly, is in my eye. But I am not in the picture.
The only way to enter into a picture is by being fixed as a "stain", which, however, is something of a trap. That much does make sense. To have a place, enact a sort of realization, is a certain stopping of oneself.
According to Lacan, the painter does not want to be regarded like the actor does, and offers something to be looked at which requires a setting down of the gaze. Tentatively, I will agree, although it is not something to which I have given much thought before. Of course, he then clarifies this by adding that this is entirely untrue for expressionism, which does satisfy the gaze, and I now find myself completely lost (vaguely I know of expressionism, but am lacking (hah!) in knowledge of art history and aesthetic theory to properly understand).
This other thing is the petit a, around which there revolves a combat of which trompe-l'œil is the soul.
Painting pretends to be what it is not, which is its lure; one wants to know what is behind it. One wants what is behind it to be a fixed object. (The best art, in my opinion, is art which refuses to be fixed in this manner).
Pictures also function, socially and rleigiously, to summon the gaze of what is depicted; the gaze of God, the gaze of heros in battle. This makes interesting films such as Crash, which certainly do subject the viewer to their gaze, but refuse to look at them. At several moments the characters almost look into the eyes of camera-as-Ballard, but never quite. I think something in this particularly lends itself to this, that the eye carries with it the fatal function of being in itself endowed—if you will allow me to play on several registers at once—with a power to separate.