Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and Negativity Materialized
FREUD AND THE NEGATIVE: A DYSFUNCTIONAL PRINCIPLE ALONE
Freud’s 1920 book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, despite being one of the most closely scrutinized portions of his picked-over corpus, contains a relatively neglected theoretical shift that has major philosophical repercussions. Of course, everyone familiar with Freud knows that this is a transitional text; it’s common knowledge that he here ushers in a fundamentally revised version of libidinal dualism, replacing prior oppositions such as sexual and self-preservative tendencies with the novel foundational distinction between Eros and the Todestrieb. This shift to a new dual-drive model involving the infamous death drive tends to be identified as the primary metapsychological significance of this particular piece of the Freudian oeuvre.
Jonathan Lear enjoys the merit of being one of the few thinkers engaging with Freud to have pointed in the direction of another 1920 change of enormous, sweeping import, obfuscated by an excessive focus on the different versions of the Todestrieb (or, at least, the widely accepted exegetical renditions of this fuzzy, multivalent concept-term designating a far-from-coherent cluster of various notions). Lear criticizes Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle for its hypostatization of the failures of the pleasure principle to assert itself as the dominant rule-like tendency of mental life. More specifically, he argues that certain Freudian formulations apropos the death drive illegitimately posit a second, deeper principle distinct from the pleasure principle to speciously explain how and why the pursuit of satisfaction and well-being goes awry.1 As Lear summarizes his critique, “what lies ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ isn’t another principle, but a lack of principle.”2 What the pre-1920 Freud treats as an unbreakable law governing the psyche proves to be susceptible to disruption, even self-subversion. There is just the dysfunctional pleasure principle and nothing more.
Lear’s criticism is justified: Freud indeed repeatedly succumbs to the temptation to elide the nonteleological negativity of the pleasure principle’s malfunctioning by transforming these glitches and short-circuits into evidence of another principled teleology, that is, the positive content of a shadowy, hidden undercurrent following its own distinct aims and purposes in ways that pull away from the directions normally pursued for the sake of gratifying contentment. But, as Lear might be willing to grant, despite engaging in this sort of hypostatization, Freud acknowledges and describes, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the phenomenon of the pleasure principle’s own dynamics and mechanisms leading to its autointerruption. With regard to the repetition compulsions tormenting his traumatized patients, he hypothesizes that these sufferers’ recurrent mnemic revisitations of their traumas result from psychical functions working in the service of the pleasure principle. Through repetition, this principle struggles to tame and domesticate experiences of overwhelming pain, to inscribe the unsettling traces of these experiences within the economy of calm, homeostatic equilibrium characterizing tolerable psychical existence. But, the whole pathological problem is that this tactic doesn’t work. Reliving the nightmares of traumas again and again doesn’t end up gradually dissipating (or, as Freud himself would put it, “abreacting” or “working-through”) the horrible, terrifying maelstrom of negative affects they arouse. Instead, the preparatory labors of repetition dictated by the pleasure principle have the effect of repeatedly retraumatizing the psyche caught in looping movements supposedly preparing for the reestablishment of this same principle’s disrupted dominance. Obviously, this strategy for coping with trauma is a failing one. And yet, the psyche gets stuck stubbornly pursuing it nonetheless, not managing to sensibly and adaptively abandon this vain Sisyphean activity in favor of other more promising maneuvers.3
In line with Lear’s perspective, one reasonably could conclude that the pleasure principle is not sufficiently clever or strong enough to do better. As a mental legislator, it possesses relatively limited powers. And it has no more powerful Other standing behind it as a secret, profound metalaw steering things when its feeble regime is in default and disarray. These implications of the 1920 dethroning of the pleasure principle as the invariantly operative fundamental inclination of mental life are often overlooked by those seduced by Freud’s musings about a mysterious, enigmatic drive-toward-death.
Apart from this overlooked feature, Beyond the Pleasure Principle also manifests a certain pervasive Freudian penchant widely lamented by his readers, especially those approaching him through the interpretive lenses of Continental European psychoanalytic and philosophical orientations. Specifically, Freud therein and elsewhere indulges in a biologistic naturalism (in keeping with his long-standing ambitions for and anticipations of a scientific grounding of analytic theory) as part of his speculations concerning the Todestrieb; with reference to, among others, the pre-Socratic Greek thinker Empedocles, he wonders aloud about a cosmic clash between the forces of life and death saturating all layers and levels of material being.4 For those whose views of psychoanalysis are shaped by their understandings of French styles of metapsychological theorizing, the purported primacy of language and all of the social, cultural, and historical mediation it entails ostensibly require dismissing Freud’s appeals to the natural sciences as a self-misunderstanding on his part—an erroneous conception of his own endeavors, perhaps indicative of the insecurities of a groundbreaking explorer of uncharted territory occasionally succumbing to the anxiety-prompted urge to cling to old cognitive maps (in this case, nineteenth-century positivist scientism) for the sake of some kind of reassurance.
For such antinaturalist readers, the “good Freud” of the signifier must be saved from the “bad Freud” of biology. The basis for this splitting into two Freuds already can be seen in Freud’s work as early as 1893. That year, in his paper “Some Points for a Comparative Study of Organic and Hysterical Motor Paralyses,” Freud distinguishes between the body examined by somatic medicine (i.e., the organic matter of living flesh) and an ethereal double of the body cobbled together out of impressions and ideas (i.e., the body as it exists within psychical reality in the form of ideational representations [Vorstellungen]). This latter body, constituted out of a mix of images, concepts, and symbols, shows itself (exemplarily through psychosomatic conversion symptoms) to be capable of perturbing the former body. However, the signifier-shaped body image isn’t in the least constrained to being a faithful reflection of physiological reality.5 In the eyes of many, one of the accomplishments of Lacan’s “return to Freud” is, as it were, the killing off of the first of these two bodies (i.e., the body of natural materiality), effectuated through both stressing the autonomy possessed by the body of Vorstellungen as well as correlatively erasing, within the theory and practice of analysis, the presence of the corporeal substance of interest to the life sciences.
And yet, not only, as will be seen here, is this construal of Lacan’s relation to the topic of embodiment wrong in several important respects—one ought to take note of an all-too-often unnoticed baby thrown out with the proverbial bathwater in any and every antinaturalist disavowal (be it Lacanian in inspiration or otherwise) of Freud’s naturalizing gestures and frequent references to biology and related fields. To cut a long story short, the Freudian naturalization of the psyche’s conflict-ridden libidinal economy entails, so to speak, a corresponding transformative denaturalization of nature itself—in other words, a defamiliarizing alteration of the protoconceptual pictures and metaphors informing what nature is taken to be in both quotidian and scientific senses.6 That is to say, psychoanalytic naturalism, instead of being summarily written off as an anachronistic aberration, a compromised ideological concession, or an outright category mistake, can and should be employed as a Trojan horse introducing into the core of the sciences considerations forcing a serious reconsideration of the very materiality of human corporeality.
To be quite specific, combining the neglected aspect of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (i.e., the shift from a strong to a weak pleasure principle, as arguably distinct from the shift to another dual-drive model involving the death drive) with its rejected aspect (i.e., Freud’s anchoring of his hypotheses and speculations in biomaterial nature itself) has the startling consequence of pointing to a somewhat counterintuitive notion: Nature itself is weak, vulnerable to breakdowns and failures in its functions.7 This challenges the intuitive notion of it as being an almighty monistic nexus of seamlessly connected elements controlled by inviolable laws of efficient causality. In such a vision of the material universe, human nature can be imagined only as an overdetermined subcomponent of a macrocosmic web of entities exhaustively integrated through causal relations. By contrast, a nature permitting and giving rise to, for example, beings guided by dysfunctional operating programs not up to the task of providing constant, steady guidance doesn’t correspond to the fantasy of a quasidivine cosmic substance as a puppet master from whose determinative grasp nothing whatsoever, including forms of psychical subjectivity reduced to the status of residual epiphenomena, escapes. Apart from psychoanalysis, a veritable avalanche of current research in genetics and the neurosciences reveals the brains and bodies of humans to be open qua massively underdetermined by preestablished codes.8
Francisco Varela and some of his collaborators (Humberto Maturana, Evan Thomson, and Eleanor Rosch), apropos the utterly aleatory status of evolutionary systems, maintain that, with respect to evolution, a change in thinking is needed “from the idea that what is not allowed is forbidden to the idea that what is not forbidden is allowed.”9 Put differently, biomaterial nature establishes a relatively small number of limiting parameters for living beings, but it hardly functions as an iron-fisted dictator issuing micromanaging commandments bearing down upon each and every of the smallest details of life. In this vein, Varela and company describe the ontogenetic and phylogenetic unfolding of organic existences as bricolage-like processes of “satisficing,” namely, as meandering trajectories of “drifting” in which the bare-minimum requirement of “good enough to survive, long enough to reproduce” permits a great deal of things, other than what is evolutionarily advantageous (i.e., for things “suboptimal” vis-à-vis evolution), to emerge and flourish.10 Evolution neither produces nor forces the production of what would be evolutionarily optimal; it may even permit the persistence of highly dysfunctional loopholes in the circuitry of organisms (such as Freud’s malfunctioning pleasure principle), so long as these organisms aggregately function in a manner sufficient to propagate their genetic material. Consequently, these authors claim, on the basis of the preceding observations, that “much of what an organism looks like and is ‘about’ is completely underdetermined by the constraints of survival and reproduction.”11 This underdetermination, unacknowledged by those who unjustifiably fear that the inevitable price to be paid for forays into the life sciences is selling one’s psychoanalytic-philosophical soul to a reductionist devil, is precisely what is at stake in the long-overdue transition from the image of nature as strong (qua overdetermining) to one in which it figures as weak.
Moreover, positing the corporeality of this weak nature, this fragile matter of error-prone contingency and complexity, as the minimal, ground-zero foundation for a materialist metapsychology, involves a renewed fidelity to the ontological implications of German idealist philosophies of nature (as elaborated primarily by Schelling and Hegel). In particular, Hegel insists, in his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, on comprehending “Substance … as Subject.”12 He clarifies, on the heels of this insistence, that such axiomatic substance-as-subject is “pure, simple negativity,”13 that is, the immanent self-sundering of incarnate being, its autointerrupting movements. An anti-antinaturalist renaturalization of select components of Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology accomplishes nothing less than putting real flesh on the bones of this Hegelian axiom. Against the tired trend of a now-misinformed and utterly outdated antinaturalism, the true materialist path to be pursued today, insofar as this path runs through the territories of psychoanalysis and several sectors of recent European philosophy, must involve resurrecting an unfamiliar incarnation of the biomaterial body to be found not only in Freud’s writings, but also within select moments in the teachings of Lacan.
LACAN’S TWO BODIES: NATURE BETWEEN THE NATURAL AND THE UNNATURAL
What sorts of bodies, if any, are acknowledged by Lacanian theory? And—this additional question is even more pressing for a contemporary materialism both informed by the natural sciences as well as interested in engaging with Lacan’s ideas—does Lacan have a brain? A certain strain of popular interpretive doxa frequently leads people to conclude that the sole type of corporeality posited by Lacanian psychoanalysis is that of a “cadaverized” or “corpsified” flesh overwritten by the lifeless, mortifying signifiers of the big Other of the symbolic order (i.e., a body analogous to that of the mind of empiricism à la Locke and Hume, namely, a passive, receptive tabula rasa merely waiting to receive exogenously imposed inscriptions). Such a conclusion is not entirely without support in particular portions of Lacan’s corpus; admittedly, especially during the height of his flirtations with structuralism in the mid-1950s, he sometimes speaks as though this body of signifiers is the only body at stake in his conceptions of analysis. But, from his early texts of the 1930s through his later pronouncements of the 1970s, Lacan never completely loses sight of other dimensions of the corporeal underlying and irreducible to Imaginary-Symbolic Vorstellungen (dimensions serving as material conditions of possibility for the body of signifiers).14 Furthermore, for several reasons that will become apparent in what follows, his frequent denunciations of biologistic naturalism shouldn’t be construed as entailing a wholesale banishment of “natural” materiality from the intertwined practical and theoretical domains of analysis. One should keep in mind that these are responses mainly to mid-twentieth-century analytic appropriations of biology, not to biology per se (and, obviously, especially not to twenty-first-century biology).
In the ensemble of concepts deployed by Lacan at various stages of his thinking, there are several obvious indications of theoretical roles being played by bits of bodily being different from the images and inscriptions constitutive of the psychical representations of the body: the “body in pieces” (corps morcelé) of the mirror stage, “need” as per the need-demand-desire triad, and specific definitions of jouissance, to list a few. Like Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Lacan’s 1949 écrit on the mirror stage has been read and reread countless times. But, surprisingly, peculiar details therein and their potential ramifications have been passed over in silence by the vast majority of commentators on this short-yet-incredibly-influential essay. Not only does Lacan invoke a number of zoological examples from the life sciences in elucidating the mirror stage (locusts, pigeons, and various primates)—like Freud, the early Lacan exhibits few qualms about borrowing liberally from these sciences15—he also directly refers to the human brain, speaking of “the central nervous system” with its “cerebral cortex” as that “which psychosurgical operations will lead us to regard as the intra-organic mirror.”16
In the mid-1990s, the neurophysiologist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues discover what they dub, in a quite serendipitous coincidence, “mirror neurons” (i.e., premotor neurons that fire both when an organism with such neurons observes another similar living being performing a given action as well as when this organism itself performs the same given action). And, despite the neuroscientists’ likely ignorance of Lacanian theory, this isn’t just an accidental linguistic link: mirror neurons can be legitimately viewed as the physiological evidence the Lacan of 1949 announces that he awaits of such phenomena as transitivism, identification, mimesis, and the pervasive dynamic through which “a gestalt may have formative effects on an organism”17 (again like Freud, Lacan voices hopes for future empirical confirmations of key psychoanalytic conjectures). Three years later, in a 1951 lecture presented to the British Psycho-Analytical Society explaining the mirror stage (entitled “Some Reflections on the Ego”), Lacan refers once more to the brain, voicing his suspicion that “the cerebral cortex functions like a mirror”;18 he then proceeds to speculate that this neural locale is “the site where the images are integrated in the libidinal relationship which is hinted at in the theory of narcissism.”19
In recent years, pioneering work by, first and foremost, philosopher Catherine Malabou and psychoanalyst François Ansermet (the latter partly in collaboration with neuroscientist Pierre Magistretti) has fleshed out the neurological configurations and operations Lacan explicitly points to as à venir scientific substantiations of some of his models and assertions. Both Malabou and Ansermet spell out the plethora of philosophical and psychoanalytic ramifications of the now-verified fact of “neuroplasticity,” a fact stating that the human brain is organized and reorganized by an open dialectical economy continually undergoing multiple oscillations between malleable flexibility and resistant fixity20 (Slavoj Žižek too, in his 2006 tome The Parallax View, likewise calls attention to the theoretical indispensability of this plasticity for a revivified dialectical materialism).21 The plastic nature of the brain makes it function as (à la Lacan) an “intra-organic mirror” simultaneously constituting and being constituted by its phenomenal and structural milieus (i.e., images, signifiers, and so on). Additionally, this connects neuroplasticity with, and adds a further twist to, the earlier discussion of underdetermination in evolution (as per Varela et al.). The brain’s plastic synapses, in a paradoxical manner Hegel certainly would appreciate, are the product of contingent evolutionary factors that necessarily determine the indeterminacy of the brain. Malabou convincingly argues that a Hegel-inspired dialectical framework is essential for, in Hegelian parlance, raising the neurosciences to the dignity of their Notions.22 This determined lack of determination results from genes preprogramming the central nervous system to be reprogrammed by epigenetic variables (i.e., by the mediating matrices of more-than-biological dimensions operative in the individual’s always-unique ontogenetic life history).23 The biomaterial substances of evolution appear to be self-sundering, reflexively negating their own causal controls and influences by giving rise to beings whose complex plasticity, epitomized by human body-brain systems, comes to escape governance by evolutionary-genetic nature alone—“the individual can be considered to be biologically determined to be free, that is, to constitute an exception to the universal that carries him.”24
Malabou and Ansermet also each draw parallels between evidence from the neurosciences and specific notions in Lacan’s metapsychology.25 (As an aside, one should note here that the Anglo-American trend known as “neuro-psychoanalysis” interfaces the neurosciences exclusively with non-Lacanian metapsychological frameworks.) Returning to Lacan in light of this work in contemporary neuroscience, other facets of his elaborations regarding the mirror stage (in both the famous 1949 écrit and the less-referenced 1951 English-language presentation) become more glaringly prominent and deserving of closer scrutiny. In 1949, Lacan, after talking about the “social dialectic” distinctive of humanity, declares that “these reflections lead me to recognize in the spatial capture manifested by the mirror stage, the effect in man, even prior to this social dialectic, of an organic inadequacy of his natural reality—assuming we can give some meaning to the word ‘nature’”26 (Lacan’s reasons for placing “nature” in quotation marks will be elucidated subsequently). In the second paragraph following this declaration, he proceeds to preface his discussion of the biological reality of human beings’ premature birth and ensuing prolonged state of helplessness once outside of the womb (this being the biology of a nature in need of nurturing). Thus, “in man … this relationship to nature is altered by a certain dehiscence at the very heart of the organism, a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of malaise and motor uncoordination of the neo-natal months.”27 For both Freud and Lacan, this physical “fetalization” has enormous psychical consequences,28 with the latter, in his 1948 écrit “Aggression in Psychoanalysis,” speaking of “neurological and humoral signs of a physiological pre-maturity at birth.”29
Lacan proposes that a flawed and conflicted biomateriality constitutive of the human organism (as a first body) both ontogenetically precedes as well as catalyzes the embracing of what come to be the Imaginary-Symbolic avatars of ego-level subjectifying identifications (as a second body) erected on the groundless ground of this natural foundation. Bodily and affective negativities (for instance, physiological prematuration and the distressing anxiety it generates) must be recognized as contingent-yet-a-priori variables inclining the human organism in the direction of subjectification in and by its enveloping intersubjective and transsubjective environs.30 Moreover, thanks to neuroplasticity—as observed, Lacan appears to anticipate its scientific discovery—the brain of this strange organism is marked and re-marked by these surrounding matrices of mediation, becoming a locus wherein the volatile material of nature and the nurture of more-than-material culture collide, creating complexities and antagonisms literally embedding themselves in and through the tangible flesh of the physical body.
In “Some Reflections on the Ego,” Lacan revisits Freud’s 1893 distinction between the two bodies involved with hysterical conversion symptoms (i.e., the organic body versus the psychical body) equipped with his account of the mirror stage. In so doing, he flatly repudiates the notion that the transbiological body of images and signifiers can be conceived of as a sociocultural construct entirely separate from and independent of biological factors; against the antinaturalist picture of embodiment in Lacanian theory as a matter of being overwritten by the nonnatural traces of the big Other, he refuses to affirm the absolute autonomy of the representational dimensions of embodiment relative to an underlying organic substratum.31 As in this 1951 lecture, Lacan, in several other places, alludes to prefigurations of Imaginary-Symbolic structures within the brute material Real.32 The body image and the signifiers shaping it don’t magically emerge ex nihilo as purely external impositions pressed upon the raw inertness of a pliable corporeal surface as a blank slate. Lacan is enough of a sober-minded materialist not to believe that the unnatural subjectivities dealt with by psychoanalysis miraculously spring into existence entirely without the consent and participation of what is usually designated, in a loose, imprecise fashion, as “nature.”
In a recently published book-length overview of Lacan’s teachings from start to finish, Lorenzo Chiesa addresses the Lacanian treatment of nature from the viewpoint of the life sciences, claiming that the fact of humans’ premature birth is the sole element of biology appropriated by Lacan over the course of his entire intellectual itinerary33 (even if true, the phenomena of fetalization, as illustrated previously, harbors multiple implications entwined with speculations pertaining to the brain’s plasticity). On Chiesa’s reading, Lacan opts for an anti-Darwinian depiction of humanity as maladapted with respect to the exigencies and pressures of evolution; Chiesa underscores how prematurely born human beings, leaning on and into the denaturalizing support networks of Imaginary-Symbolic structures available to them as compensations for their hardwired deficiencies, exhibit a “disadaptation to nature.”34 However, what about (without disagreeing with Chiesa) subtly shifting the weight of emphasis here? What if it isn’t that humans are distinctively disordered and out of joint with regard to nature, but that nature itself is disordered and out of joint? What if subjects operating in excess of the algorithms of evolution and genes are outgrowths of an inconsistent, fragmented materiality from which these same algorithms (and the brains and bodies they congeal) also arise? How must a materialist theory of denaturalized subjectivity reconceive of material nature so that the possibility of subjectivity surfacing out of substance(s) is a thinkable possibility?
Lacan’s references to organic matter are far from strictly confined to his early theories of the 1930s and 1940s. From the 1950s through the late 1970s he repeatedly speculates about “nature” along the preceding lines, namely, as a disharmonious, self-sundering Real35 (i.e., as a barred Real).36 This is the properly Hegelian-Lacanian move to make apropos the distinction between the natural and the nonnatural: what initially presents itself as an opposition between two terms external to each other turns out, upon further consideration, to be an opposition internal to one of the two terms—more precisely, the opposition between nature and antinature (as Lacan’s “antiphusis” or “contre-nature”) is internal to nature itself. Paraphrasing the Lacanian one-liner according to which “there is no Other of the Other,” there is no Nature of nature. That is to say, the barred Real of weak nature, split between itself and its internally generated countercurrents of denaturalization, is all there is, with no encompassing cosmic balance to (re-)absorb this fissuring stratification into the synthesis of a greater whole.
These rather abstract pronouncements can perhaps be concretized through a much too brief recourse to cognitive scientist Keith E. Stanovich’s interesting 2004 study The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin. Therein, Stanovich, on the basis of a combination of meme theory (à la Richard Dawkins) with a view of evolution and genetics similar to that sketched earlier, argues that a multitude of evolutionary processes have created out of themselves certain beings (i.e., humans) of such a degree of complexity (especially neural complexity) that two interlinked results occur. First, intracerebral conflicts become both possibilities and actualities in a brain shaped by a highly elaborate anatomical differentiation into a plurality of interacting constituents, constituents that aren’t entirely synchronized with each other and often push in incompatible mental or behavioral directions. Second, these intracerebral conflicts, which are the materialized products of the sedimentation in the folded matter of the human central-nervous system of various distinct periods and pressures from the history of evolution, make possible human beings’ naturally unique “rebellion” against nature qua evolutionary and genetic determinants (this amounts to an evolutionarily immanent break with evolution itself). According to Stanovich’s account, genes, in obedience to the patterns of evolution, have come to code for humans as vehicles (i.e., carriers capable of transmitting genetic material) with incredibly elaborate and flexible intelligences. From the genes’ perspective (if one can talk in this fashion for a moment), such elaborateness and flexibility—which also involves a plastic brain sensitive and responsive to a vast range of contexts and temporalities—is a form of “long-leash control,” namely, a genetic strategy of outsourcing the planning and implementation of what is required for propagating genes to the guidance of a “robot” (i.e., the human vehicle built by these genes for the sake of their own replication).
However, through a twisted turn quite familiar to aficionados of the genres of science fiction and horror, the evolutionary-genetic creators, in the case of created human beings, end up manufacturing unnatural monstrosities, creatures that escape from their control, disregard their planned purposes, and run amok in unpredictable ways.37 The hypercomplexity of human body-brain systems, attuned to and altered by rapidly changing environments of numerous types, is, from the perspective of genes as blind replicators, a double-edged sword: while enabling the execution of tactics for replication of far greater cunning and sophistication than those deployed by other living beings, humanity’s exceptional biomaterial complexity precipitates a plethora of antagonistic inconsistencies interfering with, or even disrupting, the natural dictates of evolution as conveyed via the genes.38 (What’s more, the powerful cognitive-analytic faculties of the human neurological apparatus enable it to become self-reflectively aware of its status as a robotlike vehicle for genetic replication and thereby call into question, at least in some instances, whether it desires to serve its genes’ desires.)39 These complexity-generated axes of conflict arise between a series of related variables: natural-evolutionary time and cultural-historical time, archaic pasts and unprecedented presents, as well as, on top of everything else, anticipations of multiple modes of futurity.40 (Additionally, for Stanovich, human beings’ special cognizance of various forms of temporality, apart from the immediate here and now to which other animals are riveted by naturally programmed stimulus-response repertoires, is an evolutionary adaptation helping to enable a defiance of evolutionary nature itself.)41 Humans’ plastic, multilayered brains, retaining residues of the primordial while taking on traces of newness (with the primordial sometimes being partially, although not completely, altered by this newness),42 are the embodied instantiations of these clashing temporal-material discrepancies. Stanovich partially encapsulates the upshot of all this when he says that “sometimes a person may have a brain that is, in an important sense, at war with itself.”43 Although these assertions are more involved and intricate than the early Lacan’s invocations of physiologically premature birth and neurological fetalization, how could one not construe this as a rigorous scientific specification of what is at stake in Lacanian ruminations regarding nature as self-shattering material Real?
Stanovich comments that “ironically, what from an evolutionary design point of view could be considered design defects actually make possible the robot’s rebellion.”44 Human beings and the structures of subjectivity to which they accede are byproducts of a weak nature, rebellious offspring of creators incapable of crushing this rebellion and reestablishing their undisputed authority. Or, as Malabou puts it apropos the role of plasticity in Hegel’s philosophical anthropology, “what is exemplary about man is less human-ness than his status as an insistent accident.”45 As she goes on to note, “The investigation of ‘plastic individuality’ brings out one of the fundamental aspects of the Hegelian theory of substance: the recognition of the essential status of the a posteriori”46 (more specifically, the acknowledgment of “an essence a posteriori”).47 In the spirit of Malabou’s reading of Hegel, one can claim, with respect to the lines of argumentation advanced earlier, that natural substance produces more-than-natural subjects when the material ground of being contingently gives birth to things accidental that can and do autonomize themselves apart from heteronomous determination by this same ground (being able to do so in part because of the underdetermining weakness of natural substance as a necessary-but-not-sufficient material-a-posteriori condition of possibility for the genesis of subjects immanently transcending their natural conditions). Human subjectivities are glitches and loopholes internal to an autodenaturalizing nature, Frankenstein-like creatures of material discrepancies and temporal torsions whose negativities pervade the very “stuff” of substance itself.
HOLEY SPIRIT: HEGELIAN-LACANIAN STIGMATA IN THE REAL
It ought to be admitted at this juncture that Lacan’s direct references to neurological matters are few and far between. Long after his pronouncements heralding the discovery to come of neuroplasticity articulated during the preliminary delineations of the mirror stage, Lacan, in 1967, briefly mentions the brain again. Implicitly addressing the rapport between, as it were, the word and the flesh, he depicts language as relating to the brain like a spider,48 straddling the lump of meat it catches as its prey and spinning structuring cobwebs draped over its bumpy surfaces. Lacan here seemingly repeats, with regard to the central nervous system, what many take to be the fundamental gist of his overall account of embodiment: The brain, like the rest of the body, is nothing more than the malleable recipient of inscriptions impressed upon it from the Elsewhere of the big Other, from enveloping sociosymbolic external surroundings. Of course, one could labor to reconcile this mid-1960s remark with Lacan’s characterizations of nature from both the early (1930s and 1940s) and late (1970s) phases of his theorizing, so as to mitigate against its appearing to endorse antinaturalist, even social constructivist, readings of the body in Lacanian theory. These characterizations, outlined earlier, point to his awareness of the need to envision nature differently than usual in order to explain how and why denaturalizing subjectification ever occurs to begin with.49 But, from a perspective informed by both the style and content of Hegelian philosophy, it promises to be much more interesting and productive to confront head-on and put to work such tensions and contradictions (rather than to hastily smooth over these rough patches encountered in interpreting Lacan’s elaborations of his doctrines).
As Žižek observes, Lacan is at his most Hegelian not when explicitly referring to Hegel (more often than not relying on Alexandre Kojève’s interpretations of the Phenomenology of Spirit), but, instead, in places where Hegel’s name isn’t invoked. In other words, Lacan’s Hegelianism is of an unconscious kind (with Žižek alleging that his conscious assessments of Hegel suffer from a host of inherited blind spots).50 And one of the times in Lacan’s ongoing articulations of his ideas when this is quite evident also functions as a point of condensation for conflicting, yet-to-be-resolved renditions of the interlinked problematics of the body, nature, and the Real. The time in question occurs on December 5, 1956, in the third meeting of Lacan’s fourth seminar of 1956–1957 on The Object Relation. Jacques-Alain Miller entitled this session “The Signifier and the Holy Spirit” (Le signifiant et le Saint-Esprit). What’s more, both Žižek and Chiesa refer in passing to this curiously (insofar as Lacan is an avowed atheist) entitled session in recent texts.51 It merits reexamination specifically in conjunction with the preceding considerations concerning Lacanian theory vis-à-vis the life sciences (primarily for the sake of manageable succinctness, references to Lacan’s work in what follows will be restricted exclusively to this one seminar meeting).
This session of Lacan’s fourth seminar, like so many moments in his teaching, involves a critique of other psychoanalytic schools. In particular, Lacan lambastes those analysts—he likely has in mind both ego psychologists and object-relations theorists (if not certain portions of Freud’s oeuvre too)—who appeal to a naturalistic substratum, conceived of in the vein of the biology of the time, as an ultimate underlying foundation for the psychical and libidinal phenomena handled in analyses. Echoing the quintessentially Hegelian quip that the notion of concreteness apart from abstraction is itself the height of abstraction—concrete quotidian reality is saturated with the materially efficacious effects of supposedly abstract categories and concepts—Lacan berates the “material reality” of analytic biologism as a “mythical notion.”52 There are epistemological and ontological levels to this critique. At the epistemological level, Lacanian theory generally highlights, in a somewhat Kantian manner, the limits of possible experience in psychoanalysis. The practicing clinician as well as the metapsychological theoretician is able to know the Real—at this time in Lacan’s thinking, this register frequently includes the idea of naked matter an sich in its asubjective objectivity—solely through the mediating frameworks of Imaginary-Symbolic reality. The Real is “impossible” qua epistemologically unavailable. Therefore, references to a substantial biomaterial base as a ground beneath the images and signifiers available to the theory and practice of analytic thought can be only mythlike fictions and illusions projected beyond the proper boundaries of analysis, rather than legitimate and legitimizing scientific corroborations.
But, instead of consistently sticking to a Kantian-style critique at the level of epistemology alone in criticizing other analysts’ attempts to appropriate the authoritative aura of the natural sciences, Lacan quickly traverses a path parallel to those paths leading from Kant to Hegel. To be more exact, as with Hegel’s ontologization of what Kantian transcendental idealism treats as deontologized epistemological topics, Lacan transforms what at first presents itself as a barrier or impediment to comprehending the essence of nature in and of itself into the basis for transubstantiating the very being of this material ground. Put differently, instead of simply denying other analysts theoretical and practical access to the noumenal Real of a substantial natural substratum by insisting on the constraints imposed upon them by their total immersion in a phenomenal reality of images and signifiers, Lacan performs the Hegelian gesture of insisting that this Real is dialectically entangled with and affected by reality. The ostensibly natural Real is always-already partially denaturalized through having been infiltrated and perforated by (in Hegelian parlance) the “objective spirit” of sociohistorical symbolic orders. Lacan’s famous metaphor for the id of the hydroelectric dam (referenced in several discussions of his engagement with Freud’s science-inspired energetics)53 precisely illustrates this point as regards the Real qua corporeal nature. He introduces this metaphor immediately after dismissing the material reality of non-Lacanian psychoanalytic orientations as mythical.54
Lacan protests that he doesn’t deny the existence of something before or prior to the advent of the “I” (Je), the emergence of the parlêtre ensconced in Imaginary-Symbolic reality. In other words, he can be heard as cautioning that his teachings shouldn’t be interpreted as an idealist/antimaterialist doctrine in which everything is collapsed into the inescapable enclosure of the representational spheres of selfhood and subjectification. Lacan proclaims that the anterior thing (preceding the “I”) whose being he indeed acknowledges is none other than the id/it (ça).55 Freud’s Es (id/it), not to be confused and conflated with the unconscious (das Unbewusste), is one of the concepts in Freudian metapsychology most closely associated with quasinatural soma, with the tangible physical body. As the seat of the drives, the reservoir of drive sources whose workings are described as the energetic dynamism of an embodied libidinal economy, the Es of Freud’s second topography (fully inaugurated with the publication of The Ego and the Id in 1923) might appear to be a notion through which the later Freud reverts to positing crude animalistic instinctual tendencies as the ultimate base of a human nature reduced to the nature of an unsophisticated naturalism. But, as explained previously, the naturalized Freudian id in and of itself, as a conflict-ridden vortex of elements in tension, pulls away from nature qua integrated, organic harmony; Lacan, through his metaphor of the hydroelectric dam, seeks to demonstrate that the id’s energies cannot be conceived of save for as inextricably bound up with and modulated by the signifiers of the big Other (an assertion relying on the implicit assumption of the “natural” id’s plasticity in relation to denaturalizing sociosymbolic mediation).
The real materiality of water doesn’t become hydroelectric energy per se until this moving matter is channeled through special sets of structures built at the behest of conceptually guided interests entwined with the economic, social, or political practices of humans and their histories (i.e., structures bringing to bear unnatural frameworks upon this matter). Thus, Lacan maintains that there is a world of difference between “energy” and “natural reality.”56 Energy is produced through the calculation of this presupposed reality, namely, through diverting this material substance into the defiles of signifiers and everything connected with them (such as the equations of the natural sciences and technological implements of registration and storage).57 Departing from Freud’s comparison of the libido (as the energy of the id) to an ever-flowing liquid continually diverted through elaborate labyrinths of pipes58 (an image that resembles of a dam), Lacan mobilizes these threads of thought spun out from this metaphor to argue against any sort of vitalist conception of the id. He contends that “there is nothing less fastened to a material support than the notion of libido in analysis.”59
Instead, the Lacanian id, at least at this moment in 1956, is the “It” that becomes the “I” of the speaking subject, along the lines of Lacan’s repeatedly explained and exegetically crucial (re-)translation of Freud’s “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (i.e., this statement isn’t, as per Anglo-American interpretive translations, a prescriptive injunction demanding that the agency of the ego must come to dislodge and master the unruliness of a wild, untamed id, but rather a descriptive statement according to which first-person subjectivity is an outgrowth of third-person inter/transsubjective structures preceding its genesis). Additionally, this Es that becomes the “S” of the subject-as-$ is, in its protosubjective being, already organized in fashions akin to sociosymbolic signifying configurations.60 Right at this point in his discourse, Lacan links the hydroelectric dam of the id, the prefabricated factory of the Es producing its subject-effects, with the Holy Spirit, claiming that such a Saint-Esprit is the agency responsible for constructing this apparatus.61 What is this mysterious Lacanian Geist? He explains that “the Holy Spirit is the entrance of the signifier into the world.”62
Why does Lacan, an adamant atheist, appeal to the notion of the Holy Spirit in describing the inaugural advent of signifying structures, of the big Others of symbolic orders, in the midst of being? Again making reference to the metaphor of the dam, he argues that analytic experience, as rooted in a specific form of practice (itself shaped by the framework of a particular theory), necessarily assumes the effective operation of an already-existent “factory,”63 namely, the id/it, not as the vital flux of an animalistic-organic libido, but as a self-organizing set of consciously “misunderstood” or “impenetrable” (incompris) signifiers-in-the-Real automatically functioning according to the dynamics of their own autonomous logics.64 Lacan’s remarks at this point indicate that, for him, the origins of language, as those events in history (whether phylogenetic or, in the case of an individual’s acquisition of language, ontogenetic) when signifiers first appear on the scene, are unknowable. For a knowledge (be it that of an analyst, analysand, or anyone else) thoroughly immersed in and made possible by linguistic structures, the genesis of these structures, their emergence against the backdrop of a presignifying state of being (as an extralinguistic outside), must be nothing more than a mythical moment rendered through confabulations internal to a given symbolic Other.65 Hence, a theological rather than a scientific discourse seems appropriate here: insofar as the advent of (in Hegelese) the objective Geist of the symbolic order is cognitively inaccessible and incomprehensible for those participating in this same order, its elusive mysteriousness brings it into resonant proximity with what is evoked by the holiness associated with the signifying textures of certain religious rituals and communities. Moreover, given that the individual parlêtre, the speaking subject of the signifier, isn’t the one responsible for creating the symbolic orders to which he or she is subjected, such Others must be related to a power of creation beyond subjectivity.66
But, capitalizing on the fortuitous homophony in English between “holy” and “holey” (of course, this doesn’t work in French), maybe there’s a “holey-ness” at stake in this same session of the fourth seminar that cuts against the grain of what sounds like Lacan’s somewhat Kantian emphasis on the impossibility of knowing anything beyond the limits of Imaginary-Symbolic reality (save for through indirect ideational renditions of a regulative, quasireligious sort). Going back through this 1956 seminar session a second time reveals that what Lacan initially appears to depict as obstacles blocking epistemological access to a natural Real in itself actually are ontological facets of this very Real. Prior to having holes bored in it by the impacts of signifiers (by language introducing nothingness, nonexistence, and so on into being), the Real of nature already is holey, riddled with negativities propelling it into the denaturalizing arms of Symbolic Otherness.
Twice during this session of the fourth seminar, Lacan insists, as he does elsewhere in his teachings, that the pre–Symbolic Real prefigures the Symbolic. First, speaking of his hydroelectric dam, he proposes that aspects of material nature present themselves in ways foretelling and leading to their uptake into the machinery of human activities as occurring in and through symbolic orders.67 (The second instance of this insistence involves Lacan describing the biomateriality of the human body as exhibiting aspects simultaneously heralding the yet-to-come arrival of specific signifiers as well as being retroactively altered through linking up with these signifiers once they arrive.)68 When subsequently discussing the id/it in terms of the dam metaphor, he is careful to use the word “like” (comme)—“le Es est déjà organisé, articulé, comme est organisé, articulé, le signifiant.”69 It isn’t that the id/it is itself identical to the signifying chains that come to structure it once its plastic nature is denaturalized by the mortifying effects of cadaverization/corpsification brought about by the deeply penetrating infusion of signifiers into the rock-bottom material foundations of the libidinal economy. (Lacan compares the entry of signifiers as the Holy Spirit to Freud’s death drive to the extent that mere, bare life is thereby interrupted through the introduction within it of various literal and non-literal senses of “death.”)70 Obviously, to posit this transfiguring transformation of the Es is to engage in an ontological level of analysis (rather than an epistemological reflection on the essentially unknowable nature of this id/it). However, through the déjà in addition to the comme here, Lacan indicates that there’s a further underlying dimension to this ontological analysis: the materiality of the natural Real, before “the entrance of the signifier into the world” (i.e., the Lacanian Saint-Esprit), prepares the way for this entrance.
In fact, were it not for the material Real being previously arranged in constellations resembling subsequent signifying structures—which amounts to insinuating that nature itself is a delicate, fragile tissue of mutually interconnected bundles of relations vulnerable and open to incalculable changes over time (i.e., a weak nature)—the Otherness of Symbolic Spirit might not emerge and take hold in the first place (in his later speculations on nature from the 1970s, Lacan hints at this exact axiomatic proposition). The already-there, signifier-like Real is alleged to lack any “pre-established harmony.”71 In other words, there is no strong Nature qua synthesized, synchronized cosmos, a virile sphere both impenetrably closed in upon itself and able to exert an unwavering control keeping everything within its deterministic jurisdiction. If, as Lacan indicates, his “Holy Spirit is the very opposite of the notion of nature,”72 it’s opposed specifically to this protoconceptual image of it as strong rather than weak. By reading him as a Hegelian-style materialist (and not a Kantian-style idealist) in this context, one cannot construe Lacan as maintaining merely that the id-level material Real of human being is denaturalized by the external imposition of the signifiers of the symbolic order as arising from God knows where beyond the material Real. Instead, he must be understood as asserting that the denaturalizing negativity of Geist, as the Other of nature, is nonetheless immanent to disharmonious nature itself, originating out of the internally induced autodisruptions of a self-sundering biomateriality thereafter receptive to dialectically reciprocal modifications by this thus-generated more-than-natural Otherness.
The Hegelian philosophical rendition of Christianity can sound as though it proposes that the body of Christ is the point of convergence for the human and the divine merging in the form of an embodied spirituality. Christ is here a “concrete universal” in which the external opposites of the natural and the supernatural are sublated, intersecting in a material incarnation of something transcending what is material. Heaven comes down to earth as eternity walking and talking in, through, and amongst mortal flesh. By contrast, a materialism combining Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis with certain contemporary sciences of nature turns this religious figure on its head: unlike the body of Christ, the body of this new materialism is the point of divergence (not convergence) between the material and the more-than-material, the lone immanent ground from which the dichotomies put in relation to each other by Christianity originally arise. There is only a weak nature as the sole creator, and all things spiritual are its monstrous progeny: out-of-control specters whose very existences bear witness to this impotent creator’s lack of absolute authority.73
NOTES
1. Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 80–81, 84–85.
2. Ibid., p. 85.
3. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: The Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), vol. 18, pp. 23, 32. Hereafter abbreviated SE followed by volume and page numbers.
4. SE 18:36, 37–38, 38–39, 40–41, 60–61, 258–259; SE 19:40–41; SE 21:118–119, 122; SE 22:210–211; SE 23:148–149, 197–198, 243, 245–246, 246–247.
5. SE 1:169, 170–171.
6. Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2008), p. 241; Adrian Johnston, “Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian Reformation: Giving a Hearing to The Parallax View,” Diacritics 27, no. 1 (2007): 3–20.
7. Adrian Johnston, “Conflicted Matter: Jacques Lacan and the Challenge of Secularizing Materialism,” Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 19 (2008): 177–182.
8. Adrian Johnston, “What Matter(s) in Ontology: Alain Badiou, the Hebb-Event, and Materialism Split from Within,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 13, no. 3 (2008): 28–44; Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, pp. 203–204, 204–205, 277–278; Johnston, “Conflicted Matter”; Adrian Johnston, “Lightening Ontology: Slavoj Žižek and the Unbearable Lightness of Being Free,” Lacanian Ink: The Symptom 8 (2007), http://www.lacan.com/symptom8._articles/johnston8.html; Catherine Malabou, La plasticité au soir de l’écriture: Dialectique, destruction, deconstruction (Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2005), p. 112; Catherine Malabou, Que faire de notre cerveau? (Paris: Bayard, 2004), pp. 21, 31–32; Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Viking, 2003), pp. 90–91, 93; Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (New York: Penguin, 2002), pp. 8–9; François Ansermet, “Des neurosciences aux logosciences,” in Qui sont vos psychanalystes? ed. Nathalie Georges, Jacques-Alain Miller, and Nathalie Marchaison (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), pp. 377–378, 383.
9. Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 195.
10. Ibid., pp. 196, 205; Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Boston: New Science Library, 1987), pp. 115, 117.
11. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, Embodied Mind, p. 196.
12. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), §17, p. 10.
13. Ibid., §18, p. 10.
14. Adrian Johnston, “Ghosts of Substance Past: Schelling, Lacan, and the Denaturalization of Nature,” in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2006), pp. 34–35, 36–37; Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, pp. 271–272, 272–273.
15. David Macey, Lacan in Contexts (London: Verso, 1988), p. 99; Shuli Barzilai, Lacan and the Matter of Origins (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 78–79.
16. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 78.
17. Ibid., p. 77.
18. Jacques Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34 (1953): 13.
19. Ibid., p. 13.
20. Malabou, Que faire de notre cerveau? pp. 13–14, 15–16, 17, 29–30, 40, 65–66, 145–146; Malabou, Plasticité au soir de l’écriture, pp. 110–111; Catherine Malabou, Les nouveaux blessés: De Freud à la neurologie, penser les traumatismes contemporains (Paris: Bayard, 2007), pp. 52–53; François Ansermet and Pierre Magistretti, Biology of Freedom: Neural Plasticity, Experience, and the Unconscious, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2007), pp. xiii–xiv, 6–7.
21. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 6–7, 29, 79, 166, 197, 208–209, 210–211, 213–214; Johnston, “Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian Reformation”; Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, pp. 203–204.
22. Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 192–193; Malabou, Que faire de notre cerveau? pp. 161–162, 162–163.
23. Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, pp. xvi, 8, 21, 70; Eric R. Kandel, “Psychotherapy and the Single Synapse: The Impact of Psychiatric Thought on Neurobiologic Research,” in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of Mind (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2005), p. 21; Eric R. Kandel, “A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry,” in ibid., pp. 42–43, 47; Eric R. Kandel, “From Metapsychology to Molecular Biology: Explorations Into the Nature of Anxiety,” in ibid., p. 150; Jean-Pierre Changeux, The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 32; Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt, 2003), pp. 162–163, 164, 173–174.
24. Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, p. 10.
25. Malabou, Nouveaux blessés, pp. 341–342; Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, p. 13.
26. Lacan, “Mirror Stage as Formative,” p. 77.
27. Ibid., p. 78.
28. SE 1:318; SE 20:154–155, 167; SE 21:17–19, 30; Jacques Lacan, “Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu: Essai d’analyse d’une fonction en psychologie,” in Autres écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), pp. 33–34; Lacan, “Mirror Stage as Formative,” p. 78; Dany Nobus, “Life and Death in the Glass: A New Look at the Mirror Stage,” in Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, ed. Dany Nobus (New York: Other Press, 1998), pp. 108–109.
29. Jacques Lacan, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits, p. 92.
30. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, book 8, Le transfert, 1960–1961, 2nd corrected ed., ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), p. 410.
31. Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego,” p. 13.
32. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 2, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 306; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), pp. 168–169.
33. Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), p. 17.
34. Ibid., pp. 7, 17–18, 137, 196.
35. Jacques Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” in Écrits, p. 514; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 17, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969–1970, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2007), p. 33; Jacques Lacan, “Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan,” book 21, “Les non-dupes errent, 1973–1974” (typescript), session of May 21, 1974; Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, book 23, Le sinthome, 1975–1976, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005), p. 12; Jacques Lacan, “Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan,” book 24, “L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue, s’aile à mourre, 1976–1977” (typescript), sessions of April 19 and May 17, 1977.
36. Adrian Johnston, “Against Embodiment: The Material Ground of the Immaterial Subject,” Journal for Lacanian Studies 2, no. 2 (2004): 250–251; Johnston, “Ghosts of Substance Past,” pp. 36, 46, 49–50; Johnston, “Lightening Ontology”; Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, pp. 65, 170–171, 272–273; Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness, p. 123.
37. Keith E. Stanovich, The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. xii.
38. Ibid., pp. 12, 13, 20–21, 21–22, 67, 247.
39. Ibid., pp. 15, 16, 20, 25, 28, 142.
40. Ibid., pp. 60, 122, 186–187.
41. Ibid., pp. 83–84.
42. Ibid., pp. 66–67.
43. Ibid., p. 53.
44. Ibid., p. 82.
45. Malabou, Future of Hegel, p. 73.
46. Ibid., p. 74.
47. Ibid.
48. Jacques Lacan, “Place, origine et fin de mon enseignement,” in Mon enseignement, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005), p. 46.
49. Johnston, “Ghosts of Substance Past,” p. 35; Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, p. 272.
50. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 128; Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 94–95; Slavoj Žižek, “Lacan—At What Point Is He Hegelian?” trans. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, in Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 28–29.
51. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 9–10; Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness, pp. 127–128, 128–129, 218.
52. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, book 4, La relation d’objet, 1956–1957, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994), p. 43.
53. Richard Boothby, Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 62; Adrian Johnston, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005), pp. 197–198; Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness, pp. 127–128, 128–129, 218.
54. Lacan, Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, book 4, p. 43.
55. Ibid., p. 44.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. SE 7:170.
59. Lacan, Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, book 4, p. 45.
60. Ibid., p. 46.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., p. 48.
63. Ibid., p. 50.
64. Ibid., p. 49.
65. Ibid., p. 50.
66. Ibid., p. 56.
67. Ibid., p. 44.
68. Ibid., p. 51.
69. Ibid., p. 46.
70. Ibid., p. 48.
71. Ibid., p. 49.
72. Ibid., p. 50.
73. Johnston, “Conflicted Matter.”