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A master of paradox, Lacan liked to think himself the spokesman for a veritable recasting of psychoanalytical doctrine, which I have termed an orthodox sublation of Freudianism. Sublation – Aufhebung in German – because it involved a revolutionary gesture; orthodox, because Lacan claimed to find in Freud’s text, in what he called ‘The Thing’, the essence of this renovation: ‘At the same time return signifies a renewal starting from the foundations’; ‘the meaning of a return to Freud is a return to the meaning of Freud’. In 1956, during the celebration of the centenary of Freud’s birth, thinking against himself and his orthodoxy, Lacan even went so far as to declare that the centenary of a birth ‘presupposes that the work is a continuation of the man who is its survival’.
Freud employed this noun (das Ding, The Thing) to refer to an irreducible kernel, an original experience, inaccessible to the subject, an unspeakable trace it could not name and in which it did not discern any object. For his successors – in particular, Melanie Klein – who were more interested in object relations than the singular relationship between subject and object, this thing resembled the archaic body of the mother, everything which modern clinicians in our depressive societies call attachment or bond, or lost attachment (or broken bond), or again, possible and impossible separation, producing (or failing to produce) ‘resilience’ – an overused term today.
The unnameable, then, the one found in the novels of Samuel Beckett and all the contemporary literature fascinated by abjection, filth, crime, autobiographical pathos, and direct plagiarism (without literary metamorphosis) of the life of others. ‘The Thing’ is the prehistoric, mute object buried in an abyss of destruction. In searching for its absent trace, people steal, ransack, reproduce a real that is more realistic than reality. They construct narratives on the basis of texts by internet users collected on the Web. A collage of things seen and said. As I have said, the whole of modern literature is infused with the perverted experience of this post-Freudian, post-Lacanian psychoanalysis: narrative transformed into sexual exhibitionism, the novel in the clutches of therapy or the presentation of cases, spectacularization of transgressive bodies,1 pornographic language.
Lacan transformed ‘The Thing’ into a pure lack, a jouissance, through which the subject fuses with the object: paradise lost, the body reduced to its excrement, as de Sade exhibits it in The 120 Days of Sodom – a text in which Lacan delighted. Voice, gaze, mirror, hole, female genitals disguised as a crocodile’s mouth, fragments of Joyce: such was the thing (la chose). Under Lacan’s pen, it was subject to all sorts of metamorphoses – achose, hachose, Achose, achosique – where the privative ‘a-’ indicates that it is distinguished by its gap or hole, or the ‘h’ by its decapitation: the head severed with an axe (hache). Consequently, for Lacan the ‘Freudian thing’ was also an impenetrable secret – secret of being – whose form he took from Heidegger.
Much more so, however, the thing was the riddle, the Sphinx, the beast that kills, the truth that emerges from Freud’s mouth to take ‘the said beast by the horns’.2 Once again we find the animal metaphors so dear to Lacan: something in between Max Ernst and La Fontaine.
According to Lacan, the thing (to summarize) furnished the ontological foundations of Freudian humanism – a humanism referred to as ‘inhuman’. Lacan took up the critique of humanism peculiar to the whole generation of post-Auschwitz thinkers: the nonhuman is an integral part of humanity. For, even if he did not cite them, Lacan was familiar with Adorno’s texts, especially Dialectic of Enlightenment. As a result, he summoned his listeners not to a return to the essence of European soil, or to the theme of a Heideggerian forgetting of roots, but to reclamation of an era prior to nation-states – the seventeenth century, which he loved so much: the century of Baltasar Gracián or La Rochefoucauld. Ultimately, Lacan rose up against America which, he said, had betrayed Freud’s message from old Europe.
And that is why, during a talk given in Vienna in 1955 very close to Freud’s house, he invented the decidedly French, highly surrealist idea – one thinks of Antonin Artaud – that Freud’s invention was comparable to an epidemic liable to overthrow the power of the norm, hygiene and social order: the plague. Europe against America:
Thus Freud’s comment to Jung (I have it from Jung’s own mouth) – when, having been invited by Clark University, they arrived in view of New York Harbor and of the famous statue illuminating the universe, ‘They don’t realize we’re bringing them the plague’ – was turned against him as punishment for the hubris whose antiphrasis and darkness do not extinguish its turbid brilliance. To catch its author in her trap, Nemesis had merely to take him at his word. We would be justified in fearing that Nemesis added a first-class ticket home.3
I have been able to establish that Freud never uttered this sentence and that Jung had never spoken to anyone of this story about a plague. On his arrival in the United States in 1909, with Jung and Ferenczi, Freud had simply remarked: ‘They will be surprised when they know what we have to say.’
Thus, in the mid-twentieth century Lacan managed to endow a sentence with mythical value, to the point where in France everyone is convinced that Freud actually uttered it. In truth, for all Lacanians and French people these words have become the founding myth of a subversive representation of Freudian theory, which conforms perfectly to one aspect of the French exception. France is in fact the only country in the world where, via the surrealists and Lacan’s teaching, Freud’s doctrine has been viewed as subversive and equated with an epidemic comparable to that represented by the 1789 Revolution.
Constructed as a trompe l’oeil object, with arabesques and contortions, that sentence illustrates Lacan’s conception of ‘The Thing’. A secret code for initiates, it gives it to be understood that those who wish to join the circle of the renovators of Freudianism must don the armour of soldiers of the new epidemic.
Like some Aramis admirer of Fouquet, Lacan gladly addressed his listeners in the manner of a Jesuit general challenging the imperial powers. Imprecator or liberator, in his words and frenzy of knots and plaits he combined the obscurity of the German Aufklärung with the clarity of the French Lumières. And he cast Freud as a sort of Prometheus capable of defying both the Puritans of the New World and the goddess of Reason and Liberty, ‘the famous statue illuminating the universe’. America, he was saying in substance, had turned Freud’s doctrine into the opposite of what it really was: an ideology of happiness in the service of free enterprise, which could only be subverted by a new plague.
Unlike Freud – loyal to his Jewishness, but unfaithful to Judaism and hostile to every religion – Lacan, likewise an atheist, remained attached to the clerical institution, which he regarded as a political force, and to the idea that Christianity, and still more Catholicism, was the only genuine religion on account of its doctrine of incarnation. And he brandished it, like a European banner, against Freudian, puritan and pragmatic America.
Thus, in 1953 he wanted to persuade the pope that his theory of an unconscious submerged in language – not in the cerebral cortex – could touch the faithful without harming them.4 In fact, convinced that religion would end up triumphing over everything, including science, he allocated psychoanalysis – a rational discipline – the role of concerning itself with the real – that is, what eludes any symbolization, in short, the heterogeneous aspects of the malaise of civilization: ‘The Thing’, always the thing … The lesson is valid for our age, divided as it is between a desire for fundamentalism and an unlimited quest for jouissance of which contemporary literature – sexological, self-fictional and cannibalistic – is doubtless one of the principal signs.
1. These themes can be found in the writings of Slavoj Žižek. Cf. Vincent Kaufmann, La Faute à Mallarmé, Paris, Seuil, 2011.
2. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, New York, Norton, 2007, p. 340.
3. Ibid., p. 336.
4. He wrote a letter along these lines to his brother. I have reproduced it in my Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 2009.