[Obligatory disclaimer of any implication of originality.]
As I’ve been reading the early Lacan, I’ve been puzzled by exactly what the many references to Heidegger are doing for him, what he’s getting out of Heidegger. Clearly Heidegger is important to him personally — he makes a huge deal out of the translation of Heidegger’s “Logos” essay that he did for his journal, he bulks out his introduction and response to Hyppolite’s presentation on Verneinung with Heideggerian references for the Écrits version (the original seminar version is much shorter), etc.
A cynical read would have him simply following an intellectual trend, but I think there’s more going on — in fact, I think Lacan’s appropriation of Heidegger is arguably much more faithful to the Heideggerian project than is the existentialist appropriation that was going on around the same time. Certainly Lacan makes use of the existential analytic of Dasein, but even though his project is naturally “anthropocentric,” he seems to take Heidegger much more at his word that the real goal is the question of the meaning of Being, and one could say that his historical work in the seminars often takes the form of a kind of “history of Being.”
Lacan also shares with Heidegger an opposition to a scientistic or reductionistic view of the world, and one of his primary complaints about ego psychology is that it violates the Heideggerian methodological principle that human phenomena, qua human, must never be treated as things, objects, the present-to-hand.
Other connections: the method of the “Logical Time” essay, which digs beneath the received wisdom about logic to find an originary temporal experience at the foundation of logic, is Heideggerian in spirit even if one can’t imagine Heidegger using the prisoner example; he’s continually castigating the analytic community for a radical forgetting of what was really in question in the Freudian experience (so much so that they don’t even realize there’s such a question); and since I was tempted to say that they “foreclose” that question, perhaps Verwerfung could be understood in Heideggerian terms as a primordial forgetting.
What do you think, readers?
Thursday, September 6, 2012 at 4:23 pm
Adam,
I definitely think that you are right about Lacan’s Heideggerian spirit. I just finished reading “The Function and Field of Speech in Psychoanalysis,” in which Lacan draws heavily on Heidegger’s understanding of “being-toward-death” toward the end of the work to distinguish between the human and the animal. Also, is it not possible read his aversion to a set length time of session as related to Heidegger’s claim that there is a primordial temporality (or if not primordial, at least, as Lacan says, an “intersubjective” time) in which our “clock time” is derivative. Anyway, there’s so much more to say on this topic, but my head is still dizzy from the sheer magnitude to the ground covered by Lacan in this essay: Greek myth, biblical myth Heidegger, several of Freud’s texts including the most famous case studies, the problem of ego psychology, information theory (Shannon and Weaver), Hegel, the analytic situation, negation, etc. etc.
Thursday, September 20, 2012 at 5:08 pm
Just off the top of my head, I think Lacan’s mirror stage is based on MH’s critique of Cartesian subjectivity. That is: MH argues (in “Uberwindung der Metaphysik”) that the Cartesian cogito is really a split subjectivity: split between “thinking” (cogito, I think) & “being” (ergo sum, therefore I am). (In Heidegger’s shorthand Latin: Ego cogito ist cogito: me cogitare) The Cartesian ego cogito must therefore constantly self-reflexively re-appropriate itself in re-presentation to be sure “I am, I exist” (And I don’t just think that I exist! But what if I stop thinking? Do I cease to exist? etc….) The Cartesian cogito then wills itself to exist in re-presentation as a “will to will”; as also the Western metaphysical subject wills itself to dominate the world in/as re-presentation through the same will to will. (This is MH’s notorious critique of “metapjhysical subjectivity” as subsequently elaborated by J Derrida et al). In J Lacan’s mirror stage, the Lacanian ego in its infans stage confronts itself in re-presentation as an imago & self-reflexively attempts to re-appropriate itself in re-presentation to will itself to exist. From the Lacanian specular mirror stage emerges the aggressivity of the ego that constantly attempts to will itself to dominate it-self & others through re-presentation. The specular mirror structure & the split subjectivity that arises from it are the same in Lacan & Heidegger, as are the critique of aggressivity & the will to will etc….
RSVP? ericd.meyer@yahoo.com