Anxiety and Aporia: Or, What for Lacan Makes Deconstruction Reassuring?

Abstract: While originally Lacan seconds Heidegger’s contention that “anxiety has no object,” in the early 1960’s, he scathingly repudiates his own earlier position as a childish reassurance and argues, to the contrary, that “anxiety is not without an object.” With particular attention to his use of the double negative, “not without,” this essay examines this turning point in Lacan’s thinking in order to explain the opposition between his psychoanalytic critical theory and Derrida’s deconstruction. The arguments that Lacan brings to bear on his work of the 1950’s closely approximate those that Derrida levels against Heidegger in the formulation of his own concept of “the aporia of the impossible.” Indeed, as commentators frequently emphasize, the formal logic of Lacan’s later thinking is strictly isomorphic with Derrida’s philosophy; and their respective concepts of anxiety and aporia accordingly might be misconstrued as simply identical. However, insofar Lacan furthermore discerns a content in this formal negativity, reasserting the objectivity of the Freudian “lost object” as intractably Real, the two do not coincide; to the contrary, Lacan’s repudiation of Heidegger’s concept of anxiety extends equally to Derrida’s aporia, as if, for Derrida, Heidegger’s existential phenomenology were not reassuring enough.

Keywords: Absence, Being-towards-Death, Impossible Possibility, Jouissance, Real

This article was originally published in Culture, Theory, Critique. A pdf of the original can be downloaded here , or this post can be cited as:  Buckner, Clark.  “Anxiety and Aporia: Or, What for Lacan makes Deconstruction Reasuring.”  www.clarkbuckner.com  Web. Day, Month, Year the post was accessed.

Introduction

In his work of the 1950’s, Lacan follows Heidegger in distinguishing anxiety from fear as having no object; however, in his 1962 – 1963 seminar, he scathingly repudiates his own earlier position. Lacan contends,

Anxiety, we have always been taught, is a fear without an object. A chant in which, we could say here, another discourse already announces itself, a chant which however scientific it may be is close to that of the child who reassures himself. For the truth that I am enuciating for you, I formulate in the following way: ‘[Anxiety] is not without an object.’[1]

What does Lacan mean in the peculiar use of this double-negative, “not without and object?” How does he accordingly rethink the absence in anxiety? And how does Lacan’s revision of his concept of anxiety clarify the opposition between psychoanalysis and deconstruction?

Despite drawing deeply from Heidegger’s philosophy, Derrida breaks specifically with his early existential phenomenology by arguing that his concept of the absent ground of existence, revealed by the objectlessness of anxiety, remains too pure in its distinction from, what Derrida and Heidegger both criticize as, the objectivist over-valorization of presence in Western philosophy. While extending the project of deconstruction initiated in Being and Time, Derrida thus critically redoubles the negativity in Heidegger’s concept of anxiety when formulating the quasi-transcendental concepts of his own philosophy. Along with asserting the differential condition of identity, he contends that articulating difference as such remains inevitably qualified by the objectivist reification of identity; and he asserts the irreducible mutual inclusion of these two contrary conditions as, what he calls, “the aporia of the impossible.” Insofar as Lacan too repudiates the pure negativity of his earlier concept of anxiety, his thinking develops along similar lines as Derrida’s. Lacan accommodates the criticism that Derrida similarly levels against his work in “The Facteur of Truth;” and he brings the formal logic of his critical theory into line with Derrida’s deconstruction of “the metaphysics of presence.” When denouncing the contention that “anxiety has no object,” as a childish consolation, Lacan might therefore be understood as similarly contesting its persistent, albeit indirect, privileging of self-presence, and so a reconciling psychoanalysis with deconstruction.

Indeed, on the basis of their isomorphism, several recent commentators have equated Derrida’s and Lacan’s theories.[2] Others, still more facilely, correlate the normativity of Lacan’s critical theory with what Derrida, drawing upon Levinas, explains as deconstruction’s “ethics of hospitality.”[3] And, in political philosophy, the concept of antagonism central to Radical Democracy suffers from a still inadequately clarified conflation of Derrida’s concept of the impossible and Lacan’s concept of the Real.[4]

However, Lacan’s motivations for revising his thinking are different from Derrida’s and, despite the isomorphism that informs their chronic confusion, his critique of the concept of anxiety as having no object is not only distinct from Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, it furthermore extends to the idealistic concept of absence in his own philosophy.

Whereas deconstruction develops and extends the phenomenological critique of apparently objective experience, as predicated upon an indeterminate, formal play of presence and absence, at stake in Lacan’s thinking is, first and foremost, the problem of unconscious conflict in psychical suffering. While he thus similarly critiques the objectivist concept of presence as immediately given, Lacan primarily works to explain the essentially conflicted nature of desire, by rethinking the objectivity of Freud’s concept of the lost object as symbolic.   While accommodating Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence, by revising the implicit reduction of unconscious conflict to a univocal horizon in his earlier concept of anxiety, Lacan thus also articulates a decisive point of opposition to it, by firstly reaffirming the objectivity of the obstacle it presents as intractably Real, and conceiving the force of its compelling claim as the ecstasy of an unbearable jouissance.

Despite the isomorphism between his and Derrida’s respective theories, Lacan’s dismissal of the contention “anxiety has no object” is not therefore equivalent to Derrida’s critical redoubling of the negativity in Heidegger’s existential phenomenology. To the contrary, insofar as Derrida radicalizes the “formal” objectlessness of Heidegger’s concept of anxiety in his theory of the aporia of the impossible, he denies the intractability of the Real by abstracting the impasse it presents as an “impossibility” that, in its constitutive disturbance of the actual, holds open the ever-elusive promise of the possible. [5]  And he neutralizes the force of this impasse, suffered by the subject, by reducing the jouissance of its tension to the mere epistemological uncertainty and metaphysical contingency of the undecidable. Rather than consistent with Derrida’s critique of Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, Lacan’s critique of the contention that “anxiety has no object,” thus extends to his concept of the aporia of the impossible as if, for Derrida – precisely in what he purports to be the radicality of the “trembling” of différance – Heidegger’s concept of anxiety is not reassuring enough.

Existential Angst and the Trembling of Différance

While Derrida acknowledges debts to many various and, at times, contradictory, predecessors, he draws most deeply from Heidegger, who first initiates the deconstruction of the tradition that Derrida “translate(s) and adapt(s) to (his) own ends.”[6] Correlative to the existential analytic of Dasein, Heidegger contends that deconstructing – or “unbuilding” – the tradition is essential to his project of restoring the question of the meaning of Being, not only in order to do away with it its reified categories, but still more directly in order to unearth the indeterminate, differential play of Being they implicitly preserve.[7] While the concept of difference central to Derrida’s philosophy also owes debts to Saussure, Nietzsche, and Freud, among others, he accordingly explains it as developing upon Heidegger’s concept of the ontological difference between Being and beings. Différance, he writes, “questions the limits which have always constrained us, which still constrains us – as inhabitants of a language and a system of thought – to formulate the meaning of Being in general as presence or absence, in the categories of being or beingness (ousia). Already it appears that the type of question to which we are redirected is, let us say, or the Heideggerian type, and the différance seems to lead back to the ontico-ontological difference.”[8]

Given his debt to Heidegger’s philosophy, what then becomes of existential angst in Derrida’s deconstruction? According to Heidegger, anxiety interrupts the alienated objectification of Dasein’s everyday existence as das Man, by confronting one with the nullity of Being. As distinct from fear, which pertains to something potentially detrimental, Heidegger argues that anxiety has no object. What provokes anxiety is indeterminate. It’s hard to pin down, seemingly emanating from everywhere and nowhere in particular. According to Heidegger, anxiety saddles Dasein with the weight of the world, which he conceives not merely as an aggregate of objects or the field of extended space, but rather a referential context, constituted in and through Dasein’s projects.[9] The void revealed in the nothing and nowhere of anxiety is the ultimate horizon of these pursuits: it is the defining condition of Dasein itself as, what Heidegger calls, being-in-the-world. Wrenched from its everyday immersion in das Man, Dasein thus comes face to face with the uncanniness of existence as grounded only in the transience of its own finitude.

While das Man misconstrues finitude as the inevitable actuality of the empirical subject’s demise, Heidegger contends that “death is in every case mine,” and accordingly ought to be understood rather in the dynamism of a singular, subjective relation.[10] As integral to the structure of its existence, Dasein anticipates death as a possibility. However, death is not merely one possibility among others, as a series of underdetermined actualities that might or might not transpire. Death gives Dasein “nothing to be actualized; nothing, which Dasein as actual could itself be.” Instead, death is “the measureless impossibility of existence… It is the possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself towards anything, or every way of existing.”[11] As a possibility, the impossibility of death is thus the limiting condition of being-in-the-world, which frames the whole field of the possible and the actual. In its objectlessness, Heidegger contends, anxiety thus brings Dasein face to face with its “ownmost possibility” in the groundless ground of the impossible possibility of death, which defines its finitude, and so conditions the possible.[12]

The question concerning the fate of anxiety in Derrida’s deconstruction is thus decisive for clarifying the concept of absence in his thought; and, at least at first glance, appears to be decidedly ambivalent. On the one hand, when asserting the purportedly subversive force of the signifier’s underdetermination, Derrida consistently employs metaphors that evoke anxiety, and its central importance to nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophy. In his deconstruction of the concept of translation, for instance, he writes, “From the very first moment, the body of [a] statement… becomes plural. At least it trembles in an unstable multiplicity as long as there is no context to stop us.”[13] However, Derrida also distinguishes the “trembling” of différance from existential angst. In opposition to the self-referentiality of being-towards-death, he writes, “A radical trembling can only come from the outside… This trembling is played out in the violent relationship of the whole of the West to its other.”[14] Is this “trembling” of différance therefore consistent with or contrary to existential angst?

The ambivalence Derrida expresses about existential angst evidences the fact that he not only draws deeply from, but also decisively departs from Heidegger’s early philosophy: specifically, and most fundamentally, by redoubling the negativity of Heidegger’s concept of the absent ground of Being, revealed in anxiety. Whereas, in Being and Time, Heidegger aspires for a decisive break with the objectivism of the philosophical tradition – hinging specifically upon his reassertion of this ontological difference – Derrida accordingly challenges the possibility of such a departure, and not only argues against the metaphysical reduction of difference to identity, but also challenges the possibility of conceiving difference as such. As a cornerstone of the critique that he brings to bear on not only Heidegger, but all of the phenomenological, structuralist, and psychoanalytic theorist of negativity before him, Derrida argues that the concept of absence as such remains too strictly opposed to – and hence indirectly consistent with – the tradition’s “metaphysics of presence.” Of course, Derrida does not therefore assert, what he otherwise criticizes as, the authority and privilege of presence. Instead he argues that, just as difference conditions self-presence, absence remains unavoidably contravened by the reification of identity. Rather than simply opposed, such “metaphysical” antitheses thus mutually implicate one another in an indeterminate dialectic that resolves to no more general principle. Precisely by refusing any categorical departure from the objectivism of the tradition, Derrida thus further challenges its hierarchical oppositions and further destabilizes the economies they circumscribe.

In the critiques of Heidegger to which he returns throughout his career, Derrida accordingly takes contrary tacks at different junctures in the logic of Heidegger’s philosophy. At times, he presses Heidegger further in his effort to articulate the differential underdetermination of identity. In “The Ends of Man,” for instance, Derrida argues that despite the force of his critique of the purportedly self-transparent subject of modern philosophy, Heidegger continues to presuppose the fundamental unity of man in the privilege he grants to self-presence of Dasein’s reflexivity, as the being for whom its being is a question. Derrida thus brings Heidegger’s own critique of objectivism to bear on Being and Time, pressing it further “in the same direction,” as it were, by arguing that Heidegger does not sufficiently realize his own stated project. At other times, however, Derrida doubles back on this negativity by arguing that difference ought not to be simply affirmed in contradistinction to the metaphysics of presence. In the essay, “Ousia and Gramme,” for instance, he critiques Being and Time “in the contrary direction,” by arguing that the possibility of articulating the ontological difference remains unavoidably qualified by the objectivism that it aims to subvert. He writes, “What if there was no other concept of time than the one that Heidegger calls ‘vulgar?’ What if, consequently, opposing another concept to the vulgar concept was itself impracticable, nonviable, and impossible?”[15]

Broadly speaking, philosopher’s committed to the project of grounding experience on substantive first principles classically have denounced deconstruction as sophistry, for effecting a cynical detachment from actual problems in its insistence on the radical indeterminacy of experience, and denying the responsibility they entail in order to justify its ludic indulgence in fatuous rhetoric. In this vein, one might argue that Derrida’s critique of Heidegger’s existential phenomenology compromises the force of his philosophical project by effacing the determinate negativity of the ontological difference. However, Heidegger’s argument hinges rather on the radical indeterminacy of the ontological difference, as integral to the apparent determination of self-identical phenomena – evidenced above by the paradoxical impossible possibility of being-towards-death – and, even without considering Heidegger’s own later self-critical turn, Derrida’s critique of his early existential phenomenology thus proves paradoxically to be not only consistent with, but even an extension and elaboration of Heidegger’s own philosophical project. And, in his 1993 Seminar, Aporias, Derrida evidences this paradoxical continuity between his critique of Heidegger and Heidegger’s own philosophy, specifically by redoubling the absence in Heidegger’s concept of the anxiety of being-towards-death in the formulation of his own concept of the aporia of the impossible.[16]

The Aporia of the Impossible Has No Object

Derrida considers the relationship between death’s immanent impermeability and the constitutive paradoxes of language through two deconstructions, in which he both challenges and reiterates the fundamental logic of Heidegger’s existential phenomenology. In the first, he juxtaposes Heidegger’s existential analytic and the histories of death written by Philippe Aries and Michel Vovell, and argues that they entail “an irreducible double inclusion,” in which each both presupposes and entails the other.[17] However, contrary to the all too common misconception of deconstruction, Derrida does not therefore dissolve the philosophical universality of Heidegger’s analysis into the cultural diversity of concepts of death, as if deconstruction were a naïve philosophical nominalism. Instead, he first defends Heidegger’s assertion of the priority of the existential analytic over other discourses on death, by criticizing the historians’ failure to define the terms of their analysis and citing their deference to “metaphysics” to provide this clarification.[18] However, in keeping with his argument in “The Ends of Man,” Derrida contends that Heidegger’s own analysis presupposes a “metaphysical” decision that, in his own understanding, belongs alongside the history of death, as another discourse that depends upon, and so remains undecidable, prior to the accomplishment of the existential analytic.[19] Insofar as Being and Time rests upon the axiom that “one can only start from here,” Derrida contends that Heidegger thus falls prey to metaphysics precisely at the point where he supposes to have bracketed all considerations of metaphysics. [20] While Heidegger’s resolve to begin ‘here’ reflects his philosophical modesty, according to Derrida, it nevertheless requires drawing a distinction between the “here” and the “beyond” that is no less metaphysical than the speculations of system-builders. Derrida’s assertion of the irreducible double inclusion of Being and Time and the histories of death follows from the unavoidable decision of this undecidable in Heidegger’s philosophy, insofar as it founds their hierarchical disciplinary order. Given this intrinsic inconsistency, Derrida contends, Heidegger’s analysis reveals itself to be implicated in not only “the metaphysics of death,” but any and all of the variously ontic discourse that it serves to ground.[21]

The second deconstruction that Derrida undertakes in Aporias, departs from the reflections on the intersection between the limits of truth and the brevity of life in Diderot’s study of Seneca. In their works, Derrida discerns “a rhetoric of borders,” which he captures in the phrase, “il y va d’un certain pas.”[22] On account primarily of the polyvalence of the French word, “pas,” which connotes both “not” and “step,” the sentence has multiple meanings that, according to Derrida, render this expression essentially untranslatable. Any translation one might choose would fail to grasp the alternative connotations, which inflect the expression even if they don’t pertain directly to the given context. However, in keeping with his paradigmatic reversal of writing and speech, Derrida goes on to ask whether some such translation is not already integral to the original? In French too, any one of the several distinct uses of the sentence, “Il va d’un certain pas,” entails the marginalization of its other potential meanings. The French expression itself thus remains constitutively incomplete, generating residual remainders, which tacitly evoke other possible meanings that no one formulation could properly capture.[23] In keeping with his opening reduction of the philosophical discourse on death into the indeterminate plurality of “rhetorics of borders,” Derrida thus dissolves the opposition between the original and its derivative translation into a seemingly open-ended diversity of never fully constituted particulars. However, Derrida goes on to problematize this distillation of the universal into the particular by juxtaposing what it means for an expression to belong to language with what it means to be included “in the space of citizenship or nationality; natural, historical, or political borders; geography or geo-politics; soil, blood, or social class.”[24] Because the borders delimiting each of these distinct signifying contexts presupposes the non-belonging of language, Derrida contends, the sundering of translation operative in the originality of language cannot itself be reduced to simply one among other forms of difference – one among other “rhetorics of borders” – but rather functions generically, as universal to the very concept of border. If the authority of the original is untenable, so to then is the assertion of an open-ended plurality of differences. Instead, the latter proves to presuppose an originary division, which implicitly returns Derrida’s analysis to the synchronic, ontological sundering that Heidegger contends founds the diversity of ontic particulars in his existential analysis of death.

Abstracting and generalizing the conclusions of his analyses, Derrida formalizes the terms of these two deconstructions and explains the indeterminate dialectic of their relationship to one another, as what he calls “the plural logic of the aporia.” Aporia, he contends, assumes three distinct forms: impermeability, indeterminacy, and impossibility. The first is defined by the impassability of the fixed division: epitomized by Heidegger’s being-towards-death. The second is defined by a indefinite differential plurality, for which his postulate of a rhetoric of borders provides the example: it can’t be crossed, because it can’t be specified. However, paradoxical it may seem, it is too porous. The third aporia articulates the dialectic of the other two’s mutual implication, and redoubles their negativity. In it, the impasse appears neither as the synchronic sundering of an unavoidable obstacle, nor as a diachronic slippage that loses all specificity. Instead, the impasse is altogether occluded. In this aporia of the impossible, Derrida argues, “there is no longer any problem.”[25] Not because all solutions have been found, but rather because, there is insufficient distinction – whether as impermeable or as indeterminate – even to articulate problems as such. Instead, in a state that Derrida nevertheless describes as paralyzing, “we are exposed, absolutely without protection, without problem, and without prosthesis, without possible substitution, singularly exposed in our absolute and absolutely naked uniqueness, that is to say, disarmed, delivered to the other, incapable even of sheltering ourselves behind what could still protect the interiority of a secret.”[26]

While Derrida criticizes the concept of being-towards-death central to Heidegger’s existential phenomenology by challenging its privileged, univocal horizon and all too decisive negativity, in so doing, he thus simultaneously preserves and extends the defining logic of Heidegger’s philosophy in the formulation of his own concept of the aporia of the impossible. He conceives the possibility of experience as conditioned by the absence of a radical impossibility that riddles its apparently immediately given actuality with an epistemological uncertainty and metaphysical contingency that renders it fundamentally undecidable. However, whereas Heidegger conceives this paradoxical impossibility exclusively in terms of the impermeability of death, Derrida discerns the same paradox in language and compounds the two, dividing each by the other in what amounts to an effacement of the impasse itself. As a condition for extending Lacan’s critique of Heidegger’s concept of anxiety to deconstruction, in the formulation of his own philosophy, Derrida thus preserves and extends its defining absence: that is, in Derrida’s deconstruction too, the aporia has no object.

The Empty Phallus

If the negativity in Derrida’s philosophy thus proves to be consistent with Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, how then does Lacan come to share Heidegger’s notion – which subsequently he vehemently repudiates – that anxiety is objectless? Despite the many important differences between their respective critical theories, in his work of the 1950’s Lacan follows Heidegger in conceiving experience as conditioned by the groundless ground of a radical absence, which he explains as “symbolic castration.” The orienting concerns and original formulation of Lacan’s critical theory depart from the basic conceptual framework of object-relations psychoanalysis, by explaining the development of the subject through the introjection of a lost object, which provides both the basis of the subject’s ego-identification and the motivating object-cause of its desire.[27]  However, rather than actual – as breast, feces, phallus – Lacan conceives the lost object as symbolic and so as categorically lost.[28] According to Lacan, the ego thus coalesces through an imaginary identification with an impossible object – as what the infant imagines it is expected to be – and the subject’s desire develops in relationship to this categorically elusive object, by both orienting and motivating the aspiration to compensate for the constitutive inadequacy it entails.

While he later dismisses it as too imaginary in the immediacy and correlative violence of the one-to-one relationship that it entails, Lacan’s early theory of the mirror-stage already presents an attempt to articulate this originary sundering of the subject through an identification with a symbolic object; and already, Lacan conceives the Oedipal conflict that it engenders, in existentialist terms, as a theory of Being as becoming. However, Lacan also levels a pointed attack against existential-phenomenology. “Unfortunately,” he writes, “this philosophy grasps [the negativity of the subject] only within the limits of a self-sufficiency of consciousness.”[29] Lacan’s argument here develops upon a broader criticism that he levels against philosophy in general as idealistic in its distillation of all problems to objects of critical reflection. However, Lacan does not therefore naïvely equate Heidegger’s philosophy with the philosophical over-valorization of reason. Instead, his criticism hinges on the distinction between the negativity of Heidegger’s concept of Dasein’s constitutive division and Freud’s concept of psychical conflict: as preconscious and unconscious respectively.

In keeping with Freud’s concept of unconscious conflict, in Being and Time, Heidegger explains Dasein as fundamentally divided between the inauthenticity of das Man and the authentic resoluteness that anxiety makes possible when confronting Dasein with the uncanny groundlessness of existence. However, whereas Freud conceives the unconscious as dynamically held apart from conscious attention by the force of resistance, Heidegger explains the nullity of existence as marginal to everyday experience, but nevertheless available to consciousness. While one might protest that Heidegger’s concept of being-towards-death indeed entails such a force of resistance, in fact, he rules out any appeal to the biological, “survival instinct,” and does not otherwise account for Dasein’s apparent aversion to its finitude.[30] To the contrary, he explicitly contends that finitude falls within the scope of, what he calls, Dasein’s pre-ontological understanding; and the possibility of reflectively bringing to the fore the burden of existence is presupposed by Heidegger’s effort to restore the meaning of Being as a question.

In this regard, Lacan’s early critique of existentialism is consistent with Derrida’s argument in “The Ends of Man” that, despite the radicality of Heidegger’s critique of the tradition, the privilege he grants to Dasein’s reflexivity situates his philosophy well within its parameters. However, whereas Derrida criticizes Heidegger for the persistent objectivism of his implicit valorization of Dasein’s self-presence, Lacan contends that Heidegger’s concept of the divided subject betrays philosophy’s idealism. According to Lacan, existentialism thus abstracts and dispels the force of the dynamic repression definitive of the Freudian unconscious as a merely formal, phenomenological play of presence and absence, paradigmatically defined by the combination of metaphysical contingency and epistemological uncertainty in Heidegger’s concept of truth as disclosure.[31] However, when subsequently relinquishing his theory of the mirror-stage and instead explaining the originary sundering of the subject in terms of the pure negativity of signifier, Lacan not only compromises the force of this early critique, but also falls prey to the same idealism that he criticizes in existentialism.

Even before the inchoate cries of the infant are given explicit verbal expression in its caretaker’s replies, Lacan contends that an infant’s needs undergo symbolization through the periodic presence and absence of this attentive (m)Other.[32] In a manner reminiscent of Heidegger’s concept of “the worldhood of the world,” Lacan argues that, through their exchange within the symbolic order instituted by the (m)Other’s authority, objects take on determinate contours as objects, for the first time, as objects of demand. Are they repulsive or gratifying? Do they merit love or hate? At the same time, these dialectics of demand found the subject by instituting a fundamental division between being and knowing that constitutes it as a “want-to-be.”[33] Through the symbolic articulation of needs as demands, Lacan contends, the infant presses the question, “who am I?” specifically in the form of the belligerent protest, “What does the Other want from me?” Lacan thus explains the subjectivity, in Heideggerian terms, as a form of becoming that unfolds specifically through the pursuit of an ultimately groundless question. “Whether phobic, hysterical, or obsessive,” he writes, “neurosis is a question that being raises for the subject ‘from where he was before the subject came into the world.’”[34]

What makes this questioning “neurotic” is its inevitable fixation in the short circuit of an answer provided by – or rather in the form of – the ego. According to Lacan, the sense of self first develops through the infant’s imaginary identification with the ever-elusive object of the (m)Other’s desire. As the principal target in his criticism of both ego-psychology and object-relations psychoanalysis, Lacan thus conceives the ego – like Heidegger’s concept of das Man – as an objectification of subjectivity, which is predicated upon a fundamental absence that it simultaneously denies. As such, the ego not only perpetuates the subject’s alienated self-division, but furthermore incarnates the impasses in its relationship to the world, as essentially strife-laden. The authority of the (m)Other is suffered as tyrannical, both in the apparent whimsy of her coming and going, and the supposedly objective, but nonetheless elusive, actuality of what she wants. Each of the infant’s symbolic exchanges is accordingly nullified in its abstract particularity, requiring repetition again through a metonymic succession of discrete instances, without thereby establishing the limited metaphorical consistency necessary to constitute a meaningful exchange.

According to Lacan, achieving this limited consistency depends upon the intervention of the father, and the infant’s assumption of its castration, as that which institutes the phallus as the symbol of the (m)Other’s desire. While initially the infant suffers the (m)Other’s symbolic authority in the contingent immediacy her coming and going, Lacan contends that her presence and absence is already defined by her commitment not only to the child’s father, but still more fundamentally, to the principle that defines their relationship within the broader social order. This principled “no” is the symbolic phallus, of which the infant is unaware, but which nevertheless subtends her coming and going, and implicitly defines her symbolic authority, even as the infant suffers it as the imaginary omnipotence of a fickle tyrant. In Lacan’s critical theory, the phallus thus serves as the symbol of the (m)Other’s desire, which normatively limits the infant’s engagement with the world, not by supplanting the (m)Other’s absence with a substantial presence, but rather by establishing the terms of its articulation, localizing it, and so giving it a minimal consistency.[35] Independently of its attribution to a particular person, Lacan thus explains the father’s intervention as metaphorical. Symbolizing the (m)Other’s lack, the father negates the whole economy of demand in its immediacy, redefining its haphazard exchanges in relationship to the categorical “no” of the phallus, and so opening the field of desire.

Nevertheless, the misrecognition of the father in the imaginary rivalry of Oedipal conflict is essential to the infant’s inscription in the symbolic order and qualifies the accomplishment of this process with the legacy of its difficulty. As a necessary condition of assuming its symbolic castration, the child first identifies with the father as an alter-ego, insofar as he apparently threatens to be what the (m)Other wants. The give and take of the demand to be the object of her desire thus comes to be complicated by competition with the father, over who has what it takes to be loved. Here then the symbolic phallus gets mapped onto the body of not only the father, but the whole parental couple, as the mediating term of their relationship and, specifically, the enjoyment of their intimacy. The threat of castration that ultimately resolves this Oedipal conflict is integral to it, insofar as the father apparently threatens to be the object of the (m)Other’s demand. However, with the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, the child does not simply acknowledge defeat in its rivalry with the father, but concedes the utter impossibility of there being some such object: recognizing the (m)Other’s lack – which is to say, her desire – as sustained in relationship not to a determinate thing, but rather to a constitutive, and therefore radical, absence.

As integral to ending the imaginary struggle with its father, the dissolution of the Oedipus complex thus entails a shift in seeing aspect, which dissolves the whole frame of the competition. The child’s imaginary identification with the father as alter-ego gives way to its symbolic identification with him as ego-ideal. The values he embodies, as bearer of the symbolic phallus, are introjected as the child’s own; and the imaginary struggle to be what the (m)Other wants is repressed, as definitive of the primary processes of the unconscious, which only at this point first comes to be established. In this process, one might say, the child not only concedes defeat in the imaginary struggle to be the phallus, it recognizes the phallus – and the role of the father – as symbolic, assuming responsibility for its constitutive lack as definitive of its own castration, and so adopting its terms for the articulation of its desire.

Not Without An Object

In “The Facteur of Truth,” Derrida brings to bear on Lacan’s theory of symbolic castration the same argument that he levels against the pure negativity in Heidegger’s existential phenomenology. Beyond naïvely dismissing it for asserting paternal authority as a metaphysical principle – which would be, for Lacan, rather imaginary – Derrida argues that Lacan’s concept of the symbolic phallus functions as a “transcendental signifier,” insofar as it delimits the absence in language and so regulates its dissemination.[36] According to Derrida, Lacan does not therefore simply reduce absence to a derivative of presence; however, he conceives the absence of the signifier as too categorical in its negativity. Precisely in the purity of its absence, Derrida contends, the phallus thus circumscribes the symbolic order as a closed, hermeneutical circle.[37] Of course, given the inevitable complication of the symbolic and the imaginary in its development, the subject never entirely completes the circle, by assuming full responsibility for its castration. Instead, as manifested at least in dreams, the subject remains divided between demand and desire: having assumed a debt (for something it didn’t do), which must be paid (with something it doesn’t have). Nevertheless, the phallic circumscription of lack provides a balance for this psychical accounting, and so, defines it in principle as a closed system. Explicitly drawing the connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and Lacan’s critical theory, Derrida writes, “Veiling/unveiling here concerns a hole, a non-being: the truth of Being as non-being. The truth is ‘woman’ as veiled/unveiled castration. This is where the signifier (its adequation with the signified) gets underway, this is the site of the signifier, the letter. But this is also where the trial begins, the promise of reappropriation, or return or readequation: ‘the search for the restitution of the object.”[38]

In the critical revision of his own work of the 1950’s, Lacan similarly repudiates his concept of the symbolic phallus as the Name-of-the-Father, whose decisive “no” universally marks the division between nature and society. Insisting that “There is No Other of the Other,” Lacan contends that the symbolic phallus instead is drawn from the signifying chain that it simultaneously serves to institute and sustain. Despite its privileged role – as eccentrically meaningless in the tautological emptiness of its authority – the symbolic phallus thus remains fundamentally qualified by the imaginary associations of the context from which it emerges. At the same time, Oedipal conflict does not therefore simply present an unavoidable aberration in the accomplishment of symbolic castration; it institutes the authority of the phallus as such. And the symbolic order remains irreducibly riddled with gaps and inconsistencies, opening onto what Lacan previously had categorically distinguished from it as the Real.

By renouncing the pure negativity of his concept of the symbolic phallus, Lacan thus accommodates what Derrida criticizes as the residual metaphysics of presence in his work; and, as the basis for their chronic confusion, his concept of the mutual implication of the symbolic and the imaginary closely approximates Derrida’s concept of the plural logic of the aporia. Specifically, Lacan’s theory of the symbolic phallus as a metaphorical universal, drawn from the signifying chain of particulars that it simultaneously founds, corresponds to Derrida’s concept of the aporia of the impermeable, for which the synchronic sundering of being-towards-death serves as his example. In Lacan’s thinking, the imaginary strife of demand corresponds in turn to Derrida’s concept of the aporia of the indeterminate, and his deconstruction of “the rhetoric of borders,” as a metonymic displacement of particulars that presupposes the metaphoric sundering that it nevertheless qualifies. However, Lacan’s revision of his work of the 1950’s is motivated not only by, what Derrida criticizes as, the determinate negativity of his concept of the symbolic phallus, but still more fundamentally by the idealistic concept of absence that it entails. Whereas Derrida conceives the irreducible mutual implication of these contrary dimensions of experience by radicalizing Heidegger’s concept of the phenomenological indeterminacy of death’s impossible-possibility, Lacan thus not only breaks with Derrida, but essentially opposes his concept of the aporia of the impossible, by rethinking the dialectics of need, demand, and desire in terms of the material objectivity of, what he calls, the Real of jouissance.[39]

Already, in his work of the 1950’s, Lacan conceives demand as an ambivalent phenomenon, which refuses the reduction of desire to physical need, even as it denies its constitutive absence. However, insofar as he explains this ambivalence in relationship to the sundering of the signifier, Lacan essentially reduces demand to misdirected desire. In the idealistic negativity of his concept of absence, he thus conceives desire implicitly as a purely formal intentional relatedness (even if engendered heteronomously), and he dispels the force of the drives, which he conceives in terms of the reduction of desire to demand, as ultimately illusory. Whereas Lacan first formulates his concept of the object (a) as the imaginary object of desire that reifies the lack instituted by symbolic castration (-p), when critically revising his thinking during the later 1950’s and early 1960’s, he thus comes to conceive this lost object rather as Real. In so doing, he does not, however, contend that this object-cause of desire exists as immediately given, either in actuality or as a primoridial stoff, a noumenal thing-in-itself, beyond the limits of experience. To the contrary, he contends, the Real is “not nothing, but literally is not. It is characterized by its absence, its strangeness.”[40] The Real only appears – in fact, it only exists – in the interruption of an absence. Its reality is the recalcitrant impasse it presents in the imaginary and symbolic registers in experience; and it is manifested only in – even “as” – the gaps, inconsistencies, and excesses that it accordingly generates. Slavoj Zizek explains, “For Lacan, the Real at its most radical has to be totally de-substantialized. It is not an external thing that resists being caught in the symbolic network, but the fissure within the symbolic network itself.”[41]

While the Real of the object (a) only exists as a remainder in the symbolic, it is not however only the remainder of the symbolic. Instead, when revising his concept of the object (a), Lacan postulates a cut in the Real that is prior to and independent from the cut of symbolic castration. Specifically, he compares this cut to the infant’s separation from the enveloping placenta that sustained it in utero: as a division from itself, or rather from its immersion in the formlessness of organic life.[42] The Oedipal conflicts of the subject’s inscription within the symbolic order only secondarily are mapped onto the subject, as marked by this prior division in the real; and, insofar as they intersect with the organism at the breast rather than the placenta, they do not therefore exhaustively sublate the division of the subject in the Real. Instead, the division of the symbolic remains eccentric to this (logically) prior separation, and so ultimately unable to quell its relentless disturbance. As characteristic of the material recalcitrance of it disturbing insistence, which defines the Real as more “objective” than any mere actuality, according to Lacan, the lost object therefore is not only categorically lost, it also is never entirely lost: stuck to one’s heal with the nagging persistence of a compulsion.[43]

Accordingly, Lacan contends that the gaps in experience, instituted by the subject’s originary relationship to the Other, are suffered as not only as uncertain contingencies, but rather as loci of excessive, visceral jouissance. In English, the French word translates simply as “enjoyment;” and, in common parlance, it has associations with orgasm, which Lacan does not altogether disavow.[44] However, contrary to the implications of these standard correlates, in Lacan’s understanding, jouissance exceeds the opposition between pleasure and displeasure, as explaining that which Freud asserts as the insistence of the drives “beyond the pleasure-principle.” As opposed to pleasure, jouissance is thus better conceived as an ecstatic state of frenzied dissolution, in which the self is reduced entirely to an object of the Other’s gratification. While, by no means, merely actual – as symptomatic precisely of the inconsistency of its fundamental principles, the incompleteness of its symbolic order, the failure even to constitute itself as an order – the Other indeed wants something.[45] With specific reference to the jouissance suffered in anxiety, Lacan contends,

[Anxiety is the signal of] a demand which does not concern any need, which does not concern anything other than my very being, namely which puts me in question – let us say that it cancels it out: in principle it is not addressed to me as present – which is addressed to me, if you wish, as expected which is addressed to me much more again as lost and which in or that the Other should be able to locate himself requests my loss.”[46]

Arguing that the Other indeed wants something, of course, Lacan does not thereby revert to the empiricism of the “seduction hypothesis,” which would be to renounce psychoanalysis in favor of psychology – and so, psychologism. The jouissance in the Other’s demand exceeds the understanding of the symbolic order and any of the imaginary particulars in which it might be invested. In fact, the Real of jouissance defines the self-justification of the symbolic as irreducibly contradictory, and dissolves any and all particulars in their otherwise apparently fixed actuality. However, with his concept of jouissance, Lacan simultaneously refuses the abstraction of the constitutive incompletenesss of the Other to the merely formal negativity of phenomenological indeterminacy. Instead, in its originary sundering of the subject, the Other of the symbolic order reaches into its “skin,” as a parasite that it never will be able to purge. The tautological, self-authorizing, emptiness of the law requires the subject’s support, not only as the material substrate of its instantiation, or in the conscious acknowledgment of its purportedly rational legitimacy, but also in the obscene excess of its enjoyment.

While Lacan does not therefore renounce his earlier theory of need, demand, and desire, he does not therefore any longer take the two poles of need and desire – as respectively referring to presence and absence – to be definitive of their dialectics. Instead, he conceives these dynamics in terms of the opposition between jouissance and desire, as distinct forms of absence. Given its anamorphic excess, jouissance precludes immediate localization. By definition, it is nowhere and so anywhere, everywhere. Its absence is suffered, accordingly, as an overwhelming presence, which threatens to dissolve the boundaries of experience, in an unbearable ecstasy. By contrast, the absence of desire is a lack, defined as such in relationship to the symbolic phallus. While determining the absence of desire in relationship to the presence of a symbol might seem to compromise the radicality of its distance, to the contrary, Lacan argues that the phallus first institutes and sustains the distance of the absent, precisely by circumscribing its boundaries. As opposed to the unbearable excess of jouissance, the satisfaction and disappointment of desire are accordingly experienced as pleasurable and unpleasurable.

The Real of jouissance thus provides the key to Lacan’s peculiar use of the double-negative, when contending that “anxiety is not without an object.” On the one hand, he concurs with Heidegger’s phenomenological description of anxiety as pertaining to no determinate – or, what Lacan would qualify as imaginary, object. As the object-cause of anxiety, the Real of the Other’s jouissance dissolves the imaginary and symbolic boundaries that mediate experience, confronting the subject implicitly with the radical negativity that conditions the worldhood of the world. On the other hand, however, Lacan does not understand this confrontation as an experience of lack – whether understood as being-towards-death, symbolic castration, or even the aporia of the impossible – which subverts the objectivist reduction of absence to presence, difference to identity. Instead, he re-conceives it as an excessive proximity, which manifests the failure of the symbolic phallus to institute the minimal distance necessary to make experience tenable. “Anxiety is not the signal of a lack,” Lacan writes, “but of… the absence of this support of the lack”[47]

 

Reassuring Aporia

In light of the critical revision of his theory, Lacan thus denounces the Heideggerian notion that anxiety has no object, as a childish reassurance for, at least, the following three reasons. 1) It equates objectivity exclusively with the (imaginary) reification of difference, and so denies the recalcitrant materiality of the Real. 2) It opposes this hypostatization of difference only with the phenomenological indeterminacy of experience, and so theoretically dispels the visceral, affective force of jouissance that, Lacan contends, informs it. 3) And it elevates the confrontation with the formal negativity of this phenomenological indeterminacy – which Lacan conceives as a consoling source of stability – to a challenging ethical courage.

Because Lacan contends that the symbolic phallus institutes this reassuring lack, one might argue that his critique of Heidegger’s concept of anxiety indeed corresponds to Derrida’s critique of the persistent “metaphysics of presence” in Heidegger’s existential phenomenology. So understood, the crux of Lacan’s argument would be that the absence in Heidegger’s philosophy indirectly presupposes the univocal, determination of the “transcendental signifier” that Lacan himself originally explains as the Name-of-the-Father. However, drawing the parallel between Derrida’s and Lacan’s theories on the basis of this implication of Lacan’s argument fails to account either for his rethinking of the objectivity of the lost object as Real, or for his concept of absence as riddled with enjoyment. Accordingly, it fails to appreciate how Lacan’s critical revision of his theory not only accommodates Derrida’s critique of the “metaphysics of presence,” but also redefines the terms at stake. While Lacan indeed refuses the theoretical reduction of experience to a univocal principle, his critique of the idealistic concept of absence, in the theory that anxiety has no object, transcends the problem of the philosophical over-valorization of presence. Reducing absence merely to formal, phenomenological indeterminacy dispels the affective force of jouissance and abstracts the impasse of the Real, whether it is understood as indirectly privileging self-identity or it is conceived as a radically indeterminate subversion of any such self-presence.

As an alternative line of defense, one might argue that the aporia of the impossible too is “not without an object.” So understood, Derrida’s and Lacan’s critical departures from Heidegger would correspond not because Lacan’s revision of his thinking similarly hinges on the critique of the “metaphysics of presence,” but rather because Derrida’s concept of the impossible accommodates Lacan’s insistence on the material intractability of the Real.[48] Specifically, the “a” in Derrida’s concept of différance would thus correspond to Lacan’s concept of the object (a), insofar as it embodies not only the differential subversion of identity, as a figure of the supplement at the origin, but also the ineluctable reification of difference as an objectified, typographical cliché. However, this insistent hypostatization of difference is, in Lacan’s terms, only imaginary; and, while he and Derrida concur in their repudiation of the simple disjunction between identification and differentiation – the imaginary and the symbolic – in their respective concepts of the radical alterity that sustains this irreducible complication, Lacan contests the idealism of Heidegger’s phenomenological concept of absence, while Derrida only radicalizes his theory of its indeterminacy.

Whereas Lacan critically revises Heidegger’s contention that “anxiety has no object” by preserving the concept of anxiety and defending its recalcitrant, affective insistence as “not without an object,” to the contrary, Derrida relinquishes the concept of anxiety, while retaining Heidegger’s notion of the impossible possibility of experience as “having no object.” Despite their common critique of any simple disjunction between inside and out, near and far, presence and absence, Lacan thus conceives the Real of jouissance as an ontological closure suffered by the subject as a material condition of its constitutive inscription in the symbolic order, while Derrida conceives the aporia of the impossible as a ontological openness, whose radical underdetermination doubles back on itself, and so admits only of deconstruction’s paradoxical formulations.[49] As evidence of this disjunction, Lacan conceives the radical alterity that conditions and qualifies experience as an impasse more objective than the mere actuality, and articulates it accordingly with grammatical substantives: anxiety, jouissance, the real; whereas, Derrida, to the contrary, conceives this alterity only as the unfathomable remainder born of the paradoxes it engenders, and he articulates it accordingly using only grammatical privatives: un-decidability, a-poria, im-possibility. In the aporia of the impossible, Derrida writes, “there would not even be any space for the aporia because of a lack of topographical conditions or, more radically because of a lack of the topographical condition itself.”[50]

Despite the isomorphism that informs the chronic conflation of their two theories, Derrida’s account of the conflict at the heart of experience is thus predicated upon a prior suspension of, what Lacan explains as, the jouissance of the Real. When asserting the radical indeterminacy of différance as a cause to tremble, Derrida thus brackets in advance the material recalcitrance and affective intensity that, according to Lacan, renders experience inherently problematic. In fact, he explicitly elevates it to an ever-elusive promise of the possible, and celebrates as subversive the lack that is, for Lacan, a source of consolation. From a Lacanian vantage, the critique of “the metaphysics of presence” thus ultimately amounts to a false problem. While Lacan too refuses the theoretical reduction of experience to self-presence, he conceives the phenomenological indeterminacy that Derrida opposes to it as equally repressive in its disavowal of the Real of jouissance. Despite the belligerence of his critique of the “metaphysics of presence,” Derrida’s objectivist critics thus prove to be justified by his own philosophy. Only on the basis of their anxious resistance, is Derrida able to reduce all objectivity to the reification of difference; and, only on this basis, is he able to tout as a disturbing force, the phenomenological indeterminacy of the aporia’s reassurance.[i]

[1] Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety. 1962 – 1963. Translated by Cormac Gallagher from unedited French manuscripts. Unpublished.

[2] Hurst, Andrea. 2008. Derrida vis-à-vis Lacan. New York: Fordham University Press.

Lewis, Michael. 2008. Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh, U.P.

[3] Critchley, Simon. 1999. Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity. London: Verso.

[4] Laclau, Ernesto. 1996. Emancipations. London: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Mouffe, Chantal. 1993. The Return of the Political. London: Verso. Stavrakakis, Yannis. 1999. Lacan and the Political. New York: Routledge.

[5] Derrida, Aporias, 19

[6] 1991. “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” in Between the Blinds: A Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Columbia University Press. 270 – 276

[7] Heidegger writes, “By taking the question of Being as our clue, we are to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being – the ways which have guided us ever since.” Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York, Harper Collins: San Francisco. 22/44.

[8] Derrida, Jacques. 1982a. “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 1 – 28. Beyond the assertion of his motivating project, Derrida follows Heidegger in working to unearth the complex underdetermination of apparently immediately given things, by thematizing the structures and dynamics of their relationships to the backgrounds that condition their possibilities. If, in his early work, Heidegger addresses this phenomenological indeterminacy in terms of Dasein’s being-in-the-world, in anticipation of Derrida’s focus on language, he already conceives the world as a referential context. Despite his attention to the constitutive negativity of language, on the other hand, Derrida’s attention to differential systems exceeds mere linguisticism, and his concept of the linguistic mark as “trace,” without any grounding signified or referent might accordingly be understood in more familiar phenomenological terms, as “something that shows up in such a way that it is a ghost or sham of presence, its presence is shown as not really there; it is, as Derrida says, a ‘simulacrum’of its presence; it dislocates itself, displaces itself, and refers itself.” Spinosa, Charles. 2005. “Heidegger and Derrida: Iterability and Ereignis,” in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. by Hubert Dreyfuss and Mark A. Wrathall. UK: Blackwell Publishing. 486

[9] Heidegger writes, “What oppresses us is not this or that… it is the world itself.” Heidegger, Being and Time. 187/231

[10] Ibid. 240/284

[11] Ibid. 263/307

[12] Ibid. 263/307

[13] Derrida. 1993. Aporias. Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 9 – my emphasis. Similarly, when asserting the ethico-political normativity of the undecidable – as the paradoxical conclusion that, he contends, precedes the formulation of any decision – Derrida writes, “This moment of suspense, this period of the epoché, without which in fact deconstruction is not possible is always full of anxiety, but who will claim that he is just by economizing on anxiety.” Derrida. 1992. “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, David Gray Carlson. UK: Routledge. 20

[14] Derrida, Jacques. 1982. “The Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 109 – 136 Of course, as central to the resolution of this apparent contradiction that follows, Derrida’s critique of Heidegger emphasizes the determinacy of his concept of death as indirectly sustaining the reflexive self-presence of the subject; despite the fact that Heidegger’s concept of death already is a concept of the radically alien “impossible possibility,” integral to the subject’s sense of self-identity.

[15] Derrida, Jacques. 1982. “Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time.” in Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 14.

[16] “Is my death possible?” Derrida asks, “Can we understand this question? Can I myself pose it? Am I allowed talk about my death? What does the syntagm ‘my death’ mean? And why this expression, “the syntagm ‘my death’?” Derrida, Aporias, 21 – 22.

[17] Derrida, Aporias, 80.

[18] Having failed first to clarify his presuppositions, Derrida contends that Ariès uses terms such as “beliefs, attitudes, life, death, limit, biological and cultural, collective unconscious – as if their intelligibility were guaranteed and did not cover up abysses.” Ultimately, however, he defers addressing these fundamental considerations by calling “metaphysical,” everything, “that the historian must respectively leave aside and assume accessible to common sense or universal experience.” Derrida, Aporias, 43, 50.

[19] Questions belonging to, what Heidegger calls, the “metaphysics of death” (Metaphysiks des Todes) entail considerations of what lies beyond life and death, including specifically, questions of survival and immortality. While Heidegger does not outright dismiss these questions, he contends – in keeping with one of the central tenets of modern philosophy since Kant – that the proper formulation of these questions depends upon a prior exposition of the limiting conditions of experience. Derrida explains, “To wonder what there is after death only has meaning and is legitimately possible (mit Sinn und Recht) – it is only “methodologically certain” (methodisch sicher: Heidegger rarely claims methodological order and derivative legitimacy as often as in these pages) – if one has elaborated a concept of the essence of death and if one remembers that the possibility of being of every Dasein is engaged, invested, and inscribed in the phenomenon of death (in dieses hereinsteht).” Derrida, Aporias, 52 – 53.

[20] Ibid. 53.

[21] Derrida writes, “There is no limit to the effects of a decision that, presenting itself as ‘methodological,’ organizes and hierarchizes all the delimitations that have here been called problematic closures. It extends to all problematics, all disciplines, and all forms of knowledge about death.” Ibid. 53.

[22] Ibid. 6.

[23] Derrida writes, “The border of translation does not pass among various languages. It separates translation from itself, it separates translatability within one and the same language.” As a result, the original suffers always already from what Derrida discerns in the derivative as the failure of translation. He continues, “Babelization does not therefore wait for the multiplicity of languages. The identity of language can only affirm itself as identity to itself by opening itself to the hospitality of a difference from itself or of a difference with itself.”Ibid. 10.

[24] Ibid. 7.

[25] Ibid. 12.

[26] Ibid. 12.

[27] Marc DeKesel convincingly situates Lacan within this theoretical lineage, from which he typically is taken to stand categorically opposed, on account of the vehemence of his polemics. In fact, DeKesel argues that his work serves to resolve a central paradox in object-relations psychoanalysis, by accounting for the status of the lost object as both an object of identification and an object of desire, with his concepts of the symbolic and imaginary. De Kesel, Marc. 2009. Ethics and Eros: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII, tr. Sigi Jottkandt. Albany: State University of New York Press.

[28] As a programmatic assertion of this insight, in his celebrated 1953 essay, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan contends, “Freud’s discovery was that of the field effects, in man’s nature, of his relation to the symbolic order and the fact that their meaning goes all the way back to the most radical instances of symbolization in being. To ignore the symbolic order is to condemn Freud’s discovery to forgetting and analytic experience to ruin.” Lacan, Jacques. 2002. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, Translated by Bruce Fink in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company. 227/275.

[29] Lacan, Ecrits, 80/99.

[30] As Derrida argues in Aporias, the meaning of death remains indeterminate; and, while aversion to it might seem obvious, in fact, when contrasted with the unrelenting insistence of psychical trauma, it might be understood as much of a comfort as the eternal.

[31] Heidegger, Being and Time, 212/256

[32] Lacan writes, “It is in the oldest demand that primary identification is produced, the one that occurs on the basis of the mother’s omnipotence – namely, the one that not only makes the satisfaction of needs dependent upon the signifying apparatus, but also that fragments, filters and models those needs in the defiles of the signifier’s structure.” Lacan, Ecrits; 517/618.

[33] He writes, “Desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn’t the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists.” Lacan, Jacques. 1991. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. 1954 – 1955. Translated by Sylvana Tomaselli. With notes by John Forrester. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company; 223

[34] Lacan, Ecrits; 432/520

[35] As such, the symbolic phallus is meaningless in itself, and only comes to be defined through the network of signifiers that it organizes.

[36] Derrida, Jacques. 1987. “The Facteur of Truth,” In Postcards: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 411 – 496.

[37] When inaugurating the subject’s desire, the absence confronted as the Other’s demand sets the subject on a course for which it simultaneously serves as the end. The assumption of castration is the arrival at this telos, which sublates the desire of the (m)Other in the symbolic phallus as a symbol of lack.

[38] Derrida, “The Facteur of Truth”; 439.

[39] Lacan writes, “At first glance, psychoanalysis seems to lead in the direction of idealism,” insofar as it would seem to reduce social conflict to conditions integral to subjectivity; however, “No praxis is more oriented towards that which, at the hear of experience is the kernel of the real than psychoanalysis.” Lacan, Sem. XI; 53

[40] Lacan, 1992. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. 1959 – 1960. Translated with notes by Dennis Porter. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company. 63.

[41] Zizek, How to Real Lacan; 72.

[42]In this regard, rather than the post-Heideggerian theories of difference, Lacan’s concept of the originary sundering of the Real more closely approximates Marxist critical theorist Theodor Adorno’s concept of nature as a “fractured totality.”

[43] Having radicalized the concept of relation in object-relations psychoanalysis to the point of dissolving the defining tension of unconscious conflict, one might say, Lacan thus reverts to the materialism of ego-psychology’s concept of natural instinct. However, in his postulate of the corporeality of the Real, he does not appeal to the same biologism as ego-psychology, which of course presupposes the imaginary and symbolic mediations of empirical science. Instead, with his concept of the objectivity of the Real – which Lacan sometimes distinguishes as “objectality” to mark its distinction from such naturalism – he refuses the reduction of experience to such apparently immediately given actuality. To the contrary, the Real disrupts the seemingly cohesive self-presence of the actual as that which Derrida attempts to articulate, when conceiving the phenomenological indeterminacy of experience in terms of the aporia of the impossible. By asserting the corporeal objectivity of the Real, however, Lacan simultaneously refuses the reduction of the gaps in experience to the merely formal negativity of the signifier, whether conceived in terms of the univocal horizon of symbolic castration, or the radical complexity of the aporia. Instead, in the material recalcitrance of its disturbing interruption of experience, Lacan conceives the Real as more objective than any mere actuality.

[44] However, Lacan maintains the association between jouissance and orgasm only on the condition of explaining “cumming” as more anxious than commonly understood.

[45] As Lacan himself extrapolates, to assert that “There is no Other of the Other” is effectively to argue that “there is no Other”: no fundamental, or even ever fully constituted order or identity. However, it does not therefore justify renouncing altogether the idea of the Other as a mediating universal, in the name rather of a merely particularist nominalism. Instead, as Derrida similarly argues in his theory of the plural logic of the aporia, it requires conceiving the Other as dependent upon, and so qualified by the particulars it institutes and sustains as signifying chain. However, whereas Derrida explains this dependency of the universal on the particular essentially as an ontological paradox, Lacan conceives it in a manner not only consistent with Freud’s concept of the dynamic unconscious, but also approximating Foucault’s concept of bio-power: as the generative force of the demands that social life makes upon the subject’s body.

[46] Lacan, Sem. X; 27.02.63.

[47] Lacan, Sem. X; 05.12.62. In anxiety, the subject over-identifies with the object of the Other’s demand as not only imaginary, but furthermore as Real, and so suffers the ecstatic jouissance always already implicit in its enthrallment to the symbolic order. While anxiety thus subverts the subject’s sense of experience as fixed in the apparent immediacy of the actual, it does so not merely as a phenomenological indeterminacy, which thus renders it questionable. To the contrary, Lacan contends that the institution of lack “give(s) presence its security.”[47] What subverts the apparent actuality of the symbolic order rather is the collapse of the distance necessary to sustain the jouissance that it demands from the subject; and, while anxiety thus contributes to undermining the authority of the symbolic order, in Lacan’s understanding, it does not therefore deny the validity of any and all first principles as “metaphysical” reifications of the phenomenological indeterminacy of experience. To the contrary, it equally reinforces their importance – even necessity – to instituting and sustaining the possibility of desire.

[48] Hurst, Derrida vis-à-vis Lacan, 85

[49] Derrida, Aporias, 21 – my emphasis

[50] Derrida, Aporias, 21

Works Cited

Chiesa, Lorenzo. 2007. Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. MIT Press: Cambridge.

Critchley, Simon. 1999. Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity. London: Verso.

De Kesel, Marc. 2009. Ethics and Eros: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII, tr. Sigi Jottkandt. Albany: State University of New York Press

Derrida, Jacques. 1982a. “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 1 – 28

• “Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time.” in Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 29 – 68
• “The Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 109 – 136
• “The Facteur of Truth,” In Postcards: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 411 – 496
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• “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, David Gray Carlson. UK: Routledge.
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