Review: Lacan: Anti-philosophy 3

A commentary to the lectures: "Calliope’s Sc(D)ream" by Prof. Shirley Sharon-Zisser and "Lacan and the Philosophical Soul" by Prof. Ruth Ronen, in the conference "Lacan and Philosophy", Tel Aviv University, 18-19 of November 2015.

Pavón-Cuéllar, D. (2019). Lacanizing Marxism: the Effects of Lacan in Readings of Marx and Marxist Thinkers. Crisis and Critique, 6(1), 262–289. , 2019

In this essay I discuss the ways that Marxism is read through the lens of Lacanian theory by Lacan's followers and not by Lacan himself. I distinguish between different Lacanian approaches to Marxism and between Lacan's diverse effects on the subjects that are approached. I scrutinize five affirmative effects, namely those of problematising, historicising, generalising, confirming and completing what is read. I first explicate these effects briefly in discussing classic works of the 1980s and then at length in presenting my own Lacanian approach to Marxism. I show how the realisation of such effects implies a Lacanization of Marxism and the resulting constitution of a Lacanian Marxism that I openly assume.

Crisis and Critique, 2019

In this intervention, I argue for drawing a sharp distinction between the late Lacan and the final Lacan. Specifically, I defend a reading of Lacan's twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth seminars (L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue, s'aile à mourre [1976-1977] and Le moment de conclure [1977-1978]) according to which this very last Lacan self-critically abandons much of what he pursued during the later period of his teaching from the 1960s through the mid-1970s. In particular, I contend that, starting in 1976, Lacan puts an end to the reign of the matheme, namely, the pursuit of an analysis purged of meaning through mathematical-style formalizations bearing upon a senseless Real. He does so motivated by a combination of methodological/pedagogical and ontological/metaphysical reasons. As I see it, the final Lacan opts instead for an anti-reductive treatment of sens avowedly inspired by Marxian materialism. The meanings of Imaginary-Symbolic reality arise from, but thereafter become relatively autonomous in relation to, a meaningless Real that itself in turn comes to be affected and perturbed by these same meanings. My reconstruction of the final Lacan undermines narratives suggesting an uninterrupted continuity in the later Lacan's trajectory from the start of the 1960s right up until his death in 1981. Moreover, I show how and why Lacan, in his last years, significantly reconfigures the interrelations he posits between psychoanalysis, philosophy, science, and religion.

PhD thesis, 2022

Lacanian psychoanalysis has received increasing attention in the last few decades for its relevance to thinking about politics, mainly as a result of its key role in the work of the post-Althusserian philosophers of the Ljubljana School. This, however, has resulted in a portrayal of Lacan’s position with respect to Marx that can seem obvious and uncomplicated, and that elides the complexities of the historical narrative of psychoanalysis’s interaction with Marxist thought. This thesis offers a more complex historical picture of how Lacan relates to Marx. It argues that the political possibilities opened up by psychoanalysis, in particular with respect to its response to Marx, cannot be understood extraneously to this historical dimension. The thesis carries out readings of key texts in twentieth-century philosophy, science, and political theory associated with Marxist thought to construct this intellectual history. It finds that, at each moment of its development, Lacan’s work responded to conceptual impasses precipitated by the legacy of this tradition. What also emerges, though, is a view of Lacan that cannot be reduced to a Marxist framework, precisely because of the pressure-points within it that he exploits. There is a history conditioning Lacan’s position with respect to Marx that has been forgotten, and that haunts attempts currently being made, in the half-century after his work was completed, to come to terms with it. This thesis begins a study of the contours of this history, in order to register the political possibilities that Lacan opened up.

The aim of this talk is to problematize the presence of Jacques Lacan in Alain Badiou’s thought, in order to show what is specific in his idea of philosophy and to explore why the confrontation with the French psychoanalyst is crucial in this regard. If, on the one hand, the confrontation with Lacanian psychoanalysis has engaged Badiou since his very first texts, it is, on the other hand, only within a seminar that, in 1994-1995, the French philosopher decided to consecrate to Lacan that his confrontation with the latter reached its peak, showing in a clear and definite way what it would mean that, by using an expression from Badiou’s Manifesto for Philosophy, “a philosophy is possible today, only if it is compossibile with Lacan”. It is within a series of seminars on antiphilosophy that Badiou places this decisive confrontation with Lacan. Despite the fact that the French philosopher has never dedicated a specific text to the question of antiphilosophy tout court, the confrontation with those who, after Lacan, from whom the term derives, he names antiphilosophers, constitutes one of the fundamental tasks that Badiou assigns to philosophy. Taking seriously the objections of the antiphilosophers and remodelling itself because of them, in fact, allows philosophy to avoid the “religious” risk – which its “history” shows to represent its “immanent temptation” – of presuming “a continuity between the truths and the circulation of the sense”. According to Badiou, Lacan represents the closure of this group of antiphilosophers, thus fulfilling a specific role within antiphilosophy and representing, therefore, the most appropriate place from which to examine the specificity of the latter and the consequences that its questioning has for philosophy as it is conceived and practiced by Badiou. Consequently, I will try, first of all, to provide a short reconstruction of the presence of Lacan within the Badiou’s thought taken as a whole. Then, I will focus more specifically on the 1994-1995 seminar with a twofold objective: i) trying to define clearly what is, for Badiou, antiphilosophy, for what reasons Lacan would decree its closure and to what extent the comparison with it proves decisive for the definition of the Badiousian idea of philosophy; ii) showing how Lacan’s reflection plays a fundamental role in defining what is, for Badiou, philosophy, beyond the articulation of philosophy and antiphilosophy, to the point that it is Badiou himself who points out, within certain positions taken by Lacan, “a line of contact between philosophy and antiphilosophy”. Finally, I will concentrate instead on those points within the seminar that attest to how Lacan’s antiphilosophy – or, at least, the itinerary it allows you to take – maintains a certain distance from Badiou’s philosophical gesture. After having examined the way in which Badiou deals with these issues, I will try to show the limits of his reading starting from a different rereading of the very last phase of Lacan’s reflections and to articulate a different idea of philosophy that Lacan only suggests and that he calls by the name of foliesophie.

This paper examines Lacan's historical claims about philosophy, dating back to Parmenides. It is this critical reconstruction of history of philosophy, we argue, that underlies Jacques Lacan’s polemical provocations in the mid-1970s that his position was an “anti-philosophie”. Following an introduction surveying the existing literature on the subject, in part ii, the essay present the account of classical philosophy Lacan has in mind when he declares psychoanalysis to be an antiphilosophy after 1975. It assembles his claims about the history of ideas in Seminars XVII and XX in ways earlier contributions of this subject have not systematically done. Part iii focuses upon Lacan’s remarkable reading of Descartes’ break with premodern philosophy—but touches on Lacan’s readings of Hegel and (in a remarkable confirmation of Lacan’s “Parmenidean” conception of philosophy) the early Wittgenstein. Here we examine Lacan’s positioning of psychoanalysis as a legatee of the Cartesian moment in the history of western ideas. In different terms than Slavoj Zizek, we propose that it is Lacan’s famous avowal that the subject of the psychoanalysis is the subject first essayed by Descartes in The Meditations on First Philosophy as confronting an other capable of deceit (as against mere illusion or falsity) that decisively measures the distance between Lacan’s unique “antiphilosophy” and the forms of later modern linguistic and cultural relativism whose hegemony Alain Badiou has decried. At the same time, it sets Lacan’s antiphilosophy apart from the Parmenidean legacy for which "thinking and being could be the same".

2012

The Marx through Lacan Vocabulary: A Compass for Libidinal and Political Economies, 2022

This text explores a set of key concepts in Marxist theory as developed and read by Lacan, demonstrating links and connections between Marxist thought and Lacanian practice. The book examines the complexity of these encounters through the structure of a comprehensive vocabulary which covers diverse areas, from capitalism and communism to history, ideology, politics, work, and family. Offering new perspectives on these concepts in psychoanalysis, as well as in the fields of political and critical theory, the book brings together contributions from a range of international experts to demonstrate the dynamic relationship between Marx and Lacan, as well as illuminating “untranslatable points” which may offer productive tension between the two. The entries trace the trajectory of Lacan’s appropriation of Marx’s concepts and analyses how they were questioned, criticized, and reworked by Lacan, accounting for the wide reach of two thinkers and worlds in constant homology. Each entry also discusses psychoanalytic debates relating to the concept and seeks to refine the clinical scope of Marx’s work, demonstrating its impact on the social and individual dimensions of Lacanian clinical practice. With a practical and structured approach, The Marx through Lacan Vocabulary will appeal to psychoanalysts and researchers in a range of fields, including political science, cultural studies, and philosophy.