Modes of (Un)consciousness in Merleau-Ponty and Lacan

In Merleau-Ponty's lectures at the Collège de France, there is a surprizing expression about the body: "machine à vivre", or "machine à voir", that he takes up from the writings of Paul Valéry. This metaphor occurs in the first lectures, when Merleau-Ponty describes the implicit coordination of perception and motility. It is the arrangement, or what he also calls the montage, of our sentient body that defines the meaning of what we perceive, or in other word the "body schema", defined for example in the Résumés as "open to all other bodies that I see, a lexicon of corporeality in general, a system of equivalences between the inside and the outside" (p. 178). This sensing body is also a desiring body, and both these aspects intertwine to form the realm of the unconscious as "sensing itself"; the "primordial unconscious" is this machinic dimension of the body. Merleau-Ponty's approach to the unconscious can be compared and confronted to Lacan's conception under this notion: the automaton, the machine. Such a confrontation should help answering the question of the nature of the unconscious, and thus bridge the gap between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. I will start with describing the use of the word "machine" in Merleau-Ponty's lectures; I will then show the link between this notion and his discussion of psychoanalysis; the third stage will be to present Lacan's conception of the automaton, and then Guattari's notion of the desiring machine. My conclusion will be to articulate and combine those three conceptions and show in what direction Merleau-Ponty might have gone if he had had the chance to develop his views further.

2013

Merleau-Ponty offers a significant renewal and deepening of the phenomenological project by introducing the body itself as the locus of the “upsurge of the world.” His career represents an unfolding revelation of this fundamental insight, beginning with a realization of the inadequacy of objective/mechanistic psychology and eventually moving toward a never completed project of re-imagining ontology in terms of the self revelation of the world as living existence. In this paper, I concentrate on the first phase of Merleau-Ponty’s career, which includes his challenge to the objectivist tendencies in biology and psychology and his alternative phenomenological vision of life and significance. In Phenomenology of Perception, in particular, Merleau-Ponty argues that scientific knowledge passes over the true nature of perception and, therefore, misses its origin in the silent immersion of the body in a world with which it is always already intimate. Indeed, for Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology reveals, in perceptual experience, the birth of meaning as it is lived by bodies in the subtle dance that is existence.

The French psychoanalytic Jacques Marie Èmile Lacan (1901-81) reconceptualized Sigmund Freud using post-structuralism. For him human passion is structured by the desires and feelings of the relay of others as a social phenomenon. In this context psychoanalysis can be reduced to a theory of the human subject created by social interaction in - a combination of language, culture and the spaces between people. But Lacan also insists upon distinguishing between different kinds of desires in which he points to a fundamental incompatibility between desire and speech, because there is always a leftover which exceeds speech. This leftover is by Lacan considered the centre of the real and (like Freud) he is mainly concerned with the fundamental distinction between the conscious I (ego) and the unconscious subject, which often reveals itself in situations where the conscious ego is out of control.

Psychoanalysis and History, 2015

In this paper we examine Jacques Lacan's work from the late 1940s and early 1950s and Jean-Paul Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego, published in 1936, in order to establish a conceptual connection between two authors who are usually considered, given their theoretical and methodological perspectives, as having opposing viewpoints. The proposed connection is based on Sartre's concept of unreflective consciousness and Lacan's concept of the subject. There are four notions that allow us to establish this connection: the transcendental, the active, the constitutive and the impersonal/transindividual. Finally, we present a shared epistemological basis for both concepts that is essential to support the considerations in this paper.

Philosophy of Mind: The Key Thinkers, ed. Andrew Bailey, 2013

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 2013

I attempt to show that the respective ways in which Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan broach the question of the animal demonstrate a subtle and yet important difference of approach to the question of the genesis and structure of the symbolic order and of the human being. This in turn reveals that Derrida and Lacan's theories each have a different relation to the results of the empirical sciences. In Derrida's case, the undermining of structure is necessary in order for that structure to open onto its own genesis and thus relate to the sciences which attempt to account for that genesis; while for Lacan, an account of genesis is needed in order to explain precisely why that structure is open in the first place, and to account for the ways in which it gets sealed or closed.

2013