προγραφές

'To the extent that Lacan has carried out what is, in fact, a quite singular enterprise of sublating philosophical discourse (whether referred to as “psychoanalytic,” “Lacanian,” or “of the unconscious”), he has reinvested the dominant values and positions of the philosophical. One must understand sublation here in the sense that Derrida gives it when translating Hegel’s aufheben: to suppress and conserve on another level. In this dialectical operation par excellence, Lacan adopted the aims and essential project of the philosophical: the appropriation of a truthful knowledge, systematicity, and the mastery of foundation. He also reproduced and concretized its fundamental political gesture: knowledge is invested with power, decision becomes sovereign, and the communal order is given unitary and authoritarian representation. This explains the well-known succession, in the history of the Lacanian movement, of what today are called “perverse effects” (perhaps, in fact, maliciously authorized by Lacan himself, in view of the final “dissolution,” whose meaning for him remains to be considered). Generally, then, it is a question of the sublation of a closed discourse where philosophy, since Heidegger, reorganizes and confronts its own end. Psychoanalysis, in turn, might itself succumb to this closure.'

Jean-Luc Nancy & Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Tittle of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan, translators: François Raffoul & David Pettigrew, publisher: State University of New York Press