By VINÍCIUS DUTRA*
Commentary on two recently translated books by Jacques Lacan: “Early Writings” and “The Logic of the Phantasm. Seminar 14”
That Jacques Lacan's work continues to be published on Brazilian soil is far from being a surprise. This indicates how Lacanian thought, often unfairly accused of simply providing empty concepts, which still have the worn-out varnish of cheap hermeticism, retains all its importance even today, more than forty years after his death.
The compilation of Jacques Lacan's early texts in First writings, when he was involved in his work as a psychiatrist, and the transcripts of his presentations during the fourteenth seminar, entitled The logic of the ghost, now allow a wider audience to follow the effervescent attitude of a psychoanalyst who tried to make explicit the subversion of the Freudian horizon itself.
Jacques Lacan was a restless analyst, attentive to the recognition that a concept, however elaborate it may be, needs to take into account the situation in which it is produced. Because of this, his speech in his seminars became the space destined for a dialectic in which psychoanalytic notions were turned over and over again over time, without being abandoned.
Even at the time he was writing his thesis in psychiatry on paranoia, defended in 1932, Jacques Lacan was already approaching psychoanalytic vocabulary, albeit through marginal digressions. First writings is a testament to this. The anthology now provides a selection of Lacanian texts published between 1928 and 1935. It is appropriate to include at the end of this collection the French translation, carried out by Jacques Lacan in 1932, of an essay by Sigmund Freud whose considerations on the different shades of jealousy reach the point of paranoia.
In addition to showing how Jacques Lacan subscribed to the Freudian terminology mobilized at the time (by accepting to translate “Drive”, that is, drive, by instinct), also allows us to identify how his interest in psychosis permeated his intellectual trajectory. His questioning of psychotic writing, already in 1931, seen by Jacques Lacan, with the help of surrealism, as “a play activity”, will echo in his interpretation, developed in the 1970s, of the literature of James Joyce.
The dimension of play reappears there, especially through Lacan's explanation of the singular resources for the neologisms invented by the Irish writer. Reiterating this aspect would contribute to suspicion of the current attempt to classify Jacques Lacan's work into separate parts, without any connection. It would be necessary to dare to say that the first Lacan resonates in his later thought, and the inversion of this is necessary: the last Lacan is also the first.
Jacques Lacan’s career in psychoanalysis was marked by theoretical divergences and institutional ruptures. Even so, he consolidated a solid teaching through the seminars he gave from the 1950s onwards. “The Logic of the Phantasm” is one of them. Held between November 1966 and June 1967, the seminar began with a highly influential event. November 1966 marked a crucial period in Jacques Lacan’s intellectual work: his essays, written between 1936 and 1966 and compiled by the prestigious editor Jean Wahl, were published by Seuil with a simple and powerful title, consisting of a single word: Writings.
It was an unprecedented moment for Jacques Lacan, in which his concepts began to become known beyond those listeners who followed him, generally with a greater inclination towards clinical work. It is no coincidence that the meetings transcribed in The logic of the ghost are largely haunted by the insistent return, throughout the exhibition's unfolding, of their own essays grouped together in the Writings. They insist on resurfacing, as if it were necessary to refer to the writing of the past to account for their thinking in the present.
As much as Jacques Lacan's reflection has changed over time, and it would be crucial to take such inflections into account, this does not simply mean that a certain guiding thread does not run through his theoretical experience. Such a thread is even indicated by Jacques Lacan himself in The logic of the ghost, when he makes the gesture of emphasizing that his essays from such distinct periods could be read from the question of the subject. It is worth remembering that Jacques Lacan was the one who started from the following question: how to think about the category of subject after the emergence of the “Freudian message”?
By using this expression, he was referring to nothing less than the decentering promoted by the unconscious throughout the subject's search to become conscious of his thoughts, his actions, his desires. In short, to become conscious of himself. The problem is that, at every moment, something escapes him, and "that" which surpasses him is what leads him to not be master in his own house, to use a masterful phrase by Sigmund Freud.
In view of this, some might easily be inclined to imagine that psychoanalysis is the shifting terrain of the depths of the irrational, since it is not itself a clinic that deals with a dark psychological zone, which cannot be properly grasped from the prism of reason? We are led to say that there is truth in this intuition. However, it is necessary to recognize that Jacques Lacan's work was the obstinate struggle to defend, based on the theoretical resources that were contemporary to him, that the unconscious respects a logic, which he described as Freudian logic.
Without going into all the intricacies necessary to explain this theory, let us focus on the central notion of this seminar: “phantom”. A versatile Lacanian expression, phantom indicates, among other things, a subjective scene from which we can tell our story, in which we are even positioned in a specific way in relation to others. Phantom is not entirely detached from our most intimate sexual fantasies, but points to how they organize a point from which we wish to see reality. As unusual as it may seem, “desire” and “reality” are not antagonistic terms for Lacanian psychoanalysis. They tend to coexist with each other, to the point that Jacques Lacan joked that, for us to desire someone, this otherness must be able to “wear the clothes” of our fantasies, that is, be able to enter into the logic of our phantom.
To begin to outline the notations of such logic, Jacques Lacan resorts to reflections originating from the field of mathematics, which leads The logic of the ghost to be permeated with harsh lessons that are difficult to assimilate, especially for those without a foundation in metamathematics. It is intriguing to note that, even when Lacan deepens his inclination towards ideas coming from analytical thought, such as Bertrand Russell's paradox, the philosophy that served as a basis for the young Lacan manifests itself at every step taken in his exposition.
His intellectual ghosts, which once made his speculative horizon possible, still continue to claim a place in his teaching. Thus, while he comments on Hegelian dialectics, he also does not fail to critically consider Martin Heidegger's project. In fact, Jacques Lacan cannot completely abandon the pulse that the upheaval of Heideggerian thought produced in the French context. Without a doubt, he also does not bet on Heidegger's return to a question "more original to being", that is, to a thought prior to the systematization made by classical Greek philosophy (read Plato and Aristotle).
Jacques Lacan does not accept this Heideggerian return for a number of reasons, including the fact that he does not believe it is possible to achieve it without major difficulties. This does not mean that Lacan accepts the meanings of the terms consolidated at the dawn of modernity, which Martin Heidegger wants to distance himself from at all costs, since they are the greatest culmination of the “forgetfulness of being”. The Lacanian impetus closest to Heidegger remains exactly here, intact. It emerges with force when the French psychoanalyst engages in a discussion about science in its modern configuration.
Some might suppose that Jacques Lacan subscribes to the knowledge and mastery of this same science. But what happens is something quite different: he carefully examines the traces of what is rejected by it. In this sense, we could understand psychoanalysis as a clinic that listens to the violence of this exclusion. The analytical experience would then be the space destined for that which can never be completely absorbed by the scientific method. That what is excluded by this same method has a relationship with the subject is food for thought… However, what is this, the subject?
One of the most beautiful passages of The logic of the ghost deals precisely with this point. Jacques Lacan takes up a well-known parable by the Taoist Chuang-Tzu to give it an original interpretation. The case revolves around a peculiar dream of the Chinese sage. During the dream work, he is transmuted into the form of a butterfly. It is a curious thing, to dream of being a butterfly. Needless to say, his conscience soon assures him that “this is only a dream”, as if it could then reassure him in the face of an impasse regarding his own identity.
This anecdote can be explained in many ways, but the important one here is the following: why does something that is largely excluded from the usual use of language appear in the dream? After all, if someone goes out on the street and says loudly “I am a butterfly”, what will happen is that this same person will be labeled as “crazy”. This will attest to a significant loss of the proper use of reason. It is impossible to state a statement of this nature within an intersubjective framework, because it disrupts the correct way of reporting on oneself, given current determinations. This rupture indicates that there is something in us that does not adapt to the regime of existence of our own time.
Psychoanalysis is nothing more than the guardian of that which cannot be socially expressed due to the atrophied conditions of the hegemonic form of life. The subject, under the Lacanian matrix, is then that which aims, to use the butterfly as a metaphor, to take flight towards a language freed from the bonds of the existing.
It cannot be overemphasized that Jacques Lacan's seminars edited by Jacques-Alain Miller have a frequently recalled impasse: Miller, the son-in-law in charge of publishing postmortem Lacanian work, carries out an editorial work that is not free from questioning. Criticism generally falls on its “politics of punctuation”, which is accused of infiltrating its particular reading of Lacan’s theory. However, we cannot forget that The logic of the ghost is the transcription of a speech, which inevitably imposes certain choices to the detriment of others. Jacques Lacan was someone who was open to the polysemy of language, which makes it even more difficult to identify which meaning he is playing with in a given part of the exposition of his ideas.
Although this “policy of punctuation” does indeed exist, it does not mean that one cannot find alternative sources on the work of Jacques Lacan, which transcribe his seminars in a different way. The edition published by the Zahar imprint is in addition to these editions that are already in circulation.
Se The logic of the ghost began with a milestone for Jacques Lacan via the publication of his Writings, the seminar also sensed the malaise that was spreading throughout France. Strikes were beginning to haunt the context in which its teaching took place, from student stoppages at the end of 1966 to a general workers' strike in May 1967. These episodes, which even interrupted the meetings of “The Logic of the Phantom”, were much more than simple one-off strikes: they were, in fact, a prelude to the eruption that was coming. Paraphrasing Marx and Engels, “A phantom is haunting Europe”, a specter that would question many customs and would go down in history as May 1968.
Now, it could not go unnoticed that Lacanian reflection was situated between these events. Here remains a question for posterity: were we capable of absorbing the excitement that motivated such a turnaround in ways of life? If we want to be faithful to Jacques Lacan's subversion, this dilemma should not be answered easily. We run the high risk of transforming his thought into a generalized jargon, very typical of an era like ours, marked by the end of any possibility of thinking.
A critic of Lacan, the French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida, once had the courage to recognize that the Lacanian horizon held within itself a future and a promise. What we still do not know for sure is how to unveil this future and realize this promise to the point of being worthy of the event to which the name Jacques Lacan refers each time it is enunciated.
*Vinicius Dutra is a psychoanalyst and PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of São Paulo (USP).
Originally published in the newspaper People's Mail on November 30, 2024.
References
Jacque Lacan. First writings. Translation: Vera Avellar Ribeiro. Rio de Janeiro, Zahar, 2024, 168 pages. [https://amzn.to/40dwnAA]
Jacque Lacan. The logic of the ghost. Seminar 14. Translation: Teresinha N. Meirelles do Prado, Rio de Janeiro, Zahar, 2024, 384 pages. [https://amzn.to/49XqmLJ]
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