Lacan against Derrida

I realize I've been pitting these two thinkers against each other here constantly, but only to, in the end, constantly elaborate the Derridian criticism of Lacan and not the other way around. This is not due to any prejudices I have against Lacan and in favor of Derrida (though I do have some against Lacanians) so much as it is my taking longer to come to grips with the scope of Derrida's project. But now, I think, I'm in a position to let Lacan have his word, if only because I feel that I can let his voice criticize Derrida without reducing Derrida to what he is not (as is so commonly and easily done).

For what does Derrida, in the end, despise in Lacan? If we look back at "Le Facteur de la Verité," we're liable to see that it is not Lacan's assumption that structure (language) is in the end determining (though this is a constant grievance of Derrida's and is constantly tried to be refuted by Lacanians--most notably Zizek), but that Lacan's interpretative method when reading Freud is in certain places so extremely powerful.

Now, what do we mean by this? Let's revisit a famous lecture he gave at Johns Hopkins in 1966:

When I began to teach something about Psychoanalysis I lost some of my audience, because I had perceived long before then the simple fact that if you open a book of Freud, and particularly those books which are properly about the unconscious, you can be absolutely sure — it is not a probability but a certitude — to fall on a page where it is not only a question of words — naturally in a book there are always words many printed words — but words which are the object through which one seeks for a way to handle the unconscious. Not even the meaning of the words, but words in their flesh, in their material aspect (from Lacan.com).

Now, unlike so many other times in Lacan ("The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning"), I think this passage disarms with its straightforwardness, its simplicity, its ability to be verified. This would make sense, as it is precisely outlining the transition between a phenomenological approach to Freud and a structural one. In short, Lacan is pinpointing that fulcrum in Freud's work that he is constantly leaning on: the fact that Freud is using words to grasp at the unconscious not through their meaning, but through some of their relationships to each other. Look at the analysis of Irma's injection. What is important is not so much the deployment of Freud's ever amassing conceptual apparatus (condensation, displacement, etc.) in order to make sense of the dream, but how willing Freud is to let certain words in which he originally brought the dream to language ("...my friend Otto had given her an injection of a preparation of propyl, propyls . . .. propionic acid . . . trimethylamin...") work out the functioning of the dream of themselves, as it were. That is, Lacan sees that what is important is that Freud approaches the unconscious with certain formations or instances of structure that let him get a handle on its larger possible constitution, and do so much better than a sort of analysis by way of locating its operations by trying to apply a sort of network of explanatory concepts (repression, sublimation, etc.).

Lacan thus adopts this perspective towards the unconscious, and reads Freud for instances in which this perspective is apparent or lurking beneath the surface of his faculties. He too comes up with a network of explanatory concepts (object petit a, the Real, etc.), but notice that this is not what Derrida is angry at. This is not the case, because Derrida (like the best Lacanians) knows that these concepts themselves explain little. Thus it is just as futile for someone to read Lacan and think that they can map out the functioning of the subject by way of these terms as it is for someone to read Freud and merely look at when and where he is using "repression:" Alain Badiou is a supreme example of the bankruptcy of this approach as a communication of what Lacan is getting at, as well as Zizek and Bruce Fink, to a lesser extent. And in both Zizek and Badiou, this occasionally leads them to seriously fail to think a situation thoroughly: their way of talking about Lacan feeds back into the way they understand Lacan--being in the end closer to what we are calling Lacan and Freud's "perspective" than their statements allegedly explaining him. This is why Lacan's diagrams and mathemes don't pretend to explain anything wholly, and Lacan in his seminars always remains ironic towards them.

No, Derrida does not attack this aspect in Lacan. He attacks precisely that perspective which Lacan sees in Freud and adopts. He does so because he fundamentally thinks it does not remain as provisional or heuristic as it should. In other words, Derrida thinks that utilizing certain concepts as elements of a structure in order to "get a handle on the unconscious" is  doing more than "getting a handle on" something. This is his criticism of bricolage more generally.

Lacanians have defended Lacan against this charge, as we've already seen, by trying to turn Lacan's conceptual apparatus into something that can be shown to be anti-structuralist, and thus accommodating to Derrida's demands. In short, they seek to make Lacan's insight into something that is able to account for its provisionality, its heuristic character. Thus the turn towards Badiou and the fanaticism with which Lacanians demand that Lacan's thought have an "ontology." Thus Zizek's vanguardism when it comes to politics--and this is where things get dangerous on a Lacanian view of things--which prescribes the strategic and performative positioning of leaders in the role of the analyst, the "subject who is supposed to know," with respect to society.

But one might ask whether Derrida's demand--the demand that this utilization of concepts account for the possibility that it is doing more than getting a handle on whatever it is supposed to get a handle on--one might ask whether this demand is exactly applicable to what is most powerful and interesting and fundamental in Lacan (that is, what Derrida hates about Lacan!). I would argue that it might not. Indeed, it will absolutely apply in many (many!) cases with Lacan. But with what is most powerful and at the very heart of his readings of Freud and his analysis of the subject... this might be doubted.

Now, this is not because what Derrida asks is wrong. And it is absolutely, absolutely (I can't stress this enough) not because what Derrida asks isn't "practical," or is an impossible demand. Both of these views are held by Zizek and many other Lacanians, and this I think is what makes them particularly dangerous in some instances.

It is because Lacan's analysis by way of structures is not heuristic or provisional. Immediately, though, we must say (again against Lacanians) that this is not because it is universal, i.e. grounded in a universal ontology (even if this ontology itself is merely a procedure, merely provisional, like Badiou's). Rather it is merely because Derrida demands that something not be as heuristic as it is when, from the beginning, it does not function that way. Ultimately, this fundamental feature of Lacan's analysis, its core that constitutes its amazing power, works with structures that constitute more a density than a structure (that is, if structure is conceived as what operates provisionally, as bricolage). At least when Lacan is most powerful, most faithful to what we have seen him find in Freud. These structures are not provisional nor universal, then, but operational within certain conditions, when a certain situation has constellated itself just so. And this is why Lacan is best not when he is analyzing culture but when he is reading Freud. He is delimiting these densities or structures qua densities as they operate in Freud such that the entire Freudian project is not so much made commensurate conceptually with some sort of postmodernism (by being founded upon some secure postmodern ontological basis), but instead is made more robust as a mode of thinking and of analysis. Robust, in the sense that these densities are densities of possibility: Lacan explains the possibility of Freud thinking along a particular line and having certain thoughts available to him but only perhaps half-articulated or even not articulated at all--not because of the terms he uses and the connections between them, but precisely because of the structure or density that makes possible a particular nexus of thoughts in Freud's writing. Look at "The Economic Problem of Masochism:" to proceed through this essay as if Freud is merely dealing with his own terms and not reaching towards that point where he can conclude certain things by moving along the lines of a certain structure--a structure which Lacan can specify--would be unproductive. Why? Because, as Lacan understands, Freud is precisely moving in this other way, whether he wants to or not: he is trying to get a handle on the problem by means of certain other terms--terms that function within a certain structure with a certain density within the limits of his particular problematic. This is to say that Lacan reveals certain tendencies or functions in Freud's thought that locally determine (i.e. not provisionally, nor universally) the possibility of other thoughts either more or less developed falling into their places in his thinking. The task then for Lacan is to try and work out these structures a little more explicitly, while employing the same sort of approach.

I might elaborate on this more later, when I myself can express or communicate it better. But it seems to me this is what Derrida can't quite attack fully in his reading of Lacan, and thus what constitutes the limits of the Derridian project also. This project thus sometimes makes impossible demands in the wrong places--and it is not that it is wrong to impossibly demand (on the contrary, this is necessary), nor that one can't actually do anything when the project makes this demand in some place, but that one can't do anything with his thought when it is in the wrong place. In the end it is not a failing of the impossibility of the demand itself that Derrida puts to Lacan, but one of the fact that Derrida, to paraphrase an apt yet only tangentially related phrase of Foucault, cannot isolate that element of Lacan that he would attack by reducing all other elements to the relatively undifferentiated category of "the excluded" (cf. The Archaeology of Knowledge, 9). So Derrida attacks Lacan, but not that crucial Lacan which falls short of his demand. And this is not because the attack is wrong in principle, but because Derrida cannot see that the Lacan excluded from his critique can be a differentiated category, itself perhaps containing crucial elements. It is in this space that the really crucial Lacan lies--the place of the powerful Lacan. This is that Lacan that can profitably extend and work out the structures that make possible certain aspects of Freudian thought--and not to establish these structures as universal, or claim to use them only provisionally, but in order to more thoroughly develop particular possibilities out of the density of a structure in directions that Freud went and in others that he did not.