Uphold Jacques Lacan Thought?

Published on Thu 12 October 2023 at 4:59pm.

Part One—What is Materialism?

First of all, what is materialism? We need some sort of set of explicit principles or standard against which to compare Freud. The black letter statement of what I take to be dialectical materialism is the 11 Theses on Feuerbach.1 It is possible to memorise. I think at least being able to paraphrase the most important thesis statements is actually a good idea.

I.

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by idealism—but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence in The Essence of Christianity, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of “revolutionary”, of practical-critical activity.2

Marx repeats himself a few times in other works, and settled on his kind of materialism early on in his life, in his doctoral thesis, actually--which is recommended reading from marxists.org.3 Remember that my recommendations for readings are mere suggestions and not commands. also, my standard for having engaged with something sufficiently is to read as much of it as you can, and develop the ability to learn how to come back to it with 0% guilt.

Anyway the theses on Feuerbach were discovered after Marx's death, and they were written in 1845, if I recall correctly, which is ~3 years before the Communist Manifesto. The statement of Marx's materialism that was definitive, to my mind, before the discovery of the Theses was in Das Kapital. It is known in Marxism as the 'bee and the architect' passage. This passage is also recommended reading.

We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will.4

I will make a few clarifying points--Marx is wrong about the theory of mind that insects have. specifically and particularly, he is dead wrong to use the European honey bee as an counter-example to a human architect. Anyway that doesn't matter. All you need to do is interpolate the correct opposite to the mind of a human architect, which has an example in the insect world (the vex wasp)—but even that is unnecessary. Choose another living animal with the properties he picks out, and his argument still stands.

Marx's materialism, therefore is this: it admits of minds. It admits of ideas. it is fully at odds with behaviourism, psychologism, and reductive materialism. in today's philosophical context, especially in Australia-UK-America (i.e. analytic philosophy) it would be misrepresented or slandered as a type of 'idealism'. Then, having whipped up this frenzy, they would denounce it as a kind of 'Platonism'.

So, what is dialectical materialism, then, if today it would be considered a kind of idealism? I will get right to the point: it is a form of Epicurean materialism. What passes for materialism now has a direct line that goes back unbroken to Democritus. Marx is at odds with this contemporary understanding of minds, ideas, and objective reality.

Part Two—What is psychoanalysis?

I will be brief and merely deal with Zizek and Lacan. I regard Freud as a household name with some modicum of lay understanding. Lacan's tradition, then can be easily identified, and this will serve as our starting point. He works within structuralism.

Structuralism is a continental philosophical tradition. Its most famous celebrated figure, who is taken to have inaugurated the philosophy, is Ferdinand Sausseur. The fundamental idea within structuralism is that philosophy needs to stop talking about 'substance' and start talking about 'grammar' or 'linguistic structure'. So, it is a philosophy of formalism.

The modern 'movements' of object-oriented philosophy, speculative realism, deconstruction, post-structuralism, etc. are all working within the same unbroken philosophical discourse since Sausseur.

With some licence, you can say it is a modernisation of the rationalism/empiricism debate. It all maps neatly onto essence/existence - or essentialism/nominalism. The point of giving this background is this: Lacan is to be regarded as a faithful and diligent structuralist.

Structuralism, itself, is the undialectical choice of the empiricist side of the historical discourse. This is so in the context of continental philosophy. Within traditional analytic philosophy, Lacan is totally rejected. He is regarded as alien to the practice, taken to be making no sense whatsoever. He is regarded, by the analytics, as a pure sophist, someone who says words that mean nothing. Personally, i think this is grounds for rejecting analytic philosophy in its traditional form. Anyway, let us return to how people who actually maintain you can make sense of Lacan understand him: Lacan agrees with nominalism and empiricism about metaphysics (i.e. what objects are in the universe and how we know about them).

And, like the Vienna Circle, he attempted to produce the perfect symbolic language of how to understand reality, like Wittgenstein may have with the Tractatus—except Lacan does not map neatly onto positivism. I maintain Lacanianism is not positivistic.

So, the perfect language is derived from Freud, and Lacan always maintained, right until the end, that he was doing nothing but restating psychoanalysis. I will treat you all to one last paragraph on Kacan, before turning to directly answering the question posed: Lacan's fundamental principles are that the human mind is broken up into:

• the Real;

• the Symbolic; and

• the Imaginary.

They more or less map onto, the Id, the Ego, and the Superego, from classical Freud. Each corresponding term:

• the Real = the Id;

• the Symbolic = the Supergo; and

• the Imaginary = the Ego.

Part 3—Conclusion.

First I will speak in relatives, then I will speak in absolutes.

Compared to Marx, Lacan is a kind of Kantian. Kantian idealism is called 'transcendental idealism'. It is strongly anti-realist about essences, and is therefore nominalist, and probably closer to empiricism than rationalism. The saving grace of Kantianism is this:

It says all conscious minds have the same structure, and this explains why we all seem to have the same perception of the world. To this degree he has broken with Hume, and probably looks more like a John Locke style empiricist.

On its own, Lacanianism is extremely bourgeois in character. Lacan famously said at the height of May 68:

So, really, Lacan's philosophy is about his own status as a celebrity. He can be compared to all the edgelord philosophers that are famous among today: whatever you find in the self-help section, the new age book sections, etc.

The really useful thing about it, though, is that it attempts to be universalist like Kant was about the mind. Every human mind works the same way, all else held constant. It all has the same structure. From there you diagnose what is going wrong with a person when they are psychologically sick.