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Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory This article was downloaded by: 10.3.98.104 On: 30 Sep 2021 Access details: subscription number Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG, UK Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory Yannis Stavrakakis, Stephen Frosh, Lynne Layton, Dany Nobus Jacques Lacan Publication details https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315524771-4 Dominiek Hoens Published online on: 23 Sep 2019 How to cite :- Dominiek Hoens. 23 Sep 2019, Jacques Lacan from: Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory Routledge Accessed on: 30 Sep 2021 https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315524771-4 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR DOCUMENT Full terms and conditions of use: https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/legal-notices/terms This Document PDF may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproductions, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The publisher shall not be liable for an loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. 3 JACQUES LACAN Dominiek Hoens If a political scientist were to look in a rather naïve way for a theory of the human being in Lacan’s works—for example, to obtain a precise idea of what that being that lives in common with others is—he or she may end up with both less and more than expected. Less because as Lacan once put it in unambiguous terms, ‘If there are people who do not know what man [l’homme] is, indeed they are psychoanalysts’ (Lacan 1967–1968: lesson of 6 March 1968; see also Lacan 2007: 63). There is a simple reason for this absence of knowledge about the human being in Lacanian psychoanalysis, namely it does not treat ‘man’, the human being, the individual, not even the psyche (as one may expect from a discipline named ‘psychoanalysis’), but rather the subject. Although in colloquial language, the latter notion is often used interchangeably with the former ones, the Lacanian subject has to be distinguished from them. A large part of Lacan’s con- tribution to the psychoanalytic field consists precisely in making this distinction and in explain- ing why and how the subject is neither a universal human being nor a particular individual. This also suggests why one may get more out of Lacan regarding politics than expected, because this subject, as we shall see, is conceived as intrinsically social and political. Succinctly put, the sub- ject’s social and political life is not a layer on top of a supposedly apolitical way of being; on the contrary, from a Lacanian point of view, only when taking into account a sociopolitical context does it make sense to refer to a subject. Not Without Others If the crucial point about Lacanian theory is to approach it as a theory of the subject, to be dis- tinguished from the human being, then it is all the more surprising to observe that this ‘subject’ does not appear in the early stages of Lacan’s work; instead, it is enquiries about the ‘human being’ that take the central place. Indeed, before introducing the notion of the subject, most of Lacan’s first contributions to psychoanalysis raise the question of what it means to be a human being or, more precisely, how one ends up taking oneself for a human being. This question is particularly prominent in two of his early texts, The Number Thirteen and the Logical Form of Suspicion (Lacan 2001: 85–99) and Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty (Lacan 2006: 161–175). The reader may wonder why one should pay attention to two texts that do not belong to what is generally considered as the more mature period of Lacan’s thought1 and that were originally published in the non-psychoanalytical and non-academic art journal Cahiers 44 Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 01:55 30 Sep 2021; For: 9781315524771, chapter3, 10.4324/9781315524771-4 Jacques Lacan d’Art. Yet there are two reasons to do this here. First, the texts are marked by and expressly refer to the political, (post-)World War II context during which they were written, and second, they not only reveal at what point Lacan situates the subject but also anticipate and orient later developments of his thought. Although Number Thirteen got published one year after Logical Time, in 1946, we will start our overview with this text, because it is considered by Lacan as anterior (Lacan 2001: 86). The problem that Number Thirteen discusses in detail concerns, generally put, the identification of a false coin among a variable number of coins, with a balance one can use only a limited number of times. More concretely, if given 13 coins, how can one find the false one, using a balance three times? This coin-weighing problem is well-known among mathematicians, and although it is most interesting in itself, we will engage with only a fragment of its solution.2 The first step consists in weighing four coins against four others. There are two possible outcomes: equilib- rium or not. If there is an equilibrium, one knows the false coin belongs to the five remaining pieces. How to find this odd piece in two remaining weighs only? The following weigh is done with three remaining pieces and one good coin, that is, one that belongs to the eight tested before—which turned out to be of equal weight and therefore OK. Lacan names this method ‘3 + 1’, because to three suspect coins one good coin is added, which helps to eventually discover the false weight among the suspect. For our purposes, the question of how this is done is not relevant, but Lacan’s comments on this procedure need to be spelled out. The inserted coin, Lacan argues, does not function as ‘specified or specifying norm’ according to which the other suspect coins are either in conformity or not (Lacan 2001: 98). Inserting the coin is merely part of the general operation of weighing coins against each other, the inserted coin included, which is considered ‘good’ only because it has been weighed against others before. The coins, therefore, do not belong to the same species, which would imply that their identity relies on an externally chosen quality—for example, ‘weighs 21 grams’—but belong to a collection based on being uniform. The coins, therefore, do not form a class—to which one belongs on the condition of having a certain quality—but become part of a collection through the weighing of every piece against the others. The interrelated processes of becoming a one among equal others and of the formation of a collection by testing the items one by one results, according to Lacan, in a synthesis of the particular and the universal (2001: 99). Lacan’s interest in this dialectic between a group and its individual members was piqued during a five-week stay in England in September 1945 (Roudinesco 1997: 172).3 In a text recounting his experiences and observations, English Psychiatry and the War, Lacan discusses the work of, among others, Wilfred Bion and John Rickman and praises the way one man- aged to treat large groups of patients during the Second World War (Lacan 2001: 101–120). Lacan’s main conclusion is that a group does not need to depend on a leader or an external ideal to show coherent organization. Freud had discussed this issue before in his Group Psy- chology and the Analysis of the Ego (1981 [1921]), in which he argued that horizontal, mutual identifications and emotional ties depend on an anterior, vertical identification with a leader or a more abstract ideal. Lacan reverses this order—‘horizontal’ collection/collectivity before ‘vertical’ class—and emphasizes the logical forms, like ‘3 + 1’, that define the relations between the individual and the group. Considering the horizontal relations as primordial may serve well as a way to avoid an authoritarian conception of group psychology, but this is not without problems of its own. As already mentioned, the individual finds its identity solely through its relationship with others, yet this also implies that this identity is far from particular, let alone singular, since all the members of the collection are uniform. However, this does not seem to bother Lacan much, because his focus is not on the outcome of the process but on the logical process that leads to it. 45 Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 01:55 30 Sep 2021; For: 9781315524771, chapter3, 10.4324/9781315524771-4 Dominiek Hoens The emphasis on logic and its intertwinement with individuality is made more poignant in another contemporaneous text, Logical Time (2006: 161–175). Here, logical reasoning is required to determine the color of a disk put on one’s back by a prison warden. What one sees are two fellow inmates who have white disks on their backs and what one knows is that (1) there are three white disks and two black disks at play and that (2) one will only be released if one presents a logical reasoning leading to the identification of the color of the disk on one’s back.4 Strictly speaking, nothing can be concluded from what one knows to be the situation. One can consider it to be more probable to have been adorned a black disk—after eliminating the two white disks that one can actually see, there remain two black disks (out of two) and only one white one (out of three)—but that is having to resort to probability, not to the required conclusive, logical reasoning.
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