EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT FREUD BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK LACAN

Every exercise of freedom is possible only against the background of suicidal self‑negation

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After weeks of politics, movies and TV shows, below is a touch of theory…

There is no neutral reading of Freud – by “neutral” I mean approaching Freud directly by way of ignoring later interpretations. We have a Lacanian Freud, a Winnicott-Kleinian Freud, the American ego-psychological Freud, and (what comes closest to hegemonic position) the Anna-Freudian reading which predominated in the International Psychoanalytic Association. My position is, of course, Lacanian, as the title of this text indicates: as is usually the case with “returns to” the original figure, Lacan’s “return to Freud” approaches Freud’s texts from a tradition totally foreign to Freud himself (Hegelian dialectics, structural linguistics, and anthropology), in the same way as Martin Luther’s return to original Christianity depicts an image of Christ which is totally foreign to original Christian texts.

This is in no way meant as a critical remark: since a founding figure by definition is not aware of the true dimension of its discovery, a return to this figure is possible only from an external position. To take a different example, the same holds for Marx: to properly understand his notion of commodity fetishism, one has to read him through Freud – as Adrian Johnston pointed out, Marx did not discover only symptom but also drive in the Freudian sense of these two terms.¹ And the same holds also for Hegel – “everything you wanted to know about Hegel but were afraid to ask Lacan.” Only if we read Hegel through Lacan do we get the key point that Hegel’s Absolute Knowing is his name for absolute openness of history to contingency.

The general formula we are dealing with here is: everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask – with the implication: because you already knew it but did not really want to know it, so that you preferred to act as if you are still in search of it. In contrast to positive sciences where we are always in search of the final result and cannot ever be sure that we’ve reached it, a properly dialectical approach turns the relationship between searching and finding around: we pretend to search for something because we do not want to admit that we’ve already found it.

Since I am a Lacanian, I will begin with a different (tautological) version of this formula that holds for Lacan himself: everything you wanted to know about Lacan but were afraid to ask Lacan. When all too many of us talk about Lacan, we rely on some well-known interpreter of Lacan and refer to Lacan only to reconfirm our claims. Such a situation is quite normal when we are dealing with a really big name difficult to read like Lacan himself or Hegel or…, but from time to time, at least, we should take a close look at Lacan himself, at what he says or writes, literally.

However, we will focus on reading Freud through Lacan since the Lacanian reading of Freud’s texts has an almost magic effect of bringing out distinctions which, once we become aware of them, seem self-evident: “How was it possible that I didn’t already see it myself?” At the same time, we will also be attentive to the other side of such an approach: is there an important dimension of Freud which gets lost in Lacan’s reading, or does Lacan just ignore in Freud what deserves to be ignored, like his occasional naturalist naiveties?

Let’s take the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and politics. Étienne Balibar is fully justified in pointing out that, in his description of the formation of a crowd and the genesis of the superego, Freud doesn’t provide a “psychoanalysis of politics” (an explanation of the political dynamic of crowds through libidinal processes which are in themselves apolitical) but rather its opposite, the politics of psychoanalysis (the explanation of the rise of the triadic structure of Ego-Id-Superego through the familial “political” power struggles) – or, as Lacan put it, the Freudian Unconscious is political.

The Unconscious as political means that the Unconscious is not some kind of primordial domain of instinctual archetypes (as in Jungian theory) but a proto-political space of contingent struggles grounded in a primordial abyss. We have two main terms for this abyss: what Hegel calls absolute (self-relating) negativity and what Freud called death drive. So where do we stand today with negativity? The least one can say today about negativity in all its aspects is that it has seen better days – it definitely has shot its bolt, its philosophical potentials seem to be exhausted. In philosophy of the last two centuries it was mostly valued as positive (negativity as a permanent feature of subjectivity in all its guises, from Hegel through Marx to Freud), while positivity relates to the existing order that should be undermined, transcended, etc. Already in a letter to Ruge from 1843 Marx demanded “die rücksichtslose Kritik alles Bestehenden“ (“the reckless critique of all that exists”) not only in theory but also in social practice. Along the same lines, Engels wrote in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy: “all that exists deserves to perish” – an implicit reference to what Mephistopheles said in Goethe’s Faust, part 1:

“I am the spirit that negates.
And rightly so, for all that comes to be
Deserves to perish wretchedly;
‘Twere better nothing would begin.
Thus everything that that your terms, sin,
Destruction, evil represent—
That is my proper element.”

But when Mephisto was asked by Faust, “Well now, who are you then?” (“Nun gut, wer bist du denn?”), he gave the well-known answer, “Part of that force that always wills the evil and always produces the good” (“Ein Teil von jener Kraft, die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft”). There is an obvious link here to Mandeville and Smith, to the invisible hand of the market which makes the egotism of individuals work for the common good. However, from today’s (but also already Hegel’s) experience, the opposite also holds: “that force that always wills the good and always produces the evil” – Rousseau definitely wanted the good but his disciples produced political terror, Communists wanted solidarity but produced paranoiac suspicion… There is a further ambiguity in Faust: the very last lines pronounced by Chorus Mysticus are:

“Alles Vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis; / Das Unzulängliche, / Hier wird’s Ereignis; / Das Unbeschreibliche, / Hier ist’s getan; / Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan.” / “Everything transient / Is but a simile; / The insufficient / Here finds fulfilment; / The indescribable / Here becomes deed; / The eternal-feminine / Draws us on high.”