Cogito and the Unconscious: sic 2

by Slavoj Zizek

Overview

The Cartesian cogito-the principle articulated by Descartes that "I think, therefore I am"-is often hailed as the precursor of modern science. At the same time, the cogito's agent, the ego, is sometimes feared as the agency of manipulative domination responsible for all present woes, from patriarchal oppression to ecological catastrophes. Without psychoanalyzing philosophy, Cogito and the Unconscious explores the vicissitudes of the cogito and shows that psychoanalyses can render visible a constitutive madness within modern philosophy, the point at which "I think, therefore I am" becomes obsessional neurosis characterized by "If I stop thinking, I will cease to exist."

Noting that for Lacan the Cartesian construct is the same as the Freudian "subject of the unconscious," the contributors follow Lacan's plea for a psychoanalytic return to the cogito. Along the path of this return, they examine the ethical attitude that befits modern subjectivity, the inherent sexualization of modern subjectivity, the impasse in which the Cartesian project becomes involved given the enigmatic status of the human body, and the Cartesian subject's confrontation with its modern critics, including Althusser, Bataille, and Dennett. In a style that has become familiar to Zizek's readers, these essays bring together a strict conceptual analysis and an approach to a wide range of cultural and ideological phenomena-from the sadist paradoxes of Kant's moral philosophy to the universe of Ayn Rand's novels, from the question "Which, if any, is the sex of the cogito?" to the defense of the cogito against the onslaught of cognitive sciences.

Challenging us to reconsider fundamental notions of human consciousness and modern subjectivity, this is a book whose very Lacanian orthodoxy makes it irreverently transgressive of predominant theoretical paradigms. Cogito and the Unconscious will appeal to readers interested in philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and theories of ideology.

Contributors. Miran Bozovic, Mladen Dolar, Alain Grosrichard, Marc de Kessel, Robert Pfaller, Renata Salecl, Slavoj Zizek, Alenka Zupancic

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822320975
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	04/08/1998
Series:	[Sic] , #2
Pages:	290
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Slavoj Zizek is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is a coeditor of Gaze and Voice as Love Objects and author of Tarrying with the Negative, both published by Duke University Press.

Read an Excerpt

Cogito and the Unconscious

Sic 2

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By Slavoj Zizek

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-2097-5

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CHAPTER 1

Mladen Dolar

Cogito at the subject or the Unconscious

In the opening paragraph of one of the earliest pieces in his Écrits, the famous paper entitled "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience" (1949, presented in Zürich at the International Congress of Psychoanalysis), Lacan situates his notion of the mirror stage in the following way: "The conception of the mirror stage that I introduced at our last congress, thirteen years ago [that was the congress in Marienbad in 1936, the last one where Freud was present as well], has since become more or less established in the practice of the French group. However, I think it worthwhile to bring it again to your attention, especially today, for the light it sheds on the formation of the I as we experience it in psychoanalysis. It is an experience that leads us to oppose any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito" (Lacan 1977, 1; 1966, 93). So in the very first paragraph of the first notorious écrit, there is a clear alternative, an emphatic choice that one has to assume: either the mirror phase or the cogito. One has to decide one way or the other between psychoanalysis and philosophy, which has, in the past three centuries, largely issued from cogito, despite its variety of forms and despite its often proposed criticism of cogito. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, if properly understood and practiced, promises to offer a way out of the "age of cogito." The alternative that Lacan has in mind, in this particular strategically situated spot, is the following: the mirror stage, insofar as it is indeed formative of the function of the I, demonstrates that the I, the ego, is a place of an imaginary blinding, a deception; far from being the salutary part of the mind that could serve as a firm support of the psychoanalytic cure, against the vagaries of the id and the superego (such was the argument of ego-psychology), rather, it is itself the source of paranoia, and of all kinds of fantasy formations. If such is the nature of the I, then it must be most sharply opposed to cogito, with its inherent pretension to self-transparency and self-certainty.

But even apart from Lacan's particular theory of the mirror stage, with all its ramifications, the dilemma seems to pertain to psychoanalysis as such, to its "basic insight." For is the discovery of the unconscious not in itself inherently an attack on the very idea of cogito? The self-transparent subjectivity that figures as the foundation of modern philosophy—even in those parts of it that were critical of cogito—seems to be submitted to a decisive blow with the advent of psychoanalysis. Cogito must be seen not only at odds with, but at the opposite end in relation to the unconscious. Such was Freud's own implicit self-understanding (although he didn't deal at any length with Descartes, except for his curious short paper on Descartes's dream, "Über einen Traum des Cartesius," [Freud 1929b]), and this is the spontaneous, seemingly self-evident, and widespread conception of that relation. This view can then be considered alongside other contemporary radical attempts to dismantle cogito, most notably with Heidegger, who was also during that period Lacan's source of inspiration. So both the analysis of the ego and that of the unconscious, although running in different directions, appear to undermine the very idea of cogito.

Yet, Lacan's position in that respect has undergone a far-reaching change. First of all, a clear distinction had to be made, in his further development, between the "I," the ego, on one hand, and the subject on the other. The "I" is not the subject, and the mechanism discovered in the mirror stage, the blinding, the recognition that is intrinsically mis-cognition, while defining the function of the "I," doesn't apply at all to the function of the subject. If the first one is to be put under the heading of the Imaginary, the second follows an entirely different logic, that of the Symbolic. In this division, cogito, surprisingly for many, figures on the side of the subject.

Lacan's perseverance toward retaining the concept of the subject certainly ran against the grain of the time, especially in the days of a budding and flowering structuralism that seemed to have done away with the subject, inflicting upon it a final mortal blow after its protracted moribund status. The general strategy promoted by structuralism could, in a very simplified manner, be outlined as an attempt to put forward the level of a "nonsubjective" structure as opposed to the subject's self-apprehension. There is a nonsubjective "symbolic" dimension of which the subject is but an effect, an epiphenomenon, and which is necessarily overlooked in the subject's imaginary self-understanding. This basic approach could be realized in a number of different ways: Lévi-Strauss's structure as the matrix of permutations of differential elements regulating mythologies, rituals, beliefs, habits, etcetera, behind the subjects' backs; Foucault's episteme, "anonymous" discursive formations and strategies, or later the dispositions of power, etcetera; Althusser's "process without a subject" that science has to unearth behind the ideological interpellation that constitutes subjectivity; Derrida's notion of writing, or 1a différance, as "prior" to any split into subject/object, interior/exterior, space/time, etcetera; Kristeva's opposition between the semiotic and the symbolic. In spite of great differences between those attempts and their sometimes sharply opposed results, there was a common tendency to conceive of a dimension "behind" or "underneath" or "anterior to" the subject, the very notion of the subject thereby falling into a kind of disrepute and becoming synonymous with "self-deception," a necessary illusion, an essential blinding as to the conditions that produced it. The structuralist revolution has thus seen itself as a break away from the humanist tradition centered on the subject (cf. Foucault's ponderous reference to the "death of man"), and particularly as a radical rupture with the philosophical tradition based on cogito.

Lacan's view sharply differed from this model by firmly clinging to the notion of the subject and "rescuing" it all along. His talk about the subject of the unconscious was certain to provoke some astonishment. He saw the unconscious, along structuralist lines, as a structure—"structured as a language," as the famous slogan goes—discovering in it the Saussurean and Jakobsonian operations of metaphor and metonymy, etcetera, but as a structure with a subject, a subject conceived as opposed to the consciousness and the "I." So for Lacan, on whatever level we look at matters, there is no process, and no structure, without a subject. The supposedly "nonsubjective" process overlooked in the constitution of subjectivity, was for Lacan essentially always already "subjectivized," although the subject it implied was a very different entity from the one that the structuralist strategy strove to dismantle. Retaining the concept was for him far more subversive in its effects than simply dismissing it.

In the next step, he went even further with the baffling suggestion that cogito was the subject of the unconscious, thus turning against some basic assumptions (shall one say prejudices?) of that period. It was a suggestion that has baffled Lacan's opponents and followers alike. Lacan largely defined his project with the slogan announcing a "return to Freud," but subsequently it turned out that this slogan had to be complemented with a corollary: the return to Freud had to pass by way of a return to Descartes. So there is a huge gap that separates Lacan from the rest of the structuralist generation, which defined itself as basically anti-Cartesian (and also as anti-Hegelian, but that is another story), regardless of many differences between the proposed theories, whereas Lacan saw himself rather as an heir to that tradition. This divide ultimately depends on the different ways of grasping subjectivity.

At the simplest level, one can approach this divide with the notion of recognition, which was largely seen as the necessary and sufficient condition of subjectivity, turning it thus necessarily into an imaginary or "ideological" notion that one has to be rid of. For Lacan, however, the subject emerges only at the point of a nonrecognition: all formations of the unconscious have this in common, they are accompanied by a "this is not me," "I was not there," although they were produced by the subject him/herself (or to put it in the terms of cogito: they cannot be followed by a "therefore I am"). They depend on the emergence of an "alien kernel" within subjectivity, an automatism beyond control, a "discourse of the Other," the breakdown, in certain points, of the constituted horizon of recognition and sense. This nonintegration is constitutive for the subject, although it may appear as its limit, reduction, or failure. So Lacan's criticism of the "I," the illusion of autonomous and self-transparent subjectivity, was well embedded in the general structuralist strategy, but the fact that he nevertheless stubbornly espoused the concept of the subject was the mark of his far-reaching dissent and opposition.

How can the subject of the unconscious be possibly conceived of as cogito? How to conceive of cogito after the advent of psychoanalysis? Is there a Freudian cogito? The question should perhaps be reversed: is there an unconscious outside of cogito? Lacan's wager is that there is not.

Hence his insistence that the subject that psychoanalysis has to deal with is none other than the subject of modern science, thoroughly dependent on cogito. The Freudian unconscious is the unconscious of cogito, in both senses of the genitive. There is, however, a subplot in this story, for if the subject of psychoanalysis is that of science as well, its object is not. The object that psychoanalysis has to deal with by definition eludes science, it cannot be subjected to scientific scrutiny, it is the evasive singular object that provides jouissance. So the tricky problem that the two Lacanian accounts of cogito will attempt to solve is also the following: how does the subject of the unconscious, as cogito, relate to joussance?

One can start with a simple observation about Descartes's own procedure in the Meditations, the procedure of a "methodical doubt," which can be seen as a gradual reduction of consciousness, its "evacuation." Consciousness must lose any worldly support, it must be cleansed of any objective counterpart—and the recognition/miscognition, in relation to the object opposed to it, is precisely what defines the meanderings of the Imaginary, which the mirror stage has dealt with at their core. It must also eliminate the support in the signifier, any received truths and certainties, the seemingly evident mathematical laws, etcetera. What eventually remains, is a pure vanishing point without a counterpart, which can only be sustained in a minimal gesture of enunciation. It is questionable whether this yields the subject of thought—Descartes himself considered alternative suggestions of "I doubt, I err, I lie," etcetera, ergo sum, the minimal form of which is "I enounce, ergo sum." One has to entrust oneself to the signifier, yet the subject that is at stake has no signifier of its own, it is the subject of enunciation, absent from and underlying what is enunciated: "Note in passing that in avoiding the I think, I avoid the discussion that results from the fact that this I think, for us, certainly cannot be detached from the fact that he can formulate it only by saying it to us, implicitly—a fact that [Descartes] forgets" (Lacan 1986, 36). What remains is purely an empty spot occupied by the subject of enunciation. For being empty, it can be universal, and it can indeed be seen as the form of subjectivity implied by science, a merely formal subjectivity purified of all content and substance. Each proposition of science must display the ability to be posited universally, that is, in such a way that it can be assumed by the empty form of subjectivity epitomized by cogito.

To be sure, this view already departs from Descartes. People as divergent in thought as Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Lacan all agree that Descartes's "error," if it can be so called, consists in substantializing this empty spot of cogito by turning it into res cogitans. Cogito marks a "non-place," a gap, a chasm in the chain of being, it doesn't delineate a certain sphere of being to be placed alongside other spheres, it cannot be situated in some part of reality, yet it is at the same time correlative to reality as such.

Lacan's starting point in this reading of cogito is the assumption that cogito implies, in its pure and minimal form, a non-imaginary subject as a void. This is immediately followed by a tour de force: the coupling of this empty spot with the lack implied by the Symbolic that has been produced in other ways. Lacan has spent much time demonstrating that this second lack can ultimately be deduced from Saussure's algorithm of the signifier and its underlying logic. In a nutshell, it follows from the basic property of the signifier that it can never be counted for one; "one" signifier already counts for two, because the empty place of its absence also counts. Differentiality, the Saussurean definition of the signifier has to be extended to the point where the signifier differs from itself: ultimately, it is the difference between itself and the void of its absence. Once we find ourselves in the realm of the Symbolic, there is never a simple absence or an innocent lack, and this invisible "missing half" that inherently sticks to the signifier is for Lacan precisely the place to which the subject can be "pinned" (hence the notion of suture). At a later stage, Lacan extensively uses some devices of set theory (as we shall see), which, in the most rudimentary form, implies (and formalizes) the difference between the set and the element it contains. The empty set, in this entirely formal view, is precisely the place of the subject. Its emptiness and its purely formal character have been designated by Lacan, in his algebra, by the signum, to be read as sujet barré, the barred subject—there is quite literally a bar crossing its S, it is what remains when any S, with any positive feature, has been "crossed over," erased. Nothing remains, but this nothing counts.

To be sure, again, this view can hardly be seen as Cartesian, for Descartes, having produced this vanishing point, didn't allow it to vanish. Quite the opposite, his whole problem was how to proceed from there, and it turned out that this point could only be sustained by being pinned to the Other, the big Other epitomized by God: "When Descartes introduces the concept of a certainty that holds entirely in the I think of cogitation ... one might say that his mistake is to believe that this is knowledge. To say that he knows something of this certainty. Not to make of the I think a mere point of fading. ... He puts the field of this knowledge at the level of this vaster subject, the subject who is supposed to know, God" (Lacan 1986, 224). So the barred subject needs the guarantee of the Other if there is to be any following step, the emergence of any knowledge, and in this way, by this support, it can be rid of its bar. This thesis encroaches upon a notorious controversy concerning the question of whether Descartes has committed a circulus in demonstrando, a vicious circle in his argument. The debate started already with the objections to the Meditations, and in his response, Descartes had to defend himself against the criticism about la faute qu'on appelle 1e cercle. The debate has a long history and I cannot venture into this difficult matter here. For our present purpose it suffices to say that according to Lacan, Descartes did indeed commit such a fallacy.

The implication of this reading is that the existence of cogito as such cannot be sustained—at least not without reverting to the support of the big Other, the figure of God, the intimidating subject supposed to know. If the cogito is indeed just a pure vanishing point of the subject of enunciation, then its existence doesn't follow from it. It cannot assume an ergo sum. All consistence it has is pinned to a signifier—there is no without a signifier—but only as a void that sticks to it and cannot be presentified as such. In order to see what this means and how this works, one has to consider the mechanism of alienation, itself a necessary effect of language.

Alienation was for Lacan always essentially connected with the idea of a forced choice, although the terms of this choice and its implications varied at different stages of his teaching. The subject is subject to a choice—this is what makes it a subject in the first place —but this choice is rather the opposite of the free and autonomous choice one is accustomed to associate with the subject. One could say that the very elementary device of psychoanalysis, free associations, spectacularly stages this paradox: one is supposed to freely say anything that passes through one's mind, autonomously choosing whatever one wants, yet the moment one begins, it becomes clear that one is trapped; every free choice, in free associations, turns out to have been a forced one.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Introduction: Cogito as Shibboleth 1

Part I. Cogito as a Freudian Concept

1. Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious / Mladen Dolar 11

2. The Subject of the Law / Alenka Zupančič 41

3. Four Discourses, Four Subjects / Slavoj Žižek 74

Part II. Cogito's Body

4. The Case of Polyphemus, or, a Monster and Its Mother / Alain Grosrichard 117

5. Malebranche's Occasionalism, or, Philosophy in the Garden of Eden / Miran Božovič 149

6. The Silence of the Feminine Jouissance / Renata Salecl 175

Part III.

7. A Sovereign's Anatomy: The Antique in Bataille's Modernity and Its Impact on His Political Thought / Marc de Kessel 199

8. Negation and Its Reliabilities: An Empty Subject for Ideology? / Robert Pfaller 225

9. The Cartesian Subject versus the Cartesian Theater / Slavoj Žižek 247

Notes on Contributors 275

Index 277