Identity as a covering

In Lacan's essay, 'The Instance Of The Letter In The Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud' which was originally a talk delivered to the philosophy group of the union of humanities students in Sobornne - a demarcation regarding who this discourse is meant for, and whom it is not meant for is asserted in the beginning. "I mean it is not meant for those who for any reason, psychoanalytic or other, allow their discipline to parade under a false identity; a fault of habit, but its effect on the mind is such that the true identity may appear simply as one alibi, among others, a sort of refined reduplication whose implications will not be missed by the most acute." I think this proposition drammatizes rather well and clearly the problem of identity, a question which apart from its philosophical concerns has an existential import in political and social matters.

The problem is this: from the position of the analyst, or rather from that discourse which stylistically is interogative, how can we inhibit our discipline from donning a false identity? Why do I clarify the position from which such a question is spoken? Because the analyst, within the dicourse of psychoanalysis, is by definition neither the analysand nor the master. This means simply that the subject of interrogation is not his or her property.

You may notice, perhaps now, the surprising contemporaneity of our problem, which undoubtedly, will have theological echoes if not resonances to those ears which I characterise as monastic. We are not in a domain of a dispute over property, not yet - and yet it is this very terrain which may allow us to tease out problems which very often climax in those terms.

To hold one's discipline to account, this is the proposition whose method we seek to clarify. Undoubtedly a position which at one point or the another has been occupied by many a student who sought to change their discipline. Here, we have something resembling the locus of a position: defined by its problem.

This is not it. Or rather, this is not all. In one way or another - this gathering to whom I write to have felt the force of injustice which animates the above two sentences. For how else can they invoke the sense that something is out of place?

What we often encounter within the midst of such an inquiry, is the presentation of semblances, none of which we may question for it is none whom we command.

What follows, in the essay I read to be a simple argument for the proof of the primacy of the written, and the existence of the unconscious. In confronting semblances beyond our command, the only material support one will have is the word ie. our capacity to name objects, experiences and relationships. This is perhaps why Lacan emphasises that the psychoanalyst's 'whole experience must find in the word alone, its instrument'.

We are told, that beyond the word - what the psychoanalyst, or rather the psychoanalytic experience discovers, in the unconscious - is the whole structure of language.

This step, in psychoanalysis, is one which the history of philosophy should and is already learning from. In its preliminary manouver, in its very terms, it alerts 'informed minds' that the notion that the unconscious is merely the seat of insticts will have to be rethought'. We may highlight the name who formally introduces this break into the discipline, Lacan.

I think from the position established above, we can already start beginning to grasp the set of intersubjective and informed relations which find a place in the unconscious, whose articulation as it were is expressed in the word.

Why do I say 'expression' here regarding the verb which animates the word and not characterise a kind of eruption, a la Derrida at the end of his famed paper at Johns Hopkins? Because, prior to our own entry into it, a language is there. A language whose aquisition cannot but be built upon if not inscribed within the edifice of ecriture.

Difficulty in the aquisition of language, when brought to a clinical degree is known as aphasia, a tendency against which, I believe resistance can be built via the practice of writing.

Interlude & a comparisson

There is a point at this essay where Lacan is really close to the kind of predicament Walter Benjamin presents in his 'Theses On The Philosophy Of History'. I would like to quote this short stanza in full. - "The speaking subject, if he seems to be thus a slave of language, is all the more so of a discourse in the universal moment of which he finds himself at birth, even if only by dint of his proper name.

While Lacan, to my mind at least, presents us with a synchronic representation of a name for the affinities, interelations, aspects and object relations - which lie unexpressed in society, indeed often unexpressed in language, Benjamin presents us with a diachronic picture, or should I say reading. "The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that." This latter stanza, does seem to inhabit a rather more expressionistic register, as apposed to an impressionistic one.

Sunday, 5th September, 2021, Chennai.