Saint Anselm Philosophy Blog

Lacking the time needed to really develop an extended thought or well composed essay for this month’s blog post, I’ve opted instead to simply share some notes from my personal philosophical journal in the hopes, at the very least perhaps, of sharing with you the reader some of the questions that I’ll be exploring next semester in my preceptorial on Freud and Analysis.  In this way you get a glimpse not only into what promises to be an interesting experiment in the form of a class, but also into the messy naissance of an idea.

What does it really mean to be a subject?  If to be a subject means to be held out before, extended and open towards beings, in a word ex-istent, then isn’t there a sense in which to be a subject is to always already be called away from the self, away from the starting point of one’s own being?  That is, isn’t there a sense, given the trajectory of subjectivity towards beings, that to be a subject is to be living always already beyond the ground of one’s own being, alienated or distended from one self?  Put another way, isn’t there some tragic sense in which one can only fully become oneself/become a subject by loosing or separating from oneself, by cutting oneself off/free from oneself and rejecting the primordial tendency to be absorbed in one’s own being?

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan refers to this strange and seemingly paradoxical reality as the law of castration, the fact that one can only enter into the symbolic order of language, exchange and community (the very order in which the formal structure of subjectivity is achieved), by cutting themselves free from the gravitational pull of and primordial bond to their own being.  For there is no private language, as we all know.  The language we take up in the development of our subjectivity is not our own, but belongs fundamentally to another.  Indeed, initiation into the symbolic order is to be othered in this way – it is to take on the language of the other’s as our own – in a word, to become an Other.  And to be inducted into the symbolic order (a language community) in this way is not only to be welcomed into a society, it is the very naissance of our subjectivity, our ability to think to process.  Cognition and consciousness requires this symbolic initiation.  So it seems that the very process of becoming a subject is the process of loosing one’s primordial way of being themselves, it is to be othered – to abandon that nascent privacy which is one’s original mode of being, and become fundamentally exposed in the public realm.  In other words, subjectivity appears to be a mode of becoming which is inexorably marked by being torn from one’s ‘original’ state and laid bare before another: to be me is to be alienated from myself, as it were.

This means that to be a human subject means to be by necessity ‘out-of-joint’ – it is to dwell in the rupture between a supposed closed off state of primordial being to which you can never return and which you never properly were (as you only fully came to be through the rupture of that totality), and perhaps a state of final fulfillment in which this alienation will be annihilated, and with it you (death).  The being of the subject is thus made fundamentally a way of becoming – inscribed ineluctably by desire.  Hence Lacan’s nomination of the subject as a manqué-a-etre, not so much a being as a want-to-be, a desire or absence of being (double meaning to the word want here).  To be a subject is to become in the disaster (dis-astre) that is the explosion of the singularity of our being, it is alienation, it is to be in want.  This is the law of castration.

The horrible curse, of course, is that we can only become aware of the tragedy that is our being, our want-to-be, from this side of the symbolic order (once we’ve taken up the language of another).  The result is that we all too easily give into the illusion that no gap exits – that we are whole in the symbolic order.  This emerges out of a false identification with the symbolic order (i.e. because we come-to-be in the symbolic order, we find in it our whole identity and being).  Of course this is inauthentic (in the old Greek sense of the word of being other than one’s own, failing to recognizing what is properly one’s own, to use the Latin) as it fails to recognize the ground of subjectivity.  But, more importantly, it leads to all sorts of social problem, such as social conformity and mob mentality, opening the door to totalitarianism.  For others, sensing the trauma of their being, sensing that they are fundamentally in want, will all too quickly attempt to correct the disaster and propose ‘solutions’ (even final ones) to the want in some vain nostalgic attempt to ‘return’ to some presumed primordial unity, a time before the disaster.  We see quickly how the curse of the law of castration leads to holocaust.  This is, of course, a social outworking of the Oedipal drama: the attempt to return to the primordial home (Mother), and it is necessarily doomed to failure and the harbinger or murder.

What we are left with the ethical necessity or recognizing our alienation and embracing it – the ethical imperative of refusing and resisting our inborn tendency towards nostalgia, towards ‘return’ to unity and harmony.  In a word, the ethical necessity of conflict, difference and descent.  Only through such an authentic acceptance and appropriation of our primordial alienation, through such a resistance to and rejection of the siren’s song of absorption and completion, can we mature past the Oedipal drama of totalitarianism and murder and bare our heads freely in the truth.