​Previous:

Derek Hook:
I mean, just a quick association, which perhaps we shouldn't actually go into, but it's amazing this work of bringing one concept into play, because then another concept comes up. You know, I was speaking about discourse as a kind of possibly provisionally shared concept, and then we start thinking about truth. Then we start thinking about the Bejahung, this kind of primal affirmation. And of course, it made me think, however erroneously, we have in Freud a primal affirmation, Bejahung, that is a necessary precondition and a way for negation, and that realm of affirmation also made me think a little bit about the Clearing in Heidegger. It is a very different concept, but I suppose, you know, there's this odd sensation in doing this kind of work where you get the concepts, they sort of clash, they're banging to each other, they have this awkward reverberation despite overlapping, and then they move away from one another again.
And of course, for me, one of those, a case in point, as a Lacanian reading Heidegger, when he talks about das Man and he talks about the they, you know, it's hard not for me at least to hear one echo, an aspect of the Lacanian Big Other.
Do you see any resonance or anything interesting between these two concepts, das Man and Big Other?

​Christos Tombras:
Yes! I would address the question in the similar way as I addressed your question earlier about discourse.
And I said that discourse in Heidegger, I see it more related to the chatter of das Man. So I think that das Man —of course, they are connected, not connected, connectable — but the functions of the two things are different.
Heidegger thinks of das Man, the they, the others, the chatter, as this which is actually distracting Dasein from the moral task of getting to grips with his or her authenticity— authenticity in the sense, whatever it is their own, ownmost. In order to contrast that with what the world is doing, he invents the they, das Man, and says “Man does that”. That means, “they say that it's good to pay your taxes”, “they say —something”. It is a collective, not a collective non-sense, but a collective understanding of the world.
So it is connected to discourse. It is connected to the milieu in which Dasein is finding themselves in and as such, it's something that has to be recognised and — not avoided, but taken a distance from.
For Lacan, the Big Other is the necessary backdrop onto which we have —Let me start a different way: We have the signifiers and signifiers are connectable to other signifiers, they form a network. As I indicated earlier, the subject is a product of this signifying chain. But it is not a necessary product. It requires a human being who acts according to some desire within that chain of signifiers. And this is where desire comes in.
So, the human being is the subject, the human subject; it's a product of a network of signifiers, which network of signifiers obtains a basis of reference, a field, a foundation-like field on what the others say, the symbolic order.
The symbolic order is a necessary place that we can refer and say, how do you know that when you say table, you mean a table? I know it because they say so. But this is not chatter anymore. This is the founding event. The fact that they say so makes a table a table, the fact that there are people and they say it. And this fact, that there are people and say it, can be summarised thus: there is a symbolic order which is distinct from me, a human being, was there before I came into being, was there and was forced onto me when I entered into language. And I am now checking each and everything I say or I think against that symbolic order and yes, against that Big Other.
But I have made, when I do that as an individual, as a human being in language, I have made that a bit more strong than it is. Originally, it is not strong at all. It is just chatter. But I elevate it, in my mind, each and every one of us, into a symbolic thing that has strength, stability, and can be used as a guarantee of safety. The symbolic order is necessary in that respect, and the implications of that concept are huge in the clinic.
Because there are human beings, there are subjects of language, who do not have this very stable background on which they can rest their anxiety and their uncertainty. This could be described as psychosis. I don't want to go into psychopathology here, but the Lacanian understanding of psychosis, it is an understanding of a human being, in language, which — the human being— is not really very stable in how they find, they found their chain of signifiers in connection to the symbolic order. The symbolic order is failing.
To cut a long story short, the symbolic order or the Big Other, in Lacan, has an importance, which is clinical, and not only philosophical or metaphysical, as it is the importance of the They in Heidegger. And in that respect, the two thinkers diverge. This is something that Heidegger does not even thematise in his mind.
But an important thing that has to be remembered here is that this jump into belief that the symbolic order is big, out there, stable, is an arbitrary belief.
There is nothing to justify it really.
And this is the sense of what Lacan says when he says, there is no Other of the Other.
There is no guarantee that this is the case. We have to take it that this is the case. But there is no guarantee, because there is no metalanguage, because the distinction between ontic and ontological, it doesn't apply to return it to the previous question.

DH:
Ah, okay. That's a marvellous articulation, bringing back that idea in such a powerful way. Oh, really appreciate that.
We should maybe start to wrap up a little bit. But as a way of doing that, I mean, here comes the big question, really. Tell us about Discourse Ontology. What do you mean by a discourse ontology? What is it? How can we think of it?

CT:
Yes. Okay. I tried to indicate earlier that I use discourse, I understand discourse in this way, the Lacanian way, that the human being, the subject, is a product of a discourse. Okay, that's a Lacanian idea, it's not my idea.
I take the term ontology with all knowledge of the traditional import, but I prune all the old metaphysical, non-useful connotations of the concept, and I take it to mean, A collection of entities and how we engage with these entities... Ontology.
Anyway, these two things together, I bring them together, and I'm saying that what I would propose to do is to formalise ideas that are present in Lacan, but he hasn't had time to formalise. Example of an idea is the idea of truth. What is Truth? Lacan always refers to, but he doesn't formalize it. Mm-hmm. So I'm suggesting —truth is one of the ideas, it's not the only idea— What I'm suggesting is that now that the work of Lacan has been completed, because Lacan is no longer working on it, it is useful, I claim, to take his conceptualizations and formalise them in a way that could be responding to criticisms such as those a potential Heidegger would have. So it is like formulating a philosophical background of the Lacanian understanding of the human being.
I would think that the first important thing is the Speaking Being and the fact that the speaking being, by the virtue of the fact that they are speaking, they refer to signification and the origin of signification. Lacan has the term for that, is signifierness. What is it that makes a signifier signifier? What is it? That is signifierness. So this is the first concept, important one.
The second is Truth. And I take truth in the way I described it earlier, not as a correspondence between statement and state of affairs, because we are before that, but something that is not unrelated to the Bejahung of Freud or the Clearing of Heidegger, the Alethea. So truth, you could say that this is a Heideggerian addition to the project, but it's not solely Heideggerian, it's also Lacanian.
Then an important concept is Time. What is time? Not time in the sense of in physics, what is time in physics, but what is time in the human being and in connection to the concept of signification, which is a crucial question of Heidegger. You have that in Being and Time. Time is a crucial aspect of being able to signify things, because just to give an indication, when you signify something, when you have a name for something, you make it present where it is not present anymore. And that means you free it from time. You make it present here while it is not here anymore, either because it's not existing anymore or because it's not present in locality. So time is the next part.
And then it's obviously, perhaps not so obviously, but for me it's important, crucial, the Body, because all of this is coming from the body. And here a discussion of jouissance or sexuation, and sexuality, but sexuation is the step before sexuality comes in. And this is something which is completely absent in Heidegger, as we said earlier.
And then all of this, how do they fit together into producing a world, is the concept of the World.
So these are the five themes I would think that the discourse on ontology would have to have. And I claim that it is useful because it would provide Lacanian psychoanalysis —theory— with this metapsychological foundation that is now only implied. In my view, it needs to be spelled out. And after we know it, what we deal with, we can actually start clarifying the concepts, because many of the Lacanian concepts are either redundant or overlapping, but not completely overlapping. It needs to be cleared up. The Lacanian arsenal of concepts and thinking has to be cleared up. That's not for him only, for everybody. You could say that for Heidegger, you could say that for Freud, you could say that for anyone, but I say that for Lacan. It needs to be cleared up. And this is a first attempt to start clearing up things.

DH:
I mean, it's a very elegant way of stating what a prospective project of Lacanian ontology would be, ontology, provided we understand it in terms of how you've defined it, and an intriguing project as well. You used the term formalisation, and I suppose maybe this could be the very last question. You know, for me, it's one of the great areas within Lacan's attempts at transmission of psychoanalysis that always amazes and impresses and inspires me, the multiple different modes through which he would try to formalise the crucial teachings of psychoanalysis, whether that's topology, whether it's mathemes. And of course, waiting in the wings here is the question of what kind of mathematical formalisation might be implied by the project that you're suggesting. And I mentioned that also just because obviously, I know you've worked with Bernard Burgoyne, and I know some of your other work, but I suppose that's my question: The formalization that would be required to do this inspiring and amazing project that you're speaking about, would that entail a type of mathematical formalisation? Is that what you're thinking?

CT:
I'm following Lacan in this. Lacan is using mathematics. The important thing, I think, is to understand a tiny bit more what kind of mathematics, what is mathematics for Lacan. Because if we start with this assumption that there is no metalanguage, that, there is no distinction between ontic and ontological — things like this, which are Lacanian, and they can be argued for. Then what is mathematics? Many people would think, many people would try to say that there is a contradiction here, because mathematics seems to be beyond and above all of these things. What does Lacan mean when he brings in mathematics? How can these things reconcile? Of course, this is a question that touches on questions of philosophy of mathematics.
But I take that mathematics is a type of discourse. It's a human activity. It's not something that could exist without humans. And, it is the most abstract way we have at present to describe things that entail the very concepts that we are using to describe them. That's the tricky thing with the human endeavour. We're trying to discuss about ourselves, about language, using ourselves and language. There's always something circular. And mathematics is the best tool we have managed to construct that can allow some abstraction in this circular enterprise. Unavoidably circular, because I do not know if there are extraterrestrials. I do not know if there are angels. I do not know if there are all these entities that might be studying human beings from elsewhere. If they do, they don't need any of these tools that we're talking about. But we are here, and we need to be able to speak about things.
So if we have — go back to this question of discourse— if we have the discourse as being that that describes how signifiers connect with each other, and we have this idea that the subject is a product of this connectability of signifiers, and it is occupying, inhabits these connected signifiers, if we have that, we need some tool to describe how this is working. At the time of Lacan, the best tool was topology, which is a formalised, discursive way of describing anything at all. Everything. This very abstract mathematics of the type that Lacan is advocating, does not speak about specific entities. It's not about numbers as such. It's not about human beings. It's not about signifiers. It's about anything that can be connected. And this idea, for example, in Seminar XX, Lacan speaks about set theory and compactness, and how… With all these concepts that Lacan is using, he is trying to address questions of how do signifiers connect with each other, and what can we say about the connectability of them and the obstacles to the connectability of them. A mathematician would say limits, boundaries, neighbourhoods.
What I think is needed for this, let's say, — now that Lacan has completed— next step would be an understanding of mathematics that takes into consideration time. Time, not only the sense of temporal, the temporal aspect of doing mathematics, that is, I started and then I finished, but also the fact that we're talking about entities, and the entities are being written on the paper. And as such, the entities which are written on the paper are already signifiers of something. So, we have an inherent circularity, even in the way we are trying to approach things, of the things we are trying to describe.
I don't have a clue— I'm getting a bit vague here, because I don't have a clue how this can be done. But I envisage, I know that there are some mathematicians who have worked and work on this field currently. Bernard Burgoyne is working specifically about mathematics and topology in connection to clinical structures. But I'm talking about other mathematicians who are working on the basic premises or ideas of what is a thing. How can you differentiate a thing from not a thing? Not nothing, not a thing.
I do not have the answers, but these are things that I'm interested very much in actually pursuing. 

DH:
Christos, thanks very much. Inspiring, opening up further avenues, and, I was going to use mathematical term, further neighbourhoods. But hopefully that will be a topic of a future conversation. So thanks again.

CT:
Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the opportunity you gave me to speak about all of these interesting things.

DH:
Thanks. Sure.

Derek Hook:
I mean, I had just one brief comment on that, but I would like to move on to what you've just said, because one of the questions that I had in mind was, how are we to deal with the divergences, or the possibility of some incompatibilities, more than one, between these two thinkers? And now that you've broached this topic of Lacan's critical thoughts on what is such a crucial distinction, that's foundational for Heidegger, the ontic - ontological distinction, that sounds like we're getting to an area of some real substantive issues and potential disagreements. But just before we do that, I mean, I just wanted to throw in there, while we're thinking about ethics in the multiple, and sometimes... quite diverse sense of what an ethical position might be, I have this memory, and I'm not sure of it, I have to admit, because I've subsequently gone to try and find this again in the book where I thought I read it, and you might know it, but if I remember correctly, Jacques Derrida makes this comment, and he says something like this —I hope it's not just a fantasised or imagined remark on my part—he says that in an odd sort of way, Heidegger's legacy presents us with an ethical dilemma. And ethical dilemmas are, you know, I suppose you could say it's obvious.
Well, on one hand there is this crucially important philosophical contribution to the 20th century. And on the other is Heidegger's own dubious political history. We could make the move of simply saying we will repress Heidegger, we won't read him anymore. Which seems a failure, because presumably the real ethical nature of the challenge ahead is a kind of Lacanian real. How do you deal with these? How do you deal with these two things, which seem to present us with a kind of incommensurability? We've got Heidegger, the man, or the image of Heidegger that many people would like to reject because of that history, but you've got something that's so crucial and important. And I think if I'm remembering, Derrida's answer is not that we find a solution to this, but that it's precisely the ethical dilemma, the ongoing ethical challenge of how to live with these two component facets.
I'll just say one further thing. I mean, to me, that seems a useful nonresolvable ethical dilemma. And maybe it's one that impacts on how we think the clinic. Because presumably how we think the clinic and a position as an analyst in the clinic is that we're dealing or working with human subjects who, of course, will, in many instances, present us with material that is not material that can easily be necessarily agreed with or we find morally edifying or something.
You know, particularly working in certain... In a forensic context, it may be material that is fundamentally disagreeable, but that doesn't erase one's ethical commitment to that subject's life, in a sense, or that subject.
Anyway, sorry, that was a long spiel. Maybe we'll have an opportunity to go back to it or not. But let's now think two questions.
Where do we find important compatibilities or overlaps or productive moments of interface articulation between Heidegger and Lacan? And where do we start to find some differences? And maybe I'd love to come back to the ontological question. But maybe one way of doing that first is to say, what is Lacan's —Could you qualify and clarify for us?— What is Lacan's position towards ontology? Because if we have a little bit of an idea of that, then we might be able to get a sense of how they might be put together within the domain of the ontological.
And I say that because in many respects, the ontological doesn't seem to be a priority for Lacan, to put it mildly.

Christos Tombras:
Yeah.
There's a problem with ontology. In the traditional ontology, there is a problem. It takes some assumptions for granted. Traditional philosophical ontology, for example, that the human being is an observer in the world and sees the world and the world is there and we have the intellect, let's say. This is... In Western philosophy, to clarify that, it's not all around the world. But in Western philosophy, after Descartes, there is always this assumption that there is the intellect, the embodied intellect in the best case, that sees the world objectively and tries to speak about the world and understand the world. And how this is done is a question of epistemology. And what you think about is a question of ontology. So these are distinctions of traditional philosophy.
Heidegger comes into this and he tries to say, oh, okay, that's a good starting point, but really I want to do a fundamental ontology. I want to speak about what it is really the question, where before the differentiation between the human being and the world. And this is his attempt at the fundamental ontology.
And he abandons this research project, Heidegger. Because he finds that this is not possible. And in fact, it is doomed to failure. So he abandons the concept of ontology completely.
Heidegger.
Not even Lacan.
Now, Lacan now also comes from these traditional grounds. He has a background in traditional philosophy. He knows that when we speak about ontology, we imply that, again, the intellect that sees the world and speaks about the world, speaks about being and so on and so forth.
And Lacan also is critical, sceptical originally, and then critical... And then critical of that, that it fails to address the issue how the world is constructed through the body. What is the world that is constructed through the body? What is it that we are talking about? What is this thing that we are talking about? And he, Lacan, finds the concepts lacking.
The concept of ontology then becomes completely irrelevant for him as a research objective. So he rejects it. Heidegger rejects it as well.
So in this case, then, we understand, —I answer your question— How can we conceptualise ontology in Lacan? He rejects it.
And then we remind ourselves that Heidegger rejects it as well.
And then we need to understand, what is ontology in order to see if this term is useful. Because I'm using this term after all. I'm using a term like ontology, even though I now publicly say that both these thinkers that I connect to as an ontology have rejected the term. So what am I doing here?
I'm using the term ontology in a slightly more narrow sense of the actual term. That is logos over onta. Onta is beings.
And logos means speaking about them, thinking about them, or seeing them together, gathering them, as Heidegger had it. So a collection of onta and what we can think about them.
Incidentally, I have to say that, interestingly, you can see in computer science, people speak of ontology today. And they don't mean anything metaphysic, they don't mean anything philosophical. They mean exactly that: Collections of items that this particular software or software environment or domain of software environments can speak about and deal with.
So I'm using ontology in this sense.
And in this sense, I think, Lacan would not, disagree. Because when he speaks about the human being, and when he speaks about jouissance, when he speaks about all the concepts that he's using, they imply, a field where these concepts have some kind of reference.
And this reference is an ontology. This field of reference.

DH:
That's, that's really helpful. And I think it also enables us to foreground one of the most important contributions that you make in, in Discourse Ontology, your book. Is, is when you start to narrow down and specify five domains within, if we could call it that, five or five thematic areas within a discourse ontology. So maybe we should, we should try to take some steps there because I think that's, that's really the, some of the most important, areas that you cover in your book. But as the stepping stone to doing that, I suppose we should mention the notion of discourse.
And, this seems important to me just because, you know, it's one of those words in the social sciences and in the humanities that seems to mean an awful lot of things to an awful lot of people. You know, you have Foucault's notion of a discourse, which seems to many ways take its name and, and get its identity via its kind of disciplinary application. In other words, it's, it's often not always, but largely to do with the contents that it refers to and how that that's been bounded.
So if we're going to say that we have a prospect here, of some commonality of some overlap between Heidegger and Lacan in respect to the conceptualization of discourse, we should say a few things. Why is the concept of discourse so important? Why is it so absolutely irreducible to a Lacanian project and indeed to a Heideggerian project? That'd be one question.
And then what is there that the two thinkers have in common when they think about discourse and what might some of the differences be?

CT:
I mean, as you said, the concept of discourse has many, many, many different understandings.
Let's see now.
I would not say that discourse is an important concept in Heidegger as such.
Obviously he speaks about discourse and he connects it with the chit chat that people are doing and whatever is happening in the world around you. And he differentiates, Heidegger differentiates between that which is “the people” —the term taken with all bad connotations of “the people”— with Dasein, that is, the human being, who is invited to think about what is there, the Dasein’s ownmost, i.e., genuine, authentic as it has been translated.
For Lacan, discourse is something different.
It is an indication, of the social bond. He actually defines that as a social bond. And what is social bond, it is how people engage with each other. But there is something very crucial in Lacan, which is completely absent in Heidegger.
The crucial thing in Lacan is the predominance —if we can say that— the predominance that he gives to the Signifier. So for Lacan, the important thing in the psyche is not what we think, the meaning of what we think —I'm simplifying a bit now. I'm trying to show some kind of distinction— it's not the meaning of what we think. The meaning is almost irrelevant. It's how the constitutive elements of our thinking are connected together.
The signifiers.
So the important thing is the signifiers and the interconnections and interrelationships of signifiers. Jumps between signifiers, one brings the other and so on. That's the important thing, for Lacan. This is the lesson he was taught by Freud, and this is Lacan’s starting point. He says famously that the subject is what is represented by one signifier to another signifier.
Now, this idea that Signifiers are connected and in the way they are connected, the subject is represented, is uniquely Lacanian.
And, I would now go and say that this is what the discourse is, for Lacan. The discourse is the way the signifiers are connected into a signifying network for each and every speaking being.
So “discourse” is two different things simultaneously. One is a measure or a description of the organization of the psyche; and the other is a measure and the description of the organization of many human beings engaging into communication. So the subject in the Lacanian understanding is a product of discourse.
That is not the case in Heidegger. So that could be a complete disagreement. For Heidegger, the Dasein finds themselves there. He or she — Dasein is not a gendered entity—, find themselves there, and they have to do something with that. And they have to see their authenticity, let's say. That's the moral aspect of Heidegger.
For Lacan, the subject doesn't exist first and then finds language to use; the subject is constructed through language, is constructed through discourse. Discourse is a necessary aspect of being-in-language and a necessary aspect of being a human being, a speaking human being. And, in my understanding, discourse is a necessary aspect of having an ontology. You cannot have an ontology, you cannot have a world if you are not in a discourse, if you are not product of a discourse.
So you are a product in a discourse. And this means by virtue of being a product of discourse, that you are in the world, which is constructed by this discourse.

DH:
Right. That helps bringing together a whole series of different ideas. I mean, maybe just to try to recapitulate and throw back at you, some ideas there. I like very much the Lacanian understanding of a discourse, which entails, I think, as you very nicely put it, the idea that in many respects, the subject is a function of the signifier. The subject is in a sense produced by the interaction of signifiers. It's a kind of counter-intuitive idea in many respects. And it's one that you spend some time on describing in your book, but a very important one. And also one that we do not, do not find in Heidegger.
I mean, I suppose I still wanted to maybe try and suggest that there is some potential overlap of sorts. And just thinking back to, to early Lacan and notions of full speech and empty speech. And you'll have to forgive me if I get the conceptualization slightly wrong.
Having made that point, this is a part of Lacan's understanding of discourse that doesn't exist within Heidegger, we also have the early Lacan's reference to maybe more implicit than otherwise, the Rede - Hörende distinction in Heidegger, this distinction you were referring to idle chatter, as opposed to a kind of discourse.
And if I'm understanding it correctly, we do have it in Heidegger still as some kind of notion of a discourse, which means that we can separate certain types of communicative interaction. One, the idle chatter, the ongoing fatuous noise of everyday speech, which doesn't take us anywhere towards the truth of being. If anything, it takes us away from that, which you could say, reconceptualized sounds a lot like Lacan's empty speech. Whereas you do still have in Heidegger, this idea that there could be discourse, which enables us to, or enables us to move towards a truth of being. In other words, there is some kind of function of discourse, which is, which is viable, which is enabling and which has a relationship to truth of sorts.
So I suppose what I'm kind of reaching for here is that, um, that in different ways, both of these two intellectuals at some point have some faith in, or, belief in the prospect of a relationship between discourse and truth.
Um, any thoughts you had on that?

CT:
I mean, the new concept that you added in this, what you say, which is very interesting is the concept of truth. And I would think that the concept of truth, if you ask me in the hierarchy of concepts, let's say what is more important, in Heidegger, discourse or truth? I would say truth. It's much more important. And it's important in many different ways, not only because truth has to speak about true things, not, not in this sense only —also in this, but not only in this sense—but in the sense of truth being something, the Heideggerian approach to truth has something to do with revelation, something with that the world is open to you and is presented to you as something that you accept as such. And this is truth. It's, it's the, the ancient word, Aletheia, that is, what is given to you by the world opening to you.
And how is the world open to you in Heidegger? It's actually through language. He says language is the house of being. So it is in language that the world is being presented to the human being. So you can even say that it is in discourse that the world is opening to the human being. And if we say it in this way, then there is a commonality with the discourse, the Lacanian discourse.
But I would think that the crucial part here is truth. And why do I say truth, why do I insist on truth? I find a very interesting connection with Lacan, where he goes into Freud and he speaks about Freud's understanding of negation. In Freud, negation is actually what is opening, is a description of how the world is being opened. He, Freud, brings the concept of Bejahung, affirmation, i.e., that you have to accept something as given in order to be able to have a judgement, whether this something is this or that.
And we see that Freud, suddenly —even though Freud, he famously claims that he doesn't do at all philosophy, he's against philosophy, he's a scientist and he wants to think scientifically about questions— in this case, he goes into very deep philosophy because he makes a claim that is not about truth statements, in terms of correspondence of a statement with a state of affairs, it’s not that that is important for the human being. It is the first acceptance of the world as such. This is Bejahung. 
Freud speaks about that in his article Negation, and then Lacan takes it, grasps it and makes a whole point in the very early works, in his first seminar. You see there that the main thing that Lacan recognizes in Freud and stresses is this Bejahung, the acceptance, the revelation —which we cannot fail to see that is a Heideggerian idea.
So Lacan says that Freud is Heideggerian there, without knowing it. And Heidegger has failed to see that Freud actually does not say very strange things. If you forget the mechanistic, ideas and the mechanistic conclusions, Freud says important things. This is my criticism of Heidegger's understanding of Freud.
So anyway, what I was trying to say is that yes, Discourse in this way, it's common in Heidegger and in some of Lacan. And if we put aside whatever has to do with the noise and the chatter of the day, discourse, in Heidegger, becomes, a way to address the historicity of being. That being is not one thing but comes within a history, or not within a history, it comes with periods. It's a different thing, being, today than it was in the ancient, the time of Aristotle. This historicity of being can be described as a difference of a discourse. So we have a genealogy, let's say, of discourse that is happening and is visible in Heidegger and is important. Personally I would put more stress on the concept of truth but it's compatible, the two ways are compatible.
And this genealogy of discourse, this way that the human being, the eras of society, of engagement with society, of questions, of desire, of everything, that this is historical, you find that also in Lacan. To return to your previous point about the ethical aspect of the unconscious, we recognize that the unconscious is something that compels us to act. We can only recognize that after Descartes. Because what Descartes is bringing is the belief that the human being, the subject, the intellect, can actually think for themselves and they can decide for themselves. That's the only thing they can do. They can doubt everything, this is what they can do, they can question.
So when you have a dream, before Descartes, you take it for granted that is coming from somewhere, any kind of explanation —it is a premonition of the future, or something of that sort, or is a message from the gods— whatever you do with the dream, you don't take it as yours.
After Descartes, it becomes a scientific problem. And I say the word scientific now with knowledge. Because Lacan has Science and Truth,  a paper in the Écrits, in which he makes this claim, that “the subject of psychoanalysis is the subject of science”. And what he means is that after we have Descartes and the human being can see and conceptualize the world as something that can be thought about, it's only then that the unconscious becomes the unconscious that compels us to act.

DH:
Which is also to say that the unconscious has an ethical status in a sense.

CT: 
Yes, exactly. So all of these things fit together. The ethical status of the unconscious is not a statement that could be valid for Aristotle. It's only valid after Descartes.

DH:
Yes, yes. 

CT:
This is what I'm trying to say.

DH:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's excellent.

Derek Hook:
Okay, hello everyone.
It's a great pleasure today to speak to Christos Tombras, who's a colleague of mine from my time in London. And what Christos is going to be talking to us about particularly is his fantastic book, which is Discourse Ontology, Body and the Construction of a World from Heidegger through Lacan.
So it's great to have the opportunity to enter into a dialogue about certain of these topics, because one of the questions that sometimes emerges, for me at least, where I'm teaching in an institution which is friendly to phenomenology, is why should people who are well-versed in, say, Heidegger's philosophy, be at all interested in Lacan? And I think we'd be right in saying that it doesn't always seem to be the case that there are that many Heideggerians who would be interested in Lacan, so maybe our first question for Christos today then would be something like, why these two? Why this pairing? Why do we bring Heidegger to Lacan or Lacan to Heidegger? What motivated that for you in the book? Christos, if you could give us your thoughts.

Christos Tombras:
Thank you Derek. I think what one notices, reading Lacan, is that Heidegger is always present, either by name, he mentions him, or by terminology, in conventions he is using in his writing, you can see Heideggerian features all around Lacan. That creates a first question to me. Why is Lacan interested in Heidegger? And then I went into Heidegger himself, into his work, and I found that Heidegger was very critical of psychoanalysis, extremely critical actually. So this was a challenge for me to understand how Heidegger is so against psychoanalysis, and if that is the case, why is Lacan interested in Heidegger? And what made it more important for me personally, a practitioner of psychoanalysis, is that Heidegger's arguments against basic Freudian concepts are very strong, are arguments that you cannot really ignore. So it was a challenge for me to actually see how can these criticisms of Heidegger be responded to. And of course, I would call Lacan, who provides either directly or indirectly a kind of answer. So this was the starting point for me.

​DH:
I think what you say just rings so true inasmuch as once one has started an exploration with Heidegger, you start to see these little motifs, these little conceptualisations in the backdrop, everywhere, really, in Lacan. For me one of the most crucial areas where that was apparent was in Lacan's theorisation of empty as opposed to full speech. But it seems that Heidegger is one of those rare contemporary intellectuals that Lacan respected and certainly wanted to engage more with. One of the ideas that starts to become apparent in your book is that you could say that both Lacan and Heidegger in some respects need each other. What are your thoughts on that? 

CT:
Let’s see… OK, Lacan needs Heidegger, that's for certain, at least he needed him in the beginning. I do not know if Heidegger needs Lacan. I think there is a limitation in Heidegger's thinking, if I can go there. As I said earlier, Heidegger is very critical of Freud and he is correct in being critical of some aspects of Freud's thinking. But in my opinion —and I think in Lacan's opinion as well— Heidegger fails to see what was the radical nature of Freud's discovery. So… This radical nature of Freud's discovery is what is important to be added to Heidegger.
So you take Heidegger, you take his original approach, which is, we go back to the phenomena, we speak about the world, we don't see the human being in the world as something that is added to the world, but together, we go against the subject-object division. We take all these steps, which are the steps that Heidegger takes, and we reach a point that we say that, okay, the concept of unconscious, for example, is not a valid concept —Heidegger says—because the original assumptions of Freud are wrong. But Heidegger fails to see what Freud does actually, because Freud makes an effort to understand certain phenomena. The phenomena, for example, of slips of the tongue, the phenomena of symptoms of psychopathology, phenomena which are there and are waiting to be observed and thought about. Heidegger, when he rejects Freud, indirectly seems to be ignoring the phenomena, as if he's throwing the baby together with the water. And this is where Lacan comes in and says, whatever Heidegger says about Freudian conceptualisations and about whatever correct he says, still the phenomena are still there. And what do we do with these phenomena?

DH:
There's a wonderfully paradoxical formulation that comes to mind in terms of what you've said. And that is, you could say that part of what is most valuable to Lacan about Heidegger is precisely some of the critical argumentation that Heidegger brings to the table of Freud that we can't simply ignore. So in that respect, you could say that it's almost as if Heidegger gives Lacan a gift of sorts to think about how to engage with some of these issues.
Now, I got so many questions. One of the early questions that I suppose we need to mention and think a little bit about is the contentious status of Heidegger today. We have a number of different perspectives. And for many years now, people have obviously made the claim, it's not just a claim, the assertion, the reminder, that Heidegger has a dubious political history, a dubious past. And for some years, people were like, well, okay, we can separate the man from the work. But progressively, the arguments are becoming stronger that there are facets of Heidegger's Nazi background, Nazi past, which seem to have leaked into his theorisations as well. So we should mention that. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. But as I asked that question, I'm kind of interrupting myself with another question. And I said earlier, well, what do, what, why does Heidegger need Lacan? And I think quite rightly, you said, well, perhaps, you know, to all intents and purposes, Heidegger doesn't really need Lacan. But one of the, my favourite parts of Discourse Ontology was the section where you talk about the fact that Heidegger doesn't broach the concept of jouissance, or doesn't speak about jouissance, or certainly in Being and Time, as far as I understand it, it's not a domain that his thought seems to reach into. Now, the reason I say I've kind of interrupted myself there is I've got two questions then, and I wonder whether maybe they have a relationship to one another, maybe not. But the one is, what should we say? How do you think this question of Heidegger's enormously problematic, political background on the one hand, and secondly, does the question of jouissance, or more specifically, Heidegger's failure to address that question, have any bearing on the fact of this Nazi background?

CT:
That's very interesting, actually. We can think about this. Let's start with the Nazi part.
Heidegger is a human being. As a human being, he is entitled to have failures, to have made mistakes. And to be stupid, and to be politically stupid, and actually to be very problematic. And I think also that we can take from Heidegger what we think it is useful and reject what we don't think it's very useful. So there is something, some aspect of Heidegger's thinking, which is extraordinarily important and useful. It's like a tool, I could say. His take of phenomenology. He didn't invent phenomenology. He took it from Husserl. Who took it, well he did not invent it himself. He gave it a name, but he took it from his own teacher, Brentano. So, Heidegger comes from a series of thinkers who are working within this field, Phenomenology. He is a phenomenologist himself. And he makes a radical step to overcome the, let's say, the importance that Husserl gives to consciousness. Heidegger is able to go beyond the distinction between consciousness and the world, between subject - object, and so on, in a much more systematic way than Husserl. That is important, this is his work. And as such, I find it necessary to be able to use it. Is there, I ask myself, is there anything Nazi in that?
I answer, there isn't.
In this approach, in Heidegger's approach to what it is phenomenology and his understanding of the human being, Dasein, as a being in the world, and his understanding about care, about authenticity, about possibilities, all of the concepts that he's using, describing the human being, there is nothing that could be thought as Nazi as such.
Now, if in the same period that he says these important things, Heidegger also subscribed to Hitler, to the Nazi party and to Hitler ideas, then I can reject that. I can reject anything of Heidegger that has anything to do with Nazi, because it's not acceptable. However, I will not throw away the tool. I will use the tool. The tool is too important to be ignored.
So when I'm presenting myself as someone who thinks that Heidegger is important, I don't think that everything of Heidegger is important. There are many things which are not important at all, but there are many which are very important. But this is the first part.
Now the question about jouissance… Heidegger fails to speak properly about the body, which is a question of jouissance. Heidegger was aware that he failed to speak about body. He said, when he was presented with this question, with this criticism, he said that, “I avoided to speak about the body because it's a very complicated question. This is as much as I could say”.
So we have Heidegger failing to address the question of the body. This is something that Lacan is doing. And for this reason, we can say that Lacan is important for Heidegger, but in this failure, I don't see any connection with Nazi and Nazi ideals.

DH: 
Okay. I mean, that actually enables me to ask another question.
And here we go. Okay. You could say that when jouissance becomes an important, indeed essential concept for Lacan and for the clinic, we also bring with it a kind of ethical dimension.
And when I say that I'm alluding to, you know, notions that, that the subjects’ jouissance and their enjoyment, their enjoyment and their suffering, for example, is something that one should engage, should, discuss, make the subject of analysis at some level. When we deal with the subject’s jouissance or the subjects themselves deal with issues of their jouissance within the clinic, you could say that is occurring within the vague remit of the ethical. Now, two points follow from that. Number one is we might want to think about the ethical, both in terms of how Heidegger seems to constantly, um, sidestep it and I'm no Heidegger scholar. So you'll have to forgive me if I [don’t] get this right. But in my understanding of Heidegger, he's often, you know, kind of got smarting remarks about people who want to say ethics. And he's insistent, if I recall, that Being and Time, for example, is not about ethics. So there's this kind of move away or an avoidance and apparent avoidance of ethics.
And you guess where I'm going with all of this. I'm going to this famous statement that Lacan makes, um, and at the risk of taking it out of context, I'm, I have in mind this idea that for Lacan, the status of the unconscious is not ontological, rather the status of the unconscious is ethical. So I'd be interested on any of your thoughts on that. But of course the implicit question that this is, is pushing towards is if we're going to arrive as you do at a theorisation of a discourse ontology, which wants to bring together facets, both of Lacan and Heidegger, how do we do that if they seem to have this divergence?

CT:
This question about the status of the unconscious, whether it is ethical or ontological, what does it mean? It's a big, as you said, there can be many different readings of that.
Let me attempt one reading.
When he says it's not ontological, the status of the unconscious, he says that in response to a question, the question posed to him by Jacques-Alain Miller, who said, what is your ontology?
He meant, Jacques-Alain Miller, where do you stand in terms of the big questions about Being, about this, about that? Is the unconscious a thing? This is the implied question. Is it something that exists? What is your position? Jacques-Alain Miller asks Lacan. And Lacan doesn't want to fall into this trap and say the unconscious exists because we see the formations of the unconscious. That would be the trap that Freud falls into. And then Heidegger would come and say, you see, he says it exists. That means he attributes to it something which is a mistake because it comes from his problematic, original metaphysical assumptions.
So Lacan doesn't want to commit to that. So he says, rather than ontological, I would say that it's ethical. Now, what does he mean ethical in this? I think that Lacan understands ethics in the old Aristotelian way. Not much in terms of morality, but rather in terms of what is the motive force, let's say, behind human action. What is that that moves human beings to act? And if we can discern the motive force of action, what is a good action in contrast to what is a bad action? So ethics in terms of morality comes as a conclusion of the first step, which is to say, is there something that guides the human being in their actions? Yes? And if there is, now we say yes-- this is Aristotle speaking-- then how can we differentiate between a good thing and a bad thing of the guiding forces? This is ethics.
What Lacan tries to indicate by saying that the unconscious is ethical is that it compels us, the unconscious, currently —currently means after Freud— it compels us, to act. It makes it necessary for us to take a position. Before Freud, when the person had a dream, any dream, the person thought that this is a message from God, or thought that this is something, the message from the departed parents, or some premonition of the future. They were thinking of the formations —what Freud allowed us to see as formations of the unconscious— people before Freud, were thinking these were messages from the other world, messages from the divine, chance events, all kinds of things that we can ignore. Freud brings up this and says, we cannot ignore them. This is yours. And you have a responsibility. It's up to you what you're going to do with your unconscious. This is Freud. And this is what Lacan says that we cannot ignore it. that the unconscious is ethical that means it compels us to act. That is, to understand it.

DH:
Actually this is a wonderful answer actually because it emphasises again that to be a subject, and to be a subject of the unconscious, is to have as it were an ethical responsibility to one's own unconscious or something of or —I am hesitant with these words— of accountability and responsibility. It means that there is an emergence of subjectivity but also an ethical emergence of subjectivity because one's symptoms have a significance, have a meaning which tells one something about the subject themselves rather, than simply being imposed from within.
Now this this may be a little bit of fancy footwork but i suppose what I'm wondering then is that sense of the ethical if I'm if I'm faithfully reproducing something of what you are saying… isn't that something that's missing from Heidegger and i know, I've asked about jouissance and um you said, no well you know it's not something that's crucial to Heidegger's Nazism but i suppose what i mean by that is an ethical relationship or a potential ethical relationship to jouissance. And of course I'm also thinking here about jouissance of enjoyment jouissance of racism the jouissance of antisemitism… Could we naively pose the question, that would go something like this: If Heidegger had more of a psychoanalytic sensibility, both about what the concept of jouissance does and might entail, and the ethical sensibility that comes with psychoanalysis, as you've just articulated it, surely his apparent or overt antisemitism would be more of a problem for him than it seems that it was.

CT:
It's a tricky question, really, because I think, let's put Lacan aside for a second. If we did actually challenge Heidegger about his antisemitism, he could possibly say something of that sort, that I might be antisemitic in my deepest thoughts and my worries and my prejudices and so on and so forth. But I don't hold that antisemitism is important in understanding the world. And I have never made some claim of that sort. I speak about being, I speak about the historicity of being, I speak about the ancient world and the new world, the modernity, the problems of modernity… There is nothing in this that has anything to do with antisemitism as such. I would say, being Heidegger now responding to this hypothetical, I'm pretending to be Heidegger, and responding to this hypothetical question, I would say —Heidegger would say— that the question of antisemitism is an ontic question. It's not ontological. I am allowed to be antisemitic in the same way that I'm allowed to like Southern German music. This is not an ontological preference. You might not like Southern German music, Bavarian music, you might hate Bavarian costumes, I like them, that's okay. But in the big scheme of things, these are not important things. This is the differentiation between the ontic and the ontological.
What Freud brings with the unconscious and the ethical approach of the unconscious is that you cannot ignore, you should not ignore the failures in, how can I say, the gaps into your rationality, let's call it like this. The gaps of rationality are not mistakes, Freud says. They are not just errors. This is how the mind works. The mind works in this background, in this other scene of the unconscious. And this other scene speaks about you as an individual. So you need to respond to that, Freud says.
And Lacan says further: this is the ethical aspect of the unconscious. And then you can say that to Heidegger. And Heidegger would be unwilling to follow because he would still say, this is very optical. This is not ontological.
And the disagreement of Heidegger would be this. And I think if Heidegger did see my book, let's imagine the situation, apart from anything that would be annoyed, he would be extra annoyed about that, that the book seems to be ignoring the differentiation between ontic and ontological.
And if I can add one more thing here, and we might have the opportunity to go there. This distinction, ontic vs ontological, which is crucial in Heidegger, is a distinction which is undermined by Lacan, and his claim that there is no meta-language.

DH:
Ah!

CT:
Lacan undermines this distinction by saying that there is not such a big step that you can make to differentiate between the ontic and the ontological. You are always trapped into the ontic, even though you think you are not.

DH:
Okay. So that's, I mean, thank you for that answer. It was very illuminating and very helpful to me.

It is organised in collaboration with the Psychosis Therapy Project, a therapy service for people experiencing psychosis, and I am honoured to have been invited to participate in a Clinical Round-table on technique.

PROGRAMME

08.45 - 09.30: Registration and Coffee

09.30: HISTORY
Haya Oakley: Life in the “Anti-Psychiatry” Fast Lane
Brian Martindale: Family and Psychosis (Past & Present)
Chair: Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz

11.00: Coffee break

11.30: POLITICS
Jay Watts: Navigating Language Games around Psychosis
Barry Watt: The Politics of Kleinian Technique in Post-war UK
Chair: Anne Cooke

13.00: Lunch break

14.00: THEORY
Kate Brown: Attachment Theory and Psychosis
Stijn Vanheule: Conceptualising and Treating Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective
Chair: Peter Nevins

15.45: Coffee break

16.15: TECHNIQUE
Clinical Round-table:
Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz (Presenter)
Christos Tombras and Tomasz Fortuna (Respondents)
Moderator: Gwion Jones

17.30: End

You might, or might not, be familiar with Descartes’s thought. That’s not a problem. He, as everybody else, tried to explain what it is to be human.

Descartes had observed something, which struck him as really very important. He had observed that there is a difference between material things, things that have proper dimensions --such as length, height and so on-- and immaterial things that do not have dimensions, such as the ones that you have in your mind. He called the former extended things or “res extensae” (res extensa in singular); he called the latter thinking things or “res cogitantes” (res cogitans in singular). Descartes believed that these two kinds of things although so very different, they can come together. They come together in the only being that has both a (material) body and a (non-material) mind: the human being. Descartes thought that the human being is the only extended thing that also has the quality of a thinking thing.

There are practical questions of course. How is this possible? How can these two qualities co-exist in one and the same being? Descartes thought about it and believed that he identified the place where the one meets the other. It was somewhere in the skull, underneath the brain. There is a gland there which was known from the ancient times to be the seat of vital fluids. It was called “pineal gland”, because it looks like a pine-nut. Today we know that the pineal gland is the seat of many hormones, very important for the regulation of many subsystems of the organism. Descartes did not know about hormones. But he believed that the pineal gland is really the one place in the human being where res cogitans and res extensa meet.

Descartes had a theory of behaviour which involved what he called passions. He had named six passions: wonder, love, hate, desire, joy and sadness. So, he hypothesised that the pineal gland was the important place where passions meet the body.

You may be asking yourselves right now, how is this relevant to today’s conference? How is Descartes’s theory relevant to today’s understanding of these questions? Who, but the endocrinologists, cares about the pineal gland today? Nobody.

This might be true; in general we do not seem to think very much about the pineal gland anymore. But Descartes’s ideas on the subject have left a trace. Let me bring an example. It’s a bit unexpected. It’s a film.

“The Matrix”.

You may recall the story of the film: unbeknownst to them, people were living their lives in a gigantic computer simulation, called the Matrix. Inside the simulation things were “smooth” and seamless. You could not see that you were in a simulation unless you were “in the know”. The real people, the ones who were disconnected from the simulation, had a connecting interface there at the back of their skull. Think of it as a plug. In order to re-connect to the simulation you had to put a probe in this plug. The film spared the details, but the placement of this connector and the length of the probe were hinting at one thing. They were hinting at the pineal gland. In a possible gesture to Descartes, the writers of “Matrix” imagined the pineal gland as the interface between the human body and the giant computer servers that hosted the Matrix. This interface allowed the exchange of messages and the communication of the simulated world, as constructed by the computers, with the body of the person who was logged into the simulation. The pineal gland was the meeting point of the human body and the computer’s “mind”.

I am not going to spoil for you the story of the film here. It’s quite entertaining and thought provoking, and if you have not watched it, please do.

Let me try, instead, to bring all this in connection to today’s subject.

I will start with an observation.

Here it is:

People do not know what to do with their bodies.

That’s all.

Sounds funny --I have to admit, I did want it to sound funny-- but it is not funny at all. It’s an observation.

First and foremost it is a clinical observation. You see this in the clinic: anorexia; bulimia; body dysmorphic disorder; gender dysphoria; low self-esteem; insecurity; anxiety; panic attacks; and so on and so forth. Each and every manifestation of human suffering has something to do with the body.

People do not know what to do with their body, and they suffer because of this.

One sees it on the street: You see body-builders; you see super-models; you see bankers dressed perfectly; you see hipsters; you see psychoanalysts; on the street you see all kinds of people. Always the same old story.

People do not know what to do with their body. It confuses them, it causes them discomfort.

Here you go: Each and every manifestation of human life reflects this very same discomfort with the body.

[Question by Leonardo Rondriguez]
There is a problem, I think, in characterising the mind as opposite of the body in the sense of “res extensa” because in psychoanalysis the mind is “res extensa” too. 

CT: Perhaps so. But in any case I am not trying to follow Descartes here. I wanted to point out that he tries to solve the same problem as everybody else, namely the problem of the body. Heidegger too tries to solve the same problem, even though he speaks very little about the body. And then Psychoanalysis too tries to speak about the same problem.

I could add something, if you allow me, just in connection to this: One major difference between the original Cartesian ontology and the “updated” ontology that I tried to present here is that the “mind”, the “thinking thing” of Descartes is thought to be self-contained, autonomous, and independent of the body. In Descartes, the mind meets the body. In contrast, when I speak about a personal “web of signifiers” I recognise that this cannot exist without the body. It is in the body, in the sense of signifierised jouissance, but its origin is elsewhere, it is outside, in the world. In other words, the web of signifiers is not on the same ontological level with the body: it’s on a meta-level, so to speak. Their type of existence is different, their ontological status is different. 

Thank you.

I would think that an event can be defined in this way: An “event” is a special kind of occurrence, a special kind of happening. It’s an occurrence that is recognised as such. (“Recognised” here has the sense of “being recognised by humans”.)

In other words, not all occurrences are events. In order to have an event we have to recognise it as an event. In a way one could say that an event is a product of a decision, a product of a gesture.

What this means is that humans need to be there, in order to observe the occurrence and decide that this is, or can be thought of as, an event. Humans decide to “single out” an event, so to speak, from a background of occurrences.

Of course this decision, this observation doesn’t need to be in real time, one does not need to be present at the exact moment something is happening. To bring an example, solar flares have been happening for many millions of years, and are happening this very moment as we speak; we only became aware of them, however, when we created a model in our minds about the inner workings of the Sun. From the moment we had a theory about how the Sun is working, then we could take this specific occurrence as an event, and call it a solar flare. The occurrence became an (astronomical) event as soon as we started thinking about it –when it started to concern us in some way.

As we speak, there are millions of stars out there, and there are happenings, there are solar flares –or more precisely “stellar” flares. They are happening now, as we speak, but strictly speaking they are not events. They are not events for us. They will become events from the moment we take the telescope to look at them. Or from the moment their effects obtain an importance for us, for some reason or the other.

So, this about events:

An event is a product of a decision; with this decision we distinguish something from its background.

What about historical events?

We have a historical event, or, to put it differently, an event becomes a historical event when it is incorporated in a greater narrative that involves a past and a future.

History is a narrative, it is an interpretation, and as such it involves a point of view and refers to a past and to a future. Thus, a historical event is an event that can be seen as part of a greater historical narrative.

An event cannot be thought as a historical event unless it affects the human affairs in some way, unless it is important for humans to speak about it and include it in their narrative. So, to bring an example, an earthquake is a geological event when it happens in some remote part of the Pacific, but becomes a historical event when it directly implicates humans, for example by creating a tsunami like the one in Indian Ocean in 2004. The tsunami of 2004 was a historical event, having affected or taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in many countries.

Having introduced our concepts thus, we can now return to our initial question.

What is the real in a historical event?

I answer: Nothing.

There is no real in a historical event.

Let me explain.

A historical event is already a narrative; it is an interpretation and as such it involves an act of distinguishing. We distinguish something from occurrences, and call it an event. An event is already a discussion about something. The real was before that.

The real, if we can say that, is at the very level of the occurrence. The occurrence is the real. But from the moment that we decide to call something an event, there is no real any more.

“Moment” here is used in the sense of a logical moment, not a temporal one. At the exact logical moment that we recognise an event –historical or not– in an occurrence, what we do amounts to taking some of the real, of that occurrence so to speak, and transforming it into a signifier. That occurrence –now called event– is now able to signify something. In other words, the real of an occurrence is made into a signifier –it is signifierised as an event. So, an event is but a chunk of the real taken as a signifier.

The tricky part here is that we do not know what this signifier means. (We wouldn’t know that the real means either. The real never means anything.)

When we try to understand it, to include it in a narrative that involves a past and a future –in history, that is– we transform it into a historical event. Our interpretation allows us to think that we know what it means. We have history when we impose meaning onto all these signifiers which were there, available to us to add some meaning.

So, we can only know what we can take from the real, make it into a signifier and give it a meaning –give it a sense so to speak. This is what history is about.

Let’s now return to the Shoah –the Holocaust.

As we saw, Philippe Benichou calls it “that event beyond meaning, real, all too real”.

Based on our discussion, how are we to understand this?

Why is it the case that the Shoah is beyond meaning? How are we to understand the assertion that something –anything– is beyond meaning?

Obviously, being beyond meaning does not mean to be meaningless.

One way to understand this is in the sense that meaning –any meaning– is not enough to enclose this event. As if the Shoah cannot be made into a narrative. As if, in some way, the Shoah remains off history.

Or to say it in a simpler way, it might be that the Shoah is simply too big, far too big to be captured as an event. Or, in other words, that not all of its real can be captured as an event.

Which now raises further questions. Is this whole discussion a discussion about scale and magnitude?

Do we say that the Shoah is “beyond meaning” because the Shoah is the biggest of all events? Does this mean that it was a singularity? A one-off?

Benichou attempts to discuss this in his paper. He brings up Jacques-Alain Miller:

Lacan does not say why it was the Jews, present for so long in Europe and part of its culture, who became the subject of this sacrifice. Jacques-Alain Miller proposed a reason within the Jewish tradition, which itself rejects the universal, the "for all" and assimilation. The Jews separate themselves, by making themselves the cause of the desire of their God, something that put them "in the place of a remainder". This remainder was throughout history the support of all fantasies of an Other who enjoys, enjoys money, enjoys the power of conspiring, and enjoys sacrificing the children of Christians... It was this remainder that the Nazis tried to make disappear.

This would mean that the Jews, in Jacques-Alain Miller’s view, have facilitated the work of their enemies by having put themselves in the place of a remainder which then was thought (by the Nazis) that it should be eliminated. The obvious implication is that the Shoah should not happen had the Jews not put themselves in the place of the remainder: If the Jews had positioned themselves differently in the culture of Europe during these 2000 years, then perhaps the Shoah would not have happened.

This of course is speculation. The fact of the matter is that the Shoah did happen.

Our questions then persist:

Was the Shoah a historical singularity? Was it a one-off?

Will something like the Shoah happen again? Can it happen again?

Of the top of my head I could think of Rwanda, Rwanda in 1994. They killed too many people there, fast and systematically.

My question takes then this form:

Have we really thought about Shoah? Is it possible to think about it? Is it possible to understand it? When we try to make an event out of this real, when we try to create a kind of narrative of the 20th Century, can we really enclose the Shoah, fully, in this narrative?

I am not sure about the answer, but I will quote Claude Lanzmann here –a French journalist, writer and filmmaker, the maker of a documentary called “Shoah”.

This is what Lanzmann said, talking to an American journalist about his work.

When I was making the "Shoah" I was like a horse with blinders. I did not look to the side, neither my right side nor my left side. I was trying to look straight into this black sun which is the Holocaust. And this blindness, this voluntary blindness was –is– a necessary requisite, the necessary condition for the creation. […] The only way to cope with this blinding reality it to blind one’s self to all kinds of explanation. To refuse the explanation. It is the only way. It was a moral attitude, an ethical touchstone.

To refuse all explanation. A difficult task.

But it’s only in this way that I can understand Benichou when he talks about “that event beyond meaning”.

Thank you for your attention.

Bashing DSM
In the years since its first publication in 1952, the DSM has gone through four major and many minor revisions. Its latest version, DSM-IV, was published in the 90s. The new one, DSM-5, is being prepared and expected very soon.

This would be an unremarkable event for everybody not in the business, if there was not for a major, quite unexpected development.

The news is now out. On April 29, 2013, Thomas Insel, the director of NIMH, announced that the Institute "will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories." The DSM, according to Insel, is limiting progress in mental health research. Current DSM categories "are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure”. But “patients with mental disorders deserve better”. So, the NIMH is introducing a new research framework called Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). That’s just the first step. According to Insel, “we cannot design a system based on biomarkers or cognitive performance because we [still] lack the data. In this sense, RDoC is a framework for collecting the data needed for a new nosology. But it is critical to realize that we cannot succeed if we use DSM categories as the ‘gold standard’.”

What we need, writes Insel, is to adopt a new approach, beginning "with several assumptions:

• A diagnostic approach based on the biology as well as the symptoms must not be constrained by the current DSM categories,
• Mental disorders are biological disorders involving brain circuits that implicate specific domains of cognition, emotion, or behavior,
• Each level of analysis needs to be understood across a dimension of function,
• Mapping the cognitive, circuit, and genetic aspects of mental disorders will yield new and better targets for treatment."

Good news then?
Well... Perhaps.

The thing is, as science writer John Horgan commented in his blog at Scientific American, that “the NIMH is replacing the DSM definitions of mental disorders, which virtually everyone agrees are profoundly flawed, with definitions that even he admits don’t exist yet!” (his emphasis). Horgan suspects that NIMH’s decision is connected with Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, which promises to support research in the neurosciences. Yet “neuroscience still lacks an overarching paradigm; it resembles genetics before the discovery of the double helix”.

I would agree with Horgan. A question then might be raised thus: What is needed to obtain this “overarching” paradigm? Will this ever be possible?

For Thomas Insel and the NIMH, it’s just a question of time.

For Horgan, it is mainly a question of attitude: “Instead of forming fancy new programs and initiatives and alliances”, he writes, “leaders in mental health should perhaps do some humble, honest soul searching before they decide how to proceed. And they should think of what’s best not for their professions or the pharmaceutical industry but for those suffering from mental illness, who deserve better.”

But is humility and honest soul searching the only things we lack when we are talking about mental health research?

Well, we certainly lack those, but I think we also lack something more crucial.

Questions of worldview
What, I think, we lack is an understanding of what is included in assumptions as seemingly innocuous as those of the NIMH mentioned above. Assumptions always stem from a worldview and a worldview always entails more assumptions than the ones one is willing to admit. These assumptions are thought to be self-evident and taken for granted.

A scientific research programme –any scientific research programme– always reflects an underlying worldview, i.e. includes things that are taken for granted. What we lack, then, is an understanding of what constitutes a worldview –in this case the worldview of modern science.

To bring an example, the whole enterprise of modern physics is built on the premise that this world is measurable. This simply means that phenomena in the world –the decay of radioactive materials, the phases of the moon, the greenhouse effect– can be studied via their quantifiable (i.e. measurable) properties. Different phenomena, different properties, of course; but the assumption is that all phenomena have properties, and these properties can be identified and measured.

One could ask what the problem with this assumption is. I must admit: as far as physics is concerned, not much really.

But if we talk about psychiatry, things perhaps change.

Dissecting an argument
Let us recall the second of the four NIMH assumptions above:

Mental disorders are biological disorders involving brain circuits that implicate specific domains of cognition, emotion, or behavior.

This, one can easily see, is an outline of a worldview. It is not a general worldview, as such; it only refers to our psychic life; so, let’s call it a “regional worldview”.

Now, in this regional worldview, mental functioning is described in terms of brain “circuits” that implicate “domains” of cognition, emotion, or behaviour. (The actual details of this need not concern us here: they will be in the focus of the research framework the NIMH advocates.)

What we really have is an assumption that cognition, emotion or behaviour are “domains”, of similar kind –their similarity being that they can be implicated by brain “circuits”.

What is assumed further is that there is some kind of correspondence between “circuits” and “domains”. We do not need to know what sort of correspondence this is; we only need to “accept” that for any manifestation of mental life (be it cognition, emotion, or behaviour) some brain “circuits” are involved.

This leads us to conclude, together with the NIMH, that there are biological functions which represent themselves as mental functions.

And, reversely, that mental functions stem from corresponding biological functions.

The keyword here is “corresponding”.

That’s the research framework of the NIMH. Only that they are more interested in disorders, not functioning in general.

You might ask, then, where is the problem?

Streetlight effect
Well, there are three potential sources of problems.

Firstly, we have not yet established whether there is something similar between the domains of cognition, emotion and behaviour. We have only assumed it.

Secondly, the very concepts we are using (behaviour, emotion, cognition) are vague and deceptively self-evident. In fact they can refer to very different things. Consider for example the difference between being frightened because you are chased by a lion, and being frightened because you had a bad dream. The assumption here is that because in both cases we believe we have the same (subjective) emotion, namely fright, some kind of (objective) brain circuit is involved.

But crucially, we have assumed that when we say biological functions represent themselves as mental functions, the reverse is also true: mental functions stem from corresponding biological functions.

Whether these assumptions are valid or not is a huge question in its own right. And it is a question that has not yet been addressed.

Still, it's always taken for granted that mental functioning entails quantifiable phenomena that can be studied in the ways of modern science.

Does mental functioning entail quantifiable phenomena? Well, I am not so sure.

When I am frightened because the lion is after me, how much is my fear? How do we measure it? When I wake up frightened in the middle of the night because of a bad dream, how much is my fear? When a drug-induced hallucination frightens me and makes me want to harm myself, how much is my fear?

How do we measure fear? How do we measure pain? How do we measure longing? How do we measure suffering?

I am just raising the question here. I am not attempting to answer it.

But I am also trying to point out that for the NIMH such questions are not considered relevant. They are assumed to have been already settled.

In other words, the NIMH purports to begin work on collecting the “data needed for a new nosology” without really probing further on what it takes for granted.

In this way it exhibits a type of observational bias known as the Streetlight Effect: Like the drunk man of the story who lost his keys in the park at night, but is searching under the streetlight because this is where the light is, researchers conforming to NIMH's "Research Domain Criteria" will be collecting data by looking where it is easiest.

That’s not very different from what the people behind the DSM were doing all this time.

The days of the DSM seem to be numbered, but I am afraid that the new research framework does not give me many reasons to be optimistic.