I’m sharing transcripts from a discussion I had with Derek Hook in December 2021 for his YouTube Channel. We discussed Heidegger, Lacanian psychoanalysis and my book, Discourse Ontology. What follows is the transcript of our conversation, very slightly edited for clarity.
For the actual video (part 1), see here:
For part 2 and 3 of the transcription click here and here.
For the actual video (part 1), see here:
For part 2 and 3 of the transcription click here and here.
Part 1:
What are the benefits of reading Lacan alongside Heidegger, and Heidegger alongside Lacan? Christos Tombras, Lacanian psychoanalyst and author of Discourse Ontology (Palgrave, 2019), offers his reflections on this question. Further questions emerge. How are we to use Heidegger today, given his association with the Nazi regime? Are Lacan and Heidegger not incompatible given Lacan's commitment to a kind of (psychoanalytic) ethics as opposed to Heidegger's commitment to ontology? Furthermore: might Heidegger's value to psychoanalysis be in part the result of the critical questions he directs at Freudian psychoanalysis? (DH)
What are the benefits of reading Lacan alongside Heidegger, and Heidegger alongside Lacan? Christos Tombras, Lacanian psychoanalyst and author of Discourse Ontology (Palgrave, 2019), offers his reflections on this question. Further questions emerge. How are we to use Heidegger today, given his association with the Nazi regime? Are Lacan and Heidegger not incompatible given Lacan's commitment to a kind of (psychoanalytic) ethics as opposed to Heidegger's commitment to ontology? Furthermore: might Heidegger's value to psychoanalysis be in part the result of the critical questions he directs at Freudian psychoanalysis? (DH)
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.
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.
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