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.
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.
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.
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