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 2), see here:
For part 1 and 3 of the transcription click here and here.
For the actual video (part 2), see here:
For part 1 and 3 of the transcription click here and here.
Part 2:
How should we position both Lacan and Heidegger in relation to the project of ontology? Is it the case that ontology might play a crucial role in furthering a Lacanian agenda, despite Lacan's own rejection of ontology? Stressing both incompatibilities and prospective overlaps between these two thinkers, Christos Tombras offers illuminating perspectives on these questions. Tombras also discusses the concept of discourse in Lacan's thought, before moving on to emphasize the role of truth (aletheia) in Heidegger's philosophy alongside the role of primal affirmation (Bejahung) in Freud. Can we claim that there are moments where Freud is a Heideggerian without knowing it? (DH)
How should we position both Lacan and Heidegger in relation to the project of ontology? Is it the case that ontology might play a crucial role in furthering a Lacanian agenda, despite Lacan's own rejection of ontology? Stressing both incompatibilities and prospective overlaps between these two thinkers, Christos Tombras offers illuminating perspectives on these questions. Tombras also discusses the concept of discourse in Lacan's thought, before moving on to emphasize the role of truth (aletheia) in Heidegger's philosophy alongside the role of primal affirmation (Bejahung) in Freud. Can we claim that there are moments where Freud is a Heideggerian without knowing it? (DH)
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.
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.
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