Frank H. W. Edler

Metropolitan Community College

( A talk given on January 11, 2002, at the Peter Kiewit Center for Friday Conferences sponsored
by the Center for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis of Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska)

          When I first agreed some months ago to give a paper for the Center’s Friday Conferences, I had in mind the topic of " Heidegger and Freud." However, since Tom Svolos gave his paper on Jacques Lacan at the first of these sessions, things have been bubbling on the back burner for me. Tom’s paper whetted my appetite with his references to language, mirror stage, and floating signifiers. Well, the seduction had begun. Although I consider myself a novice when it comes to Lacan, I decided to switch my topic from "Heidegger and Freud" to "Heidegger and Lacan." For those of you who are expecting a paper on Heidegger and Freud, I hope this switch is not too great a disappointment.

          One of the reasons I shifted topics is that I have an abiding interest in the relationship between language and being, and this issue is addressed more clearly as a problematic in Lacan than it is in Freud. This is not to say that the questions of language and interpretation are insignificant in Freud. They are not; however, the question of the relationship of language and being surfaces more clearly in Lacan precisely because he is translating Freud’s insights rooted in biology into the domain of language.

          As we are all aware, we have been experiencing something of an epistemological crisis for the last half of the previous century, and it is with us still. The stability of knowledge has been questioned in terms of its foundations; more, the question is not just whether foundations are possible, but rather, whether foundations are even desirable. If you will permit me a monstrosity: using Freud’s reference to the polymorphously perverse child, it seems we have a polymorphously perverse epistemology, a multitude of epistemics at play. And some would say that this is as it should be. The "should" in "as it should be," however, doesn’t seem to carry any universal validity either. Sometimes I am reminded of the main character in Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnameable who says the following at the "end" of the novel:

   … a dream silence, full of murmurs, I don’t know,

that’s all words, never wake, all words, there’s

  nothing else, you must go one, that’s all I know,

        they’re going to stop, I know that well, I can feel it,

      they’re going to abandon me, it will be the silence,

       for a moment. For a good few moments … I’ll go on,

    you must say words, as long as there are any, until

          they fix me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on…

              if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am,

         I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t

           know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (un, 414)

The main character knows that as soon as the words are out of his mouth, they are fictions that aren’t true, and yet he is sustained by the very process of making fictions.

          Philosophy has been keenly aware of this crisis, and traditional philosophy especially has felt it to the bone. The critique of traditional philosophy from multiculturalists, feminists, deconstructionists, pragmatists, and post-colonialists, to name but a few, has been devastating. This is the crisis I grew up in from the mid-Fifties onwards and which led me to the problematic of language, being, and truth.

          The critique of foundations, however, is not something alien to philosophy. It is part of the very spirit of philosophy, and, yes, I would go farther and say of the nature of philosophy. That is, questioning is of the ‘nature and essence’ of philosophy, keeping quotation marks around the phrase ‘nature and essence’ for the time being. It is this questioning that attracted me to the presocratic Greek philosophers, to Socrates, to Krishnamurti, to Simone de Beauvoir, to Heidegger, to Freud, and now to Lacan.

          We must remember that Descartes started a revolution in philosophy: he subverted all previous forms of knowledge in order to stop the subversions; he introduced the process of radical doubt in order to put philosophy on an absolutely certain foundation. There is something very curious about this idea of subversion to end subversions. It sounds akin to Marx’s revolution to end revolutions. We could go back to Socrates too: he subverts the relativism of the Sophists by establishing universal definitions. Plato goes even further: he gives these universal definitions an ontological status apart from human beings in a heaven above the gods as an absolute reality which ensures permanent presence. In Freud, we see the boy’s attempt to subvert the father in order to establish permanent residency with the mother.

          In Lacan, it is more complex. Once the child begins to see itself as separate from and other to the mother’s body, there is no return. The road toward culture has begun; however, the desire to become one with her will always persist. This lack or absence of unity with the mother’s body and the desire for self-erasure in order to merge with her continues through life.

          Subversion in Lacan, then, is the continual subversion of self-erasure by using the repressed desire for the mother in order to establish an "I" that is perfectly whole unity separate from the mother through language, that is, in the Name of the Father. The movement into verbal language which necessitates submission to the rules of language, that is, to the Law of the Father or the Phallus. By entering speech and submitting to the rules of language, the unconscious becomes anchored in the Phallus and thus fixes and stabilizes meaning.

           Desire in the Symbolic phase is the desire for possessing the Other, the Name of the Father, the center, the structure of language itself which is impossible. To be the center would be to rule the system of language, to be permanent presence itself, to be God. This comes close to Plato. In the Symposium, Diotima tells Socrates that the desire to create is the desire for immortality which is the desire for the everlasting possession of the good itself. (footnote Plato) Like Lacan, it is the desire to possess the fullness and unity of the center, of permanent presence or fixed reality.

          The entry I’m choosing for this discussion of Lacan and Heidegger is Lacan’s own interest in Heidegger, more specifically, Lacan’s translation of Heidegger’s "logos" essay.

          Heidegger’s essay was first published in 1951 as a contribution to the Festschrift fuer Hans Jantzen edited by Kurt Bauch. Lacan published his translation of the essay in the first issue of the journal La Psychanalyse in 1956. This issue was devoted entirely to the work of Lacan (Marini, ).

          This is not the first time, however, that Heidegger has appeared within the scope of Lacan’s interests. In his 1935 review of Minkowski’s book Lived Time, Lacan criticizes Minkowski for not mentioning Heidegger (Marini, 143). Marcelle Marini in his book on Lacan says that since the publication of Le Mythe du Nevrose in 1953, "reference to Heidegger was constant" (Marini, 157).

          Heidegger’s "logos" essay is itself an explication of and commentary on Heraclitus’ Fragment 50 (Heidegger is using the Diels-Kranz numbering of the fragments from Die Fragments der Vorsokratiker) which is usually translated as follows: "Listening not to me but to the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one" (Thales to Arist. ). The German text is only twenty-two pages long, but it is extremely terse and dense.

          Of course, I cannot do justice here to Heidegger’s essay in the short time that I have, so I will try to summarize it as best I can. As I go through the summary, however, I would like us to keep in mind a couple of Lacan’s main concerns: 1) the notion of the unconscious as a chain of free-floating signifiers. Let us remember too that it was Heraclitus who said that everything is in a process of change or flux. These floating signifiers are indeed in a state of flux in the sense that they have no stability or order. The question then becomes the following: how is stability or order established between signifier and signified? 2) Lacan’s mirror stage which is pre-verbal is a preparation for crossing the threshold to verbal language. This crossing into verbal language is the entry into the Symbolic phase and the ordering of the free-floating signifiers occurs only when the threshold has been crossed into verbal language. The question is whether there is any ordering in the mirror stage which is pre-verbal.

          It is interesting to note that Lacan published his essay entitled "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud" in 1957 after his translation of Heidegger’s logos essay. In that essay, that is, "The Agency of the Letter," it is clear that Lacan makes a definitive move beyond speech in the sense that " it was the entire structure of language that psychoanalytic discovers in the unconscious" (Marini, 164).

          Human being is not the logos itself but has access to the unfolding openness. In fact, Heidegger defines human existence as da-sein, usually translated as being-there, but it means being as the here-and-there, being that participates in both presence and absence, unconcealment and concealment. If the child who is playing the "fort/da" game were not open to and could not participate in presence-and-absence, he would not be able to play the game at all. Human apprehension thus participates in the unfolding openness of the logos – indeed, the unfolding openness is temporality itself which is the basis of care in Heidegger’s Being and Time. Human apprehension is a homolegein; thus, it too is a legein or gathering. What does human apprehension or homolegein gather? It gathers and lays down the same, homo; it lays down and gathers together the same that the logos has set down and set together in presencing and absencing.

          Heidegger then identifies the logos, this unfolding process – as language. The laying out and laying down, the setting out and setting together of things; this articulation of how things come to presence and how they withdraw into absence is language. This articulation is pre-logical and pre-verbal, and this, at least in part, is what interested Lacan in Heidegger’s "logos" essay, especially the notion of absence/absencing which plays such a significant role in Lacan’s theory. For Lacan, here was someone who was talking about language prior to verbal articulation and about how pre-verbal articulation takes place. The question is whether Lacan agrees that there is some kind of ordering of signifiers that takes place on a pre-verbal level, ie., during the mirror stage?

          Another issue of interest to Lacan would be the relationship Heidegger brings up between the logos and the name of Zeus in the sense that the logos as the gathering that unifies into one, is ready and not yet ready to be given the name of Zeus. This, of course, brings up Lacan’s notion of the Name of the Father and how the Phallus orders or provides an anchor for the floating or sliding signifiers. We have to keep another one of Heraclitus’ sayings in mind here: "The lightning bolt steers all things" (note). Heidegger makes the following commentary on the fragment:

                            Lightning abruptly lays before us in an instant

                                 everything present in the light of its presencing.

                                     This lightning named here steers. It brings all things

                                   forward to their designated, essential place. Such

                                       instantaneous bringing is the Laying that gathers, the

                                              logos. Lightning here appears as the epithet of Zeus (Early

Greek Thinking, 72)

The lightning here as logos reminds me of the ordering process or aligning that takes place in the unconscious as the child moves from the pre-verbal Imaginary phase to the Symbolic phase where the submission to language, to the Name or the Law of the Father occurs. When Heidegger says, "the lightning brings all things forward to their designated, essential place," I see Lacan interpreting that as the manner in which the alignment of the free-floating signifiers takes place under the rule of language, the way in which the Phallus anchors the floating signifiers into a stable order in the Symbolic phase.

          The issue between Heidegger and Lacan is how to understand language. Lacan agrees that the mirror stage is preverbal, but my reading of Lacan is that no alignment or anchoring of signifiers takes place until the child enters into verbal language, the Symbolic phase. Heidegger, on the other hand, is saying that a temporal order of presencing and absencing as an unfolding openness is already functioning pre-verbally and that a child engaged in preverbal tasks is already participating in that order. Thus, for Heidegger, some sort of psychic ordering of signifiers must be taking place even on the pre-verbal level.

Frank Edler, Ph.D.