Ben Hooson: Lacan and Wittgenstein

Lacan and Wittgenstein

Ben Hooson will lead a workshop on Jacques Lacan and Ludwig Wittgenstein, focusing on what Lacan said about the philosopher at a Seminar session in 1970 (a surviving audio recording gives us his exact words). Based on a close analysis of Wittgenstein’s best-known work, the Tractatus, Lacan took the philosopher to be “fiercely psychotic”. Remembering Freud’s comment (in his study of Judge Schreber’s memoirs), that psychotic writing offers an “endopsychic perception” of psychoanalytic theory, and remembering that Lacan’s understanding of psychoanalysis sprang from his early work with psychotic patients, the brief discussion of Wittgenstein in the Seminar gives precious insight into Lacan’s own thinking.

Abstract:

In the Seminar session of 21st January 1970, Lacan makes a sweeping statement. He says that what philosophers in the western tradition, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes, Kant and Heidegger, want to do is to save truth: “Ils veulent sauver la vérité.”

He then says:

“This drew one of them, Wittgenstein, very far in order to refuse to end up at this: that by making it [truth] the rule and the foundation of knowledge, there is nothing left to say, nothing, at least, that concerns it [truth] as such, so as to avoid this rock – this rock, where, for sure, the author has one affinity with the position of the analyst, namely, that he eliminates himself completely from his discourse.”

The French text of the Seminar, published in 1991, is not faithful to what Lacan said in the passage above (and in several other places). Translated into English, the text says:

“This drew one of them, Wittgenstein, very far; as far as to end up at this: that by making it [truth] the rule and the foundation…”

Consequently, we lose Lacan’s point that Wittgenstein went very far in order to refuse (not just to ascertain or maybe even to accept) a situation where, by making truth into “the rule and the foundation of knowledge”, we end up with “nothing left to say”.

When we re-instate what Lacan actually said, Wittgenstein’s far travelling (Lacan means his whole philosophy, from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations) would be an attempt to accommodate the possibility of saying things that “concern truth as such” – a refusal to accept that it is impossible to do so.

Why, though, might it ever be impossible to do so? Because of the threat posed by “this rock”? What rock? Lacan does not explain.

We naturally think of a rock in the sea, on which a boat can be wrecked, and that may be a connotation that Lacan intended. But his principal meaning is different. The semantic field of “roc” in French also covers what in English we call “bedrock” and Lacan had used the French word many times in earlier years when citing a Freudian metaphor: near the end of Analysis Terminable and Interminable Freud refers to the fear of castration as “bedrock”, meaning that this fear is something that psychoanalysis, in its work with neurotic subjects, is unable to break through and go beyond.

Lacan was in no doubt that Wittgenstein’s structure, judged by his philosophical writings, was not that of neurosis, but of fierce psychosis (“une férocité psychotique”). The attitude to castration is, for Lacan, the key difference between neurosis and psychosis. The neurotic represses castration; the psychotic forecloses it. Foreclosure is a more radical rejection than repression. But psychotic illness and – Lacan contends – the philosophy of Wittgenstein show that (the fear of) castration is never absent from the psychotic mind.

Why foreclosure entails a difficulty with truth; why truth, understood in the relevant way, has to do with signifiers; and why the psychotic’s attitude to castration has an affinity with the position of the analyst (Lacan’s claim in the quote above): these issues can be clarified by looking in detail at some key moments in Wittgenstein’s writings and what Lacan has to say about them.

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THERE WILL BE NO REFUNDS.

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