Sidestepping the Problem of the Unconscious: Why We Ought to Reframe the Lacan/Merleau-Ponty Debate in Bodily Terms

This article is a proposal for reframing the debate between Merleau-Ponty and Lacan in bodily terms. Instead of focusing, as scholars tend to do, on Merleau-Ponty’s difficulty accounting for the unconscious, I argue that the phenomenology of the body can offer Lacan a clue for how to develop the little-known notion of the organic Real that he struggled with in his seminars on anxiety and the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis.