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187 10  WILLIAM EGGINTON Keeping Pragmatism Pure: Rorty with Lacan Given Richard Rorty’s oft-confessed appreciation for the work of Freud, it is curious that he has had so little to say about Freud’s most influential follower, Jacques Lacan. This would not be so surprising if Rorty were universally suspicious of the French intellectual style of which Lacan was so infamous an example. But if there is one European thinker for whom Rorty has confessed an even greater appreciation than for Freud, it is Jacques Derrida—a philosopher whose syntactical acrobatics and love of poetic wordplay were forged in the intellectual world built at least in part by Lacan. Nevertheless, with the exception of a disparaging reference to a contemporary enthrallment with phrases like “the unconscious is structured like a language” and a passing suggestion that his thought may simply be too bizarre to be worth bothering with,1 Rorty has never written anything, positive or negative, about Lacan. The purpose of this article is to commend certain aspects of Lacan’s thought to Rorty as being compatible with his pragmatist project. The aspect that I wish to commend may seem at first glance the one most antithetical to Rorty’s project: namely, Lacan’s notion of the real. The concept of the real could be taken as opposed to Rorty’s project for two reasons: first, in that it would seem to connote an ultimate reality, one that could be taken as a foundation for truth; second, in that Lacan himself describes the real as that which exceeds symbolization, hence something that is part of human expe- 188 William Egginton rience and yet beyond the ken of language, in direct contradiction to Rorty’s nominalism. The first ground for disagreement is easily dismissed, because the Lacanian notion of the real does not connote what is but rather what is desired. Lacan’s notion of the real as an integral aspect of human being, as opposed to something outside it that grounds it, is entirely compatible with Rorty’s refusal to consider truth-as-correspondence versus truth-as-coherence to be a serious philosophical problem. The second reason for disagreement, on the other hand, is substantial. Rorty’s nominalism, his conviction that “nothing is better than a something about which nothing can be said,” leads him to an intransigent refusal of any notion of ineffability or of any concept that purports to refer to that which cannot be talked about. But it is precisely here that the Lacanian notion of the real becomes useful for pragmatism, because with it Lacan developed a vocabulary for discussing human experience and behavior that takes into account —that gives utmost importance to—the effects of ineffability on human behavior. And it is precisely insofar as pragmatism gives precedence to behavior , precisely insofar as it respects vocabularies that are better able to predict and explain behavior, that pragmatism should pay attention to Lacan. The intellectual position I sketch out in the pages that follow is that of the “psychoanalytic pragmatist,” the pragmatist who has a use for, as Rorty has said we should have a use for, the language of psychoanalysis.2 But the psychoanalytic pragmatist is also a specifically Lacanian pragmatist because, as I will argue, Rorty’s obvious preference for Freud notwithstanding, it was Lacan’s focus on the linguistic dimension of being that ultimately pragmatized psychoanalysis, transforming it from a discourse involved in the positivistic search for truth to one that understands the subject as a process of poetic selfcreation or, in Z v iz v ek’s words, an effect that posits its own cause.3 Rorty, in very much the way Lacan would do, reads Freud “strongly,” making of him one of the heroes of early pragmatism: “He [Freud] is not interested in invoking a reality-appearance distinction, in saying that anything is ‘merely’ or ‘really’ something quite different. He just wants to give us one more redescription of things to be filed alongside all the others, one more vocabulary, one more set of metaphors which he thinks have a chance of being used and thereby literalized.”4 But the problem with trying to make of Freud a pragmatist is that one often runs into passages like this: “[T]he ego must observe the external world, must lay down an accurate picture of it in the memory-traces of its perceptions, and by the exercise of the function of ‘reality-testing’ must put aside whatever in this picture...

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