Derrida Vis--vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis

Chapter 7 The Lacanian Real

7 The Lacanian Real One is led to the idea of a traumatic event, an event that cannot be an object of positivist historical study because it never takes place in the way historical situations do, but rather defines the place in which these situations come to inscribe themselves, a rupture that constitutes the never present origins of a race [for example]. Why ‘‘never present’’? Because it is a structural impossibility to be present at one’s own origin—except in the experience of the uncanny. This is as good a definition of the uncanny as one will find: the experience of encountering one’s own origins. Freud theorized that such an encounter was felt by the ego as a threat that initiated a preparedness for action or flight. The flight that ensues need not, however, be considered as merely reactive; the act for which the encounter prepares us can also be one of invention.1 Introductory Remarks The first move of Lacan’s treatment of the paradoxical Real in ‘‘Tuché and Automaton’’2 is to defend psychoanalysis against the charge of subjective idealism.3 Psychoanalysis, he notes, is often enough reproached for reducing experience to illusion or for promoting ‘‘some such aphorism as life is a dream,’’ but nothing could be further from the truth. As he insists: ‘‘No praxis is more orientated towards that which, at the heart of experience, is the kernel of the real than psycho-analysis.’’4 In countering the charge of subjective idealism, however, Lacan by no means resorts to the opposing doctrine of naı̈ve realism. To the contrary, he threatens this stance too, 213 because the ‘‘kernel of the real’’ turns out to be a thoroughly paradoxical notion. Accordingly, posing the question, ‘‘where do we meet this real?’’ he answers: in an essential encounter with what eludes us.5 Lacan introduces a term borrowed from Aristotle, ‘‘the tuché,’’ to name this encounter , which may be described alternatively as the traumatic cause of the repetition compulsion or simply as the Real. The tuché is here contrasted with ‘‘the automaton,’’ which designates the fabric of phenomenal reality that we humans tend to weave around the Real. The Real as Trauma: A Reading of ‘‘Tuché and Automaton’’ The Automaton Lacan describes ‘‘the automaton’’ as ‘‘the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle.’’6 Again, he calls it ‘‘the subjectifying homeostasis that orientates the whole functioning defined by the pleasure principle.’’7 These definitions presuppose his thoroughgoing revision of the relationship that Freud envisaged between the pleasure and reality principles in psychical functioning, a clear, concise account of which appears in his earlier ‘‘Ethics ’’ seminar.8 Here, Lacan finds that Freud’s conception of the ‘‘real’’ is intrinsically troubled. On the one hand, it stems from a naı̈ve realism that finds the guarantee of phenomenal reality in the repetition of external objects (objects refound via reality testing). Early in his theoretical endeavor, Lacan expresses surprise that so perspicacious a thinker as Freud should misrecognize the working of the very unconscious he so powerfully uncovered. In his words: The theoretical difficulties encountered by Freud seem to me in fact to derive from the mirage of objectification, inherited from classical psychology, constituted by the idea of the perception/consciousness system, in which Freud seems suddenly to fail to recognize the existence of everything that the ego neglects, scotomizes, misconstrues in the sensations that make it react to reality, everything that it ignores , exhausts, and binds in the significations that it receives from language: a surprising méconnaissance on the part of the man who succeeded by the power of his dialectic in forcing back the limits of the unconscious.9 On the other hand, Freud does insist that pleasure plays an originally determining role in the constitution of phenomenal reality and he holds 214 Derrida Vis-à-vis Lacan the pleasure principle responsible for our tendency to construct it as a comfortable, economic fabrication, rather than submit to a brutally honest account of actual experience. This vacillation, as already noted in chapter 5, is the consequence of necessary trouble in the ‘‘original’’ relation of ‘‘repetition’’ between what happens and its presentation to consciousness. However, if the pleasure principle does not relinquish control over the perceptual process, Freud believed he had saved ‘‘reality testing’’ from desire because...