Derrida Vis--vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis

Part 4 Lacan and the "Plural Logic of the Aporia"

PA R T 4 Lacan and the ‘‘Plural Logic of the Aporia’’ Lacan’s complex theoretical edifice, like Freud’s, is developed from a heady mix of clinical observation, theoretical speculation, and his appropriation of a vast array of literary and philosophical texts. Moreover, as Fink notes, his notions are ‘‘shaped and reshaped in the course of his career ,’’ necessitating a choice between presenting them developmentally or structurally. Some, he remarks, will no doubt find a structural account ‘‘overly static and closed, one of the many fascinations of his work lying precisely in its constant transformations, self-corrections, and reversals of perspective.’’1 Like Fink, however, I have elected nevertheless to provide a synchronic ‘‘cut of Lacanian theory,’’ for this approach is better suited to the purpose of demonstrating that the ‘‘plural logic of the aporia’’ functions as a generalizable, useful heuristic for interpreting what Lacan has to say about the transcendental relation, the ethics of psychoanalysis, and intersubjective power relations in the Seminar on the Purloined Letter. As with my treatment of Derrida’s texts, I offer no pretense of a comprehensive survey of Lacan’s daunting textual labyrinth, believing this to be as intrinsically impossible as reading the ‘‘whole’’ of Joyce. In any case, Lacan’s surrealist strategy of composition allows one some license to build up an account of ‘‘Lacanian’’ psychoanalysis from fragments, and my exposition involves less a progression of ideas than a layering, each lamination adding detail and tone to the same interpretative skeleton, which I have derived from Derrida’s ‘‘plural logic of the aporia.’’ I shall engage 283 directly with some of Lacan’s texts, but much of my account of the Lacanian version of the ‘‘plural logic of the aporia’’ can be seen as a sustained engagement with Copjec’s Lacan, as set out in Imagine There’s No Woman. In chapter 10, I address Lacan’s complex articulation of ‘‘the transcendental relation.’’ Lacan offers an overwhelming variety of schemas, models , formulas, mathemes, and diagrams, which cover greater or smaller aspects of this relation. These may be helpful to those of a certain intellectual temperament but alienating to others. Favoring more concrete metaphorics over mathematical symbolization, I have taken the articulated imagoes that appear in his early essays as an orienting armature to explain the ‘‘Gödelian structure’’ of the transcendental relation. These also serve to emphasize that other humans are the primary and most significant ‘‘objects ’’ or ‘‘others’’ implicated in the constitution of the subject in the transcendental relation. The ‘‘other,’’ which takes the three generalized forms of Nebenmensch, alter egos, and speaking others, is not a neutral, inert object. It is not merely touched, but it touches back with a shaping power of its own, teaching infants, through an encouraging or prohibiting circulation of desire, a certain version of reality. In Lacan’s early essays, these generalized or ‘‘structural’’ forms of the other are associated with three ‘‘imagoes’’ that take their names from traditional family figures, and the transcendental relation is described as an articulated armature of three subject-object complexes associated with the maternal, fraternal, and paternal imagoes.2 One does not have to retain these traditional names, and Lacan would be the first to agree that various actual individuals of different sexual orientations may fill the roles of Nebenmensch, alter ego, or speaking other. Following Copjec, I have tended to substitute the ‘‘Nebenmensch-complex ’’ for the ‘‘maternal-imago,’’ but I have retained the ‘‘fraternal-complex ’’ on the assumption that fraternity these days can be pressed beyond the connotations of brotherhood. I have also retained the ‘‘paternal-complex ’’ as a reminder of the patriarchal residues still inscribed in the Symbolic Order. Names aside, I shall follow Lee in holding that the family complexes of Lacan’s early writings offer a metaphorical organization that, while certainly subject to refinement, elaboration, and modification in the lengthy course of his investigations, remains a productive and orientating heuristic for understanding the complexities of his account of the transcendental relation.3 By using these structural metaphors, Lacan is at pains to point out that subjective development is not shaped by instincts but by complex imaginary constructs that inaugurate drives.4 In other words, what shapes subjectivity are basic, impersonal structural complexes that remain constant 284 Derrida Vis-à-vis Lacan no matter how they are concretized. Moreover, individuals respond to the demands of these complexes without necessarily being...