Derrida Vis--vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis

Chapter 10 The Transcendental Relation in Lacanian Psychoanalysis

10 The Transcendental Relation in Lacanian Psychoanalysis Introductory Remarks: Immortality In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud attributes the persistent human dream of a mythical beginning, where all was encompassed in the circle of self-sufficiency, to the unconscious mnemic trace in all of us of the primordial mother-child dyad (or its equivalents), which is to the infant an original, albeit never actually experienced, ‘‘oceanic’’ plenum.1 As Copjec notes, one might immediately think of the ‘‘body without organs’’ depicted in Plato’s Timaeus as an early example of such a dream.2 However, she argues, given Freud’s insistence that the body through which infants are attached to the Nebenmensch (and later the wider world) is not just pragmatically functional but infused from top to toe with an erotic charge, psychoanalysis conceives of this mythical state in terms of libidinal fullness, or immortal jouissance, rather than mere biological selfsuf ficiency.3 Challenging Freud’s insistence on the eventual dominance of the reality principle, which raises pragmatic concerns of physical need above erotic interests, Lacan replaces the Timaean-type myth with his own ‘‘myth of the lamella,’’ which underscores the primacy of libidinal interests over the ‘‘return of need.’’4 As noted in chapter 5, the figure of the ‘‘lamella’’ (thin membrane) refers to the protective/receptive outer membrane that, as Freud argues in ‘‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’’ characterizes all living organisms.5 On the one hand, the lamella figures as a 291 protective layer that encloses the living organism and separates it from an infinite environmental beyond. But simultaneously, on the other hand, it opens the organism up, for the membrane exists as a multiplicity of libidinally charged ‘‘mouths’’ that attach the organism, through the drives, to the environment around it. In other words, the lamella represents a strange border that both separates the limited being from the unlimited All and attaches it to this ‘‘outside.’’ In equivalent terms, it represents a split that allows for a relation between the mortal living subject (presided over by pleasure) and the ‘‘immortality lost’’ (lost jouissance) that is, ironically, the consequence of life itself. In Lacan’s words: ‘‘The relation to the Other is precisely that which, for us, brings out what is represented by the lamella . . . the relation between the living subject and that which he loses by having to pass, for his reproduction, through the sexual cycle.’’6 Condensed in this citation is a reference to Freud’s treatment of mortality as ‘‘immortality lost’’ in ‘‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle.’’ Lacan draws out subtly conflicting conceptions of mortality in this essay, which in turn have a bearing upon our understanding of the primary human libidinal interest in immortalization, or of our death drive toward the restitution of ‘‘lost’’ immortality.7 He notes the irony that Freud situates mortality ‘‘at the advent of the living being, that is to say, at sexed reproduction ,’’ which is also, on one interpretation, our only means of immortalization .8 Here, one could argue, Freud makes the fairly commonsensical observation that because human reproduction occurs via sex rather than, say, cloning or spontaneous cell division, human being is ‘‘originally’’ split between Eros and Thanatos. The germ cells, under the sway of Eros, are pulled toward a return to the beginning in a bond that renews life. These then, are split off from other somatic processes, which, subject to Thanatos , strive for the abolition of all tensions and are pulled in the direction of inertial protectiveness and entropic dissolution, or, that is, death.9 In other words, if individual bodies remain merely mortal, we may nevertheless seek immortalization through genetic replication. This reflects a fairly common traditional notion that ‘‘he’’ reproduces ‘‘himself’’ through his children. Lacan, however, presses Freud’s observation further, suggesting that what the organism loses via sexed reproduction is any prospect at all of individual immortality, defined as the endless replication of precisely the same being. As he puts it: ‘‘the living being, by being subject to sex, has fallen under the blow of individual death.’’10 In other words, the consequence of sexual reproduction is not immortalization through genetic replication but, to the contrary, a guarantee that every individual is entirely unique, that is, mortal. Accordingly, Lacan takes this to imply that our 292 Derrida Vis-à-vis Lacan mortality is not reducible to the mere death of our bodies (which, in turn, promotes the idea that...