Derrida Vis--vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis

Chapter 1 The "Ruin" of the Transcendental Tradition

1 The ‘‘Ruin’’ of the Transcendental Tradition Introductory Remarks: Transcendental Constitution The word ‘‘ontology,’’ derived from the Greek word for ‘‘being,’’ is often reduced to a name for the branch of metaphysics that concerns itself with characterizing what exists via, as Simon Blackburn puts it, ‘‘a priori arguments that the world must contain certain things of one kind or another: simple things, unextended things, eternal substances, necessary beings, and so on’’ that ‘‘often depend on some version of the principle of sufficient reason.’’1 After Kant, however, the thinking of being can no longer simply characterize ‘‘what exists’’ as if one could determine what things would be like regardless of whether there are humans around to experience them.2 Kant saw that the path so far traveled had brought metaphysics to such a state of vacillation that any way forward had become impossible.3 Reason’s very nature, characterized by what he called the ‘‘principle of unconditioned unity,’’4 combined with a fundamental commitment to some form of representational relation between perceiving humans and an independently determined external world, had engendered a ‘‘two-fold, self-conflicting interest,’’5 which trapped reason in metaphysical antinomies that, he argues, old-style metaphysicians could neither pass beyond nor turn away from. Reason has a two-fold interest in moving from universal to particular in determinative judgment and from particular to universal in reflective judgment. Ideally, for him, these movements should be reversible, but they led instead to opposing conclusions about the nature of the world-whole, the self, and God. Pure 19 Reason’s ‘‘peculiar fate’’ was its inability to live up to its most fundamental principle, namely complete, systematic unity. He argues that one can avoid the gridlock of reason’s antinomies and preserve Reason’s ‘‘principle of unconditioned unity’’ only on a constitutive , rather than representational, account of the relation between ‘‘thought’’ and ‘‘thing’’ (henceforth, the transcendental relation). In this case, subjective processes are recognized as unavoidably implicated in the constitution of the ‘‘external objective world,’’ thus converting it from a supposedly independently determined thing-in-itself to ‘‘phenomenal reality .’’6 On Kant’s account of the transcendental relation, then, one is obliged to take into account three rather than two terms: ‘‘phenomenal reality’’ as the constituted effect, and, working back to its transcendental conditions, the embrace between two irreducible poles: ‘‘the transcendental subject,’’ described as an interpreting or synthesizing subject already equipped with certain sensory and cognitive powers, and an ‘‘object ⳱ X,’’ described as an existing materiality not created by us, to which we respond via receptive sensory systems. After Kant, ‘‘thought’’ (or that aspect of it we can call synthetic, cognitive processing) is implicated in the shaping of spatiotemporal things (now viewed as phenomena) in response to the force field of our sensory reception, which, in turn, is occasioned by an otherwise unknowable hyletic substratum. Put differently, phenomenal reality is the effect of transcendental constitution , involving a relation between a perceiving subject and a perceived materiality, neither of which is visible as such in the phenomenal effect. Accordingly, philosophical thinking proceeds by transcendental questioning : on the basis of what does appear phenomenally, one proceeds by asking after its antecedent conditions of possibility. In so doing, one aims to determine, lay out, or explicate the tacit conditional structures of transcendental constitution (the synthetic process, or ‘‘intentional life’’) by virtue of which subjects let objects be.7 For Kant, transcendental constitution involves a combination of the a priori syntheses of productive imagination and the a posteriori syntheses of meaning-giving cognition. Although there are also important differences (for example, concerning where to draw the dividing line between unconscious and conscious processing), one finds certain parallels in Husserl ’s passive and active genesis, Heidegger’s prethematic and thematic hermeneutics (understanding and interpretation), Nietzsche’s distinction between ‘‘our spiritual fatum’’ and concept formation, and Freud’s primary and secondary processes.8 Although not strictly in accordance with Freud’s more technical terms, I shall here use the terms ‘‘unconscious’’ and ‘‘conscious’’ as roughly synonymous with ‘‘implicit’’ and ‘‘explicit.’’ 20 Derrida Vis-à-vis Lacan In view of these later developments, Kant’s important distinction between a priori and a posteriori synthesis warrants the slight digression needed here for an elaboration. He accepts that human infants enter the world prematurely, not only because they are physically underdeveloped but also because there is no pregiven phenomenal reality, and a sense...