In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 The “Truth about Truth” At the level of the unconscious, the subject lies. And this is his way of telling the truth of the matter. The orthos logos of the unconscious . . . is expressed as the proton pseudos, the first lie. —Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis Il n’y a pas d’Autre de l’Autre, il n’y a pas de vrai sur le vrai. Je me suis amusé un jour à faire parler le vérité. Que peut-il y avoir de plus vrai que l’énonciation ‘Je mens’? —Jacques Lacan, D’un discourse qui ne serait pas du semblant The following pages explore the relationship given voice in these startling passages: the relation of identity between the orthos and the pseudos , between the “straightness” (orthos) of the truth and the necessary refractions of the lie, which is a signifying relation that follows from the thesis, “the unconscious is structured like a language.” Insofar as truth is not just objective truth, but also truth as something said by a speaking being, my study of truth will also necessitate an investigation into the engendering of the subject as a speaking being through the double relation of alienation and separation. Preliminary Remarks In his concern for truth, in the many ways he posed the question and the questioning of truth, Lacan was perhaps the one psychoanalyst and structuralist closest to philosophy. Certainly more so than Lévi-Strauss or Roland Barthes, Lacan’s conceptualization of the analytic situation was much more “philosophical,” and not only in its explicit engagement with philosophical texts by the likes of Plato, Hegel, and Kant, but especially in his questioning of and concern for the question of truth. His seminars 51 52 Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor made truth not so much a Copernican center of their conceptual universe as they made of truth a problem, an elliptical fissure traversing both the scientific and philosophical traditions that placed reflection and research into the essence of human experience at the forefront of their endeavors. Yet, there is always something provisional and even hesitant about Lacan’s seminars on truth. A questioning, even provisional mood of thought was never supplanted by dogmatism. Truth, for him, the truth of his teachings , was never empowered by a certitude held beyond all questioning and reservation. There thus remains a strongly Socratic element in his search for truth. Lacan’s ways of telling the truth about truth are, thus, knotted into the philosophical tradition’s ways of thinking truth, and yet, it must be said in the same breath, they mark a certain limit and a point of breaking with that tradition. Over the years, Lacan formulated his conception of truth in several different ways. Let us take a quick preview of those that seem most prominent and provocative. No doubt, the first truth for Lacan is Freud’s truth: the truth of the unconscious. This is an unsurpassed truth, something that Lacan never calls into question. It is the fundamental starting point for all of Lacan’s various ways of thinking about and talking about truth. Everything follows from this. Among the ways Lacan talks about truth, the many ways in which truth is said in the Lacanian seminars, let us list these: First, he rejects the philosophical, propositional definition of truth, whereby truth is a value assigned to a proposition, a truth-value. He finds such a definition of truth in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (S17: 59/67). This is also a philosophical truth insofar as it is a truth located at the level of the “ideal I,” “the I that masters,” and that is identical with itself (S17: 63/71). Lacan’s overall orientations come not from philosophy, therefore, but from Freud, for whom the I-qua-ego is an illusory formation. Obviously, Freud’s “truth,” the truth of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, is most fundamental in Lacan’s teachings. That there is a truth of the unconscious is verified through clinical experience . Thus, for Lacan, the subject is always a divided subject, divided between a thinking that obtains at the level of the unconscious, and its being, the “I am” that is established in and through the symbolic order. Second, and emerging from this, is the definition of truth as the truth of desire. This is the truth that pertains to the symbolic domain, a truth masked or blocked by the imaginary registers of the ego formations , those of self-knowledge and self-mastery...

Share