Lacan with Heidegger

Lacan was one of the first French readers of Heidegger. He may have discovered him thanks to the course given by Jean Wahl¹ at the Sorbonne from January to June 1946 : Jean Wahl was condensing his notes on Heidegger's 1928 Freiburg seminar² ; perhaps also on the occasion of Emmanuel Lévinas' four lectures on Le Temps et l'Autre, given in 1946-1947 at the Collège philosophique.

Lacan wanted to meet Heidegger, finally met him. When Heidegger visited France in 1955, incognito so to speak, at the instigation of Jean Baufret and Maurice de Gandillac, to deliver his lecture " Qu'est-ce que la philosophie ? ", Lacan, who had visited Freiburg a few months earlier, welcomed him to his country manor at Guitrancourt : but apart from a few walks and insignificant conversations, they had no serious intellectual exchange³.

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What was Lacan looking for ? Heidegger appears in Lacanian thought at a time when the latter is engaged in a linguistic modeling of Freud's theories. But Heidegger did not serve this modeling  on the contrary, he opened up to Lacan the possibility of resisting the structural thinking of language, and overcoming it by deconstructing the very notion of structure. In 1951, Heidegger had published an article entitled " Logos " in a collection of essays in honor of his colleague Hans Jantzen. Lacan translated this article into French during 1955  it appeared in 1956 in issue no. 1 of the journal La Pyschanalyse⁴.

I. Heidegger's " Logos "

Logos as a device for receiving speech

Hans Jantzen was an art historian specializing in Gothic architecture. In particular, he had studied what he called the diaphanous structure of Gothic partitioning⁵, a concept now foundational for contemporary architecture. Heidegger's deconstruction of the notion of logos, based on a lexicological analysis of Heraclitus' aphorism on the Ἕν πάντα, is in a way symbolically inscribed in Jantzen's diaphanous structure. Heidegger proceeds here in the same way as he had done a few years earlier with the word of Anaximander⁶, the oldest known philosophical word : by restoring to the terms that have become, in post-platonic philosophy, abstract and logical categories of thought, their original practical materiality, spatiality and plasticity. Greek discourse, disseminated as the disposition of a devolute and a gathered, as the installation of a mandate that makes an event, is organized, in the course of the Heideggerian demonstration, into a mise en espace, an arrangement that precedes speech, prepares to welcome it. This arrangement replaces the articulation of the signified, which becomes secondary, posterior. The problem of the signified is in a way evacuated by Heidegger in favor of the device that welcomes the word, according to a configuration that is not without echoing the diaphanous structure of Gothic architecture :

" Thus what speaks in language by being at the level of the λέγειν as the fact of putting-to-repose, finds itself to be determined neither from vocalization (φωνή), nor from the fact of signifying (σημαίνειν). Expression and signification have long been regarded as manifestations that offer the unmistakable features of language. But they do not properly touch the domain marked by the original imprint that is the essence of language, nor can they generally determine that domain in its main features⁷. "

Heidegger here clearly defines his approach as ontological : that is, it aims to identify a " domain " of the logos, to define in this domain an " original imprint ", to infer from this imprint " the essence of language ". To this ontological approach, disconcerting at first sight, he contrasts the classical grammatical approach, which will produce and motivate the structural approach: from the Greek opposition between φωνεῖσθαι and σημαίνειν, we move to that of expression and signification, which will give Saussure's binary structure of the sign, separated into a signifier and a signified. While Heidegger is silent on this last avatar, it is against it that he carries out this ontological deconstruction of the Greek logos.

Heideggerian deconstruction : device and ontology

The point, then, is to start again from the pre-discursive meaning of the Greek verb λέγειν, to harvest, to gather, and to work this meaning. Lacan's translator takes pains to render the German language's Heideggerian mise en travail: porter à gésir, mettre à reposer, jeter le dévolu. It's doubtful that λέγειν ever technically meant so many things, but that's not the point. Heidegger converts Heraclitus' phrase into a tableau, a context, an image in which to spot an ontological imprint :

" The hoarding of what must be brought in has already marked its hold on the steps of the harvest from their start and on their whole in the entanglement of their sequence. If we only focus on the turn-by-turn nature of these steps, then lifting and pruning are followed by gathering, the latter by bringing in the harvest, and the former by sheltering it in containers and sheds. "

It would be a mistake to reduce what is expressed here to a simple work of metaphor, unless we understand metaphor literally, as transfer, and here transfer from the logical linearity of discourse (the post-platonic logos), to the plasticity of a living tableau unfolding in time. In the painting, something " marks its grip ", imprints its ontological imprint : this something is " the mise en réserve ", the legein, which is, on its own, unintelligible, but makes sense in the overall picture. In the work of the seasons, in the sequence of work in the fields, sa manifests the dynamic form of the legein ; it's always about putting in reserve ; putting in reserve is the essence to which all these activities boil down.

At this point in the exposition, the logos is totally deconstructed : the logical category of discourse has completely disappeared, the essential truth of the logos has been disseminated in works and days, Ἔργα καὶ Ἡμέραι would say Hesiod, whom Heidegger is certainly thinking of here. " The point of rearrangement we have reached already contains the answer ", he then writes. This point of reassembling is precisely the change of logic to which the transfer of discourse to the painting leads us. It's no longer a question of identifying, etymologically or historically, how a concept like logos has changed meaning, and for example of defining a pre-Socratic logos to which logical discourse would have succeeded, but of introducing into the table of the logoshesiodic or Heraclitean an event that will be the event of the advent of language. It's not two semantically different conceptions that succeed each other in a technically immutable logical category  it's a single device that is constructed, first as the spatial foundation of the " mettre en réserve ", then, within this foundation (i.e. neither alongside it, nor to replace it), as the event of speech.

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" We have had nothing to do in the foregoing with the shifting meaning of words, but rather have come up against a real event whose /// its reassuring character is still hidden in the simplicity that has made it go unnoticed until now."

How do we characterize this event of speech that we no longer perceive as an event today, whose very simplicity conceals from us its disquieting strangeness ? It's here that the diaphanous structure of Jantzen's Gothic cloisonné surreptitiously shines through. Something is obscured, the essential event of speech is obscured, but it is obscured by the diaphanous, by the obvious simplicity of what has the appearance of a non-event.

Contamination of logos : from syntax to fractal

Heidegger starts again here from Heraclitus' aphorism as a whole, to demonstrate that the " mettre en réserve " consubstantial to the λέγειν contaminates itself there throughout the sentence and unfolds as a device antecedent to speech. The aphorism is :

Οὐκ ἐμοὺ ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁμολογεῖν σοφὸν ἐστίν ; Ἕν πάντα⁸.

We could translate, naively no doubt, as : It's not me, but the logos that we have to listen to in order to agree that the One is all things. In other words : it's not because it's me Heraclitus who says it, but it's the very logic of the logos that wants it  it's wise to agree that the One is all things.

Heidegger points out that we're not simply dealing here with a word that expresses itself, even a double one, on the one hand the word of Heraclitus, on the other the very principle of all speech. Faced with this event of speech, the aphorism disposes of a listening, ἀκούσαντας. This listening is not a simple reception, but an acceptance, an understanding, in other words once again a " mettre en réserve ". Then, between the listening listeners, it sets up a chord, ὁμολογεῖν, which is a compound of the initial λέγειν. This agreement is designated as σοφὸν, which Heidegger does not translate as " wise " in the classical sense, but as " mandated " :

" This, then, is how that which holds of the mandated comes to be, when mortals perform that which is properly of hearing. But σοφὸν "mandated" is not τὸ σοφὸν, the mandate, which is so called because it distributes within itself all that is destiny, and precisely also what is seen of it in the destination of mortal maintenance. [...] And already we are stopped before the new enigma of a word : τὸ σοφὸν. [...] Insofar as such and such a thing happens, there comes to the event that which holds of the mandated. In what and as what is there essentially the mandated ? Heraclitus says : ὁμολογεῖν σοφὸν ἐστίν Ἕν πάντα [εἶναι], "from the mandated comes to the event, insofar as the One is All Things." "

At this point in the Heideggerian progression, to which the Lacanian translation perhaps adds one more turn of obscurity, the reader has reason to be bewildered. It was a priori to translate a simple sentence, ὁμολογεῖν σοφὸν ἐστίν, it is wise to agree, to agree, to agree that. But the original form of the initial λέγειν, this imprint, this figure of the mise en réserve extends metonymically, contaminates the σοφὸν, which in turn designates " how comes to be what holds of the mandated ", which is a way of interrogating this reserve of which the logos introduces the gesture, or more exactly both the space and the event. Heidegger unfolds this original form through the movement of speech towards listening, " what is properly ouïr " the act of welcoming what is mandated, devolved, harvested, gathered. The deployment of the sentence does not obey a syntactic logic, but rather a recursive principle: it's a gigogne deployment, a fractal organization of /// the object, whose formula is the liminal logos indefinitely repeated : each proferation, each " mandate " is inscribed in a welcome that is itself proferred from a domain of welcome that... etc. From the original nucleus, this logos that it's a matter of listening to, we move on to the reception of logos, which passes through listening and ὁμολογεῖν (from logos to ὁμολογεῖν), then to the reception of this reception, τὸ σοφὸν, the mandate, then to what the mandate mandates, the content of the word received in the reception of this reception, Ἕν πάντα, where we find the event of the word, the One, the Ἕν, and the dissemination of the harvest prior to this gathering, this devolution, this mandate, the πάντα, All things.

The shift from syntax to fractal, or in other words from discourse to a diaphanous structure of compartmentalization, isolates an essential, atemporal core, designated as the " mandated "around which are concentrically arranged the conjunctural, mortal envelopes of recollection, hearing, deposit and harvest, inscribed in time and event (" il vient à l'événement ", " du mandaté vient à l'événement "). This is why we see the appearance of this term mortal, which did not appear in Heraclitus' original aphorism : " when mortals accomplish what is properly of hearing ", " what makes itself seen in the destination of mortal maintenance ".

Being as an elusive core

But is an essential core really isolated ? this is the subject of the final, most difficult part of the article. The ultimate metonymic form of the initial imprint, the " mettre en réserve " of the logos, is the formula Ἕν πάντα, which we translate " the One is all things ", substituting the copula εἶναι, the verb to be as syntactic articulation between Ἕν the subject and πάντα its attribute. Yet precisely the whole Heideggerian rearrangement here aims to isolate this verb to be not as a mere verbal tool that can be easily elided, but as a kind of primordial copula where the original mystery of being would be played out.

Or, Heidegger tells us, this is not Heraclitus's style :

" The Ἕν πάντα is enough. But it is not only sufficient. It remains for itself much more in keeping with the thing here thought of and also with the style of what Heraclitus says : Ἕν πάντα, the One-All things, All-One.

How to tell them take these words lightly ? What clarification is there in uttering them in the approximate ? A tangled diversity of meanings finds a home in the two dangerously innocuous words Ἕν and πάντα. The indeterminacy of their nodes gives license to propositions with multiple meanings. "

Once again, the problem of the Ἕν πάντα cannot be resolved in terms of signification, of what it is to signify, and that only leads to approximations and misdirection  the Ἕν πάντα must be grasped as a disposition of Being, i.e. as a configuration in space ready to welcome its event. The effect of signification blurs the principle of configuration. Heidegger mimics this scrambling or intoxication with a game of consonances, whose French equivalents Lacan was pleased to find. The pure play of the signifier forces the abolition of syntax and sets the stage for ontological advent :

"  Ἕν is the only-One as that which unites. It unites at the same time as it divides. At the same time as it reads what it elects, it allows what presents itself as such to present itself, it distributes it in its entirety ? The only-One unites insofar as it is the lais where that which is elected is read. This fact here of uniting what in this bed reads, distributed into is what unites to the point that it is this one-this, and insofar as it is this one-this, also the One. The Ἕν /// πάντα which is named in Heraclitus' word opens us a simple blink on what Logos is. "

In this glossolalia of the Ἕν πάντα the verbs unite, distribute, present themselves recur. Heidegger superimposes the gesture of gathering and that of separation, what is the logical articulation of the logos, and its disarticulation, its disseminating deconstruction. The sentence is ordered around the incantatory formula " le lais où se lit ce qui s'élit ", which designates the nodal copula around which the mandate and recollection are organized, but which only designates it by eliding it : being disappears from the statement, which constitutes itself as its envelope. Not being directly, but a song to say it, the lais, a song that is also a space of recollection, lais as what is left, a song whose content, the object of election, " what elides ", is only indicated allusively, without even being proferred but simply read.

II. Heidegger in Lacan's Le Séminaire

To understand the role this Heideggerian reference is to play in Lacan's thinking, we need to go back a little, to Book I of The Seminar, to the year 1953-1954, devoted to Freud's technical writings. Of Lacan's 24 seminars, 16 contain at least one reference to Heidegger, often many more. The first reference comes in the closing discussion of the May 19, 1954 session, devoted to the core of repression. Here, Lacan develops a thesis that was already in germ in his very first pre-war articles on psychosis: there is no objective trauma event of which subsequent psychic disorders are the consequence. Taking up the analysis of The Man with the Wolf, where Freud develops his thesis of the primitive scene, he shows that it is neurosis that constructs a posteriori the original trauma on which it feeds, even if the trauma does have a real existence and is never a pure affabulation. Neurosis is thus the first analytic work, and its origin is an anterior future. As a result, repression, whose process constitutes neurosis, and the return of the repressed, in the dreams, missed acts and slips of the tongue that constitute the material of psychoanalytic analysis, are one and the same thing. Paradoxically, the return of the repressed creates repression at the same time as it stems from it. Olivier Mannoni asks: "Can we simply and happily forget? Lacan's answer:

" Yes, without the return of the repressed. Integration into history obviously entails forgetting a whole world of shadows that are not brought into symbolic existence. And if this symbolic existence is successful and fully assumed by the subject, it leaves no weight behind. Heideggerian notions would then have to be brought into play. There is in every entry of being into its dwelling of words a margin of oblivion, a λήθη complementary to any ἀλήθεια. "

Lacan is not necessarily referring here to Heidegger's " Logos " by Heidegger, as the meditation on ἀλήθεια goes back to the end of the first section of Être et Temps⁹ (1927), is taken up again in De l'essence de la vérité (1931-1932) and in Questions II (1947). But he may also have found in " Logos " the formulations to which he refers here :

" The fact of revealing needs veiling. The ἀλήθεια rests in Lethe, draws from it, produces what through it is relegated. The logos is in itself both a revelation and a concealment. It is the ἀλήθεια. The unveiling needs the veiling of Lethe, as the reserve from which the revelation can somehow draw. The Logos, the lais where that which elects itself is read, has in itself the character of that which saves by revealing. "

The question of truth is intimately linked to that of the logos, and it is in /// Heidegger's contribution to Lacan's elaboration is to be found in this connection. It's always a question of this movement of setting aside, which Lacan reads in Heidegger as the constitutive movement of the unconscious : it's in this movement that truth manifests itself, and it's in this same movement that the logos arises, which we shouldn't be too hasty in defining as language, or even as speech, for in it the essential imprint is that of a movement in a space, i.e. the installation of a device. In this movement, the " margin of oblivion " (Lacan), the " veiling " (Heidegger) play an essential role that Jantzen's " diaphanous structure " allows us to image. Lacan would speak, in Séminaire IV on the object relation, of the function of the veil¹⁰.

Lacan seems here to concede to Mannoni the possibility of pure forgetting, outside the mechanism of repression and the return of the repressed, but he does so by referring to Heidegger, for whom forgetting is not a suppression, but on the contrary the manifestation of the veil, i.e. the installation of the ontological device. Lacanian oblivion comes here in addition to the traditional psychoanalytical apparatus, and on the bangs of it, as the possibility of a successful being, as the possibility of happiness, as the affirmation that there is something outside neurosis. But this outside, this free supplement evoked at the end of the session, in fact contains the germ of the entire Lacanian model from which repression, the constitution of the subject and the articulation of these processes to a structuralist thought of language will be rethought.

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For if we were to retain only one formula of Lacanian thought, it is indeed that of the unconscious structured as a language, a formula too often misinterpreted precisely because it neglects the Heideggerian transference that constitutes its bedrock : this language, which seems to be Saussure's, borrowing its signs and words from linguistics, the S of signifier and subject, the s of signified and unconscious, the semiotic bar as a cut-off point for symbolic castration, this language that seems to structure Lacan's production of mathemes is also the Heideggerian logos, as evidenced, as early as Book III of the Seminar, by this clarification that amounts to a warning :

" The signified is not things all raw, already there given in an order open to signification. Meaning is human discourse insofar as it always refers to another meaning. In his famous lectures on linguistics, M. Saussure depicts a schema with one flow, meaning, and another, discourse, what we hear. [...] This schema is debatable. [...] A signifier system, a language, has certain particularities that specify the syllables, the uses of words, the locutions in which they are grouped, and this conditions, right down to its most original weave, what goes on in the unconscious¹¹. "

This recusal from the Saussurean double flux here prepares what will be formulated even more clearly in " L'instance de la lettre " : the evacuation of the signified in favor of a theorization of language as a pure " système du signifiant ", in which the signified is merely a signifier positioned differently, fallen into the unconscious, repressed under the semiotic bar. We see here how " the signified " is first diluted in " the signification ", then disappears in favor of a " system of the signifier ". The signifier itself changes its nature, ceasing to be thought of as an isolable entity  " human discourse insofar as it always refers to another signification " will give rise to the notion of the signifying chain, through which Lacan moves away from a strictly linguistic, or at least strictly Saussurian, model, to think of a space of reception, of bringing into being ". /// reserve, the unconscious, where something is woven, arranged and organized that is not a nameable entity, but rather the articulatory play of the copula, through which Heidegger defines being :

" This is not to say that the symptom is always founded on a pun, but it is always founded on the existence of the signifier as such, on a complex relation of totality to totality, or more exactly of whole system to whole system, of universe of the signifier to universe of the signifier. " (ibid.)

The signifier becomes a relation, and a relation " from totality to totality ", i.e. irreducible to structural mechanics. These reflections arise during an analysis of " Remarques psychanalytiques sur l'autobiographie d'un cas de paranoïa : President Schreber "¹², in which Lacan seeks to establish the validity of the document constituted by Schreber's Memoirs¹³ in understanding the logic and process of his psychosis. The delirium of the Mémoires cannot be treated as the articulation of a flow of discourse to a flow of signification, and is symptomatic precisely because it is worked by nonsense. It would also be a mistake to assume a rationality of delirium anterior to language, of which the psychotic's discourse would be no more than a disfigured fragment, a pale reflection. We must take these Memoirs as a signifying totality, as a whole system, as a universe of the signifier that articulates itself to another whole system, another universe of the signifier, that of Schreber's own psychosis.

Evidently, this principle of method, initiated by Freud, goes far beyond the sphere of psychoanalysis, because it induces a global conception of the nature of language. Lacan is fully aware of this, and for this very reason summons Heidegger :

" First, is there an interlocutor ?

Yes, there is, and one that at its core is unique. This Einheit is very amusing to consider, if we think of this text by Heidegger on logos that I've translated, which you'll see appearing in the first issue of our new journal, La Psychanalyse, and which identifies logos with the Heraclitean En. And precisely, we'll see that Schreber's delusion is in its own way a mode of the subject's relation to the whole of language¹⁴. "

President Schreber's monologue, however delusional, is addressed; he has an interlocutor. But this interlocutor is not a person, it's " the whole of language ". His Mémoires thereby confronts us with what language is globally, as a system, as an articulatory mode, as an operating principle. This system, this block, this Einheit, Lacan refers to Heraclitus' Ἕν πάντα, which Heidegger identifies as the essential knot of being from which to think the logos. This means that, at the same time as he generalizes the linguistic paradigm as an instrument for a rationalized exegesis of Freud's writings, Lacan radically subverts this paradigm, tipping Saussurean semiotics towards a logic of configuration, of the dispositif where language is understood as Heraclitean logos, as a principle of articulation, of veiling and unveiling, of disposition.

On June 13, 1956, during a session of the same seminar, Lacan again refers to Heidegger to imitate, in the manner of the Freiburg master, this device :

" In short, I'd like to bring you to a breakdown of the functions of language other than these assertions around locution, delocution and allocution. And this, in relation to the question, the question always latent, never asked.

If it comes to light, if it arises, it is always because of a mode of appearance of speech that we /// can be called in different ways, mission, mandate, delegation, or devolution, in reference to Heidegger. It's the foundation, or the founding word - You are this, my wife, my master, a thousand other things. This you are this, when I receive it, makes me in the word other than I am¹⁵. "

This latent question, which the subject asks itself and where its essential constitution is played out, is the question that psychoanalysis sets as its object. But it is also the Heideggerian interrogation of being : the mandate, by which Heidegger defines the Heraclitean logos, here happily meets the mission that Schreber claims was assigned to him by the angels. This encounter does not make Lacan a Heideggerian : it facilitates the overtaking he initiates from the linguistic paradigm towards fractal logic, the metonymic contamination of the tableau vivant, the articulation of worlds, through which we enter the contemporary thought of dispositifs.

Notes

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