Organisers:
Tadej Troha (ZRC SAZU) and Lorenzo Chiesa (Newcastle University)
Organising committee: Lorenzo Chiesa, Emily Laurent-Monaghan, Holden M. Rasmussen, Tadej Troha
To Be Continued? ... Philosophy and Psychoanalysis Today
We can certainly say that the dialogue between philosophy and psychoanalysis, however prolix, has so far proved very difficult, ever since the latter’s inception. Is there such thing as a philosophy-psychoanalysis relationship? Or has it always been only empty speech? In that case, should it be continued?
On the side of psychoanalysis, Freud was notoriously critical of philosophy. Most conclusively, when reading together the discourses of religion, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and science – in this hierarchical order – he does not hesitate to associate philosophy with religion and psychoanalysis with science. Philosophy, even in its contemporary variations and despite declaring the death of God, remains a Weltanschauung, a totalising vision-of-the-world. Philosophy “cling[s] to the illusion of being able to present a picture of the universe which is without gaps and is coherent”.
When we turn to Lacanian psychoanalysis, ambivalence with respect to philosophy reigns supreme, at least initially. First, Lacan seems to pick up a quite personal fight against philosophy: “I rebel against philosophy”, since, in line with Freud, “there is only one kind of philosophy, and it is always theological”. But second, more constructively, although philosophy has been “effaced” by the emergence of psychoanalysis (and set-theoretical mathematics), psychoanalysis nonetheless “extends” philosophy. And yet third, beyond this compromising position, in an apparently inconsistent change of mind that also reverses the value of philosophy for the entire Freudian legacy, “what I am doing here is philosophy. […] It’s a philosophy that I have handled the best way I could following the current that results from Freud’s philosophy”.
On the side of philosophy, leaving aside vociferous detractors who deem psychoanalysis to be unfalsifiable (Popper), false (Grünbaum), patriarchal (most feminist thought), or, in a telling short-circuit with Freud’s own contentions, a modern lay religion suited to the age of the death of God (Gellner), ambivalence, now with respect to psychoanalysis, still takes centre stage. Even a great philosopher and, at face value, great supporter of psychoanalysis like Badiou labels Lacan an anti-philosopher. However, according to Badiou, a precondition for contemporary philosophy is to work through Lacan’s anti-philosophy. And, in a final reversal that ends up matching Lacan’s from an opposite direction, assuming that Lacanian psychoanalysis is an ontology revolving around the “quadrupole” letter, disappearing, void, advent/event, then, for Badiou, “it is a philosophy homogeneous to mine”.
What should we make of the philosophy-psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis-philosophy, (non-) relationship today, if we decide to wager on its future, and on the fact that both philosophy and psychoanalysis are here to stay?
It is nowadays widely assumed, in part for good reasons, that philosophy, unlike in its past, terribly lags science. It is equally more and more uncontroversial that psychoanalysis is increasingly unable to read new symptoms and identify contemporary instantiations of classical symptoms, thus giving way to psychotherapies (practically) and neurosciences (empirically and theoretically). Philosophy would at best badly recapitulate what Plato already set out more than two thousand years ago. Psychoanalysis would at best stand as a sad “end-product, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin”, of what went wrong in the twentieth century, and “no better theory can be erected on its ruins” (Medawar).
While, in a circumscribed way, agreeing with this bleak assessment, how can we think a superseding of such a historical trend by reinforcing the philosophy-psychoanalysis-philosophy dialogue?
Lorenzo Chiesa (Newcastle University)
Serijo konferenc financira Javna agencija za znanstvenoraziskovalno in inovacijsko dejavnost Republike Slovenije v okviru programa P6-0014 »Pogoji in problemi sodobne filozofije« in projektov J6-2589 »Struktura in genealogija perverzije v sodobni filozofiji, politiki in umetnosti«, J6-3139 »Rekonfiguracija meja v filozofiji, politiki in psihoanalizi«, J6-4623 »Konceptualizacija konca: njegova temporalnost, dialektika in afektivna dimenzija« in N6-0286 »Realnost, iluzija, fikcija, resnica: preliminarna študija«.