The subject is what is lacking to knowledge. Knowledge in its presence, in its mass, in its own growth regulated by the laws which are different to those of intuition, which are those of the symbolic operation and of a close copulation of number with a real which is above all the real of a knowledge, this is what it is a matter of analysing in order to give the status, the true status of what is meant by a subject at the historical moment of science.
Just as all modern psychology is constructed to explain how a human being can behave in the capitalist structure, in the same way the true core of the research about the identity of the subject is to know how a subject sustains himself before the accumulation of knowledge. It is precisely this state, this extreme state, that the discovery of Freud offers to you, a discovery which means and which says that there is an “I think” which is knowledge without knowing it. That the link is quartered (écartelé) but at the same time tips over from this relationship of “I think” to “I am”. The one is *entzweiet* [split] from the other, there where I think, I do not know everything that I know, and it is not where I am discoursing, where I am articulating, that there is produced this announcement which is that of my being as being, from which I am being. It is in the stumblings, in the intervals of this discourse that I find my status as subject. The truth is announced to me where I do not protect myself from what comes in my word.
The problem of the truth re-emerges. The truth returns in experience and along a different path to that of my confrontation with knowledge, of the certainty that I may attempt to win in this very confrontation, precisely because I learn that this confrontation is ineffective, and that where I have a presentiment, where I avoid, where I divine one or other rock that I avoid, thanks to the extraordinarily rich and complex construction of a symptom, what I show as a symptom proves that I know what obstacle I am dealing with, alongside that, my thoughts, my phantasies construct, not alone as if I knew nothing about it, but as if I wished to know nothing about it. This is the *Entzweiung* [splitting]. The value of this image, the one that I put on the right, which is easy for you to reproduce because it is one of these constructions that one can make very simply by manipulating a strip of paper. It is still the Moebius strip but a Moebius strip that is in a way crushed and flattened.
I think that you will rediscover there the profile that I made familiar to you of the interval where in the interior eight there is knotted together the Moebius strip, namely, this strip which is stuck together again to itself after a simple half-turn and which has as a property, as I told you, this surface, of having neither a front nor a back, it is exactly the same.
Jacques Lacan 1964-65 Seminar 12: Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis
Beginning in the late sixties, however, Lacan focuses his attention more and more on drive as a kind of “acephalic” knowledge which brings about satisfaction. This knowledge involves no inherent relation to truth, no subjective position of enunciation – not because it dissimulates the subjective position of enunciation, but because it is in itself nonsubjectivized, or ontologically prior to the very dimension of truth (of course, the term ontological becomes thereby problematic, since ontology is by definition a discourse on truth). Truth and knowledge are thus related as desire and drive: interpretation aims at the truth of the subject’s desire (the truth of desire is the desire for truth, as one is tempted to put it in a pseudo-Heideggerian way), while construction provides knowledge about drive.
Is not the paradigmatic case of such an “acephalic” knowledge provided by modern science which exemplifies the “blind insistence” of the (death) drive? Modern science follows its path (in microbiology, in manipulating genes, in particle physics) heedless of cost – satisfaction is here provided by knowledge itself, not by any moral or communal goals scientific knowledge is supposed to serve. All the “ethical committees” which abound today and attempt to establish rules for the proper conduct of gene-manipulation, of medical experiments, etc. – are they ultimately not desperate attempts to reinscribe this inexorable drive-progress of science which knows of no inherent limitation (in short: this inherent ethic of the scientific attitude) within the confines of human goals, to provide it with a “human face,” a limitation? The commonplace wisdom today is that “our extraordinary power to manipulate nature through scientific devices has run ahead of our faculty to lead a meaningful existence, to make human use of this immense power.” Thus, the properly modern ethics of “following the drive” clashes with traditional ethics whereby one is instructed to live one’s life according to standards of proper measure and to subordinate all its aspects to some all-encompassing notion of the Good. The problem is, of course, that no balance between these two notions of ethics can ever be achieved. The notion of reinscribing scientific drive into the constraints of the life-world is fantasy at its purest – perhaps the fundamental fascist fantasy. Any limitation of this kind is utterly foreign to the inherent logic of science – science belongs to the real and, as a mode of the real of jouissance, it is indifferent to the modalities of its symbolization, to the way it will affect social life.
In order to make the step from reformism to radical change, we must pass through the zero-point of abstaining from acts of resistance which only keep the system alive. In a strange kind of release, we have to cease to worry about other people’s worries, and withdraw into the role of a passive observer of the system’s circular self-destructive movement. For example, in relation to the ongoing financial crisis that threatens the euro and other currencies, we should stop worrying about how to prevent financial collapse in order to keep the whole system going. The model for such a stance is Lenin during World War I: ignoring all “patriotic” worries about the motherland in danger, he coolly steps back to observe the deadly imperialist dance while laying the foundations for the future revolutionary process—his worries were not the worries of most of his countrymen.
As was clear to Rand, if we want to see real change, then our own worries and cares are our main enemy. We need to stop fighting small battles against the inertia of the system, attempting to make things better here and there, and instead prepare the terrain for the big battle to come. The standpoint of the Absolute is simple enough to achieve; one merely has to withdraw to the (usually aestheticized) position of totality, as in the popular song the “Circle of Life” from The Lion King (words by Tim Rice):
It’s the Circle of Life And it moves us all Through despair and hope Through faith and love Till we find our place On the path unwinding In the Circle The Circle of Life
The song is sung by, of course, the lions: life is a great circle, we eat the zebras, the zebras eat grass; but then, after we die and return to the earth, we also feed the grass, and the circle is closed—this is the best message imaginable for those at the top. The crucial thing is the political spin we give to such “wisdom”: is it a matter of simple withdrawal or of withdrawal as the condition for a radical act? In other words, yes, life always forms a circle, but it is still possible (sometimes) not just to climb or descend its hierarchy, but to change the circle itself. Here we should indeed follow Christ, as the paradox of the Absolute itself renouncing the standpoint of the Absolute and adopting the radically “critical” stance of a finite agent engaged in a terrestrial struggle. This stance is deeply Hegelian, Hegel’s main thesis being precisely that of an Absolute strong enough to “finitize” itself, to act as a finite subject.
Derrida’s starting point is that every clear and general differentiation between humans and “the animal” in the history of philosophy (from Aristotle to Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas) should be deconstructed: what really authorizes us to say that only humans speak, while animals merely emit signs; that only humans respond, while animals merely react; that only humans experience things “as such,” while animals are just captivated by their life world; that only humans can feign to feign, while animals just directly feign; that only humans are mortal, experience death, while animals just die; or that animals enjoy a harmonious sexual relationship of instinctual mating, while for humans, il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel; and so on and so forth? Derrida displays here the best of what we cannot but call the “common sense of deconstruction,” asking naïve questions which undermine philosophical propositions taken for granted for centuries. What, for example, allows Lacan to claim with such self-confidence, without providing any data or arguments, that animals cannot feign to feign? What allows Heidegger to claim as a self-evident fact that animals do not relate to their death? As Derrida emphasizes again and again, the point of this questioning is not to cancel the gap that separates man from (other) animals and attribute also to (other) animals properly “spiritual” properties―the path taken by some eco-mystics who claim that not only animals, but even trees and plants communicate in a language of their own to which we humans are deaf. The point is rather that all these differences should be re-thought and conceived in a different way, multiplied, “thickened”―and the first step on this path is to denounce the all-encompassing category of “the animal.”
