The other side of the canvas, part 7

7 Conclusion, References, Photo Credits

Recall, from my earlier discussion, the cul de sac in which the Foucault of The Order of Things found himself; dedicated to challenging as deceptive the very idea of a single Western ‘‘history’’ unfolding over time and space, his analysis nonetheless seemed to suggest just such a single story occurring for and to a single subject. The term ‘‘finitude’’ marked the locus where this tension between project and the hermeneutic with which it is pursued comes to a head. In a sense, my point here is simply that what could only appear in Les Mots et les choses in a symptomatic manner—as the unresolved tension between ‘‘finitude’’ as remainder of a historicism to be overcome and the same ‘‘finitude’’ as marker for the very instability that defeats historicism in its rationalist presumption—emerges in Lacan’s Seminar as defining psychoanalysis itself. Indeed, one could go further down this road, since Foucault himself, in allowing the signifier ‘‘psychoanalysis’’ to mark the very place in his argument where the ambiguity of ‘‘finitude’’ emerges, seems to anticipate Lacan’s move. In Les Mots et les choses, we already find the name for that practice highlighted as containing the positive possibility today for the ‘‘human sciences’’; Lacan simply investigates what this ‘‘psychoanalysis’’ must be if it is to escape the imperative for a ‘‘death of man.’’

The answer to that demand comes in terms not directly of the ‘‘subject’’ of modernity but of an object implied by but missed in earlier accounts of modernity. Lacan’s account of representation and its subject differs from Foucault’s precisely because it turns on the enigmatic object, the object that equally either appears to a subject as anxious ontological incompletion or as the transcendental condition for apparent ontological completion. This is key; for neither position cancels out the necessity of the other; above all, this means that the ‘‘science’’ granted to the analyst cannot be seen as substitute or replacement for the destitute experience of the analysand. Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, in demonstrating another object—a ‘‘partial object’’ that shifts between the analyst’s (objective) understanding of it and the analysand’s (subjective) experience (Lacan reminds us that the window looks at us)—also gives the lie to Foucault’s paradoxically historicist impulse in Les Mots et les choses. It suggests that all along the possibility for de-stabilization, for a challenge to modernist complacency, has stood within the constitution of the modern subject. We should give up the post-modernist idyll to which the Foucault of 1966 sometimes succumbed—the dream of a world ‘‘beyond’’ the subject of representation. Not as beyond or outside of representation, but in its innermost heart lies subversion of its limitations, of its mania for domination.