Lacan’s subject is something beyond nature and culture. The subject cannot be reduced to either biology or culture. “It is the result of the collision between the human animal and social order”1. This is very important. This collision gives rise to unconscious desires that are different from animal instincts and social determinations. Which means that the subject is universal and is there in every society. Universal politics can be based on this subject.
Lacan returns to Freud. But this return is to the Freud who talked about the unconscious, and not the one who talked about the ego. “The psychoanalytical tradition has betrayed Freud.”2 Psychoanalysis after Freud focused too much on the ego and how it must be “adapted’ to reality. Which basically meant that there was something wrong with the person, and that the society out there was more or less fine. One must adjust to what is there outside. Failing to adapt is what causes the subject’s suffering. For Lacan, adaptation is not the goal for psychoanalysis because there’s nothing to which we get adapted, and the subject is always maladapted. This maladaptation is inscribed into the subjectivity.
I am reminded of a guy who used to live right next to me in the dorm in my first year of college. There was a college club that had been organizing some meditation classes. He used to go there. However, one day while we were chilling in our room, he said, “I don’t want to be at peace. I want to be frustrated. That is where the fun is at.” It was very counterintuitive when I heard that. I thought to myself, who wouldn’t want some peace? But I think that guy had cracked the code, which took me a long while to understand, only through my engagement with Zizek & co.
If Lacan’s subject is true, it has several implications. The people who look to biologize subjectivity, or what they call free will, and the people who look to culture to get the answers, and try to reduce people to their culture, must confront the kind of subject that Lacan calls for. It has immense potential for emancipation. I’m never one with myself, ever. And neither can I be then one with the universe or outside world. And that is the source of my freedom. No harmony, only dis-jointedness.
I am trying to think how this subject differs from what Acharya Prashant (AP) or Swami Sarvapriyananda from Vedanta NY would talk about. For them, it is ‘chetna’. For AP, especially, it is about the power of choice that everyone has at all times, no matter what the circumstances are. However, as I see it, Lacan’s subject is based on the ‘unknowing’ of my self, that I cannot be aware of my unconscious, which ensures that there is this freedom that is always already there.
References:
1. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan, Todd McGowan
2. Against Adaptation, Phillipe Van Haute
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