I dream of a Lacanian philosophy. The Lacanian philosophy I dream of would not be modeled on his theory of the subject, signifier, desire, drive, unconscious, language, etc, so much as on the ethics of the Lacanian clinic. That ethics outlines how the analyst should position herself with respect to the analysand or patient.
The analyst is not a master, nor an authority. She does not tell the analysand what her symptom means or is “really” saying (given the singular nature of every unconscious, how could she?). She does not reveal a diagnosis like “hysteric”, “obsessional”, “phobic”, etc in the clinical setting, alienating her analysand in a generic category. The point is to discover the singular desire of the analysand, not subsume under a generic type. She is not a guru that dispenses knowledge of how to achieve happiness, success, wealth, health, a good relationship, etc.
Rather, an analyst is a sort of truth-attractor for the analysand’s desire. The analysand’s symptom is expressive of a desire. Through the enigmatic way in which she conducts herself, the analyst helps the analysand to articulate this desire in speech, to avow it, rather than to live it through symptoms and parapraxes. All analysis offers is a more direct and honest relation to the unconscious desire that animates ones life.
But above all, an analyst does not conduct herself as a master. She does not act as if she knows the meaning of her analysand’s symptoms and parapraxes, but rather asks questions and gives interpretations that assist the analysand in articulating that meaning and truth. She does not claim to have answers to the pain and misery of life (gurus). She does not set herself up as a moral tribunal, praising or condemning the analysand’s desire. No, she just functions as a locus of the analysand’s speech. In operating as an analyst, she sets her own desires to the side.
The Lacanian clinic, then, is based on a profound respect for the singularity of each subject. It attempts to open a space where that singularity might speak itself. Given the lures of the imaginary and our will to mastery, this is a very difficult space to maintain and endure for both analyst and analysand to endure. Analysands often want a master to tell them the way and are terrified that they will be condemned or “do it wrong”. Analysts can’t help but harbor desires as to what their patients will decide, what life they will pursue, but must set these aside as the aim is for the analysand to articulate their being, what animates them, for perhaps the first time in their lives.
A Lacanian philosophy, of course, would be different than the clinic as it is not dealing with the desire that animates a subject. Rather, if there is a parallel between a Lacanian philosophy and a Lacanian clinic, it would lie in both refusing to occupy the position of master. Just as the Lacanian analyst refuses to comport herself as a master that knows the truth of her patient, a Lacanian philosopher would refuse to present herself as a judge and tribunal of other practices and disciplines. It would refuse the position of legislator.
This is what I take from Badiou and Deleuze and Guattari. Badiou argues that philosophy has no truths of its own, but that truths always come from elsewhere: art, science, politics, and love. Philosophy’s vocation is to think the compossibility of these truths as they appear in the present. Deleuze and Guattari argue that philosophers create concepts, but are careful to point out that while these concepts are inventions unique to philosophy, they are nonetheless extracted from encounters with non-conceptual modes of thought such as art (which makes precepts and affects) or science (which makes functives). Each of these practices can influence one another, but in a way proper to their own medium. Thus, for example, science can be influenced by philosophical concepts, but in such a way as to create functives. Deleuze is transformed by cinema, but where directors invent new images, Deleuze creates concepts proper to those images. Those concepts can then, in turn, produce effects in other practices: literature can write like Hitchcock directs, politics can devise political strategies like Aronofsky develops with his images.
In all of these thinkers there is a profound respect for other practices and disciplines. Rather than setting themselves up as masters whose vocation is to regulate other practices, they instead listen to these other practices, take them as competent in their own terms, and try to extract something from them that pertains to their own philosophical practice. They refuse to be Socrates interrogating the slave boy. To be sure, like the Lacanian analyst that points out slips of the tongue, bungled actions, polysemy in speech, etc, the Lacanian analyst can draw attention to knots or symptoms in other practices, but always with the aim of intensifying those practices. Such would be a Lacanian philosophy.
Larval Subjects . 
November 18, 2012 at 7:06 pm
Guattari was on to this early on. He wrote a nice essay called ‘Cracks in the Street.’
(Lecture given at the meeting of Modern Language Association in New York, December 28th 1986). A version of this paper was translated in the journal Flash Art in xxx 1987.
It is also in Schizoanalytic Cartographies which has been trans by Andy Goffey (forthcoming, maybe continuum). Here is an extract from Andy’s trans:
‘“Cracks in the street”
In response to the invitation to your conference, I had suggested calling my paper “The existentialising functions of discourse.” But after having crossed the Atlantic this proposition became “Cracks in the text of the State.” Already that gives us quite a lot to think about! Subsequently, it was explained to me that for a meeting placing itself under the auspices of an organisation devoted to literature, it would be a good idea to stick to the idea of the text. OK! But it nonetheless remains that when I speak of discourse, it is only incidentally a question of text or even of language. Discourse, discursivity is for me first of all a trajectory, the wandering of Lenz, for example, reconstituted by Büchner in the profound life of forms, the encounter with the soul of rocks, metals, water, plants… Or the immobile peregrination that grasping a zen garden consists of, to the point that, achieving the total presence of Satori, it is closed to any communication. Or, indeed, even an autistic child’s fascination with the slow formation of a drop of water, the endlessly reiterated falling of which he greets with the same explosion of joy and jouissance (in Ce gamin-là, the film Renaud Victor devoted to the experiments of Fernand Deligny).
But some will wonder what this discursivity outside the text might be were it not taken up in the literary treatment of a Büchner, supported by Buddhist texts, or overdetermined by the poetico-philosophical reading that a Fernand Deligny can give of it? Certainly minimising the role of the text and of the writing machine in the putting to work of these mute redundancies and in the deployment of the Universes of virtuality of which they are the bearers is not part of my aim. Besides, nowadays modes of non-verbal semiotisation are evidently called on to lead a life that is symbiotic not only to speech and writing but is also computer-assisted. Let’s say all that works together, without any precedence or folding back of one domain onto another. So, I’m ok with the title “Cracks in the text” that was suggested to me and with the diverse modalities of textual discontinuity that your letter of invitation enumerated: gaps, ruptures, interstices, slippages, margins, crises, liminal periods, peripheries, frames, silences…OK to all that, on condition, though, that it is not taken as a pretext to definitively silence the other forms of discursivity that persist in inhabiting our world!……
Linguists and semiologists haven’t completely ignored the existence of this existential function inherent in diverse modalities of discursivity – and not, I repeat, just in linguistic discourse. But hitherto they have opted to keep it in the drawer marked “pragmatics”, the third drawer below those of syntax and semantics. Contrary to the linguists and semiologists, I would like to have shown that its dimensions of polyphony, of a-signifying rupture generative of enunciation and of processual fractalisation give it a completely different scope. It is true that it has an essential place in semiological fields (for example, in the use of accents, intonation, prosodic traits etc), but its role is nonetheless fundamental in the constitution of: existential Territories arising from human ethology (amongst others); rituals and refrains of social demarcation; even the facialitarian compositions, the “part objects” and transitional objects around which the psyche is organised…Through all these possible procedures of fractalisation, of processualisation and of existential recomposition, this third function of discursivity (established concurrently with those of signification and denotation) engenders modalities of individual and/or collective subjectification that set to work across/through dominant subjective formations. In other words, subjectivity is in a position to take hold of its own fate, through their mediation.’
And from another essay:
November 18, 2012 at 7:09 pm
‘From the chapter ‘Analytic Cartographies’:
‘Whether they are painters, architects or philosophers, the heroes of postmodernity share an assessment that the crises the artistic and social practices are experiencing today can no longer lead into anything other than irrevocable refusal of any collective projectuality of any scale. Let’s tend to our garden then and preferably in conformity with the habits and customs of our contemporaries. No waves. Just vogues, modulated on the markets of art and opinion, by means of publicity campaigns and opinion polls. As for ordinary sociality, a new principle of “sufficient communication” will have to provide for the maintenance of its equilibria and ephemeral consistency. If one thinks about it, how much distance has been travelled since the epoch in which one could read on the banners of French sociology: “social facts are not things”! For the postmoderns, they are now nothing more than erratic clouds of floating discourse in a signifying ether!’ (Guattari).
November 18, 2012 at 7:19 pm
‘For their part, the linguists of enunciation and of speech acts have brought out the fact that certain linguistic segments, in parallel with their classically recognised functions of signification and denotation, could acquire a particular pragmatic effectiveness by making the respective positions of enunciating subjects crystallise or by putting into place, de facto, certain situational framings. (The classic example: the president who declares “the session is open” and who, so doing, effectively opens the session). But they also believed they had to restrict the scope of their discovery to the register of their specialism only. Whereas in reality this third, “existentialising” function, which they emphasised, ought logically to imply a definitive breaking up of the structuralist corset in which they continue to keep language..
‘ Although I can’t develop this point at length here, it also implies an exit from a whole dualistic ontological tradition, which makes existence depend on a law of all or nothing “to be or not to be”. By way of an indispensable transitory return to animist thought, the quality of being takes primacy over a “neutral” essentiality of being, which can be allocated universally and is thus exchangeable, that one might characterise as capitalistic facticity. Existence here gains, loses, intensifies, crosses qualitative thresholds, because of its adherence to such and such an incorporeal Universe of endo-reference.’ (Guattari,
November 18, 2012 at 11:08 pm
Btw, Massumi translated the first essay in schizoanalytic cartographies years ago:
“Regimes, Pathways, Subjects,” Félix Guattari, Zone, no.6 (1992), pp. 16-35.
–Reprinted in: Gary Genosko, ed. The Guattari Reader (London: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 95-108.
If you don’t know this book you’d prob find it v. relevant to your interests – quite a bit on Lacan/psychoanalysis
November 19, 2012 at 11:15 pm
Lovely post… I have written a bit on this in my PhD thesis, specifically around the pursuit of an ‘ethics of desire’, a reaction to the (capitalist) ethic promoted in the industry of weight anxiety.
I have tried to think what a ‘weight’ industry would look like if it followed the desire of the subject, based on the philosophy you describe above I would see this perhaps as an industry that spoke to consumers only as an analyst might. This would involve deploying the knowledge under the bar of the analyst – assuming the position of ‘docta ignorantia’ and specifically not assuming that the consciousness of the subject bears any direct relation to their desire. Clearly this is not a very good capitalist model ;-)
Thanks for writing this.
November 21, 2012 at 12:01 am
And finally, I promise, Guattari warming up:
‘It is on the basis of this paradigm that an entropic Superego was established, which had as its principal effect to make those who were afflicted by it incapable of perceiving a movement, a transformation, an alteration, anything “experiencable” whatsoever, without relating it to a single economy of energy, founded on the two sacrosanct principles of thermodynamics. One can represent this parasitic instance as a sort of epistemological crab pulling apart the givens on which it feeds, always following the same ceremonial movement:
With one of its claws,
a) it places on one side those givens that it circumscribes as arising from the energy capital in question, as the only reality susceptible of scientific consumption;
b) it crushes these givens of energy so as to relieve them of their specific traits and confer on them a uniformly convertible character;
With its other claw,
c) it reduces the givens, which have resisted its enterprise of energeticisation, to the state of abstract equivalent, giving, for example, Capital, the Libido, Music, Scientificity…
d) it prepares a super-equivalent (a “capitalistic pulp”) on the basis of all these regional equivalents, in such a way that the ensemble of singularities and intrinsic structures, the ensemble of representations and affects relating to them, and in certain extreme cases, the ensemble of energetic processes themselves, find themselves totally dissolved and assimilated.
At its terminal point – I’m thinking here of structuralisms and systemisms – the disease of entropism may seem to evolve towards remission by the spontaneous lifting of the Infrastructures Complex. In effect, traditional dualisms of the matter-form type thus seem to be overcome because of a transfering of formalism, supposed to arise from superstructures, towards infrastructural levels. Unfortunately this is not the case: the focus of reductionism is simply displaced towards a matter that is even more radically purged of its final specific traits, to the profit of an energetic hyle assimilated to a Flux of binary alternatives (despite multiple safeguards against the paralogism that consists in deducing the identity ‘neg-information=energy’ from the identity ‘neg-entropy=information’). (Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies).
Fnotes
Examples of these transfers: Capital, at the heart of the labour process; the semiotic substance of the drive (the Freudian Vorstellungrepräsentanz, reduced by Lacan to the state of the Signifier) at the heart of the libido; “binary digits” at the heart of Fluxes of information…It will be noted that Marxists never attempted the quantification of Capital in the economic sphere and that Freudians quickly put the libido back in the cupboard of pious relics, or “miraculated” it in different ways.
Everything started with the bringing to light of an identical formula for calculating a quantity of information and for establishing a relationship between entropy and thermodynamic probability. But as Karl Popper remarks “all that has been shown is
that entropy and lack of information can be measured by probabilities, or interpreted as probabilities. It has not been shown that they are probabilities of the same attributes as the system”. See Popper Unended Quest op. cit. p. 163