Mladen Dolar

Cogito at the subject or the Unconscious

In the opening paragraph of one of the earliest pieces in his Écrits, the famous paper entitled "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience" (1949, presented in Zürich at the International Congress of Psychoanalysis), Lacan situates his notion of the mirror stage in the following way: "The conception of the mirror stage that I introduced at our last congress, thirteen years ago [that was the congress in Marienbad in 1936, the last one where Freud was present as well], has since become more or less established in the practice of the French group. However, I think it worthwhile to bring it again to your attention, especially today, for the light it sheds on the formation of the I as we experience it in psychoanalysis. It is an experience that leads us to oppose any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito" (Lacan 1977, 1; 1966, 93). So in the very first paragraph of the first notorious écrit, there is a clear alternative, an emphatic choice that one has to assume: either the mirror phase or the cogito. One has to decide one way or the other between psychoanalysis and philosophy, which has, in the past three centuries, largely issued from cogito, despite its variety of forms and despite its often proposed criticism of cogito. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, if properly understood and practiced, promises to offer a way out of the "age of cogito." The alternative that Lacan has in mind, in this particular strategically situated spot, is the following: the mirror stage, insofar as it is indeed formative of the function of the I, demonstrates that the I, the ego, is a place of an imaginary blinding, a deception; far from being the salutary part of the mind that could serve as a firm support of the psychoanalytic cure, against the vagaries of the id and the superego (such was the argument of ego-psychology), rather, it is itself the source of paranoia, and of all kinds of fantasy formations. If such is the nature of the I, then it must be most sharply opposed to cogito, with its inherent pretension to self-transparency and self-certainty.

But even apart from Lacan's particular theory of the mirror stage, with all its ramifications, the dilemma seems to pertain to psychoanalysis as such, to its "basic insight." For is the discovery of the unconscious not in itself inherently an attack on the very idea of cogito? The self-transparent subjectivity that figures as the foundation of modern philosophy—even in those parts of it that were critical of cogito—seems to be submitted to a decisive blow with the advent of psychoanalysis. Cogito must be seen not only at odds with, but at the opposite end in relation to the unconscious. Such was Freud's own implicit self-understanding (although he didn't deal at any length with Descartes, except for his curious short paper on Descartes's dream, "Über einen Traum des Cartesius," [Freud 1929b]), and this is the spontaneous, seemingly self-evident, and widespread conception of that relation. This view can then be considered alongside other contemporary radical attempts to dismantle cogito, most notably with Heidegger, who was also during that period Lacan's source of inspiration. So both the analysis of the ego and that of the unconscious, although running in different directions, appear to undermine the very idea of cogito.

Yet, Lacan's position in that respect has undergone a far-reaching change. First of all, a clear distinction had to be made, in his further development, between the "I," the ego, on one hand, and the subject on the other. The "I" is not the subject, and the mechanism discovered in the mirror stage, the blinding, the recognition that is intrinsically mis-cognition, while defining the function of the "I," doesn't apply at all to the function of the subject. If the first one is to be put under the heading of the Imaginary, the second follows an entirely different logic, that of the Symbolic. In this division, cogito, surprisingly for many, figures on the side of the subject.

Lacan's perseverance toward retaining the concept of the subject certainly ran against the grain of the time, especially in the days of a budding and flowering structuralism that seemed to have done away with the subject, inflicting upon it a final mortal blow after its protracted moribund status. The general strategy promoted by structuralism could, in a very simplified manner, be outlined as an attempt to put forward the level of a "nonsubjective" structure as opposed to the subject's self-apprehension. There is a nonsubjective "symbolic" dimension of which the subject is but an effect, an epiphenomenon, and which is necessarily overlooked in the subject's imaginary self-understanding. This basic approach could be realized in a number of different ways: Lévi-Strauss's structure as the matrix of permutations of differential elements regulating mythologies, rituals, beliefs, habits, etcetera, behind the subjects' backs; Foucault's episteme, "anonymous" discursive formations and strategies, or later the dispositions of power, etcetera; Althusser's "process without a subject" that science has to unearth behind the ideological interpellation that constitutes subjectivity; Derrida's notion of writing, or 1a différance, as "prior" to any split into subject/object, interior/exterior, space/time, etcetera; Kristeva's opposition between the semiotic and the symbolic. In spite of great differences between those attempts and their sometimes sharply opposed results, there was a common tendency to conceive of a dimension "behind" or "underneath" or "anterior to" the subject, the very notion of the subject thereby falling into a kind of disrepute and becoming synonymous with "self-deception," a necessary illusion, an essential blinding as to the conditions that produced it. The structuralist revolution has thus seen itself as a break away from the humanist tradition centered on the subject (cf. Foucault's ponderous reference to the "death of man"), and particularly as a radical rupture with the philosophical tradition based on cogito.

Lacan's view sharply differed from this model by firmly clinging to the notion of the subject and "rescuing" it all along. His talk about the subject of the unconscious was certain to provoke some astonishment. He saw the unconscious, along structuralist lines, as a structure—"structured as a language," as the famous slogan goes—discovering in it the Saussurean and Jakobsonian operations of metaphor and metonymy, etcetera, but as a structure with a subject, a subject conceived as opposed to the consciousness...