The Four Fundamental Concepts - Review

“The unconscious is structured like a language.”

This book marks my first encounter with not only Lacan, but the field of psychoanalysis and especially that of semiotics. Although it proved immensely difficult, I stand by the notion that in order to learn how to swim one should immerse themselves in water, ‘just dive in’. It’s characteristic of a great thinker to challenge predetermined views and as such to really cut into the foundation of how you relate to the world, and Lacan has done nothing if not this. Although his language is often dismissed as pretentious obscurantism, once grasped the sheer scale and boldness of it is astonishing, and it’s honestly at the core of what is offered. In order to try and explain what I mean by this, I will travel by means of my own experience.

I knew from the start that this reading would require serious effort, and as such I started documenting concepts brought up chronologically, partially by quotation but mostly trying to grasp what is approached in my own words and by way of other references. This quickly proved to be futile, because Lacan abhors definitions, finding them too constraining. Not only that, there is no chronology either. Everything is extremely intertwined and as such concepts are mentioned in passing which won’t be elaborated on until way later and the experience of reading is as of being led in the dark, only possible by way of blind trust. Nevertheless, one finds that the entire structure mirrors precisely what is being approached. To be precise, his seminar communicates in the same way as the unconscious; it is allusive, circumscribing, never pinpointing anything exactly. It is poetic, deeply enigmatic, and in it’s unique way beautiful.

I am not arrogant enough to summarize, but there are a few things that I at least want to touch upon. First of all it’s the way the subject is slighted. He is born into the world, into culture, without any sort of primacy, determined by the Other, by signifiers, by language, which existed long before he came and will continue to do so long after he is gone. His desire is determined by the Other, “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other.” He does not even exist on a deeper level unconsciously, because the unconscious is transindividual. In short, the subject is stuck in the structure of language, existing solely as an effect of signifiers. “It is not that I speak, but that I am being spoken.” He is merely an opportunity for the communication of the unconscious. Intellectually it can be accepted, but emotionally it’s terrifying “because it forces one to think that the subject is not alienated due to having extracted something from himself, but that this is the cost of becoming part of the herd.”

This seminar was primarily held for aspiring psychoanalysts, in order for them to be taught. As someone who is far from fitting into such a description, it begs the question as to the value to be found compared to the immense effort required to penetrate Lacan’s notorious difficulty. As someone interested in philosophy, the value is found in his structures. His concepts are, although based in Freudianism, undoubtedly his own. He goes to long lengths to build them from the ground up (not to be confused with chronologically), with rich references to a broad spectrum of philosophical works. They are, as it turns out, extremely valuable for navigating not only the psyche but the world in general, for what is our relation to the world if not through our minds? “The privilege of the subject seems to be …, as soon as I perceive, my representations belong to me. This is how the world is struck with a presumption of idealization”.

There is neither time nor space to flesh out even a fraction of what I would like to say on Lacan, but the last thing I have to mention is his relation to that of mysticism. He has, far more than anybody else I’ve read, conceptualized the existence of the subject and the world in which he finds himself. For Lacan, there is nothing for the subject outside of language, the Real being wholly unapproachable. Anything even remotely close to that of something akin to self-actualization, of the reconquering of human agency, seems impossible. As such, it has to be sought beyond the subject, reinforcing the age-old wisdom “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”