Less Than Nothing by Slavoj Zizek

Author:Slavoj Zizek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

THE UNCONSCIOUS OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

It is along these lines that we can discern the contours of the theologico-political in Lacan: the political nature of the unconscious means that it is not an underlying deeper force secretly governing what appear as contingencies, expressing itself through them: contingencies are irreducible, primary, they really are contingencies, and the unconscious is strictly parasitic, opportunistically exploiting unexpected contingencies to deliver its message. Freud is here radically opposed to that Jungian New Age obscurantism for which, precisely, “there are no accidents,” and everything has a deeper meaning—therein resides the difference between idealism and materialism (and, unexpectedly, Hegel is here on the side of materialism: for him, speculative meaning articulates itself by way of exploiting the contingent ambiguities or double meanings of our ordinary language). This is why the Lacanian “de-centered subject” does not imply the kind of de-centering usually associated with psychoanalysis: “there is something in me more than myself, some foreign power which runs the show, so that I am not responsible for my acts …” If anything, Lacan insists on the subject’s total responsibility: I am responsible even for acts and decisions of which I am not aware.

Apropos the fear that the brain sciences will eventually demonstrate that humans are in reality merely neuro-biological mechanisms, that there is “nobody home” beneath the surface of our phenomenal (self-)experience, one should fully accept this fear and avoid the primordial idealist lure which tempts us to substantialize our consciousness in some determinate component of reality (the temptation to which David Chalmers succumbed in an exemplary way). There effectively is nothing “beneath” or “behind,” since consciousness is entirely phenomenal: the moment one brackets the phenomenal level of (self-)awareness and limits oneself to “reality,” consciousness by definition disappears. It is as if one were to take a close look at a rainbow in order to locate some mysterious X in reality that corresponds to “rainbow in itself.” Consciousness thus confronts us with the hard task of grasping the effectiveness, the (quasi-)causal power, of the appearance as such—and the Freudian unconscious should also be understood along these lines: not as a substance behind the appearances of consciousness, but as itself a mode of appearing. In other words, the term “unconscious” must be understood in terms of the Kantian infinite judgment rather than negative judgment: it is not that what it designates “is not conscious,” it is rather that what it designates “is unconscious.” This is what differentiates the Freudian unconscious from the neuronal unconscious of the material processes going on in our brain when we think: the neuronal unconscious is merely not conscious, while the Freudian unconscious is like the “undead,” it is inherent to the psyche.

Here the Freudian hypothesis of the unconscious confronts us with the limits of any torture or truth serum procedure designed to extract from the subject his true position, “what he really thinks.” A truth serum may get results if there is an ultimate truth the subject is trying to conceal—it may work if we are

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