Lacan's Return to Antiquity by Harris Oliver;

Author:Harris, Oliver;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

The fifteenth-century Italian scholar Marsilio Ficino translated the Hermetica and interpreted Plato as part of a sixteenth-century revival of Neoplatonism. He borrows from Aristophanes’ myth of Eros in constructing his own Neoplatonic creation myth: souls as originally created were whole but, through aspiring to equal God they fell, divided, lost their supernatural facilities, and entered bodies. But Plotinus rescues Narcissus-Dionysus from their violent division. Crucially, in his philosophy, reunion is possible (Vernant, 1990). For Plotinus’ disciples, Narcissus became a model for reflective reason, the possibility of using the mind to reflect on truth and so reunite with original Being. In this sense the fall is a felix culpa, without which there would be no process of reunification for us.

This reveals two very different traditions of cosmic dualism: one that retains an emphasis on potential harmony, one associated with an enduring schism (Kristeva, 1989).23 In so far as Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage betrays clear echoes of the Neoplatonic myth, he must negotiate the opposing connotations. Indeed, in an intriguing London Review of Books essay, Malcolm Bull (2001) suggests that the parallels between Plotinus and Lacan may be more than coincidental. The 1930s, when Lacan first developed his theory of the mirror stage, was a time when Neoplatonism was undergoing a revival in France under the leadership of Emile Berthier at the Sorbonne; Bergson also brought Neoplatonism into contemporary philosophical debate, and the belief that there were affinities between his philosophy and that of Plotinus enhanced its status. Bull points out one further possible source for Lacan’s interest in the myth of Dionysus Zagreus and its Neoplatonic interpreters in a book Lacan refers to in his Ethics seminar: Erwin Rohde’s Psyche (1890–94), a monumental study of Greek cult practices and the associated conception of the soul, which had been translated into French in 1928 (Lacan, 2008, recommends that all psychoanalysts read it at least once). Bull concludes that while the general fascination with Neoplatonism had waned by the 1950s and 1960s, Lacan’s references to Plotinus in the seminars testifies to his enduring interest.

Lacan’s emphasis on disjunction suggests the importance for him of clarifying that his mirror stage does not hold out the promise of potential reunification and harmony. The event before the mirror is presented by Lacan as the moment when an inescapable discrepancy opens up between the unified image of the reflection and the experiential fact of our uncoordinated body. We gain an idealized image of ourselves as unified but, insofar as it is merely an image, a rupture is created: fantasy splits from the real.

Lacan establishes a tone of tragic violence in his own ‘myth’. We are cursed by being born too soon, and the initial months of dim chaos haunt the apparently unified ego that subsequently arises. Lacan (2007) adds a powerful cosmological element to Wallon’s developmental scheme, asserting that, in man, the ‘relationship to nature is altered by a certain dehiscence at the very heart of the organism, a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of malaise and motor uncoordination of the neonatal months’ (p.

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