JNU Philosophy Colloquium: Anup Dhar on "Psychoanalysis: The Other Side ...

source: Babu Thaliath     2014年12月7日
Time and Date: 4. p.m.Friday 29th August, 2014
Venue: School of Language, Literature & Culture Studies
Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi
Abstract:Jacques Lacan's Seminar XVII, delivered at the Law Faculty, Place du Pantheon, in 1969-70 is titled The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Lacan was undecided as to whether he should title this seminar (a) "Psychoanalysis upside down", i.e. "a revival of the Freudian project upside down, or (b) The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, i.e. "a revival from the other direction. Taking off from Foucault's take on 'philosophy' and ascesis (askesis) in Hermeneutics of the Subject this talk argues that psychoanalysis could be seen as the other side of philosophy; an 'other side' that is also somewhat closely related to the philosophy of the Other. Why however, would psychoanalysis be the other side of philosophy, other side of which philosophy, and which psychoanalysis would be the other side, would have to be examined, perhaps demonstrated. One will also have to see what is the other side? What does it mean to be on the other side or to not be on the other side? Turning away from psychoanalysis marked by 'The Repressive Hypothesis', Oedipalization and the interiority of the desiring subject, Lacan and Derrida in their respective ways develop the other side of psychoanalysis; which also happens to be the other side of philosophy. In their rewriting of psychoanalysis they thus rewrite philosophy; or perhaps in their rewriting of philosophy they rewrite psychoanalysis. The talk asks, does the Freudian turn to the akratic, the bodily ego, and the sexuated take psychoanalysis to the other side of philosophy, an other side Foucault inaugurates in History of Madness and Irigaray inaugurates in Speculum of the Other Woman? Between Lacan's rewriting of the 'philosophy of the subject' in Seminar on "The Purloined Letter", Remarks on Daniel Lagache's Presentation, and Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty and Derrida's rewriting of the 'philosophy of mind' and the topographical in Freud and the Scene of Writing and The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy do we get a glimpse of psychoanalysis as the other side of philosophy? Is Heidegger’s critique of the Cartesian cogito an alter ego of the Freudian ‘decentring’ of the subject? Through the paradoxical and counterintuitive embrace of the cogito as the subject of the unconscious, does Lacan open the other side of (Cartesian) philosophy? What does the Lacanian Real do to (Kantian) philosophy? Does the psychoanalytic turn hollow out its own support tree: philosophy? Does the main trunk of psychoanalysis get hollowed out in turn and in the process? What remain are perhaps just prop roots! What we end up with is the Banyan Vine of a vast network of innumerable prop roots, of both psychoanalysis and philosophy.