Who cares?
As a Platonic philosopher reminded me, Lacan’s ideology is extreme. All the foundations are destroyed, leaving a kind of cognitive futility, undecidability, impossibility and so on. We live in a post-apocalyptic non-world; in Blanchot’s terms, ‘writing the disaster’ with our suicide preceding us. This situation resembles a tactical nuclear weapon strike that kills everything that is alive while leaving the infrastructure looking unchanged; the disaster ‘ruins everything, while leaving everything intact’. (Blanchot 1986, 1). Thus, being without being, or being otherwise than being. In the manner of Becket in The Unnamable: ‘I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on’. Or, the Silicon Valley slogan: ‘Fail early, fail fast and fail cheap’: their formula for creativity, creative desire, whereby failing does not have such a final quality.
As Lacan says in Seminar 20, ‘The discordance between knowledge and being is my subject’ (Lacan 1972-1973, 228). Earlier he had made it clear that, ‘I am thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not thinking’ (Lacan 2002, 517). There is therefore in this radical discourse, no community between being and thinking; each negates the other. Thus thinking, speaking, intelligibility and so on are enabled only via a violence done to Being. Being itself is dumb (Lacan 1959-1960, 55) and lacks all Logos; it is language that imposes a structure on Being. Being, or the Real is too much of a fullness, therefore it has to be reduced or lacked so that thinking can take place. ‘The symbol is the murder of the [Real] thing’ (Lacan 2002, 262/319). Thus the Lacanian notion of the subject is already ‘thin, empty and weightless’ (Bowie 1991, 75). Now the signifier has to cover all that was formerly meant by mental life and indeed mental illness. In the disaster, the near nothing, which is my life and the life of our patients – I can’t go on – becomes: from nothing to something as nothing.
Thus the insubstantiality of the text is all we are left with. If we follow Baudrillard: “We are afraid of language since we have been told about the signifier and all that. The signifier has introduced terror into language. “The unconscious is structured like a language” – nothing has wreaked such havoc as that kind of proposition” (Baudrillard 2005b, 95).