Essays on Otherness

Jean Laplanche, John Fletcher, Luke Thurston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134790333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Since the death of Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche is now considered to be one of the worlds foremost psychoanalytic thinkers. In spite of the influence of his work over the last thirty years, remarkably little has been available in English. Essays On Otherness presents for the first time in English many of Laplanche's key essays and is the first book to provide an overview of his thinking. It offers an introduction to many of the key themes that characterise his work: seduction, persecution, revelation, masochism, transference and mourning. Such themes have been increasingly both in psychoanalytic thought and in continental philosophy, social and cultural theory, and literature making Essays On Otherness indispensable reading for all those concerned with the implications of psychoanalytic theory today.

1

The Unfinished Copernican Revolution

Copernicus: The Decentering of the Human Being

The fate of the word ‘revolution’ is linked in a curious manner to the name of Copernicus. Only the properly astronomical or geometrical meaning of the term existed in his time, and his treatise De revolutionibus orbium caelestium, published in 1543, discusses the cyclical and essentially repetitive motion of the heavenly spheres.¹

The ‘revolutionary’ aspect of these ‘revolutions’ is therefore not yet reflected in the terminology, and it is not until sixteen years later, in 1559, that Amyot began to set in motion the evolution of the term with his immortal translations of Plutarch—an illustration, among so many others, of the creative role of translators in the evolution of language. The change in meaning is, moreover, a progressive one: for Amyot, ‘revolution’ admittedly indicates an abrupt transformation —although one which is still predetermined, signalled in advance by ‘various heavenly signs’.² I do not have at my disposal sufficient documentation to trace in detail this metabolization of the word. Whatever its course, by the time of Kant, more than two hundred years later, our modern term ‘revolution’³ is well established. In 1787, in the second Preface to The Critique of Pure Reason, it seems that scientific and political revolutions go hand in hand: the thought of Copernicus constitutes a ‘sudden revolution in natural science’. But at the price of what misunderstanding is Kant to take it up as a model for his own philosophy? We shall return to this later.

It is well known that the revolution of Copernicus in astronomy is invoked by Freud as the first humiliating blow, the first narcissistic wound inflicted on mankind by science. It is worth looking in more detail at what it consists of, without for the time being considering its relation to psychoanalysis.

The history of astronomy, which is known to go back to earliest antiquity (the Assyrians, the Babylonians and then the Greeks) is anything but linear as far as its major problem is concerned, which can be stated as follows: we observe movements of circular appearance in the universe—but what finally turns around what?

The opposition between Ptolemy and Copernicus, geocentrism and heliocentrism is a simple, pedagogical one; but let us remember that a revolution is never as revolutionary as it thinks—it has its forerunners in the past, and what it offers as a new opening also carries with it possibilities for potential relapses. Throughout the centuries, even the millennia, of astronomical theories, what ultimately emerges is the confrontation and alternation of two lines of thought—the one Ptolemaic, the other Copernican (or so called)—with equally remarkable thinkers on both sides. Ptolemy, who lived in the second century A.D., was only the culmination of a long, double tradition going back at least to the fourth or fifth century B.C.; with the philosophers (the Pythagoreans, Plato and Aristotle) on one side, and on the other scholars closer to observation—astronomers, geographers and mathematicians. Eudoxes of Cnidus (408–355 B.C.), who was the first to reconstruct the movements of the stars on the basis of their circular motion; Autolycus (fourth century B.C.), Hipparchus of Nicea (second century B.C.), to whom we owe the first great catalogue of stars, and finally Ptolemy himself (138–180 A.D.), who proposed his ‘great synthesis’ (Мεγάλη ∑ύνταξις).⁴

As for the Copernican lineage, it is well known that this was to continue its illustrious descent through Galileo, Kepler, Newton—then beyond—in the Einsteinian revolution. What is not generally known is that it goes back explicitly to the third century B.C., to the astonishing Aristarchus of Samos, whose works Copernicus knew. Of these we still have the Treatise on the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and the Moon, in which he has the daring to work out these measurements, in some cases with a surprising accuracy, due to observation and to innovative trigonometric calculations. But above all we know him as the first to propose a heliocentric system, thus incurring—even then, in the Greek world—the accusation of impiety. What is at stake in this Copernican revolution (which should therefore really be termed Aristarchan)? Here, a distinction might be made between the astronomical level and the philosophico-anthropological level.

From the point of view of astronomy, the aim is to explain the trajectories of the different heavenly bodies in relation to the earth. I leave to one side a number of issues which, though important, are nonetheless outside the Copernican shift of perspective. For instance, the privilege accorded to circular movement will not be questioned by Copernicus. Similarly, the rotundity of the earth, which was accepted in antiquity from the fourth century B.C. onwards. Not even the earth’s rotation on its own axis, the cause of the alternation of day and night, is at issue. This last hypothesis, attributed to Heraclitus, is in itself nothing but a change of co-ordinates vis-à-vis something shown by everyday observation: the unchanging rotation of the astral sphere in relation to the earth.⁵ Without going into details, we can note that the main obstacle to the notion of a simple rotation of the sphere said to be ‘fixed’ (let’s say, the totality of distant stars) is the movement of different heavenly bodies—the sun, the moon, finally the ‘planets’—in relation to that sphere. Above all, this is because the movements of these wandering, straying⁶ stars in the end defy all straightforward explanation in a system where the earth remains the centre of reference.

The foremost issue in the whole of astronomy, up to and including the Ptolemaic synthesis, is thus located on the path of an initial going-astray.⁷ Starting out from a basic hypothesis which is false, it becomes a question of finding—of inventing—‘those regular and ordered movements which must be assumed in order to save [i.e. take account of] the appearances observed in the movement of the planets’.⁸

Since the multiplication of ‘spheres’ centering on the earth is hardly enough to account for the movements of the sun and moon, a whole series of accidental movements must be called upon—movements which are always circular but displaced from the center, then displaced in relation to one another: ‘excentrics’, ‘epicycles’, ‘deferents’, etc. All these are highly mathematical hypotheses which mobilize the ingenuity, even the genius, of astronomers up to the Ptolemaic summation which will remain the Bible of astronomy for fourteen centuries. Given its complexity, it is almost impossible to add anything further to it. It is a system in which each unexplained detail, far from bringing the whole in question, was made the object of a supplementary ad hoc hypothesis. Overload, blockage—one thinks of what became of Freudian metapsychology at a certain level of complication, when it began to fill out certain inadequacies with new concepts, without bothering to determine whether they were congruent with the whole or whether it was not rather the whole which should have been reconstructed.⁹

What is at stake in what we neatly term ‘the Copernican revolution’ is a question of ‘centering’ which at the outset seems limited to a change of astronomical center (from the earth to the sun) but which actually opens onto far vaster consequences.

The immediate result of heliocentrism, the perspective adopted by Copernicus, is an immense simplification (at least, a potential one). The idea which seems banal to us today, that the earth is a planet in orbit like the others around the sun, does not make things simpler straight away: the circularity of the orbits means that a certain number of accidental hypotheses, epicycles and others, have to be retained. The way is open, however, to further progress towards unification; not only simplifications, but also an indefinite number of improvements: the system is no longer ‘stuffed’; not only the physical closure of the world but also an epistemological closure has been surpassed.

The immensity or even infinity of the universe is a consequence of heliocentric theory—and was already perceived as such from the time of Aristarchus. This started with the following objection: if the earth was in motion and therefore, constantly changing its point of view, the positions of the ‘fixed’ stars in relation to one another, the ‘constellations’, would have to undergo modifications and deformations…which does not occur. This leads to two possible conclusions: either the Aristarchan-Copernican theory is false…or else the stars are at a distance from us incommensurable with the internal distances of the solar system. The specific idea of heliocentrism was thus only the first step: the Copernican revolution, to some extent, opened up the possibility of the absence of a center. In a world of quasi-infinite distances it becomes absurd to persist in trying to preserve one star among others—the sun or solar system—as center.

If the ‘center’ of the world can be everywhere, it follows correlatively that ‘its circumference is nowhere’.¹⁰ A decentered and infinite world—this double affirmation led, as surely in the time of Aristarchus as in the Renaissance, to the accusation of impiety. If man is no longer at the center of the universe, not only are all cosmogonies and creation myths contradicted, but all the pantheons forged in the image of man or centered on man are thereby devalorized.

But doubtless there are deeper roots to humanity’s clinging to the Ptolemaic vision. When Freud speaks of narcissistic wounding in this connection, he is referring to the humiliation of man as flesh and blood, as an empirical individual. But one must go further: it is not only that man in his concrete existence is humbled to find himself nowhere, in the midst of the immensity of the universe; the Copernican revolution is perhaps still more radical in that it suggests that man, even as subject of knowledge, is not the central reference-point of what he knows. No more than they orbit around him do the stars recognize the primacy of man’s knowledge. Conversely, if the Copernican revolution sets in motion an open-ended progress of knowledge (even through crises), it is no doubt because it affirms implicitly that man is in no way the measure of all things. Thus the decentering and the infinity of the universe would herald an infinity of knowledge, as well as an epistemological decentering much harder to accept.¹¹

I find this potential link between astronomical decentering and the decentering of knowledge confirmed in three thinkers, whom I will consider briefly in their relation to Copernicus.

In the second Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant evokes the ‘revolutions’ in science that may provide a model that ‘promises to metaphysics…the secure path of a science’. It is immediately Copernicus who is invoked, in that it was he who ‘made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest’. According to Kant, metaphysics should make a similar attempt. … Yet far from offering us a Copernican decentering, it is quite clearly a Ptolemaic recentering that Kant wishes to effect—far from intuition on one side and concepts ‘conforming to the object’ on the other, he would rather turn things around and claim that it is the object which ‘conforms’ to the ‘constitution of our faculty of intuition’ and our ‘a priori concepts’.¹² I do not wish to discuss here the significance of Kantian idealism,¹³ but I cannot fail to be troubled by the fact that a movement of radical decentering is being invoked to support a no less radical recentering. There is clearly only one way to save Kant—to recall that ‘worldly’, physical science has nothing in common with metaphysical knowledge, the conditions of possibility of which are prescribed by transcendental philosophy. The empirical subject accords with Copernicus: he is carried back and forth in the movement of the universe. The transcendental subject for his part remains faithful to Ptolemy: it is to him that the movements of heavenly bodies, which are only ‘objects in general’, conform. So be it! But in that case, why invoke the procedures of the one to found that of the other, and this against the grain?

However, two authors after Kant refuse this too easy dissociation of the empirical and the transcendental, and do so in diametrically opposed ways. Let us take Husserl first—the later Husserl whom the thought of Merleau-Ponty invokes as an authority. In the Phenomenology of Perception (1945), the latter was already quoting a text by Husserl of 1934, whose title alone is an entire programme:Umsturz der kopernikanischen Lehre: die Erde als Ur-Arche bewegt sich nicht; which can be translated, ‘Subversion of Copernican doctrine: the Earth, as primal Ark, does not move’.¹⁴ Here, as will be the case for Merleau-Ponty, it is clearly a matter of re-introducing the human being with his ‘flesh’, his native ‘soil’, in a word, the earth itself as his primal habitat, the ‘Ark’ he shares with the animals, into the ‘constitutive ego’. It is an astonishing text, since despite some hesitations and numerous obscurities, it attacks the Copernican revolution on its own ground, even claiming to recenter it. For the ‘apodictic ego’, which thus again becomes Ptolemaic, is at once the constitutive subject and the contingent subject of flesh and blood whose feet are on that Earth.¹⁵

This shows us that the stakes of the Copernican revolution—its acceptance or rejection—ultimately go beyond the simple technical domain of astronomical science.

My second testimony on this point comes from a certain N.Y.Marr. Today his name is forgotten, but in his own day it enjoyed a grim renown. He was a Russian linguist (1864–1934) who lived before the 1917 revolution, then radicalized his ideas under the revolution and at the beginning of Stalinism, in what was called ‘the new theory of language’. He became a sort of Lyssenko of linguistics: ‘Marrism’ became synonymous with Marxist linguistics and anyone who did not show absolute allegiance to it found himself persecuted, forced to perform self-critiques and sometimes physically eliminated. The Marrists were given total support by Stalin until 1950, at which point the tyrant himself, reflecting that this was all leading to extra-vagant conclusions (some even thought them deranged), liquidated Marrism (and possibly several ‘Marrists’ as well) by announcing the following revelation, truly as simplistic as what it was attacking: ‘language is not a super structure; language has no class character’.¹⁶

Marrism argued, then, that language is a class phenomenon and that its early stages can be specified according to the type of class-society: aristocratic societies/languages, followed by bourgeois societies/languages, and finally ‘proletarian-speak’, wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Other
• 1. The Unfinished Copernican Revolution
• 2. A Short Treatise on the Unconscious
• 3. The Drive and its Source-Object: its Fate in the Transference
• 4. Implantation, Intromission
• 5. Interpretation between Determinism and Hermeneutics: a Restatement of the Problem
• 6. Seduction, Persecution, Revelation
• 7. Masochism and the General Theory of Seduction
• 8. Transference: its Provocation by the Analyst
• 9. Time and the Other
• 10. Notes on Afterwardsness
• Select Bibliography
• Index