The Nonhuman Desire of Jacques Lacan

Abstract

The romanticization of the ‘non-human’ which implicitly ideologizes and transhumanizes modern thought in the form of all that is associated with object-oriented ontology, builds not only on obvious starting points (‘deep ecology’, the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari), but also tries to rethink ‘in its favor’ antagonistic paradigms and discourses. These include the Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis. In this article, we will show that not only an external orientation, but also internal gaps, can create an impetus for such a ‘neutralization’. Jacques Lacan’s attempt to remain ‘loyal’ both to the ‘classical subject of the soul’ and to the Real (pre-/beyond-subjective, residual) has resulted in a contradictory concept of desire, having a paradoxical implosive potential which, in turn, was unlocked by the new-materialist, post/transhumanist reading of Lacan.

The analysis of desire topic, fundamental to Lacan’s clinical methodology, shows how fragile and susceptible to external attacks is the hermetic conceptual apparatus developed for purely clinical purposes. Based on the logic of Lacan himself, who defined psychoanalysis as a symptom of a concomitant era, we have to state that formal attempts to dissociate oneself from ‘ordinary reality’ cannot save one from the crucible of history, and this fatality is always present in inescapable traps of language. In the vein of psychoanalysis understood as an ‘impossible profession’, the attempt to dialecticize Freud’s thermodynamic ‘biologism’, the fiasco of the Western subject ‘after Auschwitz’ and the belief in the immanence of interpersonal communication, has turned out to be an ‘impossible project’ for Lacan.