Even when it is not only a matter of ontic experience, but of ontological understanding, the interpretation of being initially orients itself toward the being of innerworldly beings. Here the being of things initially at hand is passed over and beings are first conceived as a context of things (res) objectively present. Being acquires the meaning of reality. Substantiality becomes the basic of characteristic of being…. like other beings, Da-sein is also objectively present as real. (Heidegger, Being and Time I.vi 43)
At the backend of human existence, there is always the haunting spirit of our own desire. Psychoanalysis tells us about desire – originated from primitive lack which is our memory of primitive love toward parental unity. What is it? The parental unity is what exists before we are (being). The lack is what haunting us since the day we acquire the partial characteristic of being – materiality of being, the body, the sense, the Real. The haunting spirit constitutes our primitive fear; its basic is our drive to transpass the symbolic borderline and gain access to the unspeakable jouissance to the Real. In the Realm of the Real, there is nothing being “objectively presented” as the lack, desire, love and fear are the polemics posed to itself and have never been answered except we see our own death face to face. That is the impossibility of being as object, for object is not a priori knowledge and it is an impossible agent. For an object can never be an object without already being assigned the position of the Subject as a subject. But the argument is who authorizes the Subject as a subject while the position of being as being has to be worked through the background of the lack as the Real. If at the end of our human existence, we see only lack and emptiness, what is the value of being if put into the framework of a universal truth.
Is philosophy the theoretical framework to access the Universal truth? Or rather is psychoanalysis the framework for the possible Universal truth?
Psychoanalysis has never tried to answer the philosophical question of being. Its knowledge about being is more from its interest in subjectivity as reflected in structure of paternality. There is no psychoanalytic truth without the structure of a family. The truth in psychoanalysis, if there is any, is a form of truth which we can achieve through dialectics between the love and loss in relation to parents. But is this paternality a form of Universal truth? The love and loss in psychoanalysis create the first cause (desire) which formulates the structure of the Universe. Desire is the unfulfilled want for perfection. Perfection have never been a truth in psychoanalysis although it is what the Subject has been looking after. It is the impossibility in psychoanalysis, the zero degree in the subject’s relationship with the external world. But there is no dimension in psychoanalysis which could cover the position of achieving perfection.
Perfection is only a philosophical realm which at least logically we can have the conceptual capacity to describe it in philosophical understanding. It could be infinity in mathematics or it could be holistic experience in religion. Perfection is ultimate in philosophy but it is impossible in psychoanalysis.
However, philosophical understanding about perfection has never satisfied us as it have not fulfilled the logics of the lack. Desire has never been a philosophical problem, but it has created the neccessary constituent for our knowledge about perfection. Perfection comes out of desire, but desire has never been well explaint or simply it has denied its own validity.
Filed under: Lacan
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