19-20 November 2022

52nd Study Days of the ECF (France)
3rd Argument, by Alice Delarue
Available in French: https://journees.causefreudienne.org/argument-3/

The Cogito and the Unconscious

“I am what I say.” With this formula, which is the title to the 52nd Study Days of the École de la Cause freudienne, Jacques-Alain Miller sheds light on a contemporary twist of the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am.” This new paradigm pinpoints a trait of the subjectivity of our time, a trait that, at the highest point, concerns the relationship to speech and to the unconscious. It concerns, therefore, the praxis of psychoanalysis. Lacan demonstrated that the moment of the cogito was correlative to a decisive mutation of science and that it signaled the appearance of a new subject. This new subject is specified by its having first shed all subjective knowledge in order to be able to produce the certain knowledge of science. Although science is “an ideology of the suppression of the subject,” the subject of science is paradoxically the one on which psychoanalysis can operate, insofar as it is possible for the subject to allow himself to be divided by consenting to separate itself from its intuitions, beliefs, affects, identifications. It was this Cartesian moment that opened up the possibility of the invention of psychoanalysis and its object, unconscious knowledge––for which scientific discourse has no cure...[Read more]