Something–Nothing–Den?

Abstract

In the closing paragraphs of “L’Étourdit”, originally a lecture given at the fiftieth anniversary of the Hôpital Henri-Rousselle in Paris in 1972 and published the following year in Scilicet, Lacan once again takes up Democritus’ atomism. By returning to this doctrine, discussed earlier in one of the lectures of the eleventh seminar, Lacan opens not only the question of negativity – of being and nothing, and of how we move from nothing and being, via becoming, to something, that is, the question of ontology and its genesis – but just as much the question of the unconscious and repetition. The repetition of Democritus’ atomism, and the problem concerning the den and the mēden, thus points to a fundamental problem for psychoanalysis.

Insofar as “L’Étourdit” itself marks a turn, serving both as a summary of Lacan’s work up to 1972 and as a point of departure for what follows, it is directed at the questions that had haunted Lacan since he began formulating the four discourses three years earlier. That the question of the subject’s speech – that what is said remains hidden behind what is heard and understood in what is said – and the related question of how discourse can reach beyond itself find their resolution precisely in Democritus’ atomism, or, as Lacan puts it, that “Democritus in fact makes us a gift of the ατομος, of the radical real” (2001 [1973]: 494), should indicate the central, and at the same time ambiguous, position this theory holds in psychoanalysis’ most central formulations of the unconscious and desire.

Cite

APA

Stagnell, A. (2021). Något-intet-den? Res Cogitans, 15(1), 28–42. https://doi.org/10.7146/rc.15132022

@article{stagnell2021,
  author  = {Stagnell, Alexander},
  title   = {Något-intet-den?},
  journal = {Res Cogitans},
  volume  = {15},
  number  = {1},
  pages   = {28--42},
  year    = {2021},
  doi     = {10.7146/rc.15132022}
}