The unconscious is a modern experience

Dialogues between Lacan, Foucault and Agamben

Abstract

In the following paper we will make an articulation between Lacan, Foucault and Agamben’s research on the links between the subject, knowledge and truth in modernity. To do so, we will first take the concept of the subject of science from Lacan’s work. According to Lacan,
the subject of the unconscious is the subject of science, for it could not have arisen without the birth of modern  science and its philosophical correlative, the Cartesian cogito. Foucault, for his part, will, in the 1980s, carry out a history of the relations between the subject and truth. In this context, he will present his hypothesis of the Cartesian moment as an index of the changes in the production of subjectivities. Finally, Agamben will also work with modern science and the Cartesian cogito to think of the  unconscious as a modern experience, the place where truth will be recovered.