The awkwardness of prematurity: whether Hegel enjoys

Abstract

In The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious, Lacan poses a capital question to his readers: Hegel, in the famous Lord–bondsman dialectic, would have ignored the premature condition of the human being, delegating to the Cunning of Reason the task of placing the servant in his rightful place, in the place of the lord. Thus, the Hegelian dialectic is a dialectic guided by a rationality intrinsic to the real, which manifests itself in the figures that the spirit assumes on its way to self-realization. For Lacan, it would seem that this is not exactly the case. Indeed, at the basis of his reinterpretation of the dialectic in question would be the real of jouissance, of that jouissance lost ab origine because of the biological prematurity that distinguishes man. In a sense, the real in Hegel is full, internally rational, tending toward completeness; in Lacan, on the contrary, it is punctured. The hole in the real of biology, according to Lacan, is made up for by language which, precisely because it comes from the Other, stamps its mark forever on the subject's acting in relation to the other. In our view, for Lacan it is not the Cunning of Reason that is the real protagonist of the intersubjective dialectic but symbolic castration.