The socio-philosophical theory by Jacques Lacan as a metacriticism of the world outlook concept

Zakharov Aleksandr Dmitrievich ORCID: 0000-0003-4422-4797 Postgraduate Student, Faculty of Social Sciences and Mass Communications, Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation 125167, Russia, Moscow region, Moscow, 49/2 Leningradsky Ave. zaharofff1997@gmail.com Other publications by this author

Introduction

Jacques Marie Emile Lacan is undoubtedly one of the main figures of the second half of the XX century, not only for psychiatry and psychoanalysis, within which he created and lived, but also for world culture as a whole. This is especially true of philosophical thought, since the observations, as well as the suggestions and conclusions of the French thinker, who all his life disavowed philosophy and its so-called discourse of the master, allegedly exclusively forcibly instructing and claiming the primacy of omniscience, still lie in the plane of aesthetics, ethics, axiology, ontology, epistemology, praxiology, and even philosophical anthropology. This article will partially consider all these philosophical disciplines, without at least a brief mention it will be impossible to reveal the theory of Jacques Lacan as a metacritic of the concept of worldview.

It is worth noting that Lacan's ambiguous, sometimes confused, eccentric statements, overflowing with irony, mathematicisms, complex logical constructions and references to ancient, medieval and modern culture, generate disputes and doubts to this day, the thinker has many followers and opponents. For the same reason, it is difficult to use his lecture statements-slogans recorded and published by some of his chosen students, which complicates quoting the original source, if one can say so about recordings by ear. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that he influenced the development of psychology and psychoanalysis, semiotics, cognitive science, of course, and philosophical thought (in particular, structuralism and poststructuralism, ontological and aesthetic issues), somehow gave impetus to the development of the problems of feminism, cognitive science and trans-, posthumanism.

It can be said that Lacan covered a huge amount of information and provided versatile critical remarks about the integrity of the personality and the possibility of building a worldview, at the same time, a scientific and humanitarian basis for the development of extremely general socio-philosophical concepts that meet the needs of the time and reflect them in a versatile way, which at the same time does not remain project-prognostic or exclusively theoretical, which characteristic of social philosophy. It is the practical orientation and energy in the formulations of Jacques Lacan's philosophical system mediated by psychoanalysis that attracts the keen interest of researchers decades after the author's death. His approach to man, although based on the familiar themes of the inner world of man, the key stages of his development, interaction with individuals in the process of socialization, cultural and economic conditions of life, but puts them literally upside down, allows you to approach familiar problems from another, original side.

Linguistics in Psychoanalysis

Jacques Lacan was sensitive to the moment of the emergence of psychoanalysis and the first psychoanalytic works of Freud. In them, the Austrian psychologist re-raised the forgotten topics of dream interpretation, previously carried out in an unscientific manner exclusively by mystics, shamans, fools and soothsayers; reservations and everything that can be connected with them directly or indirectly; free associations, through which the patient could tell much more than in a meaningful dialogue. The naked eye can see Freud's special attention to words, word formation and its ambiguous mechanisms when it comes to everyday life. Interpretation and interpretation in Freudian psychoanalysis play a crucial role, always being in incompleteness and incompleteness. Fragmentation and openness of interpretation lead to its inexhaustibility and multiplicity. Freud said that in any case, another interpretation is possible. Any sane person with classical scientific evidence–based thinking may have a question about the validity of multiple variations of interpretations and interpretations, but there is an answer in analytical discourse - the constant restructuring of personality does not make it possible to look at a person as a stable system, and the famous Delphic inscription "know yourself" says that a person does not know and he can't even know himself completely. How to exhaust the spiritual life? Is it possible to put a limit to the constantly rearranging symbolic matrix?^{[1, p.151]}

This incompleteness, openness, and impossibility of totalizing the symbolic, on the one hand, clarifies Freud's careful avoidance of the formalization of the psychoanalytic system, and in general such words as "system" and "worldview" in relation to psychoanalysis. Following him, Lacan also subtly escapes from paranoid knowledge, from the science that, even at the beginning of the XXI century, will recklessly strive for narcissistic foundations of completeness, integrity, autonomy. And yet, it is impossible not to apply the resourcefulness and skeptical squeamishness of psychoanalysis to wholeness when considering worldview issues, which strongly depends on subjective and intersubjective factors.

In addition, Jacques Lacan very often appealed to the concepts of sign, symbol, metaphor and metonymy, signifier and signified, which he borrowed from structural linguistics from Ferdinand De Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss and Roman Jacobson, although he significantly revised them within the framework of his theory. Doctor of Philosophy M. D. Kuparashvili, paying attention to the linguistic side of Lacanian creativity, writes that taking into account the high degree of metaphoricity of the language of psychoanalysis not only explained the ambiguity of the patient's speech, but made obvious the specifics of the ambiguity of the symbol and the language as a whole. Hence the great interest of J. Lacan's approach to verbal activity and mediation of the unconscious. In this context , the structural psychoanalysis of J. Lacan explores the connection of symbolic systems with linguistic practices that form the social code of the epoch, beyond which the individual is not given.^{[2, p.46]}

In order to approach the topic of the section comprehensively and consistently, first of all it is worth turning to subjectivity within the framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the so-called analytical discourse. For Lacan, the subject is, first of all, the subject of the unconscious, who is more himself the less he thinks and talks more. For him, the subject is no longer a thinking subject, but one who is called not to say everything in order to make him talk nonsense. Language is filled with reason to a greater extent than it seems ^{[3, p. 114]}, and we owe this discovery to Sigmund Freud with his "Interpretation of Dreams" and "Psychopathology of Everyday Life". Lacan believed that language is just that truly transcendent, which has been sought for so long in the framework of philosophical discourse as an object of wisdom and in which people, unhappy speaking beings, have been for a long time. Psychoanalysis has made public the fact that there is knowledge that does not know about itself, knowledge, the carrier of which is the signifier as such.^{[3, p.114]}

A subject is a subject only within the framework of signifiers explained by one through the other. Accordingly, pleasure, one of the cornerstones of the psychoanalytic approach, one of the most important principles of the organization of human life alone with oneself and in society, is evoked in analytical discourse by the signifier, since pleasure exists for the subject figuratively, within the framework of words and can be formulated exclusively verbally.  At the same time, being the boundary of pleasure, the signifier is what interrupts it.^{[3, p.32]} Where they speak, they always enjoy. And they don't necessarily know. Freud's cogito "I think" belongs to the unconscious... besides, as Lacan will emphasize more than once, Freud's cogito is his desidero, and his formula is: I think, so I wish. In other words, a thought is always a thought–desire.^{[1, p.8]} The gaping, which in a speaking being, whose pleasure is a dimension of the body where the tale lives, is inscribed in this pleasure initially, is precisely what Freud discovers.^{[3, p.137]}

Jacques Lacan sees man as an animal who discovers the gift of speech in himself and, dwelling in the signifier, turns out to be his subject.^{[3, p.105]} With such a definition, the question arises by itself, does being exist otherwise than inside the utterance? The thinker answers the question in the format of assumption-reflection: there is no utterance that does not come from being ... the unconscious, on the contrary, always comes from utterance.^{[3, p.120]}

The signifier, a formal sign or symbol of the subject, addressed to the object and referring to it, in analytical discourse is connected with the signified, the fact of the Real, but it is connected loosely, fantasmatically, since it is not identical to what it allegedly refers to – the referent. It is especially interesting in this context that Lacan emphasizes the unimportance of the distinction between the imaginary or real condition of the signifier's appearance, because in any case it is perceived as something that exists. At the level of difference, the signifier/signified relation of the signified to what is present in this difference as a necessary third, i.e. to the referent, consists, in fact, in the fact that the signified misses it.^{[3, p.27]} In this Lacan significantly departs from the linguistic understanding of terms in favor of a more insightful psychologism. A. R. Kozharinova shrewdly notes that, from the point of view of J. Lacan, the approach to the analysis of society and culture through the study of speech is not productive, since speech is the result of the work not only of consciousness, but also of the Freudian unconscious, which does not possess the substantiality. Only an approach to the consideration of communication through a structural analysis of discourse, which is an intersubjective concept, can help to analyze social connections and identify the fundamental foundations of socio-cultural organization.^{[4, p.158]}

So, according to Jacques Lacan, psychoanalysis has made public the fact that there is knowledge that does not know about itself, knowledge, the carrier of which is the signifier as such. Of course, philosophers of the past, including the Pythagoreans with their Eros and Psyche, Plato with his knowledge-recollection, Leibniz and his lower form of mental activity comparable to the ocean of dark perceptions, Schopenhauer and the will as governing the whole world, full of its own wisdom, Background, can also tell about the knowledge that does not know about itself and the unconscious. Hartmann, who, in fact, supplemented Schopenhauer's theory by replacing the will with the unconscious, as well as many other researchers from ancient times to the present day. However, it was Freud and Lacan who drew particular attention to the linguistic side of the unconscious, which is noted in the current section of the article. Nevertheless, Jacques Lacan's interest and discoveries are not limited to the verbal question, his views on the conscious and unconscious also have philosophical value and uniqueness.

Knowledge, consciousness and the unconscious in people's lives

The French psychoanalyst in his work involuntarily compares the ways of direct use of words in speech and the construction of mental constructions from one word to another, as if repeating the path of Kant's division of judgments into analytical and synthetic. In Kant's terms and within the framework of Jacques Lacan's theory, the unconscious is, as it were, a source of analytical judgments, on the basis of which a person builds synthetic thoughts, actions, impressions, So Lacan comes to the well–known conclusion for the philosophical tradition that, acting, a person knows much more than he can think. What is such spontaneous knowledge in analytical discourse? What is knowledge in psychoanalysis?

Knowledge is primarily the enjoyment of the practical use of information, which is therefore as difficult to obtain as to put into use. It is easy to see that by knowledge is meant something detached from materialistic possession, something active and authentic, not amenable to forgery, something unconscious, that is, "being, which, speaking, enjoys, and ... does not want to know anything more. Moreover, he does not want to know anything at all."^{[3, p.126]}

It is obvious that knowledge for Lacan is primary with respect to any thought and any thought, it completely coincides with desire, while it is not surprising to see on his part a consistent assumption that a computer can think without gaining knowledge. Lacan remains skeptical about the participation of artificial intelligence in people 's lives and assigns it a lower place in the hierarchy relative to the human subject and asks: "But in what sense can we say that a computer knows, if knowledge is based on the fact that the pleasure of using it and the pleasure of finding it coincide?" ^{[3, p.115]}

The subject within the framework of this conceptual approach, of course, may know something, but he does not know everything, even "not everything", which can be distinguished as a separate fundamental term in analytical discourse. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, Another person who does not know anything within the framework of the already mentioned "not everything", only seems to be the desired object, and thus fulfills his function in the structure of personality, serves as the object on which the subject imposes the burden of knowledge, his own desire, the purpose of all motives and the need for an interlocutor, in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Researcher-philosopher L. V. Velikanova in one of his works once again notes within the framework of the Lacanian theory that an analytical act – speaking, in which the truth slips, leaving traces, is possible only in the presence of Another.^{[5, p.9]} D. K. Shcherbachev echoes Lacan in the question of the sovereignty of the individual, its isolation from society, and believes that I have no sovereignty: the image of myself/relations with myself /sovereignty, according to the concept of the mirror stage, is secondary and derived from relations with Another. The demand addressed to the Other is the more fiercely the more promising the expectation was–the more fervent was the belief that it was this Other who possessed the desired object a. This fascination with Others is always too radical, irrational. It is deeper than thought, it is already there, where thoughts are just to be born: strictly speaking, thought unfolds in the space that it will prepare for it.^{[6, pp. 146, 148]} At the same time, within the framework of the consideration of the modern actual context of the relationship between the subject and the Other, A.D. Karachintsev, with reference to the Lacanian philosopher-psychoanalyst S. Zizek, notes that the difference between consumption and interpersonal relations in modern society is increasingly balanced: the very nature of the advertising message, referring not to the useful properties of the product, and to the very fact of the prestige of its ownership, shows that here in the first place is precisely the desire of Another. Similarly, when we turn to the merits of a particular person, we simultaneously make him the object of Another's desire, asserting the "status" of the nature of the communicative act in the symbolic system.^{[7, p.28]}

Thus, in the context of purposeful endowment of certain properties of a certain figurative representation of Another, the most important mysterious ideological questions and problems related to the categories of birth, life, death, eternity, origin are raised. 

Being, reality and fantasy

It is not surprising that the Self that is doomed to remember, to be aware in reality, and not to know firmly and clearly, turns out to be distracted, frightened. The skeptical Self is constantly confronted with the fact of the ephemerality of the fundamental oppositions external/internal, everywhere/nowhere, own/improper, own/alien. For Lacan, this focus turns out to be between the orders of the Symbolic (abstract), the Imaginary (perceived and constructed by the senses) and the Real (something totally external, extremely random and discarded from perception).  Lacan's explanation of fear is radically different from most other theories: it is not caused by lack, loss or uncertainty, it is also not the fear of losing something (a solid foundation, one's own fulcrum, etc.), on the contrary, fear is the fear of getting something too much, the fear of the object's presence too close. With fear, it is the loss that is lost – the loss that allows you to deal with an understandable reality.^{[8, p. 20]} It can be concluded that a person is not so much initially inferior for himself, as it was described by Alfred Adler, but responds with inferiority to the threat of the Real, because he is afraid to become full-fledged, original, if we return to symbolic images, then not yet born or already dead. D. K. Shcherbachev, a researcher of ethical issues of Lacanian theory, asks an obvious question for analytical discourse: what ethical requirement can be made for a crippled at birth and even before birth, an absurd, incomplete and radically antinomic being?^{[6, p.143]}

Lacan called the complex of the subject's responses to the real a syntome, and actively advocated the inviolability of such a system as forming a personality and its ability to survive in society, adaptability as such. There is an obvious split between being and thought for analytical discourse, which can disappear if a person resorts to metaphor as an oversaturation of something with meaning or loses the symbolic as a response to the threat of the Real.

The revolutionary reorganization of two realities, dreamlike and waking, imagined and experienced directly, leads to their deconstruction, to their interpenetration and to a new uneven unbalanced non-dialectical opposition of reality and the real. To reality can be attributed the psychic reality, that is, the subject and his subjective world, and to the real – the material world, which exists parallel to man and invades the subjective world.

What was said earlier about being suggests that it is possible to completely abandon any predicate and say, for example, a person is — without specifying what exactly. Jacques Lacan said the following about this: "Being — being claiming to be absolute is just a crack, a fracture, a gap in being endowed with sex, being interested in pleasure."^{[3, p.17]} This quote confirms the gap between the subject and being as absolute, while it is especially interesting that Lacan calls gender and pleasure subjective qualities, that is, essentially imaginary. But it's not that simple. Of course, it turns out that, within the framework of analytical discourse, the subjective mental world is more important and more important than the objective and bodily for both the subject and life in society, but Jacques Lacan had a different opinion on this matter, which will be revealed later in the article.

Physicality in Analytical Discourse

The French master psychoanalyst really believed and argued that there is no pre-discursive reality, if only because under any category denoting a community of people, in the end there are signifiers — men, women, children, the French, humanity. If we take the sign of mental life as the basis of the division, then within the framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is articulated identically in all of them. Perhaps it is necessary to dwell a little more on the issue of gender, since it is important in the context of the work of Jacques Lacan and the consequences of this work for global human rights movements.

Man and woman are just words that function as signifiers and therefore refer to each other. Of course, Jacques Lacan does not deny the traces of sex in the existence of the body, but for him the pleasure of the body is above the sexual characteristics, and it depends on the symbolic relationship to the Other.

However, Lacan pays special attention to the woman within the framework of his theory. Special attention, which excludes "woman" from analytical discourse as conceptually non-existent, since her predominantly female maternal, social, behavioral characteristics are still insufficiently well and accurately explained and studied, and her pleasure allegedly cannot be accurately identified, localized, even in pleasure a woman is "not all", not everything in her lends itself symbolic explanation and designation. It is this unsymbolizable pleasure that is exclusively in the aesthetic dimension of direct vague experience, which unites philosophers and mystical theologians with women. Lacan said this at the 21st seminar: "This is, for example, Angelus Silesius: to identify one's own contemplative gaze with the gaze of God looking at him — what is it but a sign of perverted pleasure?"^{[3, p. 90]}

In such an inexplicable form of pleasure, the French psychoanalyst sees the way to the Heideggerian ex-system, to out-being, that is, to one of the immediate phenomena of Another (or Real), which is often equated with the divine. If on the basis of such pleasure people have built and are building ideological systems, then, from the point of view of analytical discourse, this natural pleasure, which is not guaranteed and not promised even to women as "not to everyone", cannot be an acceptable maxim. It seems that such an ex-system is very accessible and can be called unconscious, since it occurs without understanding and signification, but one has only to recall Lacan's famous phrase "the unconscious is structured like a language", then thoughts about the ease of achieving existential ideals become completely groundless.

Even if one can be guided exclusively by the verbal symbolized categories in the ultimate worldview issues, it turns out that psychoanalysis makes it possible to use the conscious and unconscious motives of a person, allowing one to pay attention to what is available and permissible within the law of Another (which, in addition to internal moral laws, also includes legal laws) and dismissing the inaccessible.

Ethics and Politics as ways of expressing a worldview in action

The Belgian scientist Schrance conducted an interesting study of social issues within the framework of the theory of Jacques Lacan. Using Lacan's thought experiments as an example, he came to the conclusion that a human group is not made up on a common basis. The characteristic is retrospectively determined by the group through the approval of the subject. The collective is based on the reciprocity of differences. Thus, Lacan formalizes the relationship between the individual and the collective. In this formalization, the individual is a subject and in this form also a function within the logical process of differentiation. However, through anticipating his truth, the subject can turn against this collective and avoid being captured by the relationship.^{[9, p. 8]}

Psychoanalyst T. P. Osipova subtly grasped the essence of the ethics of psychoanalysis, conceptually immune to changes in fashionable approaches or socio-philosophical conjuncture. In her opinion, psychoanalysis may seem to be a marginal practice, socially immoral and even contrary to all morality, if we consider it only as a method that opens access to the unconscious, full of sexual and aggressive drives, where there is a constant counteraction of Eros and Thanatos, etc. But this is only at first glance, because the ethics of psychoanalysis, although contradictory, finds the line between the impossibility of following the laws and the original, sewn into the structure of the psyche, the need to follow them. That is, ethics is on the other side of both morality and permissiveness. Lacan's idea is not to give up your desire. The only possible ethics in psychoanalysis is following what is true. Psychoanalytic ethics, the soul of psychoanalysis, is born in the consciousness of such a position in relation to another, which protects his freedom and supports the thirst for truth, since only in this way can the desire of the subject be revealed. It is realized in the possibility for the free choice of the human position in relation to the phenomena inside and outside of oneself.^{[10, pp.60,61,76]}

D. K. Shcherbachev concludes that in the psychoanalytic philosophical approach, ethics is built around trust. It arises involuntarily: because of the very difference between the little other and the Other, because Desire is always the Desire of Desire, the Desire of Another. In a moment of trust, it seems that the initial gap that precedes history, if not overcome, then at least it can be forgotten for a while: an embrace, a sign of trust is a literal metaphor for removing the gap.^{[6, p.149]}

English and German researchers Paul and Svindzhdau argue that the political means an indelible void or "absence" at the heart of any established order. While politics means the completeness/integrity of society, taking into account everyone and everything, the political means a completely random basis on which this calculation is made-accounting.^{[11, p.4]}

American scientists Sheldon and Hook, referring to the late Lacan, call practice in human life a coordinated human action that is allowed to relate to the real through the symbolic, thereby emphasizing the practical reorientation of his psychoanalytic theory relative to the original clinical-therapeutic modality.^{[12, p.236]}

Of course, modern discourse dictates the primacy of the social and environmental in relation to any issue, including influencing the formation of a worldview. In relation to the practical side of the application of analytical discourse in modern science, Sheldon and Hook give examples of the correlation of racism, sexism, transphobia and new socio-existential gender experiences of a modern subject with the category of super-pleasure jouissance, which is a partial invasion of the Real into the Symbolic, that is, something uncontrollable, but inherent in all people. Lacanian psychoanalysis has significantly enriched these areas of scientific interest, since each of the issues described in the last sentence now refers to its socio-unconscious nature of origin and existence, completely taking away the rights from the usual purely biological or ethical points of view.^{[12, pp.237-239]}

Conclusion

Summing up, I would like to say that the metacritic of the concept of worldview in the context of Lacan's work boils down to a special ethics of the social act, fashionable for structuralism and poststructuralism, contemporary to the French author. Without an active outward orientation, also conditioned by the inherent extimity of each person, that is, the cultural and external experiential conditioning of the core of the human personality, no existence in society, no socialization and, accordingly, no society as a set of acting agents as a whole is impossible. K. S. Sharov, with the general controversy of the use of the term "extimity" and the content of its the articles as a whole, appropriately and accurately cites Jacques Lacan and his student Jacques Allen Miller, who understand by ecstasy the external unconscious, the unconscious outside, the intersubjective structure reflecting intimate experiences.^{[13, p.140]} Of course, here one can try to see the copying of the category of the collective unconscious by Carl Gustav Jung, but in Jung's theory there is not enough individual embeddedness of public knowledge in the structure of a person's personality, this unconscious exists as if outside of time and space, which is too idealistic for the XX century. Based on Lacan's critical remarks about the integrity of the individual and the possibility of a holistic perception of the world, it becomes possible to look at the worldview as a decentralized structure that can still be formed, albeit unstable, within the framework of the infinitely reorganizing social life of modern man.