I hope the following post addresses some of the concerns/questions raised over my first post. It should also further display how Scourge and I are speaking of similar things in this thread, albeit in a different fashion and level of concern.
Below is Lacan's "L Schema". I generally dislike Lacan (and am weary of much of psychoanalysis, despite its important findings) but his schema (when utilized as a starting point for interpretive speculation
, as a strict Lacanian reading is limited) presents an interestingly organized formulation of many concepts found in (mostly continental) philosophy, from Kant to the present:
(Scanned from Lacan's
Ecrits)
The "
(Es) S" is the Freudian Subject, Lacan's "divided subject", what they claim to be constituted by the dialectical interplay of consciousness and unconsciousness. (Note: this "subject" is a problem for those who take Heidegger's analytic of Dasein seriously; Da-sein is beyond subjectivity)
The "
(ego) a" is the Freudian ego, the mediator of the id and the superego, what engages the external world. In my discussions with Professor Ned Lukacher, he recommended that a dashed line be drawn between the subject and the ego to signal their intrinsic relation (the schema seems to suggest separation)
The "
other" (
objet petit a) for Lacan is distinct from the many other uses of the term (including Derrida's interpretation and those found in the social sciences and humanities) and how I tend to employ it. Lacan's is bound with notions of desire, the imaginary, and is heavily Freudian. For our purposes, it is probably not too fatal to think of it in the Derridean sense
. Lukacher suggests Kantian
appearance, which I find very helpful (as shown in my first post).
The
Other ("big Other") or "the Real" is what is radically other, resists identification and lies outside the imaginary. Lukacher refers to it as "radical non-knowledge". This is the most difficult to discuss and come to terms with, and its meaning varies dramatically (for example, in psychoanalysis it is thought of as related to the superego, the inner-representation of "authority", "the they/one", "God", etc.). As Scourge rightly said, and as the direction of the arrow on the schema indicates, the ego/subject has some degree of "awareness" of the Other but lacks "knowledge" of it. This leads to a discussion of what we mean by knowledge and awareness (and
apprehension and
comprehension [intuition, concept]), but you'll forgive me if I leave that aside for now and assume the general thrust is understood to some degree; "Subjectivity doesn't touch the Real, but the signifying network" (Lukacher). In other (Kantian) words, we are barred access to the noumenal, without correspondence between appearances, what we bring to language/conceptualization, and things-in-themselves (the Real).
Despite being a crude gloss, I hope this post demonstrates the subtle ground here, and reveals the "self-defeating" objections (that attempt the reduction, absurdly, to P and ~P) as gamesmen's parlor tricks that lack "philosophical" substance.