Five definitions related to Non-psychoanalysis

Auto-Position

The highest formal act of the philosophical Decision through which philosophical faith in the real allows the latter to be posited as the Real in an illusory way. It is consequently the real cause of the appearance of philosophy. The auto-position as real of the transcendental Unity proper to philosophy is that which prioritizes the vision-in-One.

The formal trait of auto-position is structural and completely exceeds the presence of this concept in Fichte (Self=Self). Not only the transcendental One—the peak of philosophical knowledge—but whichever concept (cf. Deleuze) is itself posited or is in a state of pairing, doubling, self-survey…Philosophizing is concentrated in the inasmuch and the as [l’en tant que et le comme], in the repetition of a more or less differentiated Same. This trait forms a system with philosophy’s no less structural debt to perception as its point of departure and to transcending it as its essential organon. Object and objectivity, phenomenological self and disinterested and philosophical self, consciousness of object and self-consciousness, transcendent One and transcendental One, all philosophy repeats itself because it copies itself. This is the activity of philosophical faith and this faith itself.

Pure heresy

The vision-in-One supports the specific faith-in-the-real of philosophy, i.e. the philosophical hallucination of the Real. But this support is still nothing but a partial condition which is completed through a different suspension, the unilateralization of the transcendental One, of the divided One of philosophy. This suspension is performed by the transcendental Identity which the vision-in-One clones beginning from the former. Auto-position (its sufficiency, its desire for mastery, its violence) is annihilated while non-philosophical thought renounces any idealism so as to be allowed-to-be determined-in-the-last-instance by the Real. Hence the characterization of non-philosophical a prioris as non-auto(decisional, positional, donative, etc.). Concretely, the vision-in-One dismantles the relationality [pertinence] of any dyad. The object is seen-in-One or dualyzed on a noetic and transcendental side, and on a noematic content on the other which is the reduction of this object to the state of occasion.

---

Other (Non-Autopositional Other, Non-Thetic Transcendence)

Aprioritic structure which is a mode of the force (of) thought and of the non-autopositional Distance which belongs to it. It corresponds to the symptom-material of transcendence but insofar as the latter is not reduced to simple exteriority or distance but adds a “vertical” dimension or height to it.

The philosophical history of the Other is punctuated by three epochs. 1) The Other as belonging to the Same or expulsed by it, as deprived of being and more or less identical to the pure multiple or simulacra (Plato). 2) The Other as real opposition, existence irreducible to logic (Kant). This Other founds the modern concept of the subject as denying its particularity and transcendence towards self. But it is finally re-absorbable in rational autoposition. 3) The Other, in the Judaic and psychoanalytic extraction, characterized by a real transcendence affecting the ideal transcendence of the Logos (Derrida). This Other, proper to the “Judiac turn” and posterior to Nietzsche, marks the “attack” or real excess of alterity over philosophy but always under the ultimate authority of the latter, supposedly valid. Furthermore, the Other being grasped dialectically as alterity under the theoretical angle (Plato) as well as the practical (Fichte), all philosophy of the Other as such is thus carried off in a speculation up to the fiction of an Other of the Other, which psychoanalysis (Lacan) intends to prohibit. On the other hand, when ethics intends to become primary, indeed an-archic (Levinas), the Other is grasped as identity of an absolute Other or infinite distance (of) the “Most-High.” But when this Judaic Other affects philosophy itself, the rigor of this identity is again attenuated and the Other menaced by duplication—this is différance (double, proxy, supplement, vicariousness, etc. cf. Derrida).

It’s advisable to distinguish, against the philosophical amphibology of the Other, between a transcendence of pure exteriority or ex-stasis–non-horizontal in every way, non-autopositional and non-autodecisional position, organon of thought—and the secondary dimension of a real alterity of transcendence whose symptoms are ethics and theology and whose manifestation constitutes the specific organon of a non-ethics and a non-religion.

The experience of alterity implies a non-autopositional transcendence prohibiting both the absolute Levinasian reversal of the hierarchy of Being to the Other as well as the Derridean semi-dialectization of this reversal under the name of différance. This dialectization implies that the Other is only present as a symptom; instead it is performatively given, but in the vision-in-One in-the-last-instance. There is an identity of-the-last-instance of the Other, and this objective structure is not obtained by the reversal of a philosophical hierarchy, but given once and for all without which it can be divided: this is the Other such as it is and not as such [tel quell et non comme tel], with its own action in the force (of) thought.

The vision-in-One is not the vision-in-Other (cf. Lacan: “discourse of the Other”) which would make the Other primary. It no longer presents the One and the Other as a mixture subtending a thought of relation such as is fashionable in psychoanalysis: the Other is not the immanent content of the One, no more than its final transcendent(al) condition.

The existing-subject-Stranger is defined by the force of thought, while alterity is here no longer one of its specifications. Non-philosophy distinguishes, in contrast to philosophy, three concepts entangled in the generality of the “Other”: 1) the immanent Uni-versality of the vision-in-One, which gives the World without-givenness or which is disposable for it, uni-verts to it; 2) non-autopositional Distance or Exteriority; 3) finally, its modality of real alterity or “vertical” transcendence. Alterity is an ethical specification of the existing-Stranger, but is not itself essentially defined by this alterity as philosophy would have it in its dyad of ego and alter-ego. The “Other” or “Alterity” with its divers ancient and recent modes is nothing but a symptom of the existing-Stranger. In its beginnings, non-philosophy itself, under the term of “non-thetic Transcendence (NTT),” does not distinguish between these three layers.

---

Desire (Non-Desiring (of) Self)

Designates, for non-psychoanalysis, the side of reality of jouissance, itself determined by the Real or Enjoying-without-enjoyment [Joui-sans-jouissance]. Deprived of its philosophical essence of desire of self or desire of the desire of the Other, it loses its determining role which philosophy, through Plato, and psychoanalysis, through Lacan, granted it.

Desire, at least when it’s not understood, as in the classical, notably Thomist tradition, as a mask of the will or, in Kant, as having its destination in the latter which would constitute its superior form, is often defined as the essence of man: either under its simple form (Spinoza), or under the reflected or duplicated form of a desire-of-desire (Kojève), or finally under the triadic form mediated by representation (Plato, Girard). In the desire of Hegelian recognition, “the two fall together as three,” because recognition is created in relation to the Idea of man intervening in the third position among animals that are mistrusted, being understood that Hegelian desire is the consequence of life.

In psychoanalysis, desire is itself triadic since it is advisable to discern here, either in Freud, the representation of the affect (desire itself differing from the one as well as the other, representation not being libidinal as such and anxiety, for example, consisting in a non-desired and even undesirable affect); or in Lacan, the object of the cause. The cause of desire is the castration of the “subject;” the object is contingent. Desire “not giving up on its desire” (Lacan) founds the ethics of psychoanalysis.

Verdiglione and Deleuze, in different directions, dissociate desire and castration: the former, because he situates desire and jouissance (whose condition is castration) on opposed sides of the unconscious; the latter, because he rejects law and castration in general, affirms the plenitude of desire indentified with creativity, and subtracts it from the lack to which, on the contrary, he submits all psychoanalysis.

“Non-analytic” desire is “simplified” since it finds its non-Platonic essence in the non-autopositional transcendence of jouissance or affect of the Other in the sense that non-philosophy intends; like it, desire has its condition in the Enjoying or Real-of-the-last-instance. Its transcendence constitutes it in the desire (of) the Other. The way in which Lacan grasps it is a redundant structure; indeed the desire (of) desire testifies not only to his affiliation with Kojève but also to the structure of the philosophico-analytic mixture in general where the philosophy of desire obviously has a privileged place. Desire can only escape from philosophical and psychoanalytic authority if its cause is no longer the Real as lack or castration, but the Enjoying-without-enjoyment insofar as it determines it in-the-last-instance.

In fact, desire finds its identity in jouissance with the syntax which is the property of the Unconscious. This identity defetishizes it and dismantles its relation with repetition, diffèrance, the letter, and the symbolic as it has been advanced by the restrained deconstruction which sets its post-Lacanism in the Idea of a constitutive Alterity and a One insufficient to itself on the mode of an “I desire, thus You Enjoy.” Its setting in relation with its essence of the non-autopositional Other dismantles the circle of desire and liberates thought from phantasmatic desire: enjoyed loss—thus Freud designates it—of the hallucinatory object of satisfaction. A loss which neither grounds an identifying “hysteria” nor a traditional lack of desire (in aphanisis), nor the unconscious insistence on incest as in schizoanalysis. Desire is not desiring (of) self or (of) the desire-of-the-Other by its essence, it is instead a clone enjoying-in-the-Real, even if it is cloned from philosophico-analytic desire.

---

Unconscious (Non-Psychoanalytic Unconscious)

Syntactic dimension of jouissance whose desire is the dimension of reality.

The unconscious designates one of the modes of representation, initially in Descartes a negative mode under which representation comes to be deficient, since, in Leibniz, there is an intimate representation itself as unperceived representation. It can also be interpreted as position of an unconscious absence, in Kant, of a radical or real foundation of representations. Following this path, the unconscious becomes the quasi-synonym of the will (Schopenhauer), at least being simply nature or the idealized object (Schelling), even life (Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze. A transcendental reduction, à la Michel Henry, illuminates the genealogy of the unconscious in its transmission from philosophy to psychoanalysis. In fact, psychoanalysis treats under the name of the unconscious not only one of the local proprieties of the psychic apparatus—the product of repression constituted from representations of things (Freud, Klein)–but also the dimension of the imaginary (Jung) or symbolic (Lacan) Other, nevertheless generally endowed with a “subject” that Lacan estimates as being “nothing but the Cartesian subject.” It is thus legitimate, on behalf of this transcendental solidarity which makes the unconscious appear as the support of an epistemological circle, to consider this notion as the major axis of the philosophico-analytic Complex (or Mixture) or moreover to identify the unconscious as an invention (but not an illusion) of psychoanalysis.

Non-psychoanalysis extricates a radical transcendental unconscious from the result of the Real (the One). The unconscious is the syntactic side of jouissance, which is itself, in non-psychoanalysis, a concept on the same level as the Stranger. But, in opposition to the restrained unconscious or the unconscious determined by the signifier, logic, or the combinatory, the non-psychoanalytic unconscious has nothing to do with the transcendence of “the autonomy of the symbolic”: it is the identity of jouissance and of a unilateral duality. Together they form with Enjoying or the Real such a duality, which does not exclude that other syntactic aspects would be able to overdetermine jouissance, yet only overdetermine it—which excludes every concept of phallic jouissance, or jouissance determined itself by the “signifier of the unconscious.” Finally, the expression “jouissance of the Other” appears redundant since the unconscious is already united with jouissance and the Other. On the other hand, there is no jouissance of the One, the One is Enjoying-without-enjoyment.

To the degree that the signifier, conforming here to the “generalized” tendencies of linguistics, is dual or unilateral, it never represents the subject (of the) unconscious, but jouissance itself. Jouissance is the identity of desire and syntax. That it is non-signifying (of) self specifies the unconscious as non-phallic, as transcendental autonomy without repetition, without Other of the Other (one last form of the Other’s autoposition). The unconscious does not even have the Other for its subject, because what psychoanalysis calls subject is simultaneously transcendent and immanent to the signifier, and because the signifier signifies nothing but the Other—which is a way of calling it pulsional. It is void without forming an ontological void, Other rather than Being, but an Other whose essence resides, in-the-last-instance, in the One. In fact, the unconscious is so estranged from the Cartesian concept of the subject that such a subject of the unconscious would be equivalent to the foreclosure of jouissance. This foreclosure is perhaps materialized, in psychoanalysis, by the concept of sex as signifier of a hole in knowledge and (non-)truth of the signifier.

---

Non-Psychoanalysis

Real and transcendental uni-versalization of psychoanalysis which suspends its theoretical authority rather than its objects (Unconscious, Identification, Symptom, etc.) by relating it to the Real as vision-in-One rather than to a final philosophical definition of the Real. Non-psychoanalysis is the unified theory (not unitary or auto-legitimating) of psychoanalysis and philosophy.

All philosophy is by definition anti-psychoanalytic instead of non-psychoanalytic insofar as it refers to Being or the transcendent Other. Even through its essence it denies (Sartre) or ignores (Leibniz’s “tiny perceptions”) the autonomy or immanent alterity of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis affirms on the contrary, through its essence, the irreducibility of the unconscious to any philosophical operation. This incompatibility does not exclude certain philosophers (Ricouer, Deleuze, Henry, Derrida); even certain analysts (to begin with, Lacan) tried several allergic combinations which would join these two domains, particularly around the notion of a supposed subject (of the unconscious). Lacan notably believed to be able to affirm, after Michel Henry whose research would confirm this genealogy if it was authentically analytic, that the subject of the unconscious is the Cartesian subject.

On its behalf, in a final homage to philosophical authority, psychoanalysis lays claim to its own autonomy, its sufficiency and the critique of philosophy. The double yet always unequal bind of philosophy and psychoanalysis is the Ariadne’s thread leading through the labyrinth of 20th century “continental” thought, and the ground upon which psychoanalysis’ pretentions of autonomy are dismantled. These types of unitary relations inaugurated by the “Judaic turn” of thought at the beginning of the century, only allows imagining—the concept (still) does not exist in this framework–a very restrained form of “non-psychoanalysis,” for example through a simple transference of the non-Euclidean style. The topological generalization, de-biologization and de-psychologization of psychoanalysis, along with the primacy of theory over the system performed by Lacan, are undoubtedly the most fruitful tendencies in the transformation of psychoanalysis (not by its own means but under its own authority and under that of the thought-world) and the preparation of non-psychoanalysis.

Non-philosophy is concretized and exposed in diverse “unified theories” or according-to-the-One in-the-last-instance. In particular, it substitutes a unified theory of psychoanalysis and philosophy in their confused, unstable and violent relations. From this perspective, simultaneously of its own necessity and through that which the Lacanian occasion offers, it reorganizes every analytic problematic. including the Real/Symbolic/Imaginary structure, around the primacy of the Real and of the One but understood as vision-in-One, foreclosed to the order of knowledge and of thought, not simply to the symbolic. Any knot between any circle merely ties these essential instances in a structure or simultaneity, but a series of clonings articulates the Real and the thought-world. For example, if one is given Lacan-thought as simple material, it is necessary, on the one hand, to treat the philosophico-analytic complex as the Imaginary object of non-psychoanalysis; the symbolic and in general all structures of the Unconscious and the Other as occasion and symptom of the transcendental and aprioritic instances of a non-analytic “subject” whose force (of) thought gives the universal matrix. From this point of view, these are all analytic instances which are transformed and displaced: the Unconscious itself, the Other, Object, Symptom, Identification, Desire, Jouissance, etc. On the other hand, the structural and “Borromean” organization of these instances, forcibly unitary, circular and knotted, finally yields to a cloning process. The Real clones non-analytic instances beginning from the philosophico-analytic given.

Unified theory thus radically differs from the syntheses described, which it considers as mixtures that, in their entirety, together constitute the Imaginary or philosophico-analytic symptom. Hence the dyads of the subject and the object, of the conscious and the unconscious, the signifier and the signified, metaphor and metonymy in their pre-pragmatic use in a large number of Lacanian analysts or several “Derridanalysts.”

The Real is given prior to the Imaginary or the transcendental appearance of the philosophico-analytic, what unified theory will call, in this particular case, Enjoying, or Enjoying-without-enjoyment. Enjoying [Joui] is distinguished from enjoyment [jouissance] which is furthermore so poorly defined that a number of contemporary analysts gladly identify it with the unconscious. The Real—contrary to Lacan’s lack-oriented ontology—adequate, with the exclusion of any other, to the Freudian discovery—never lacks even though it is of itself radically foreclosed.

Radical jouissance is distinguished completely from “Jouissance,” which the philosophico-analytic mixture characterizes as the return of the repressed, the subversion of the subject, jouissance of the Other, phallic jouissance, indeed jouissance of being or the open, proliferations of disseminated signifiers where the One-experience of Enjoying is completely lost in “La-Jouissance.” Non-psychoanalysis admits jouissance as an analogue of the Stranger, organon of Enjoying as cause-of-the-last-instance of the Unconscious. This last is thus a jouissance neither connected to a mixture nor a symptom (which marks a decisive rupture with psychiatry). With this title, we will speak of the non-signifying Unconscious (of) self, never signifying or coming to overdetermine jouissance.

The fundamental tendencies of this lack-oriented ontology in Lacan—rather than those of subtractive ontology—constitute the privileged, but not unique, material submitted to non-psychoanalysis. Because it is not a question of destroying psychoanalysis but of transforming it into an object-material and occasion of a different, more rigorous and more universal knowledge. Non-psychoanalysis intends to put an end to the confused conflict between philosophy and psychoanalysis; by universalizing the latter under conditions which are no longer philosophical and scientific (mathematical), but in-One-in-the-last-instance; by making theoretical and pragmatic activity prevail over the system; finally, by establishing the theory of a non-analytic subject. Rather than the discourse of the Other, non-psychoanalysis is the discourse of the Stranger-of-the-last-instance, of man as existing-Stranger.