I’ve spent the year cobbling together a working understanding of Lacanian psychoanalysis. I’ve found this tricky because I still find the Seminars largely unreadable (though it’s improving with time) but I also don’t think you can adequately grasp a thinker through secondary sources. This has left me extremely cautious about how I understand Lacan. For this reason I was reluctant to voice my sense there were fascinating overlaps between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Buddhism because I suspect it reflected my flawed understanding on one or both of them. So I felt vindicated to stumble across this curious essay by Zizek in the mid 2000s in which he explores exactly this overlap:
The only other mode of thinking that fully accepts the incompleteness of reality and non-existence of the big Other is Buddhism … This is why, for Buddhism, thep oint is not to discover one’s ‘true’ self but to accept that there is none, that the ‘Self’ as such is an illusion, an imposture. To put it in more psychoanalytical term, not only should one analyse resistences, but, ultimately, ‘there is really nothing to be analysed; there is no true self waiting in the wings to be released’. Self is a disruptive, false, and, as such, unnecessary metaphor for the process of awareness and knowing: when we awaken to knowing, we realize that all that goes on in us is the flow of ‘thoughts without a thinker’. The impossibility of figuring out who or what we are is inherent, since there is nothing that we ‘really are’ – just a void in the core of our being.
Zizek’s Interrogating the Real pg 333-334.
Perhaps a core difference is that for Lacan there are not refuges, even if the attempt to find them in the figure of the master featured prominently in his thought. There is nothing to be done about the incompleteness we find inside ourselves, or which we discern out there in the world; at least beyond the loosening of the hold of our symptoms which is a precondition for perceiving that incompleteness in the first place. There is no master who can tell us what to do, no hero who can swoop in to save us, because these figures are characterised by the same incompleteness we are unable to stand in ourselves. What we hoped was a limitation of our knowledge about the thing is discovered to be a limitation of the thing itself. What we hoped was a limitation of our knowledge about ourselves is discovered to be a limitation of the self itself; or more specifically a void where we imagined that ‘self’ could be found. But there’s a worldliness to the Lacanian framing of this predicament which can be found in some Buddhist traditions but not others:
What Lacan calls ‘symbolic castration is a deprivation, a gesture of dispossession (the loss of the ultimate and absolute – ‘incestuous’ – object of desire) which is in itself giving, productive, generating, opening and sustaining the space of desire and of meaning. the very frustrating nature of our human existence, the fact that our lives are forever out of joint, marked by a traumatic inbalance, is what propels us, as humans, towards permenent creativity.
Zizek’s Interrogating the Real pg 337-338
Where does this leave us? As Zizek later puts it, “Even if the object of desire is an illusory lure, there is a real in this illusion: the object of desire in its positive nature is vain, but not the place it occupies, the place of the Real, which is why there is more truth in unconditional fidelity to one’s desire than in resigned insight into the vanity of one’s striving” (pg 339). I find this quite an inspiring idea: rather than seeking to cultivate an aloofness from desire, which is doomed to fail, we throw ourself into it without illusions. In doing so we open up the possibility of finding newer, richer, stranger ways of relating to our objects rather than the nature of that relation being determined by the qualities we impute to the object itself.
Mark Carrigan 