Hegel’s relation to Lacan’s four discourses has been analyzed in depth elsewhere [1] but I don’t recall anyone identifying the obvious smoking gun at the beginning of The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807): Hegel sets out for his spiritual adventure by openly declaring his criticism of the Master’s discourse and the University discourse for immanent spiritual reasons. I ironically used the phrase ‘spiritual adventure’ to evoke Hegel’s ambivalence between the hysteric’s discourse and the analytic discourse. Just read the first paragraph of his Introduction:

It is a natural assumption that in philosophy, before we start to deal with its proper subject-matter, viz. the actual cognition of what truly is, one must first of all come to an understanding about cognition, which is regarded either as the instrument to get hold of the Absolute, or as the medium through which one discovers it. (§73)

Here Hegel discerns two particular discourses:

1) The one in which cognition is an instrument: This is the Master’s discourse where S₂ serves S₁ as its instrument.

2) The one in which cognition is the medium. This is the University discourse where S₂ becomes the outlet of speech as its medium.

Then he identifies the uneasiness that emerges from the realization that both of these discourses are based on the imposture of the signifier, S₁ in the first, S₂ in the second. For Hegel this uneasiness has a definite aim:

This feeling of uneasiness is surely bound to be transformed into the conviction that the whole project of securing for consciousness through cognition what exists in itself is absurd, and that there is a boundary between cognition and the Absolute that completely separates them. (§73)

Hegel’s conviction about this subjective-objective barrier is his version of the barred subject $, which announces the reader’s entrance to the hysteric’s discourse. Then he says this barrier exists because both the instrument and the medium distort the truth:

1) The instrument distorts the truth because objet petit a is positioned as the product of the knowledge-instrument in the Master’s discourse. In this case, desire is directed to serve the Master.

2) The medium distorts the truth because objet petit a is positioned as secondary and rendered subordinate to the judgments and evaluations of the knowledge-in-power of the University discourse. In this case, desire is subjugated to the existing pseudo-public knowledge which secretly continue to serve its private Master.

According to Hegel, the uneasiness about the signifying imposture brings about a fear of falling into error. This fear is the essential neurotic factor that hystericizes the subject. But the truth is that being afraid of encountering an error has to presuppose the existence of that error in the world to be able to retain its object of fear. Hegel concludes that “what calls itself fear of error reveals itself rather as fear of the truth”. This feared truth is the objet petit a as the repressed truth of the hysteric’s discourse.

As hystericization progresses, the fear of truth (disguised as a fear of error) dissolves into anxiety by losing the last shaky ground offered by its object of fear. Anxiety is said to be without an object and thereby held responsible for a despair deeper and worse than fear, but this appearance is only due to the repression of the object of anxiety. Even though it is already lost, the object of anxiety still (encore) subsists, it’s discernible and interpretable in the symptoms which mark the returns of the repressed; it is a special object that emerges as being lost. As Lacan contended, this object of anxiety is the famous objet petit a. One shifts from the hysteric’s discourse into the analytic discourse by raising the objet petit a from the repressed position to the agential position. This is the famous determinate negation. The analytic discourse is able to shift paradigms by producing new Master-Signifiers.

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan (2014) by Slavoj Žižek and “Hegel as the Other Side of Psychoanalysis” by Mladen Dolar in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII Series: SIC 6 (2006).