Denaturalizing Nature, Dehumanizing Humanity: Lacan, iek, and the Metaphysics of Psychoana-

lysis1

Joseph Carew, McGill University, 2012

Psychoanalysis presents us with much more than a therapeutic model that stands in strict opposition to

current mainstream psychiatry. Already during its beginnings in Freud, we see that psychoanalysis was

unable to limit its aspirations to clinical success but, from the very outset, regarded itself as investigat-

ing the status of the self and its relationship to the natural and social world. 2 This self-perception, how-

ever, drastically changed in the aftermath of its reception, especially in North America and Great Bri-

tain, where an overemphasis upon its medical applications quickly took over, largely leaving its specu-

lative element neglected or outright denied, which, in turn, contributed to the dismissal of psychoana-

lysis as lacking empirical evidence while other psychotherapeutic methods seemed, and continue to

seem, to displace completely psychoanalysis in this regard. However, much work has been done re-

cently to remind us just how relevant psychoanalysis remains for fields such as political theory and

gender and religious studies. Nevertheless, psychoanalysis at its inception never understood itself as a

tool for merely analyzing subjective or objective features of identity; rather it also proclaimed nothing

else than to reveal something radically new concerning the relationship between nature and culture. 3

Perhaps more than any other representatives of the psychoanalytical tradition, it is Jacques Lacan and

his disciple, Slavoj iek, who illuminate most clearly the metaphysical import of its underlying claims

about the human subject and its ontogenesis.

1
In this paper, I take up and elaborate upon certain strands of argument that I have already developed in The Grundlogik
of German Idealism: The Ambiguity of the Hegel-Schelling Relationship in iek, International Journal of iek
Studies (Vol 5, No 1, 2011), but this time with a completely different intent and aim. I would also like to thank Ryan
Mullins for his useful comments in improving the following text.
2
As early as 1873, in a letter to Fluss, Freud indicates his reason for choosing medicine over law was not of a practical
nature but driven by a drive for speculative knowledge: I will examine the millennia-old documents of nature, perhaps
personally eavesdrop on its eternal lawsuit, and share my winnings with everyone willing to learn. Taken from Peter
Gay, Freud: A Life for Out Time (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), p. 24
3
Although notions of the unconscious were plentiful in the 19th-century, both within philosophy and psychology, as Freud
worked his way towards the invention of psychoanalysis Freud's own addition of the concepts of repression, resistance,
and later the death-drive as crucial to understanding not only pathological but also normal mental life, were radically
unique, even if precursors to them can be find.
 Lacan and the irreducibility of the Symbolic

Inspired by the work of Levi-Strauss, who argued that [s]tructural linguistics will certainly

play the same renovating role with respect to the social sciences that nuclear physics, for example, has

played for the physical sciences,4 Lacanian psychoanalysis finds its origins in the application of Saus-

sure's structuralism to psychoanalysis, accomplishing this feat largely by a retour to Freud. What Lacan

finds so intriguing is that, despite Freud's attempts to ground the unconscious within the dynamics of

instinctual energy,5 his examples themselves gravitate around a purely structural analysis of images and

words. Lacan's fundamental thesis is that, retroactively, we can see that Freud already had an implicit

idea of the importance of symbolic formations for understanding the unconscious but simply lacked the

appropriate methodology for its articulation. Consequently, Lacan argues that if we read Freud against

Freud, structural linguistics can give psychoanalysis the scientific rigor that it needs by systematizing

the logic of the unconscious, a claim at the heart of the (in)famous Lacanian dictum, the unconscious

is structured like a language. Linked to this linguistic turn are his critiques of ego-psychology and

post-Freudian attempts to reduce the unconscious to biology, for Lacanian psychoanalysis' emphasis on

the self-articulating system of language displaces the individual and its organic constitution in terms of

the nature of psychic reality. The unconscious is, strictly speaking, an irreducibly symbolic phenomen-

on: it emerges contemporaneously with the advent of language in the split between the subject of enun-

ciation and the enunciating subject. It has little to do with underlying personality structures which de-

termine how the ego relates to the external world or libidinal energetics.

Drawing upon the implications of its structuralist metapsychology, many critics of Lacanian

psychoanalysis are wont to denounce its rampant idealism. However, such a move is too quick. Real-

4
Lvi-Strauss, Structural analysis in linguistics and in anthropology, in Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson
and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), p. 33.
5
As Richard Boothby points out, even in Freud's earliest attempts at a metapsychology in A Project for a Scientific
Psychology which Freud refers to as a psychology for neurologists there is an ambiguity between the purely
quantitative system of energy in neurons and their relationship to lived experiences, which taken on a certain autonomy
in his descriptions. See Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 72-78.
Though Freud does abandon this endeavour, he still holds out hope for its eventual possibility, a hope that often goes
against his own psychoanalytical theorical achievements.
izing that the subject cannot occur within an ontological vacuum, Lacan is not satisfied with just assert-

ing a self-grounding idealism. If symbolic structures display a radical autonomy over bodily forces and

can construct their own world, the essence of human being must be constituted originally by a kind of

biological short circuit that disrupts man's complete immersion in nature, eternally separating the in-

ner and outerworld, that is, a mal-adaptation which represents the minimum of freedom, of a behavior

uncoupled from the utilitarian-survivalist attitude insofar as the organism is no longer fully determ-

ined by its environs, that it 'explodes/implodes' into a cycle of autonomous behavior. 6 If, as conven-

tionally defined, madness is the withdrawal from objective reality into an inner, self-enclosed space, in

Lacanian psychoanalysis madness is not a mere accidental state of certain sick individuals, but the ir-

reducible background of all human existence:

And far from being an insult to freedom, madness is freedom's most faithful compan-
ion, following its every move like a shadow.

Not only can man's being not be understood without madness, but it would not be man's
being if it did not bear madness within itself as the limit of his freedom. 7

If madness is freedom's most faithful companion it is precisely because madness in its most primor-

dial sense refers to the specific ontogenetic conditions for the irreducibility of language that makes us

distinctly human. It is the price the Lacanian subject pays for its 'transubstantiation' from being the

agent of a direct animal vitality to being a speaking subject whose identity is kept apart from the direct

vitality of passions.8

Madness is originarily an ontological category precisely insofar as it guarantees that the subject

is dominated by non-natural influences and opens up the possibility of culture's complete self-standing-

ness, a point which crystalizes in the three registers according to which Lacanian psychoanalysis cat-

egorizes all psychic reality. Although the Imaginary is roughly equivalent to phenomenological percep-

tion and is related in mature personality to the cogito and its narcissistic fantasy of self-transparency,
6
iek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009), p. 231.
7
Lacan, Presentation on Psychic Causality, in crits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006),
p. 176/144.
8
iek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), p. 197.
at its most rudimentary level it is related to the foundation of psychogenesis in the mirror stage. In the

latter, which happens around the age of six months, we encounter a certain dehiscence at the very

heart of the organism, a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of malaise and motor uncoordination

of the neonatal months,9 which reduces the child's experience to an irreconcilable series of fragments.

Lacan's provocative thesis is that the only way out of this biological short circuit is a vel, a misrecogni-

tion of the primordial helplessness of the human organism in the specular image 10 of its mirror self in

which the child finds a captivating lie of false mastery into which it libidinally invests itself. The result

of the mirror stage is a reorganization of the child's fragmentation through a virtual, and therefore illu-

sionary, schemata as the self becomes alienated from its real chaotic being. In this respect, the mirror

stage is responsible for the transformation we see in our relationship to nature in comparison with other

animals insofar as it radicalizes the shattering of the Innenwelt and Umwelt circle11 already evident in

our helplessness. Here we see the true intersection of nature and culture 12 insofar as this logical open-

ing thus creates the space within which the structural system of the Symbolic takes hold. After all, we

are only captivated by this image by dint of parental gestures (Look, it's you!).

Constituting the logical fabric of language and the laws of culture which transcend and are an-

terior to the concretely existing personal self, the Symbolic precedes the imaginary orbit of full-fledged

experience insofar as the phenomenological constitution of objects in a strong sense presupposes lan-

guage, which comes to primordially mediate all contact with the outside world. Reproducing and

propagating itself, the Symbolic further displaces the role of nature in understanding psychic reality be-

cause it is able to articulate itself in utter isolation: the incessant sliding of the signified under the sig -

nifier,13 that is, the solipsistic dance of language always in step with itself, means that the essential link

between signifier and transcendent, extra-linguistic signified has been violently ruptured; mere chains

9
Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytical Experience, crits p. 96/77.
10
Ibid., p. 94/76.
11
Ibid., p. 97/78.
12
Ibid., p 100/80.
13
Lacan, The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud, in crits, p. 502/419.
of signifiers are capable of constructing meaning. It is in this precise manner that the Symbolic can be

said to obey its own self-grounding transcendental logic. 14

In its simplest form, the Real is that which does not fall under either the Imaginary or the Sym-

bolic, whereby its upsurge is associated with experiences of breakdown and inconsistency not only of

the unity at the basis of phenomenological experience, but also of language itself. In this respect, the

Real is not only dependent upon the symbolic matrix of language and the imaginary orbit of experience

but is nothing but their immanent obstruction and lacksany positive content, emerging only when the

psychoanalytical subject fully arrives on the scene as a linguistic subject. However, the Symbolic and

the Imaginary also imply their own origin from within something which is completely Other to both. In

this extended sense we must also posit a Real which is coincident with the pre-linguistic life from

which the human infant exiles itself by entering language, yet upon which the Imaginary and the Sym-

bolic logically depend, even if they only relate to it negatively through its primordial repression as the

founding gesture of full-fledged subjectivity. 15

Lacan, antiphusis, and the parasite of images and words

One can now understand why Lacan defines the object of psychoanalysis as antiphusis.16 The

effect of this designation is much greater than it may initially appear, for it attests to the fact that the

human subject is non-natural not only because the structuralist fabric constituting conscious experi-

ence enjoys a freedom over and above the flux of nature, but also, and more primordially, because it

transcendentally alienates us from the immediacy of the corpo-Real of our body. Images and words

14
See Lacan, Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter', in crits and Bruce Fink's recapitulation of ciphering in chapter two
(The Creative Function of the Word: The Symbolic and the Real) of The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and
Jouissance (New York: Princeton University Press,1995), pp. 14-23.
15
Bruce Fink refers to this as Real1 because it is a necessary presupposition for the Symbolic as a structural system that
mediates the world; but because the Symbolic, which functions without any external support for its truth, is not always
capable of idealizing the Real in a way that enables its own autonomous, smooth functioning, it engenders kinks in its
own order. These kinks in the Symbolic are nothing other than the Real 2, something which cannot be integrated
because it presents itself as as an inassimilable kernel within the self-referential matrix of the differential relations within
which it emerged; and although the Real 2 is of utmost importance for understanding the therapeutic and cultural and
political implications of Lacanian psychoanalysis, what becomes evident is that without an understanding of how the
Real1 sets the stage for the Symbolic, the Real2 risks being theoretically groundless. See Fink, chapter three (The
Creative Function of the Word: The Symbolic and the Real) of The Lacanian Subject, pp. 24-31.
16
Lacan, The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power, in crits, p. 615/514.
primordially engender the logico-formal space that makes personality possible only by preventing us

from having genuine, unmediated access to the brute reality of our own being an sich.

When one reads Lacan's early to middle works, one is struck with the impression that words and

images are a purely external force which attack the body, torturing it from the outside, and thereby cre-

ate a denaturalized human subject. Like a violent imposition, imaginary mesmerization and the matrix

of signifiers preclude the possibility of a biologically-closed libidinal economy as an inborn, innate

movement of energy defined by instinctual schemata. Whereas in the animal kingdom these schemata

direct bodily energy toward various objects within its immediate environment through an immanent

causal push, images and especially language appear to obstruct the dialectic of need and satisfaction,

lack and fullness, by re-articulating human being's libidinal dynamics. However, the subject is thereby

thrown into the endless deferral of desire and structurally loses the possibility of attaining its object. In-

stead of predetermined, biological goals, we are left with the objet petit a:

The standard Lacanian theme in the 1950s and 1960s was the unsurmountable opposi-
tion between the animal universe [] of the balanced mirror-relationship between
Innenwelt and Aussenwelt, and the human universe of symbolic negativity, imbalance.
[] Symptomatic here is Lacan's mechanistic metaphorics: an almost celebratory
characterizing of the symbolic order as an automaton that follows its path, totally imper-
vious to human emotions and needs language is a parasitic entity that battens on the
human animal, throws his or her life rhythm off balance, derailing it, subordinating it to
its own brutally imposed circuit. 17

But here a theoretical concern immediately surfaces: How can the symbolic-imaginary matrix, as a

kind of alien blow which tears apart or obstructs the body's knowledge in the Real, sustain itself in face

of this very corpo-Real of the biological organism? Why is it not, as Adrian Johnston succinctly puts it,

rejected by this economy in a manner analogous to failed organ transplants 18?

The irreducibility of the Symbolic in Lacan's psychoanalysis thus demands full metaphysics

capable of explaining its emergence in the Real. But Lacan was in no way oblivious to this fact, contra

17
iek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (New York: Verso, 2007), p. 218
18
Adrian Johnson, iek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialistic Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2000), p. 271.
to what his correlationist critics may believe. 19 After the 1950s and 1960s, where antiphusis as non-

natural intrusion reigns supreme, we see a shift in Lacan's thinking which testifies to a growing preoc-

cupation with the ontologico-foundational basis of the subject.20 Whereas the early to middle Lacan fo-

cuses on the derailing capacity of images which set the stage for words as that which parasitizes the

corpo-Real of the body, Lacan is forced to reconceptualize the problematic. The object of psychoana-

lysis and by consequence the human subject are not antiphusis precisely because images and words are

an infinite Other to nature that penetrate into her secret chamber like a vandal who defaces her sacred

inviolability. The incommensurability must lie elsewhere: the mesmerization of the Imaginary and the

automaton of the Symbolic cannot be the cause of the denaturalization of human existence; there must

be something in nature itself that immanently moves it toward denaturalization if these are to take hold.

Here we encounter a properly speculative thesis that goes much further than the confines of psychogen-

esis. Subjectivity is not a scar inflicted upon an otherwise harmonious nature, a disturbance of its sym-

phonized order by means of a haphazard intrusion into its sphere of non-natural influences; the psycho-

analytical experience is rather revelatory of something much more primordial, namely, that nature itself

must be always already antiphusis, self-sabotaging, self-lacerating, and responsible for its own demise

in the human being's denaturalized essence. But why? As Adrian Johnston points out:

Lacan provides only a few hints. At one point, he identifies liberty (libert) with the
non-existence of the sexual relationship, which [...] can be understood as indicating that
the freedom enjoyed by the autonomous subject is made possible by the lack of an integ-
rated organic foundation as the grounding basis of the subject's being. Similarly, several
years later, Lacan speaks of nature as not all that natural due to being internally plagued
by rottenness (pourriture), by a decay or defect out of which culture (as antiphusis)
bubbles forth (bouillonner). Viewed thus, human nature is naturally destined for denatu-
alization.21
19
For an account of correlationism, which is at the heart of a contemporary movement in Continental philosophy which
goes by the name of speculative realism, see Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of
Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2008).
20
Johnston, iek's Ontology, p. 272. Here Johnston is referring to Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XXI: Les non-
dupes errent, 1973-1974 (unpublished typescript), p. 2, 21 & 74 and Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XXIII : Le
sinthome, 1975-1976, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 2005), p. 5, 17 & 77 (untranslated).
21
Ibid., p. 273. Again following Johnston's bibliography, the first quote comes from Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre
XVIII: D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, 1971 (unpublished typescript), p. 2, 17 & 71, while the second
seminar he makes reference to is to (as in the previous footnote) Le Sminaire de Jaques Lacan, Livre XXIV: L'insu que
sait de l'une bvue s'aile mourre, 1976-1977, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, in Ornicar? 12-18, p. 5, 17 &77.
 From the rottenness of nature to denaturalized monstrosity

But how can psychoanalysis explicitly a theory of psychogenesis and its pathologies explain

where this denaturalization comes from? Slavoj iek, using Lacan's gesture towards an originary

rotteness plaguing nature as a theoretical starting point, seeks to expand this structuralist metapsycho-

logy in order to secure the means of articulating the ontogenetic possibility-conditions of the Symbolic

in the Real. Seeing psychoanalysis as conceptually unable to fulfill this task, he expands its horizon by

recourse to modern philosophy, seeing therein a certain homology that enables him to draw upon its re-

sources:

What really interests me is the following insight: if you look at the very core of psycho-
analytic theory, of which even Freud was not aware, it's properly read death drive this
idea of beyond the pleasure principle, self-sabotaging, etc. the only way to read this
properly is to read it against the background of the notion of subjectivity as self-relating
negativity in German Idealism. That is to say, I just take literally Lacan's indication that
the subject of psychoanalysis is the Cartesian cogito of course, I would add, as reread
by Kant, Schelling, and Hegel,22

iek finds numerous textual traces of the death-drive understood as a self-sabotaging tendency

in nature being logically prior to subjectivity in both Kant, Schelling, and Hegel, which suggests that

what first appears a mere homology in conceptual structure is in fact a strict identity. Thus, what Ger-

man Idealism introduces, and what psychoanalysis in turn radicalizes in its stead, is the following:

the passage from nature to culture is not direct, that one cannot account for it within
a continuous evolutionary narrative: something has to intervene between the two, a kind
of vanishing mediator, which is neither nature nor culture this In-between is silently
presupposed in all evolutionary narratives [...] a moment of human (pre)history when
(what will become) man is no longer a mere animal and simultaneously not a being of
language, bound by symbolic Law; a moment of thoroughly perverted, denatural-
ized, derailed nature which is not yet culture. 23

According to iek, we find the first expression of this in-between in Kant's pedagogical writings in the

necessity to discipline the excessive unruliness (Wildheit) of human nature, the wild, unconstrained

22
iek, Liberation Hurts: An Interview with Slavoj iek (with Eric Dean Rasmussen). Retrieved Feb 23 2010 from:
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/desublimation.
23
iek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ideology (New York: Verso, 2000), p. 36.
propensity to insist stubbornly on one's own will, cost what it may, if culture is to emerge. 24 Yet, this

unruliness cannot be equated with the brute reality of animal existence even if it exists within

nature, it is strictly speaking something non-natural:

The love of freedom is naturally so strong in man, that when once he has grown accus-
tomed to freedom, he will sacrifice everything for its sake [...]. Owing to his natural love
of freedom, it is necessary that man should have his natural roughness smoothed down;
with animals, their instinct renders this unnecessary. 25

The enigma of the emergence of subjectivity in Kant cannot be reduced to a mere dichotomy between

nature and culture, as if in order to conform to the symbolic law of our own making we must first tame

the blind, egotistical pleasure-seeking principles of our animal nature. The self-creative, logically

autonomous milieu of culture is only possible through a prior, infinitely uncontainable freedom which

acts as the vanishing mediator between brute animal reality and linguistically-structured human exist -

ence. The passage to culture does not consist in a sublimation of animalistic needs, but rather through a

disciplining or symbolic re-articulation of a monstrous and logically irreducible unruliness that marks

the essence of the human being, a process which can fail. It is precisely for this reason that iek,

along with Lacan, believes that Kant's practical philosophy [is] the starting point of the lineage cul-

minating in Freud's invention of psychoanalysis,26 for we can already see within the former the latter's

traits principaux in an implicit way:

Furthermore, is not the object of psychoanalysis precisely this gap between first and
second nature the insecure position of a human subject who, after losing his footing in
the first nature, can never feel fully at case in the second: what Freud called das Unbe-
hagen in der Kultur, the different way the subject's passage from first to second nature
can go wrong (psychosis, neurosis ...)?27

However, there is in another important way in which Kantian transcendentalism is haunted by

the exact problematic of Lacanian psychoanalysis and even gestures towards the same solution, thereby

24
Ibem.
25
Taken from Kant, Kant on Education, trans. Annette Churton (Boston: D. C. Heath & Co, 1900), pp. 4-5; for a more
easily findable edition, see Lectures on pedagogy, trans. Robert B. Louden, in Kant, Anthropology, History, and
Education, eds. Gnter Zller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 438; quoted by
iek in The Ticklish Subject, p. 36.
26
iek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 48.
27
Ibid., pp. 81-2.
further advancing the claim that there is an identity to the operative logic in each. For both, experiential

reality is never merely given, but is in fact an artificial composite produced by the subject (whether it

be by the transcendental synthesis of the imagination or the ciphering activity of the Symbolic); and

even if both Kant's and Lacan's radical idealism prevent them from embarking upon a proper metaphys-

ical explanation of how this artificial composition is possible, nevertheless each proclaims that the very

existence of subjectivity alludes to an ontologically self-violent wildness that serves as its ontogenet-

ically constitutive basis, in such a way that makes the late Lacan's passing remarks over the ontology of

the subject (the rottenness of nature) come strikingly close to those of Kant on the devastating state

of the human neonate (what could have been nature's intentions been in creating us? 28). In this re-

spect, not only can iek argue for the interpenetration of Kantian transcendentalism and Lacanian psy-

choanalysis through the notion of unruliness, so that Todestrieb becomes a synonym for the cogito by

giving expression to the pre-subjective conditions of the possibility of our freedom, but we are simul-

taneously given a wide range of resources to thematize the properly metaphysical import of the Lacani-

an subject. Unwilling to give up on the Kantian critical revolution towards idealism, both Hegel and

Schelling seek to understand how the transcendental field of experience could be inscribed in being or,

in Lacanian parlance, how the corpo-Real of the body could be taken over by images and words.

Hegel and the terror of the night of the world

Just as the freedom advocated by Kantian idealism is something that is neither noumenal nor

phenomenal, but is in some sense the impossible in-between of both which somehow instigates the pas-

sage from the former to the latter, the freedom thematized by Lacan as the basis of the psychoanalytical

subject does not exist in the pure Real nor in the Symbolic but is yet in some sense the (vanishing) me -

diator between them. But this is not enough. We must give an account of the precise manner in which

language as irreducible emerges in nature, for otherwise a reductionist of whatever variety could al-

ways argue that the freedom we attribute to it is false. If human activity is truly irreducibly self-reflex-
28
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert B. Louden, in Kant, Anthropology, History, and
Education, p. 423.
ive and self-legislative, and thus cannot be understood by natural determinations, nevertheless freedom

must be paradoxically situated within the totality of nature because it cannot exist nowhere. In this re-

spect, what iek finds so fascinating in Hegel's early Jenaer concept of the night of the world is

how it ties together the Kantian concepts of unruliness and transcendental imagination, thereby

making explicit not only the obscure pre-history of the subject in being, but the paradoxical ground of

the Symbolic in the pure Real: emphasizing how both are constituted by a disruption of/in the circuitry

of nature's laws, it demonstrates how the field of culture can come into play as self-standing despite its

originary basis in nature. The night of the world this empty nothing that is night all around it, in

which here shoots a bloody head there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and

just so disappears29 supplements Kant's transcendental constitution of experience with a gesture to-

wards its dark commencement, a glimpse into how the pandemonium of the Real we observe in unruli-

ness precedes and makes possible the autonomy of the Symbolic:

The pre-synthetic Real, its pure, not-yet-fashioned multitude not yet synthesized by a
minimum of transcendental imagination, is, stricto sensu, impossible: a level that must
be retroactively presupposed, but can never actually be encountered. Our (Hegelian)
point, however, is that this mythical/impossible starting point, the presupposition of ima-
gination, is already the product, the result of, the imagination's disruptive activity. In
short, the mythic, inaccessible zero-level of pure multitude not yet affected/fashioned by
imagination is nothing but pure imagination itself, imagination at its most violent, as the
activity of disrupting the continuity of the inertia of the pre-symbolic natural Real.
This pre-synthetic multitude is what Hegel describes as the night of the world, as the
unruliness of the subject's abyssal freedom which violently explodes reality into a dis-
persed floating of membra disjecta.30

This chaotic aggregate of ghastly forms and shapes making up the quasi-phenomenological self-

experience of the night of the world is the pure expression of the primordial unruliness/biological short-

circuitry of the human organism, the German Idealist variation upon Lacan's mirror stage. 31 As in the

latter, this moment is not to be taken in isolation, but to be supplemented with what it ontogenetically

29
See Hegel, Jenaer Realphilosophie, in Frhe politische Systeme (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein,1974), p. 204. For a
discussion, see iek, The Abyss of Freedom, in The Abyss of Freedom/The Ages of the World (Ann Arbor: The MIT
Press, 2008), pp. 4-14; The Ticklish Subject, pp. 26-48; and The Parallax View, pp. 43-45.
30
iek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 33
31
Kant knew this very well. See Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, p. 423.
makes possible, namely, the ideal-symbolical realm of ordered experience. What we see here is quasi-

phenomenological because, in actuality, there is no fully developed I which stands in relationship to

an alterity over and against which it can stand (Gegen-stand). This I emerges aprs coup after a free

act of synthesis, that is, ideal-symbolic re-articulation. As a result, the unruliness of the human organ-

ism is nothing other than another logical modality of transcendental imagination, its ontological zero-

level as a disruption in/of the circuitry of nature's laws that demands its recombination, a recombination

that can only be done in a non-natural (virtual) register. Reading this insight in light of Kant's pedago -

gical writings on the necessity of disciplining for the emergence of culture, we can thus further say that

the epigenesis of the categories32 as that which bestow upon experience its form cannot be just limited

to the logico-scientific structure that the latter assumes, but must also extend to the sociopolitical code

underlying culture: the out-of-control freedom of the subject is intimately linked with the power of

imagination (Einbildungskraft) because it is only by means of the latter that the subject is capable of

producing images (Bilder or schemata) by which it can overcome this ghastly state of pure chaos,

this macabre seizure of the continuity of the pure Real which represents ontological mayhem/madness

at its finest, and mold reality into an integrated, smooth fabric (a process of transcendental Bildung, a

schematization of the night of the world). The ideal-symbolic constitution of reality is not performed by

a mere notional apparatus that which gives us the universal and necessary forms we need to know ob-

jects, but is also linked the creation of a second nature in social reality: the role of transcendental ima-

gination in Kant is identical to the role of the Symbolic in Lacan, where the latter comes in to colonize

the libidinal economy of the body and thereby engenders culture. In this sense, we can read Lacan's ac-

count of language as a correction to Kant's narrow understanding of idealism and the role of categories

in the constitution of experience.

What both theories of the subject have in common, and which Hegel in his own manner radical-

izes, is that in order for idealization/symbolization to occur as a purely autonomous activity, we must
32
Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer & Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), B167.
proclaim that nature undergoes a process of internal self-diremption. 33 As an irreducible system, for hu-

man language to take hold there must be something in nature which leaves nature lacerated, wounded,

bleeding, and thus carves up a zone freed from its hegemony. For the German Idealists, just as for

Lacan, the Symbolic truly is a kingdom within a kingdom (imperium in imperio) which has won its

way through force.34 If the breakthrough of Kantian idealism is the a priority of the categories whereby

the subject engenders experience, which in turn assures that culture is always of our own making, then

this is the dark horizon within which the sociopolitical as a self-creative, logically autonomous milieu

can operate: the death of nature in us. Freedom is not a raw, brute fact, but depends upon the caustic

collapse of being, a brisure in the heart of Real.35 The Hegel of the Jenaer period takes a crucial step

towards elaborating the paradoxical ground of the subject, demonstrating that it is this dysfunction that

makes subjectivity incommensurate with material being and renders possible freedom in the truly

idealist sense of the word. The subject, whether Cartesian or psychoanalytical, is that which disturbs

that whole from within: Subject designates the 'imperfection' of Substance, the inherent gap, self-de-

ferral, distance-from-itself, which forever prevents Substance from fully realizing itself, from becoming

'fully itself.'36

Schelling and desire, the disease-stricken body of being

But in order to explicate how nature could auto-disrupt into a chaotic series of membra disjecta,

iek, finding limitations in Hegel's mature philosophy of nature, appears to encounter an impasse. 37

The night of the world is at best a profile portrait of the pandemonium that paves the way for the tran-

scendental constitution of reality and comprehending this requires us to plunge head first into the im-
33
Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, trans. M. J. Petry (London: Humanities Press, 1970), Vol. 3, pp. 142-143 (359A).
Hegel characterizes this internal self-diremption by means of the leaping point of selfhood, which appears to follow
Fichte's intuition that the subject emerges in being by absolute spontaneity alone, that is, not through a transition, but
by means of a leap. Science of Knowledge, eds. and trans. Peter Heath & John Lachs (Cambridge: University of
Cambridge Press, 1982), p. 262.
34
This displays late German Idealism's and psychoanalysis' avid anti-Spinozism. Compare Spinoza, Ethics and Selected
Letters, ed. Seymour Feldman and trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1982), p. 103
(Book III, Preface).
35
iek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 31.
36
iek, The Abyss of Freedom, p. 7.
37
See iek, the section entitled 3, 4, 5, of The Ticklish Subject, pp. 79-86.
manent pulsation of the vital ebb and flow of the Real itself if we are to see how it sets the stage for the

latter a project, which iek explicitly says, is most acutely developed in Schelling:

Kant was the first to detect this crack in the ontological edifice of reality: if (what we ex-
perience as) objective reality is not simply given out there, waiting to be perceived
by the subject, but an artificial composite constituted through the subject's active parti-
cipation that is, through the act of transcendental synthesis then the question crops
up sooner or later: what is the status of the uncanny X that precedes the transcendentally
constituted reality? F. W. J. Schelling gave the most detailed account of this X in his no-
tion of the Ground of Existence [] the obscure pre-ontological domain of drives, the
pre-logical Real that forever remains the elusive Ground of Reason that can never be
grasped as such, merely glimpsed in the very gesture of its withdrawal. 38

What interests iek in Schelling is how Schelling advances the descriptions in the tradition of

the elusive X, the je ne sais quoi, which simultaneously haunts transcendentally constituted reality, pre-

cedes it, and appears to set the stage for its condition of possibility. These three conceptual aspects of

the je ne sais quoi map directly unto the three modalities of the Real: (i) the Real as a kink in the

Symbolic, which pressurizes phenomenal reality; (ii) the Real as pre-symbolic immediacy which is

lost through the advent of language; and (iii) the barred Real now understood as an auto-disruptive

nature (NN) whose self-laceration creates the necessary room for the transcendental constitution of

reality through the Symbolic, thus drawing attention to the interconnection of each aspect. Prior to

Schelling, as we have seen, our relation to this mysterious X had already been partially schematized

from the Kantian concept of unruliness to that of Hegelian the night of the world.

What iek refers to as Schelling-in-itself: the 'Orgasm of Forces'39 is the remarkable capacity

Schelling possesses of thematizing the immanent driving forces governing the pure Real, the elusive,

obscure phase of darkness that precedes the birth of consciousness. However, a concern immediately

arises: when we look at the elusive X of nature in the immemorial epochs of cosmological and geolo -

gical time or the evolutionary strata of biological evolution, we encounter an all-encompassing/all-con-

suming whole that precludes the absolute freedom of the subject, even if it gives the subject space

within it. Insofar as this self-totalizing, teleologically unfolding causality intrinsic to nature represents a
38
Ibid., p. 55.
39
iek, The Indivisible Remainder, p. 13.
relatively closed circle, how is this deadlock surpassed so that autonomy is possible? Although

iek's own descriptions of the passage focus on the founding gesture of the Symbolic as a self-institut -

ing fiat brought on by the subject, this does not suffice. The question is how the self-regulating pulsa-

tion of nature paradoxically grounds the irreducibility of the latter. As Adrian Johnston argues, although

this ultimately is an arbitrary, groundless act analogous to the cutting of the Gordian knot which, as

iek himself says, can be described (narrated) only post festum, after it has already taken place, since

we are dealing not with a necessary act but with a free act which could also not have happened 40 ,

Schelling himself searches for a way to inscribe the very condition of the possibility of the act itself

within the material palpitations of nature. 41

As Johnston goes on to point out, within the Schellingian ontogenetic narrative, the emergence

of the Symbolic is first made possible by the emergence of desire (Begierde) within being, which marks

the first juncture of some kind of blockage in closed causal nature's self-articulation . This has two ef-

fects: first, in psychoanalytical terms, this signifies that, instead of homeostasis as the inner telos guid-

ing the organism's biological life, we see for the first time a relative short-circuiting of the pleasure

principle, an inability to find satisfaction through the iteration constitutive of instincts; second, in place

of a smooth, determined relation to the environment wholly programmed by instincts (the coincidence

of inner world and outer world through a predetermined biological schemata which hardwire the organ-

ism into its surroundings), we get a degree of liberation from the sense data of perception that normally

mechanically determine an organism's actions as it enters into a state of denaturalization which is

contemporaneous with an act of withdrawing from its immersion in being. Desire in its Schellingian

mode is thus an intermediary stage between nature and the violent unruliness that is the dark birthplace

of the subject. But what must be noted here is how desire, as the beginning of the idealization of reality,

is essentially identical to the conventional definitions of madness as withdrawal from objective reality

into self, but here, at the ontological level instead of that of sociopolitically-structured reality.
40
Ibid., pp. 22-23.
41
See Johnston, iek's Ontology, pp. 80-92.
Schelling thus gives us the resources needed to articulate the ontological passage through madness that

Lacan, and iek, postulates at the beginning of the Symbolic.

If we take this re-appropriation of Schellings ontology seriously, we arrive at some interesting

conclusions. iek's metaphysical archaeology of the psychoanalytical subject by recourse to German

Idealism forces us to speak of a spectrum of subjectivity or ideality inherent within nature. We must

come across traces of desire within other organisms to varying degrees: there is a kind of quantitative

accumulation of desire (an evolutionary genesis) that may lead to a qualitative break with nature (the

emergence of the Symbolic), but in such a way that the possibility of the latter is not logically con-

tained within the former as a kind of hidden, self-unfolding kernel rather, the former can only incite

it, so that only after the fact can we establish a relation between the two, which is why language ap-

pears as a parasite. Desire shows us that the pure Real is not all-consuming: it is teeming with crevices

within its positive fold. However, these sites of negativity are to be distinguished from human sub-

jectivity insofar as, despite expressing a minimal level of liberation from nature's cycles, they are un-

able to completely liberate themselves from nature's biological hardwiring and thus seek a new form of

non-natural (virtual) organization. In this respect, they would only resemble the primordial unruliness

prior to the advent of the Symbolic insofar as they would not exhibit a violent process of utter denatur-

alization, although we must nevertheless speak of a tension-ridden trembling of the organic system as it

begins to quiver under its own weight.

It is for this reason that iek can adopt Heidegger's claim in the Fundamental Concepts of

Metaphysics that animals feel the 'poorness' of their relating to the world in such a way that we see in

them an infinite pain pervading the whole of living nature. 42 This, as iek points out, shares a com-

mon ground with Schelling's notion of the veil of despondency that spreads itself over nature. 43 How-

ever, we must understand this pain or despondency in nature in two separate, but interrelated ways.

42
iek, The Fragile Absolute: Or Why is the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2008), pp. 86-89.
43
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Other Related Matters, trans. Priscilla
Hayden-Roy, in Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. Ernst Behler. (New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 271
First, one could say that in desire, as the commencement of idealization, animals have a kind of impli-

cit, yet non-conscious knowledge that they are unfree because they exist in a mode of unfathomable

tension between the biological Real (instinctual-deterministic schemata) and the ideal (desire as a

blockage), but without this distinction being posited as such. The former rules supreme full-fledged

ideality has not emerged. By consequence, the slightest tinge of desire within the biological system

gives it, as it were, a taste of its own possible, but unreachable freedom, the animal being liberated yet

confined in its movement. It is this simultaneous non-conscious dreamlike premonition of subjective

freedom and its ultimate ontological foreclosure that constitutes nature's despondency. But it must be

noted that this despondency is not a moment of mere uncalled-for anthropomorphism. As Henri

Maldiney points out, Heidegger's descriptions of living being (das Lebendige) as plagued by a con-

stitutive Benommenheit (captivation, dazedness) coincide with that mode of being of the type melan-

colicus elaborated by Tellenbach.44 If nature is overcome by a veil of despondency, it is because non-

human life is wrought by a structure which is, for us, distinctively pathological: it is as if it is held

back, stuck in its tracks, because it is incapable of a truly effective willing. Second, with the emergence

of desire, the self-sustaining circuitry of nature becomes disturbed by an inassimilable Real within its

very ebb and flow causing its system to become an erratic oscillation of conflictual tendencies which

become more and more uncontrollable as desire increases. If the animal gets its first taste of freedom in

desire, nature in the same moment gets the first taste of the madness that awaits it if this freedom were

to be fully actualized. Nature's pain is the unsteady, unpredictable palpitation of its heart of hearts

threatening to explode in one excessive outburst as Todestrieb begins to awake itself, but because it has

yet to self-accumulate to a great intensity, and nothing has arisen to tame this propensity, there is a

bleak darkness of antagonism. What is at issue here is the state of nature that precedes and sets the

stage for humanity as a response: the emphasis is not on us, but rather ontogenetic conditions, so that

the apparent anthropomorphization of nature is coincident with the dehumanization of humanity, for in-

44
Maldiney, Penser l'homme et la folie (Paris: Gillon, 1997), p. 270.
scribing desire into being is identical with taking it away from us as a privileged attribute.

The subject and nature grasping for breath

For the late Schelling, as the force of desire is raised to a higher degree of ideality, matter

enters into a self- lacerating rage (sich selbst zereiende Wut) like a cancer-ridden, disease-stricken

body, howling under its own out-of-control energy.45 The freedom of the subject that anarchic state

which precedes the birth of the Symbolic as a form of retroactive damage control is not a positive

characteristic or attribute: it is the failure of the auto-actualization of nature, its inability to contain it-

self within its own preset logistics. It is the result of a mal-adaptation, 46 something going terribly

wrong, a snag in the biological weave, 47 an ontological explosion, 48 to mention just a few of

iek's descriptions of this process. In this context, iek talks of Jacques-Alain Miller's remarks on an

unsettling rat experiment to which Lacan alludes in one of his unpublished seminars, where it is only

through a kind of neurological mutilation that a rat can be made to behave like a human: formally, the

specific character that distinguishes human freedom, and thus separates it from the rest of the world, is

identical to rampant malfunction, a violent disfiguring. 49 The psychoanalytico-Cartesian subject is the

result of a catastrophe.50

Because iek in this way identifies the subject with the non-coincidence of nature, its aliena-

tion to itself,51 this self-lacerating rage is equivalent to what Lacan refers to as the organic

dehiscence52 exhibited in the mirror stage quoted above, which forms the basis of the ontogenesis of

personality and his latter passing remarks on nature's rottenness. However, it should be clear that we

can no longer understand the subject as a haphazard feature of nature which falls upon her like an alien

45
See Schelling, The Ages of the World: Third Version (c. 1815), trans. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), p.
322.
46
iek, The Paralax View, p. 241.
47
iek & Glyn Daly, Conversations with iek (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), p. 59.
48
iek, The Parallax View, p. 210.
49
See iek, The Indivisible Remainder, pp. 219-220.
50
For more on this topic, see my Ontological Catastrophe: iek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism
(Open Humanities Press, forthcoming).
51
iek, The Ticklish Subject, pp. 88-89.
52
Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, crits, p. 96/77.
blow from nowhere rather, its pure contingency must itself emerge from some kind of immanent,

self-effacing possibility always already implicit within her. We can see this in various forms de-

formed animals, natural disasters, black holes, all of which point to ways in which the originary har-

mony of the world is predicated upon irruptive/eruptive disarray:

The most unsettling aspect of such phenomena is the disturbance caused in what Lacan
called knowledge in the Real: the 'instinctual' knowledge which regulates animal and
plant activity. This obscure knowledge can run amok. When winter is too warm, plants
and animals misread the temperature as a signal that spring has already begun and so
start to behave accordingly, thus not only rendering themselves vulnerable to later on-
slaughts of cold, but also perturbing the entire rhythm of natural reproduction. 53

What the psychoanalytico-Cartesian subject thus shows us is that the idea of extra/pre-subjective nature

as the harmonious ground of all things, a causally closed play of forces caught within a blind necessity,

is a pure fantasy: the beginning is not a solid, inert density self-unfolding, but a seething mass of het -

erogeneous matter lacking overarching symmetry and balanced movement. Nature is not some kind of

irreducible real stuff that persists beyond conscious representation and obeys eternal laws, for the

very presence of subjectivity reveals that nature always denaturalizes itself: its own self-operative logic

reveals that its immanence is not a permeating weave of positive being, a never-ending sea of pure af-

firmation whose fullness encompasses all; it is plagued by self-fragmentation wherein irrevocable

zones of non-being preclude causal closure. The libidinal frenzy of the unruliness of human nature, the

biological short-circuit preceding the birth of the Symbolic does not merely represent a single case of

the diseased breakdown of the ontological, but rather the inability of nature to posit itself as a totality:

the ground fails to ground,54 for it always threatens to pass over into hemorrhaging conflict and

ravaging antagonism.

The metaphysical basis of the freedom of culture is the irremovable possibility of negativity

from within the self-totalizing, self-enclosed system of nature. But this is always possible given the un-

avoidable ruptures within its logical fold. Furthermore, these ruptures are more than contingent features

53
iek, Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2011), pp. 350-351. I capitalize the Real for consistency.
54
Johnson, iek's Ontology, p. 92.
of the otherwise harmonious symphony of being's pure power.55 Monstrosities and ontological abor-

tions are an inescapable effect of nature's functioning, for functioning now shows itself to be one with

dysfunctioning: nature was always-already a sickly creature whose collapse coincides with her own

conditions of (im)possibility. It is not only that nature never knew a moment of eternal happiness and

joy; rather, the dull, inarticulate pressure of her own asphyxiation, her own grasping for breath (spirit,

recall, comes from the Latin spiritus, breath, and is related to spirare, to breathe) precedes the very

positivity of her essence. Nature can only be nature insofar as it is always already internally torn apart

by a constitutive moment of auto-laceration that is the site of spirit/subject: incompleteness [is]

already in itself a mode of subjectivity, such that subjectivity is always already part of the Absolute,

and reality is not even thinkable without subjectivity. 56

If the ontological dislocation attested to by the subject is constitutively a part of the absolute,

then the passage from nature to culture is a mere logical conversion. It only requires a certain gesture or

incitation to be brought to the fore while nothing changes at the level of positive being. Full-fledged

subjectivity, and hence the symbolic universe of meaning which emerges as a belated response, may be

an unpredictable event, but its metaphysical basis demonstrates that there is no ultimate opposition

between us and the world:

True anthropomorphism resides in the notion of nature tacitly assumed by those who
oppose man to nature: nature as a circular return of the same, as the determinist king-
dom of inexorable natural laws, or (more in accordance with New Age sensitivity)
nature as a harmonious, balanced Whole of cosmic forces derailed by man's hubris, his
pathological arrogance. What is to be deconstructed is this very notion of nature: the
features we refer to in order to emphasize man's unique status the constitutive imbal-
ance, the out-of-joint, on account of which man is an unnatural creature, nature
sick unto death must somehow be at work in nature itself, although as Schelling
would have put it in another, lower power. 57

In this respect, the idea of a unified, self-penetrating nature whose delicate balance we perturb only

emerges aprs-coup as part of a pure fantasmatic protection mechanism. Without such a fantasmatic
55
This is another point demonstrating German Idealism and psychoanalysis' avid anti-Spinozism. Compare Spinoza, The
Ethics, pp. 55-57 (Prs. 33-35).
56
iek, Less Than Nothing, p. 905.
57
iek, The Indivisible Remainder, p. 220. See also p. 223.
support of fullness we risk facing the tragic ontological incompletion of the world, what Kant refers to

as a mere rhapsody of representations. 58 The fiction of Nature is thus, in many ways, psychoanalytic-

ally unavoidable: we unconsciously create it to save us from recognizing the true basis of subjectivity

and its stark implications.

Conclusion: Denaturalizing Nature, Dehumanizing Humanity

To understand iek's appropriation of German Idealism, what is important is not so much the

philological or historical accuracy of his readings, but the manner in which he finds conceptual re-

sources to embark upon a metaphysical archaeology of the psychoanalytical subject,59 an archeaology

which is the necessary supplement to Freud's own archaeological investigations of the human mind, es-

pecially in the aftermath of Lacan's strucuralist reworkings of it. Kant, Hegel, and Schelling each in

their own way outline an ontological edifice that grounds subjectivity qua cogito, a gesture which

brings their thought in direct contact with psychoanalysis, which presupposes the irreducibility of the

psyche to nature. For all, if we are to account for our freedom from natural determination, necessary for

the creation of an autonomous field of ideal-symbolic phenomena, we must posit some kind of devast-

ating ontological violence, a denaturalized monstrosity, whether it be articulated in the concept of unru-

liness (Wildheit), the night of the world (die Nacht der Welt), or the self-lacerating rage of matter (die

sich selbst zerreiende Wut), all of which incites the creation of a new self-sufficient, virtual world

where any naturally unified one is lacking by disrupting our instinctual pre-determined rapport to our

environment. This intuition was shared by Lacan in his own attempts to understand how the biologic-

ally irreducible world of images and words could take told: for the psychoanalytical subject to posit it-

self, there must be a certain dehiscence at the heart of organism (une certaine dhiscence de l'organ-

isme),60 a primordial rottenness (pourriture) of nature from which culture bubbles forth (bouillon-

58
Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, A 156/B195.
59
Although we may claim that there is little concern for philological methodology in iek's reading of German Idealism
(something which he, as a Lacanian, would not think is the last word on a text's meaning), that does not mean that his
choice of selection of texts is arbitrary. For a reconstruction of iek's argument, see Johnston's iek's Ontology and my
Ontological Catastrophe.
60
Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, crits, p. 96/77.
ner) and proclaims that the very object of psychoanalysis as antiphusis. In this respect, despite their a

priority for us, both the ideal and the Symbolic come too late on the scene their formative power in

experience is a mere attempt to schematize or cultivate this primordial chaos of the drives, from

which they draw their energy (Einbildungskraft as a means of transcendental Bildung; symbolization as

a response to the primordial Real of trauma). 61

In this sense, we can begin to see why iek would would endorse Lacan's claim that Kant's

practical philosophy [is] the starting point of the lineage culminating in Freud's invention of psycho-

analysis.62 Both struggle to thematize the subject as simultaneously nature turned against itself

(Todestrieb) and a dangerous negativity that destroys all symbolic-cultural formations from within and

must be disciplined in/by culture (das Unbehagen in der Kultur). Combining both these on first glance

disparate traditions together allows us to bring into relief the properly metaphysical issue posed by psy-

choanalaysis, especially in its Lacanian mode, namely, how the Real could have come to appear to it-

self, how the Symbolic could have taken hold, in what way is our universe of meaning necessary as a

response to some now irretrievable ontological state of affairs that preceded us and although this may

appear to risk an anthropomorphization of nature ([w]e should apply hear something like a weak an-

thropic principle: how should the Real be structured so that it allow for the emergence of subjectivity

[...]?63), one should proceed cautiously: iek's metaphysical archaeology of the psychoanalytical sub-

ject is an attempt to think the intersection of the Real and the Symbolic, nature and culture, the cold-

ness of being and the fervor of humanity, because if images and words, and by implication our very so -

cio-historical existence exist, they must exist in the world. Nature is inclusive, not exclusive, of human-

ity, even if the specificity of our intersubjective action is understood in a structuralist manner. The price

we pay for this theoretical gain of re-inscribing humanity into nature, however, is a complete denatural-

ization of nature and a dehumanization of humanity. For not only is nature now reduced to a freak

61
iek & Glyn Daly, Conversations with iek, pp. 64-65.
62
iek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 48.
63
iek, Less Than Nothing, p. 905.
show of contingent disturbances with no inner rhyme or reason, 64 but even if humanity still retains a

certain qualitatively distinct status in contradistinction to other things in virtue of the autonomous char-

acter of images and words, what we normally take as the great and sublime achievements of culture

are, in fact, grounded in a mere virtual re-compensation for our disruption from the corpo-Real of our

bodies. The entirety of our cultural activity a kind of transcendental lie designed to protect us from the

ontogenetic trauma that is our dark birthplace in being. What is more, desire, once seen as a prestige

that we own have, is ontologized, thus making our very ground, the unruliness of our being, nothing

but an amplification of an already existing tendency in nature, assuming we can give some meaning to

the word 'nature',65 and forcing us to radically rethink the nature-culture distinction and debate. What

Lacanian psychoanalysis, now reworked by iek, teaches us, is that both the New Age holistic no-

tion of man as a part of the natural-spiritual global process, and the notion of man as derailed nature, an

entity out of joint, are ideological what both notions repress is the fact that there is no (balanced,

self-enclosed) Nature to be thrown out of joint by man's hubris (or to whose harmonious Way man has

to adapt).66

64
Ibid., p. 298.
65
Lacan, crits, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, p. 96/77.
66
iek, The Indivisible Remainder, p. 223.