Lacan, Foucault, and the Crisis of the Subject: Revisionist Reflections on Phenomenology

and Post-structuralism

Louis Sass

Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, Volume 21, Number 4, December

2014, pp. 325-341 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/595136

Access provided by Smith College Libraries (15 Apr 2017 15:39 GMT)
Lacan, Foucault, and
the Crisis of the
Subject:
Revisionist Reflections
on Phenomenology and
Post-structuralism
Abstract: This article offers a revisionist interpreta-
tion of the relationship between phenomenology and
post-structuralism through an analysis of the post-struc-
turalists most influential at philosophys intersection
with the psy professions: Jacques Lacan and Michel
Foucault. French structuralists and post-structuralists
sharply criticized subjectivity as a domain of study (the
primacy of consciousness) and notions of the au-
tonomous subject, arguing instead for the determining
role of language and other semiotic systems. I discuss
Heideggers role as a vanishing mediator, an influ-
ence on both phenomenology and post-structuralism
whose own focus on forms of being (the ontological
dimension) undermines this assumed opposition. I
discuss the relevance for phenomenology of Foucaults
epistemes (in Order of Things) and of Lacans registers
of Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real. Finally, I consider
ways in which Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) and
Lacan (on ethics and the psychoanalytic act) seem to
accept elements of the traditional notion of the subject,
including forms of freedom and responsibility, and the
possibility of self-reflection.
Keywords: anti-humanism; ontological difference;
Heidegger; episteme; structuralism; Imaginary/Sym-
bolic/Real; subjectivity; hermeneutic phenomenology;
Panopticon
2015 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
Louis Sass
French thought in the twentieth century is typi-
cally described as marked by a major fault line,
a rupture or grande coupure, that emerged in the
1960s, the heyday of the crisis of the subject.
Before this time French philosophy, together with
associated fields (including psychiatry and psycho-
analysis), were focused on issues of subjectivity
first in the vein of Bergsonian vitalism but then
shifting, with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in the late
1930s and 1940s, to forms of phenomenology and
existentialism inspired first by Husserl and then,
even more decisively, by Heidegger.1 But starting
mid-century, developments in the human sciences
of linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis
began to offer a different perspective. Inspired by
Roman Jakobson and Claude Lvi-Strauss (both
drawing on early twentieth-century linguist Ferdi-
nand de Saussure) and especially by Lvi-Strausss
attack on Sartres humanism in The Savage Mind
(1962), a number of thinkers, soon to be known
as post-structuralists, criticized the focus on
freedom and self-awareness, and the somewhat
self-congratulatory anguish, that they saw as the
core of phenomenology and existentialism.
326 PPP / Vol. 21, No. 4 / December 2014
With the rise of these later thinkersthe most
important are Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Mi-
chel Foucault, and Jacques Derridathe focus of
theoretical attention shifted. It turned away from
individual human consciousness and its dilemmas,
away from belief in the potential self-transparency
and sovereignty (Descombes and Larmore 2009,
182) of the subject or self2 and toward the more
objective and supposedly determining structures
of language, collective myth or ideology, and so-
cial institutions. Lvi-Strauss dismissed the focus
on subjectivity, individualism, the supposed
continuity of the self, and the allegedly self-
evident truths of introspection; the goal was not
to constitute but to dissolve man (1966, 250,
256, 249). Lvi-Strauss even spoke of wishing
to undertake the resolution of the human into
the non-human and to study men as if they
were ants (p. 2467). Few of the later thinkers
would go quite so far. All, however, followed Lvi-
Strausss lead in denouncing the primacy of con-
sciousness and the autonomy of the subject,
often associated with the so-called Cartesian
subject (Delacampagne 1995, 321; Worms 2009,
482). The crisis in question was not restricted
to the theoretical realm alone, but coincided with
major upheavals in politics, literature (e.g., the
nouveau roman), and institutional life (e.g., the
mental asylum).
It is hardly surprising that historians should
emphasize such an account (e.g., Descombes
1980; Worms 2009; Delacampagne 1995; Gutting
2001; Wicks 2003). They are, after all, echoing
statements by the key actors themselves, who
sometimes spoke in millennial or even apocalyp-
tic terms of the death of man and in some cases
(e.g., Foucault [1966], following Bachelard and
Koyr [Delacampagne 1995, 327]) were inclined
to repudiate the very idea of significant histori-
cal continuity in intellectual life. Lacan seemed
to spurn existential psychoanalysis out of hand,
stating that Sartre had never been willing to take
any interest in the true psychoanalysis of Freud
(Leguil 2012, 20). Lacan dismissed as profoundly
delusional the discourse of freedom, essential
to modern man insofar as he is structured by a
certain conception of his own autonomy (Lacan
1993, 144145, 165). In an interview in 1960, he
renounced any focus on the immanent movement
of consciousness (Pluth 2007, 45). Derrida
(1967a/1973) rejected phenomenological method
on the grounds that Husserls assumption of an
indivisible self-presence, with its privileging of the
actual present, the now of immanent experience,
was an egregious instantiation of the self-deceiving
metaphysics of presence of Western philosophy
(p. 623, 668).
Anyone familiar with these ideas will have en-
countered what seems a stark opposition: on one
side, the defenders of the self or subject and the
primacy of individual subjectivity, under the aegis
of phenomenology, existentialism, and humanism;
on the other side of an abyss, the tougher-minded
partisans of determining semiotic structures,
marching under the banners of structuralism,
post-structuralism, and the true psychoanalysis
(Delacampagne 1995, 321).3 One implication of
this schema is that the work associated with the
second, supposedly anti-humanist group is as-
sumed to be irrelevant, if not actually opposed, to
the study of either subjectivity or the individual
subjectexcept, perhaps, insofar as it shows these
latter to be epiphenomena or illusions, no more
than what Foucault in 1966 called a sort of sur-
face effect, a shimmer, a foam (quoted in Eribon
1991, 161) cast up from the more decisive plane
of language and social structure.
There are, however, certain facts of intellec-
tual history that should make one feel uncom-
fortable with this opposition. It is interesting,
for example, that the most important so-called
post-structuralists began as adherents or close
students of phenomenology: Lacan as a follower
of Jaspersian phenomenological psychiatry and
proponent of a vaguely existentialist paradigm
(Leguil 2012, 121; Miller 2012, 10), Foucault as
a champion of Binswangers Daseinanalysis, and
Derrida as an appreciative if somewhat skeptical
student of Husserl. These can hardly be dismissed
as mere youthful indiscretions, given, for example,
Lacans ambivalent but continuing relationship
to the thought of both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty
(Leguil 2012), and Foucaults oft-remarked turn,
in his final work, to a focus on aesthetics or
techniques of the self and the ideal of deliberate
self-fashioning.
 Sass / Lacan, Foucault, and Crisis of the Subject 327
The most obvious reason to question the
standard schema lies, however, in the fact that
one of the most influential influences on Lacan
and Foucault as well as Derrida was none other
than Martin Heidegger, one of the two founding
figures of phenomenology. Indeed, it seems fairly
clear, in retrospect, that both the structuralist and
post-structuralist critiques were centered, not on
phenomenology in general or in its diversity, but
on Sartre and Husserl in particularthe one treat-
ed (with good reason) as an absolutist regarding
freedom, the other as a Cartesian foundationalist
regarding method.
Here we might think of a concept often em-
ployed by some of Lacans disciples, that of the
vanishing mediator (Zizek 1990). One type of
vanishing mediator is an intellectual figure who
constitutes an important source of influence
between two different intellectual positions, but
whose role is conveniently forgotten in order
to occlude some inconvenient affinities. That
Heidegger might be such a figure is apparent
when one recalls his close link to both sides of
the supposed coupure. Heidegger, after all, is the
co-founder, with his early mentor Husserl, of the
phenomenological tradition itself and also the key
inspiration (together with Husserl) of Sartres phi-
losophy. Yet Heideggers workincluding writings
from before as well as after his famous turning
or Kehre in the 1930swas also a (perhaps the)
decisive recent influence on the most important
figures of post-structuralism, including Lacan,
Foucault, and Derrida.
Consideration of Heideggers own position
certainly makes it difficult to credit any sharp op-
position between subjectivity and structure, or to
accept the polarity implicit in Foucaults reference
to the question of language [laying] siege on every
side to the figure of man (Foucault 1966, 417).4
From early on, Heidegger questioned both the
freedom and the self-transparency of the individual
subject; and, especially after the 1927 publica-
tion of Being and Time, he advocated a form of
phenomenology that increasingly emphasized the
interdependence of language and human existence,
treating them as at least equiprimordial. And
given the influence of Heideggers 1949 Letter on
Humanism, a sharply critical response to Sartres
Existentialism is a Humanism of 1946, it is dif-
ficult to deny that at least some forms of so-called
anti-humanism (a broad and oversimplifying
term) stem from the heart of phenomenology itself.
All this is obviousso obvious, in fact, that one
may wonder how its implications could ever have
been ignored. If Heideggers significance has been
occluded, it is surely because he has been hiding
in plain sight all along (sometimes the best way
to vanish).
In recent years, a number of writers have in fact
been calling attention to the influences of various
phenomenologists on post-structuralism (regard-
ing Lacan, see Leguil [2012], Duportail [2013],
and Phillips [1996]; regarding Foucault, see Presses
Universitaires de France [2013]). Herein, I am less
interested in demonstrating influences (important
as they are) than in examining affinities and,
in particular, in demonstrating the relevance of
some key poststructuralist contributions for the
essentially phenomenological project of clarifying
subjectivity or lived-experience and, in particular,
for the history of the subject. I focus on two
thinkers who are, in my view, the most significant
post-structuralists, and whose work has clearly
had the greatest influence at the intersections
of philosophy with psychiatry, psychology, and
psychoanalysis: Jacques Lacan (19011981) and
Michel Foucault (19261984).
It is useful to think of the crisis of the sub-
jectespecially of his supposed freedom or self-
transparencyas involving two distinct albeit
not unrelated levels. Whereas the first concerns
the qualities or capacities attributed to the actual
human subjectthe vision of the human person,
or what is sometimes called philosophical anthro-
pologythe second concerns a more epistemo-
logical or methodological plane, pertaining to the
philosophers or other theoreticians potential for
discovering the truth about the human condition
or human consciousness.
Sartres emphasis was largely on the first level,
as in his famous analysis in Being and Nothingness
(1943) of the anguish and bad faith that afflict the
individual human being. These reflect the actual
freedom, and the inexpungible awareness of ones
freedom, that, for Sartre, is an incontrovertible fact
of our existential condition. Husserls emphasis
328 PPP / Vol. 21, No. 4 / December 2014
is more on the second level. At least in the works
published in his lifetime, Husserl says rather little
about the freedom or self-transparency of the
empirical individual living her life: Does she, for
example, experience herself as essentially free and
self-aware? as a nothingness? as a founding enti-
ty? as a shepherd of being? Husserl does not focus
on such questions. He concerns himself far more
with the potential for the philosopher to discover
the structure and operation of human subjectiv-
ity. And here Husserl (1913; 1954) does indeed
assume freedom and self-transparency. Thus, he
advocates forms of reflection (the epoche and
reduction of phenomenological method) that
require a capacity, on the part of the philosophical
subject, for deliberate detachment from normal
embeddedness (emancipation from the natural
attitude, for example, which he describes as
founded on a particular resolve of the will and
as an abstention through which the gaze of
the philosopher in truth first becomes fully free
[Husserl 1954, 145, 151]); this detachment facili-
tates what Husserl describes as a quasi-Cartesian,
reflective self-awareness that is all-encompassing
and possessed of potentially apodictic certitude
and clarity (self-reflective clarity carried to its lim-
its, ultimate self-evidence [1954, 153, 189]).
The crisis of the human subject, as understood
by both the structuralists and post-structuralists
of mid-century Paris, is a crisis on both levels,
although with shifting emphasis depending on
context. The individual human beings belief (or, at
least, the bourgeois Western Europeans belief) in
his subjecthood is declared an illusion. At the same
time, the very project of describing subjectivity is
called into questionboth for being impossible
on epistemological grounds (given the supposed
impossibility of valid self-reflection, and thus of
phenomenology) and as trivial in its potential yield
(because subjectivity is but a shimmer or foam
riding atop the real events). This, at least, has
been the prevailing orthodoxy or ideology of both
structuralism and post-structuralism. It is the key
lesson that figures like Lacan, Foucault, and Der-
rida, and many of their followers, claim to have
drawn from Freud, Saussure, and Lvi-Strauss.
It can be difficult to assess the real import or
seriousness of these claims. They do sound, at
times, like a wholesale refusal of the very notion
of the person or individual, which are among
the most foundational concepts of Western culture
(Strawson 1959). Both person and self imply,
after all, a being who is a subject of awareness,
capable of experience, thought, and voluntary
action, and with a crucial capacity for self-con-
sciousness (Honderich 1995, 655, 816).
One might wonder, as well, about the legitimacy
of concepts and distinctions that have readily
been assumed. Post-structuralism is known for
its critique of essentialist overgeneralization and
polarizing; yet this entire discussion displays all
the marks of such oversimplification, including an
either/or attitude toward the existence of a self/
subject, and the facile assumption that certain
tendencies are necessarily linked. Must freedom
or self-transparency really be conceived as either
absolute or else nonexistent? Do they always go
together like aspects of a single whole? Does a
sympathy for phenomenology necessarily imply
a belief in subjectivism or a sovereign self? Much
of the original discussion has proceeded as if all
these were necessarily the case, with but rare
acknowledgment of the possibility of partial or
complex types of freedom or of more shadowy
forms of self-awareness.
What I would like to do here is to look beyond
or beneath the standard level of polemics and proc-
lamations, which in my view has been taken far too
seriously. I want to ask whether this critical vision
associated with post-structuralism, with its sup-
posedly radical rejection of both subjecthood and
subjectivity, isor need be seen as beingtruly
characteristic of the contributions of Foucault
and Lacan, that is, of the actual concepts and
novel perspectives that are their most important
legacy. In discussing both figures, I focus on key
propositions and central periods of their careers,
periods in which their anti-humanistic proclama-
tions could be at their most strident.
I begin with Foucaults book The Order of
Things, typically seen as heralding the triumph
of a supposedly anti-humanist post-structuralism.
Then I turn to Lacan, considering especially his
key notions of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real.
Finally I return again to Foucault, this time to his
book Discipline and Punish. Overall, I begin with
 Sass / Lacan, Foucault, and Crisis of the Subject 329
the issue of subjectivity, considering the relevance
of these figures for the study of consciousness or
the experiential dimension. In the final pages, I
focus more directly on the interrelated question
of subjecthood, namely, the ways in which each
of these authors treats the questions of freedom,
responsibility, and the possibility of self-reflection.
It would take a book to examine these issues
in detail (see Sass 2001, 2008, 2009, in press).
My goal here is only to sketch some neglected
intellectual affinities and influences and, more
important, to indicate how these two thinkers,
typically considered post-structuralists, can be
seen as contributing to the more general phenom-
enological enterprise, or at least to the particular
line of hermeneutic phenomenology opened up
by Heidegger. My hope is to transcend the usual
focus on schools of thought and their supposed
incompatibilities. I want, in fact, to liberate certain
key ideas and perspectives from the constraining
or even suffocating environment in which they are
typically discussed. My purpose is to show the po-
tential relevance of these notions for the phenom-
enological project broadly conceivedthat is, not
for furthering this or that particular philosophers
signature approach, but for exploring subjectivity
in its disclosure of what Merleau-Ponty (1945)
called the mystery of the world (p. lxxxv). To
do this, however, it will be useful to recall the
significance of what Heidegger terms the ontologi-
cal dimension, his focus on what he terms being
(sometimes capitalized: Being) rather than beings.
Heideggers Ontological
Difference
A crucial passage in Being and Time, for under-
standing the entirety of Heideggers work, is one in
which he describes the phenomenological project
in somewhat contradictory terms: as seeking to
describe something that is, at the same time, om-
nipresent and obvious yet also hidden and obscure.
And this, he says, is that most decisive yet subtle
of dimensions, the Being of entities:
What is it that phenomenology is to let be seen?
.. Manifestly it is something that does not show
itself initially and for the most part, something that
is concealed, in contrast to what initially and for the
most part does show itself. But at the same time it is
something that essentially belongs to what initially and
for the most part shows itself, indeed in such a way that
it constitutes its meaning and ground.
But what remains concealed in an exceptional sense,
or what falls back and is covered up again, or shows
itself only in a distorted way, is not this or that being but
rather, as we have shown in our foregoing observations,
the being of beings. (Heidegger 1927a, 31)
Heidegger directs the phenomenologists atten-
tion not to any particular object or ontic entity,
but to what he calls the theme of ontology, which
is the overall way in which everything shows up,
especially regarding its felt quality of reality or
the lack thereof. Ontology is possible, writes
Heidegger, only as phenomenology. The phe-
nomenological concept of phenomenon, as self-
showing, means the being of beings (Heidegger
1927a, 31). It is this most general ontological
dimensioncall it the worlds form or manner of
presencethat is, for Heidegger, the very heart
of our existence as subjective beings yet that is so
readily forgotten, ignored, or distorted by reifica-
tion and other distortions that seem to come as
naturally to us as breathing. Essentially, writes
Heidegger, nothing else stands behind the phe-
nomena of phenomenology. Nevertheless, what is
to become a phenomenon can be concealed. And
precisely because phenomena are initially and for
the most part not given phenomenology is needed
(Heidegger 1927a, 31, 36 in orig.).
In a lecture course given in 1927, the year Being
and Time was published, Heidegger (1927b) de-
scribes the ontological difference (p. 72) as the
difference between being and beings. He notes
that, for a particular entity to be perceived or rec-
ognized, for example, within a given science, the
very possibility of such an entity must first exist.
(A medieval scientist could not possibly recognize
chromosomes or photons.) Before that particular
entity can be uncovered, the realm of its possibil-
ity, its mode of being, must first be disclosed to
the scientist. What Heidegger terms disclosure
refers to a kind of a priori knowledge and an a
priori understanding of the beings being; it is our
mode of access to beings (p. 52, 72). Neither
the scientist nor the man in the street is, however,
aware of this deeper, a priori dimension, the on-
tological realm of being or of disclosureeven
330 PPP / Vol. 21, No. 4 / December 2014
though it is the basis of their experience and their
behavior or comportment, and even though it
determines the mode of actuality or reality,
the ontological sense of reality in general, that
any entity or particular being is capable of having
(p. 75, 76, 72, 74). Only rarely and momentari-
ly, writes Heidegger, do scientists awaken from
their dreaming and open their eyes to the being
of the beings which they investigate (1927b, p.
54). (There are obvious affinities with the phi-
losophies of science of Canguilhem and Kuhn.)
We are speaking, then, of a foundational realm of
experience that is too omnipresent and immediate
to be itself experienced, at least in the sense of be-
ing consciously recognized. Indeed, it may elude
even the approach of phenomenology itself, or at
least that of the early Husserl (e.g., 1913)who
conceived phenomenology as a method whereby,
with the elimination of prejudices, the structures
of experience could be clearly revealed in a form
of direct or immediate intuition or quasi-seeing.
But how then, one may wonder, can this level of
disclosure be itself disclosed?
Heidegger describes this a priori aspect of be-
ing as a part of what he calls the perceivedness
of something extant which nevertheless belongs
to the Dasein (1927b, 69 emphasis added)the
latter term being Heideggers attempt to refer to
the subjective sphere without implying the usual
Cartesian distinctions. This quality of being or
presence is not any kind of object and cannot be
treated as the object of even a direct phenomeno-
logical contemplation. It is what must be under-
stood if we are to carry out the project of herme-
neutic phenomenologythat is to say, if we are
to understand either the general human condition
or particular forms it may take on in particular
personalities or particular cultures, whether, for
example, these latter be anxious or confused,
melancholic or schizophrenic, Greek or Judaic,
Renaissance or modern.5 The central purpose and
highest calling of phenomenology, we might say,
is to disclose this dimension of disclosure. It is
to bring to explicit or theoretical awareness this
ontological sense of reality in general, the deepest
and most decisive level of our experiential lives.
Foucault, The Order of Things
I mentioned Foucaults early sympathy for
phenomenology as well as his late interest in an
aesthetics of the self and techniques of the self,
which clearly imply belief in a significant degree of
freedom and self-awareness. Now let us consider
The Order of Things (1966; originally Les mots
et les choses [Word and Things]), a book widely
understood as delivering the deathblow to human-
ism and phenomenology and as establishing the
preeminence of post-structuralism (Delacampagne
1995, 334).
This is the work in which Foucault, aiming
at the deepest and most implicit levels of human
knowing, describes how the very experience of
order itself has shifted over the course of Western
history since the sixteenth centurymutating from
a vision of divinely ordained signatures and simi-
larities (in the Renaissance), to the rationalist and
objectivist scientific order of the Classical Age
(the Enlightenment), then to the self-conscious and
potentially subjectivist categories of the modern
or post-Kantian age in which we still live. Here
the very object of Foucaults analysis is itself epis-
temological: the basic modes of knowing, what he
terms epistemes, dominant in three major epochs
of Western history. Les mots et les choses focuses
not on private existence or the individual person,
but on what governs knowledge across a variety
of fields during a given historical epoch, fields
that demonstrate the same general way of orga-
nizing knowledge despite diverse subject matters
(biology, economics, linguisticsor the precursor
disciplines of life, labor, or language).
There can be little doubt as to Foucaults in-
tended target and imagined allies. The book ends
with the famous image of the figure of man (the
essence of a supposed humanism) being erased
like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea
(1966, 422), giving way, presumably, to the tide
of a new episteme that Foucault (e.g., p. 407416)
explicitly associates with the structuralist disci-
plines of linguistics, ethnology, and psychoanalysis
(Saussure/Jakobson, Lvi-Strauss, Lacan). In the
preface to the English translation, written a few
years later, Foucault even states that if there is
one position he does reject, it is what, broadly
 Sass / Lacan, Foucault, and Crisis of the Subject 331
speaking, could be called the phenomenological
approach. Such an approach, he says, gives abso-
lute priority to the observing subject [the notion of
self-transparency], attributes a constituent role
to an act [the issue of freedom], places its own
point of view at the origin of all historicity,
in short, leads to a transcendental consciousness
[subjectivism]. To such a theory of the knowing
subject Foucault declares his preference for a
theory of discursive practice (p. xv).
Yet it would be mistaken to read this as a rejec-
tion of phenomenology in all its forms. Les mots
et les choses is obviously highly sympathetic to
structuralism. But Foucault (in the same preface)
disputes certain half-witted commentators
in France who have persisted in labeling him a
structuralist, lamenting that he has been unable
to get it into their tiny minds that [he has] used
none of the methods, concepts or key terms that
characterize structural analysis. (Foucault goes
on to pay homage to structuralism, referring to a
connection that does me honor, but that I have
not deserved [p. xv].)
Foucaults demurral is accurate enough. Unlike
Lvi-Strauss, for example, his own general meth-
od, at least in this book, in identifying epistemes
does not seek basic elements that are organized
in terms of structural oppositions, nor does he
assert that this is how actual humans necessarily
function.6 The Renaissance episteme, as he con-
ceives it, for example, operates not according to
the diacritical principles of structural opposition
between polarized identities, but in accord with
various modes of experienced similarity or resem-
blance, modes in which experienced meaning is
far from being mere shimmer or foam (quoted
in Eribon 1991, 161). Foucaults analysis of the
modern era is still further from structuralism,
given that here the fundamental category is actu-
ally self-consciousness, the post-Kantian tendency
of the subject to take itself as the supposed basis
for all knowing while also taking itself as the
prime object of knowledge (thus falling into the
paradoxical condition that Foucault termed the
empirico-transcendental doublet).
Foucaults way of describing his project is,
in fact, highly reminiscent of Heideggerwho
speaks, as noted, of disclosing the hidden mean-
ing and ground (Heidegger 1927a, 31) of what
is manifest in our experience, the a priori knowl-
edge and an a priori understanding of the beings
being (Heidegger 1927b, 52) Foucault speaks
similarly of seeking conditions of possibility and
a positive unconscious of knowledge, and of
an historical a priori level that can seem con-
fused and obscure yet is most fundamental of
all (Foucault 1966, 72). Foucault even uses the
b-word repeatedly. He speaks, for example, of
the pure experience of order and of its modes of
being, the mode of being of the objects that ap-
pear in [a] field, and discourse and mans being
(1966, 366); and states that the present study is
an attempt to analyze that experience (emphasis
added). We might say that Foucaults object is the
same as what Heidegger describes, in his lecture
course, as the perceivedness of the perceived. It
is something that belong[s] in a certain sense to
the object, to the perceived, yet is rooted in the
Dasein or knowing subject, which in Foucaults
case is understood as a kind of collective or cul-
tural/historical subject, an episteme.
Foucault is interested, in fact, not just in dem-
onstrating the general presence of structure, or
even of certain particular structures as such, but
in examining the ontological implications of the
epistemes he delineates, which is to say, the most
general or foundational way in which they convey
an experience of reality or of Being.
There is indeed a difference in the overall sense
of actuality or reality, and of ones relationship to
it, when one feels oneself to be living in the pres-
ence of the following three forms of being: the
divinely ordained (and magic-friendly) pattern
of similarities and signatures of the Renaissance;
the purely objective order of the Enlightenment or
Classical Age, which rejects the very category of
similarity as superficial, emphasizes measurement
or analysis into units, and views names as but
arbitrary labels rather than divine signatures; and
finally, what Foucault termed the transcendental
narcissism (1969, 203) of the modern, post-
Kantian era that we are still caught inside, the
era in which language becomes object and the
empirical sciences become linked with reflections
on subjectivity (1966, 239, 321, 270). Foucault
speaks, for example, of experiencing the raw
332 PPP / Vol. 21, No. 4 / December 2014
being of language in the Renaissance and of
how that experience has been forgotten since
the sixteenth century (p. 48), after which words
(during the Enlightenment) came to be understood
as arbitrary labels harboring no necessary clue to
the essence of what they designate.
What Foucault describes as the difference
between Renaissance and Enlightenment has, in
fact, something in common with the shift between
a religious/Aristotelian and a Galilean universe as
described by historian of science Alexandre Koyr
(a significant influence on Foucault) in From the
Closed World to the Infinite Universe. But closer
analogies to Foucaults epistemes are the distinct
forms of being invoked by the later Heidegger
(1977) when he contrasts the worlds of the Greek
temple, Gothic church, and hydroelectric dam
although Foucault focuses more on something like
underlying codes and categories. This, of course,
is a form of phenomenology, albeit one that dif-
fers profoundly from that of at least the early
Husserl. It is hermeneutic/interpretive rather than
Cartesian/foundationalist in its methodology. (It
may also exemplify what Husserls follower Eugen
Fink (1985/1995, 5565) described as construc-
tive phenomenology.) In its vision of its human
object (the epistemes), it insists on the collective,
horizonal, and non-self-transparent nature of what
it describes, and on the crucial importance of the
overall ontological dimension of the experience
of Being.
Les mots et les choses is a book that many
have found exceedingly obscure. Much of its dif-
ficulty, as well as its lyricism, probably stems from
Foucaults awareness of the challenge of evoking
dimensions of knowledge that (as Heidegger un-
derstands) clearly verge on the ineffable. These are
not structures that can simply be seen, in any sense
of the latter term. They are not revealed before a
purified gaze, but must be elicited or imagined, fur-
ther clarified, and only then, perhaps, recognized.
Foucaults essentially phenomenological inter-
est in what he himself calls the experience of
order and its modes of being (emphasis added)
emerges with particular force in his discussions
of Don Quixote (1605/1615) and Las Meninas
(1656), two works poised at the transition (circa
1650) from Renaissance to Classical Age. For
Foucault, Cervantes work demonstrates a grow-
ing discomfort with the modes of order and forms
of credulity (based on resemblance, as in the case
of Don Quixote mistaking windmills for knights
or scullery maids for princesses) characteristic of
the Renaissance episteme. It is as if Cervantes were
somehow anticipating the immanent transition
into, and retrospective view from, the more sober
perspective of the Enlightenment. In the latter
episteme or mode of being, things cannot be taken
to be what they may seem to be on the basis of
(mere) resemblance. The play of similitudes is now
suspect. It is no longer an enigmatic but poten-
tially revelatory domain of deepest truth (Foucault
1966, 30), but only a fabric of illusion, born of
human fantasy, that obscures the deeper ground
of material reality, the realm that any sober person
might measure, touch, or see. Foucault (1966)
describes Don Quixote as the hero of the same:
his whole journey [is] a quest for similitudes,
but in a new world in which similitudes have
become deceptive and verge upon the visionary or
madness. In Cervantes novel, the cruel reason
of identities and differences makes endless sport
of signs and similitudes [and] language breaks off
its old kinship with things (pp. 514).
The intensely phenomenological character of
Foucaults interest is even more obvious in his
elaborate analysis of the experience of looking
at Velasquezs painting, Las Meninas. Foucaults
appreciation of a paintings potential to reveal an
entire lived-world, together with his analysis of
the interplay of gazes depicted on the canvas, are
highly reminiscent of both Merleau-Ponty and
Sartre. Foucaults (1966) main emphasis, however,
is on the ontological issues typical of Heideggers
hermeneutic phenomenology, which is to say, on
the way Velasquez painting can be understood to
reveal the overall mode of being of the Enlight-
enment or Classical Ageto serve, as it were, as
the representation of Classical representation
(p. 17). Thus, Foucault calls our attention to the
importance of the sense of a looming void, in the
midst of a wholly realistic world, that is evoked
by the absence from the canvas of the royal pair,
the king and queen. (We only see them reflected,
ghostlike, in a distant mirror: figures of absence,
two tiny silhouettes gleaming out from the
 Sass / Lacan, Foucault, and Crisis of the Subject 333
looking-glassthe palest, the most unrealof all
the paintings images [p. 5, 15].) This absence is
both peculiar and distinctive: the king and queen
are not only the object of all the gazes depicted
in the canvas (everyone is looking toward them,
which is also toward us, the viewers, who stand in
the spot where the painter, Velasquez, must have
been); they also constitute the standpoint from
which everything is seenwhat Foucault describes
as the gaze which has organized it and the gaze
for which it is displayed (p. 17). For Foucault,
this is emblematic of the Classical experience of
being. It demonstrates how, in this episteme, nearly
everything can be given a realistic, in a sense ob-
jective, representationeverything, that is, with
the crucial exception of the constituting viewer, a
being who will be thematized only later, by Kant
and all that follows in his wake.7
We see, then, that Foucaults project in Les
mots et les choses is an eminently Heideggerian
one: that of disclosing forms of disclosure, of
revealing the characteristic structures of distinct,
culturally grounded forms of subjectivity. Anyone
who might attempt to grasp the lived-world of a
Renaissance, Enlightenment, or modern individual
would do well to bear in mind the overall ways of
experiencing meaning and reality, together with
characteristic forms of credulity and doubt, that
Foucault describes in his analysis of these epis-
temes.8 The disclosure of these fundamental forms
of disclosure clearly requires hermeneutic methods
that go beyond the purifying subtractions inherent
in the phenomenological and other Husserlian
reductions, a method Heidegger considered insuf-
ficiently sensitive to the ontological difference. It is
nonetheless a phenomenological project, focused
on experience or the lived-world, indeed on the
subtlest and most fundamental yet least objectifi-
able dimensions of subjective life. One should
note as well that it is impossible to dismiss these
modes of disclosure that are disclosed in Foucaults
book as mere epiphenomena or surface effects
(shimmer or foam), for it is obvious that these
underlying modes organize the culture, and with
this the behavior and expression (what Heidegger
calls the comportment) of human beings.9
Lacans Three Registers
The phenomenological implications of Lacans
(1953a) contribution can best be demonstrated
by considering the core of his theoretical vision,
which is his notion of the three registers of human
reality: Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary (sometimes
abbreviated as RSI). At first this may seem surpris-
ing, given that each concept clearly does imply, on
some level, a confrontation with what might be
termed the illusory nature of our lived experience.
Closer consideration shows that each of these no-
tions can, in fact, also be understood in a rather
different light.
Let us start with Lacans overtly anti-phenom-
enological thrust, beginning with the Imaginary
register as presented in his famous analysis of the
mirror stage. Here Lacan (1966, orig. 1949) sug-
gests that our sense of having an autonomous ego
or self is, in fact, a sort of subjective illusion (the
illusion of being a subject, or at least a certain kind
of subject: coherent and in control), and that this
illusion is based on internalizing the objective im-
age we see of ourselves in a mirror or other source
of reflection. Lacan himself offers his argument as
a refutation of a notion, epitomized by Sartre and
presumably accepted by phenomenology (he refers
dismissively to the contemporary philosophy of
being and nothingness). This is the notion that one
is indeed an autonomous and self-aware subject (a
self-sufficiency of consciousness [and] the illusion
of autonomy [p. 99100]), and that this truth is
somehow incontrovertible, an immanent fact of
experience itself.
The anti-phenomenological import of the Sym-
bolic Order (1953a, 1953b) seems equally telling.
Here, Lacan presents a realm that is understood to
lie beyond our conscious grasp (a realm of semiotic
structures encompassing the unconscious, which is
structured like a language), yet which, in contrast
with the illusions of the imaginary realm, sup-
posedly constitutes the actual matrix and motor
of much of our experience and action. For Lacan,
as for Lvi-Strauss before him, it is clear that we
are not the masters of the language-like structures.
Regardless of what our immediate experience may
seem to tell us, it is language that speaks us rather
than the reverse.
334 PPP / Vol. 21, No. 4 / December 2014
The anti-phenomenological thrust may seem
most obvious of all in Lacans discussion of his
third register of the Real (1953a, 1993, 2007).
Here, after all, we are dealing with a realm that
is, in some sense, actually defined by its inacces-
sibility to our experiencea realm that Lacan as-
sociated with Kants notion of noumenal reality
(reality in-itself) and that is specifically conceived
in contrast with the manifest, phenomenal realm
of our lived-experience. The very existence of the
Real may well seem the ultimate refutation of
phenomenological complacency or indeed, of any
expectation that examination of our conscious-
ness could provide an inventory of what there is
or could be.
It is understandable, then, that Lacans registers
are so often conceived as undermining any image
of a free and self-transparent subject or self, and
also the notion that subjectivity is either an acces-
sible or a consequential realm. What these registers
seem to reveal is, rather, that our experiential lives
are largely illusory (the Imaginary), epiphenom-
enal (the Symbolic), or simply blind (the Real).
Much of what I have just said about Lacans
vision of the deceptions and blindspots of our
experiential lives is not only true but crucial for
any understanding of his perspective. A more ex-
tended consideration of each register nevertheless
shows, however, that Lacan can more accurately
be viewed as a potential contributor to, than as an
enemy of, phenomenology. To see this, we need to
think of phenomenology not as presupposing or
vindicating the sovereign or self-transparent self,
but as a tentative and exploratory disclosure of
subjective life in its more formal or ontological
dimensions; not as a Cartesian project seeking
a realm of absolute clarity and certitude (whose
possibility is assumed), but as an exploration of
subjective life as it actually exists, with all its lim-
its and constraints and realms of blindness. On
Heideggers ontological and hermeneutic account,
human subjectivity is not and cannot be either self-
grounding or fully self-transparent. Bearing this
in mind, each of Lacans three registers or orders
can be understood as constituting something like
a Heideggerian mode of Being. (This is not to say,
of course, that this is the only way they need to
be or can be understood; I argue that Lacan con-
tributes to phenomenology, not that he is entirely
or solely a phenomenologist.) Here I have space
only to sketch these dimensions.
That the Imaginary, despite its generating of il-
lusion, is a mode of experience is perfectly obvious,
and indeed explicit in Lacans account. In this sense
Lacans account of the imaginary realm just is, on
one level, an account of one crucial dimension of
what it is like to be a living human being. The
fact that the Imaginary is a partial, in some sense
deceptive, realm, does not gainsay it own experi-
ential reality, its actuality as a form of experience,
nor its relevance for a phenomenological account
of a key aspect or dimension of subjectivity.10
The Symbolic is often described in structural
terms, and in this sense is not directly a phenom-
enological fact. It should be clear, however, that
Lacans Symbolic has various sorts of relevance for
our subjective lives. It does, for example, lend a
certain polarizing tendency to our sense of things,
grounded in the diacritical nature of language,
and this becomes a feature of our lived world.
But perhaps the crucial feature of the Symbolic,
in Lacans account, is how the advent of linguistic
symbolism supposedly cuts us off from a pre- or
sub-linguistic experience of the world that we
experience, in its absence (and as an absence), as
more authentic, and immediate, thereby tinging
our very experience of being with a pervasive
aura of loss. Lacan (1960) describes this event as
a kind of castration, but goes on to view it as
the essential generator of our desire (which is, at
bottom, the desire for a return to something that
is felt to be both primordial and forbidden, hence
dangerous and infinitely alluringwhat Lacan re-
fers to as the thing and the objet petit a). In these
ways the Symbolic is of great phenomenological
relevance since it both generates and constitutes
certain modes of subjective life. One should note,
as well, the profound influence that Heideggers
(1950) notion of die Sprache, understood as the
fundamental source of disclosure, had on Lacans
(1953a, 1953b) notion of the importance of la
parole (human speech).11
As for the Real, it needs to be recognized that
what Lacan is interested in is not, in fact, the
actual noumenon as it really is or might be. The
notion of the Real is, ratherat least in large
 Sass / Lacan, Foucault, and Crisis of the Subject 335
parta way of capturing the role that our sense
of otherness, limits, and the unknown can actually
play in our subjective lives. The Real, we might
say, is a kind of unknowable and unattainable
beyond that refuses to leave us alone. It is the
unexpected surprise that confounds expectations,
yet assaults us again and again with implacable
repetition. One might say, then (putting things in
a maximally paradoxical way), that the Lacanian
Real is concerned with the phenomenon of the
noumenonnot with the in-itself in itself, but
with the in-itself in-itself for us.12
One could say, then, that each of the Lacanian
registers describes a form of Being in the Heideg-
gerian ontological sense: an overall way in which
one can (and does) experience the world and one-
self. The imaginary is that mode of subjective life
in which what is most actual or real tends to be
identified with that which has distinct, Gestalt-like
form. The Symbolic is that mode in which Being
is experienced as involving categorical polarities
and a sense of abstraction from something more
grounded or authentic. The Real is that mode in
which the very eluding of our conceptual/percep-
tual grasp serves as the ultimate index of Being.
The affinities with the projects of both Heidegger
and Foucault should be clear. One could describe
Lacan as offering an ontological characterization
of much of what Freud interpreted in more ontic
(entity-like) fashion. I would note, however, that
Lacans vision has the advantagefor a psycholo-
gistof ascribing more than a single experience of
order or of a mode of being to a given subjectivity,
in contrast with the historical analyses of both
Heidegger and Foucault. We must remember, after
all, that Lacans three registers (RSI) are not only
conflicting, but also interdependent and mutually
defining. His tripartite account opens up the pos-
sibility of an ontological account that is more com-
plex and dynamic, grounded in the various forms
of interdependency and opposition that can exist
between these orders or regimes (Sass, in press).
It should be noted, by the way, that each of
Lacans three registers is grounded in something
distinctly human, that is, in one or another feature
traditionally seen as unique to, and definitive of,
the human essence: self-consciousness in the case
of the Imaginary; language in the case of the Sym-
bolic; awareness of mortality and a beyond in the
case of the Real. This is true as well of Foucaults
epistemes. Humanism is a polysemic term; and it
is clear that both Foucault and Lacan show disdain
for self-satisfied liberal humanism and engage in
anti-humanist polemics. Neither, however, shows
any real inclination toward Lvi-Strausss (1962)
ambition to undertake the resolution of the hu-
man into the non-human (p. 2467).
It should be obvious, I think, that experiential
dimensions such as those captured by Lacans
registers do not and cannot lend themselves to the
kind of clarity and certitude to which Husserl, in
his Cartesian moments, was drawn. It cannot be
an enterprise of pure intuition or direct descrip-
tion, relying entirely on what a given subject could
report either naively or with benefit of the various
phenomenological reductions. Nor does it aspire
to anything like apodictic certitude. A phenom-
enology of this kind is more in line with Heidegger,
especially the later Heidegger, for it puts a higher
premium on the evocation of profound existential
and ontological realities than it does on hopes of
incremental progress of a methodological sort.
The ultimate object of phenomenology is con-
sciousness or presence itself, but this is something
that, although omnipresent, is also hidden or
obscure (because it is too close to us, indeed is
us). Hermeneutic phenomenology recognizes the
need to bring other knowledge to bear, including
theories and metaphors of various kinds, so long
as these other forms of knowledge are in service
of revealing the nature of consciousness. This is
clearly a hermeneutic, dialectical, in some respects
free-wheeling enterprise, one in which speculation
and imaginative hypothesizing must play a central
role. It is crucial, of course, that these potential
revelations not simply be accepted without criti-
cism, but rather judged (itself an interpretive act,
obviously) in terms of how well they seem to
correspond to or to capture the reality of our
subjective lives.
The Subject
Let us turn from the question of subjectivity
to the related but more specific issue of subject-
hood. The reader may now accept the relevance
336 PPP / Vol. 21, No. 4 / December 2014
of these post-structuralists for the general project
of phenomenology. But can it really be said that,
despite their anti-humanist polemics, Foucault and
Lacan also accept, at least to some extent, the no-
tion of a self-conscious and self-controlling subject
(which, roughly speaking, would be equivalent
to accepting some of the traditional notion of the
person)?13 I touch briefly on Lacan before turning
to Foucault.
Lacan, Ethics, and the Acte
Lacan is often described as a sort of radical
anti-humanist who crusaded not only against what
he saw as the reifications of American ego psy-
chology, but also against any notion of a free or
self-aware subject. It is true that Lacan dismissed
voluntarism: the term freedom, he said, makes
me laugh; I never talk about freedom (Pluth
2007, 4). But, as more discerning scholars have
argued (e.g., Leguil 2012, 85; Zizek 2000), Lacan
does not in fact attack the subject tout court so
much as seek a new notion of the subject, one
more linked to language and the unconscious,
and therefore more reflective of its problematic
or paradoxical status.
It would be impossible here to enter into the
complexities of Lacans notion or notions of the
subject. It seems obvious, however, that Lacans
rejection of free will is far from absolute. This
should be clear from the mere fact that he speaks of
an ethics of psychoanalysis (Miller 1992), given
that ethical responsibility is inconceivable in the
absence of at least some degree of freedom, com-
promised and complicated though it may be. Sartre
and Lacan have often been considered antithetical
figures on the issue of freedom. But as Leguil has
shown in her recent Sartre with Lacan (2012, 85),
there are actually many affinities, including that
of Lacans divided subject with Sartres pour-soi. I do not simply express, or actualize my inner
Both she and Jacques-Alain Miller (Lacans son-in-
law and orthodox intellectual heir) have recently
argued, in fact, that Lacan, in speaking of the
psychotic patients insondable decision de ltre is wholly unpredictable and undetermined; stem-
(unfathomable decision of being) seems to have
adopted something very close to Sartres notion of
a fundamental existential choice (le choix origi-
nal) as central to human life (Leguil 2012, 26, 33;
Miller 2012, 9). It also seems that, in his critique
of the ego/self/moi, in favor of a certain notion of
the subject or sujet as a manque--tre irrduct-
ible (an irreducible lack-of-being; Leguil 2012, 17,
103), Lacan (both early and late) borrowed from
Sartres work on prereflective awareness. Sartres
work offers his famous desubstantialization of
consciousness, but it is one in which consciousness
is understood both as an experience of nothingness
and as a condition of limitless freedom (a nant
able to nantise).
Something akin to this emphasis on freedom
emerges in a highly enigmatic but forceful way in
Lacans insistence on the possibility or even ethical
necessity of what he calls the acte or psycho-
analytic acta moment in which the subject,
says Lacan, is most fully activated (Gallagher
2002, 11). Lacan does not, so far as I can judge,
offer any clear philosophical formulation of his
positionthat is, of just how to integrate these
claims with his insistence on the decisive role of the
notion of the unconscious; perhaps he recognizes
that clear formulation of this problematic synthesis
is impossible. The echoes of Kierkegaards notions
of freedom and the leap of faith, and of the acte
gratuite of Gide, Sartre, and Camus, seem clear
enough, however. The acte psychoanalytique
(to be distinguished, incidentally, from passage
lacte and acting-out) seems to be some kind of
extreme albeit paradoxical expression of freedom,
involving a simultaneous recognition and refusal
of all imaginable constraints. One Lacanian dis-
ciple speaks of it as implying an ability to break
through the limit imposed by the phantasy and
thus to call into question our attachment to the
symptom (Melman in Gallagher 2010, 21).
Another influential Lacanian goes so far as to
interpret it as both totally free and profoundly
consequential: In an authentic [Lacanian] act
nature. I rather redefine myself, the very core of
my identity (Zizek 1999, also 1997). At least on
this account, the Lacanian acte is something that
ming from nowhere, yet somehow simultaneously
aware of its own freedom from necessity and of
its own overwhelming significance.
 Sass / Lacan, Foucault, and Crisis of the Subject 337
Foucaults Discipline and Punish
In concluding, I turn again to Foucault, this
time to Discipline and Punish (1975). Whereas
The Order of Things is inspired, in large measure
by an animus (misconceived, as I have argued)
against phenomenology, against the very idea of
taking subjectivity as ones object, Discipline and
Punish is more directed against the notion of the
subject. An implicit project of this book about dis-
cipline and surveillance is to undermine our faith
in the modern sense of autonomy, self-awareness,
and self-control. Here the target, we might say,
is less transcendental narcissism than a kind of
transcendental egotism: not the mere attending to
our own consciousness, but the prideful claiming
of autonomy and self-control.
Foucault describes Discipline and Punish, per-
haps his most famous book, as intended to offer
a correlative history of the modern soul and of a
new power to judge, a genealogy of the modern
soul grounded in a history of punitive power of spontaneity and dominated instead by a sense
(1975, 23, 29). This is the work in which Foucault
describes the famous image of the Panopticon,
offering this as an emblem of the general disciplin-
ary order in which the modern, self-monitoring
self and sense of interiority has supposedly been
forged. The import of Foucaults analysis is to
portray the modern humanistic senses of self-
awareness and self-control in a most unhealthy
light. They are presented not as the self-founding,
intrinsically liberating expressions of individual
initiative that they may seem, but, rather, as the
products of subjectification, of an oppressive but
anonymous regime that reproduces itself blindly
via processes that serve, not the individual, but
the requirements of an isolating yet homogenizing
social order.
Foucault can certainly be enigmatic; his attack
on humanism, at least in its autonomy-obsessed
form, seems obvious enough however. He goes
so far as to state that it is on the basis of the
panoptical, disciplinary order that various con-
structs have been constructed, including those of
psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness
(1975, 29). Whereas Sartre famously insisted
that even the prisoner is free, Foucault claims
that panoptical imprisonment generates what is
only the illusion of freedom. Perhaps we should
register, as well, an implicit questioning of the kind
of self-transparency epitomized by the Husserlian
epoche, at least insofar as the latter assumes an act
of autonomous and volitional self-founding. In
all these ways, it would seem, Foucault separates
himself from the ethos of phenomenology and
existentialism, with their characteristic focus on
subjectivity and the subject.
A bit of thought, however, should make one
question the cleanness of this separation. First
we should note that the key notion of panopti-
cism seems inseparable from phenomenological
concerns, insofar as it is concerned with not only
the genealogy but also the form of a certain kind
of modern subjectivity. The very structure of the
Panopticon implies the presence of a specific kind
of subjectivity, the very sort, obviously, that it itself
is intended to bring about. And this, of course, is
the divided self of modern, self-monitoring sub-
jectivity. It is a form of experiential life emptied
of taking oneself as ones own object and thus of
being divided between an observing and observed
part. R. D. Laings The Divided Self describes
analogous forms of subjective life, as does the
account by sociologist Norbert Elias of various
aspects of modern interiority.
Foucaults image of the Panopticona ma-
chine for dissociating the see/being seen dyadis
just the sort of historically rooted image and
theory that can enrich a hermeneutically oriented
phenomenological analysis. I myself have used it
to offer a detailed phenomenological interpreta-
tion of the lived-world and self-experience of one
famous and perhaps paradigmatic patient, Daniel
Paul Schreber, whose subjective existence is best
understood (so I argue) as a particularly extreme
instance of a kind of lived panopticism (Sass 1987,
1992 chap 8). The patients delusional beliefs
(which are largely centered on the interaction of
what he calls rays and nerves, corresponding
to the watching and watched parts of the divided
stream) can, for example, be read as a sort of in-
ner allegory of this specific form of subjectivity.
But what if we consider neither subjectivity nor
the subjective illusion of self-hood, but the subject
or self itself, that is, taken as a reality? Discipline
and Punish might at first seem to present itself
338 PPP / Vol. 21, No. 4 / December 2014
(albeit obliquely) as an attack on the very idea
that autonomy and self-awareness could be more
than subjective illusions, perverse products of
the disciplinary order. To think clearly here, it is
necessary to remove ourselves from the polarized
ideological currents that dominated the era of the
crisis of the subject. For even if we accept the role
of the Panopticon in molding the self, there is no
reason to deny the reality of this self, a self that,
on Foucaults own explicit account, is nothing if
not consequential. The modern subject, molded
by processes of panoptical subjectification, does,
after all, both accurately scrutinize and effectively
control its own behavior, at least to a significant
extent. If having causal powers is a criterion of
the real, then surely the panoptical subject is very
far from being a mere illusion. This truth is inde-
pendent of the fact that, on Foucaults account,
the modern soul may also be quite ignorant of
its actual genealogy (in the Panopticon, etc.) and
thus deluded about its own deeper motivations.
Beyond this, on a more abstract philosophical
level, we might ask whether the creation of such a
self-monitoring subject would even be imaginable
in the absence of some sort of minimal- or proto-
self, some inherent capacity for self-consciousness
and self-control that is elicited and exploited by the
new disciplinary regime. Surely it is more plausible
to imagine the Panopticon as eliciting and shaping
an inherent feature of human consciousness than
as creating it out of whole cloth. In this sense,
Discipline and Punish cannot be viewed as a total
rejection of the reality of subjecthood, even though
it obviously undermines any image of complete
sovereignty or absolute self-transparency. Fou-
caults imminent turn, in his work on sexuality
and the ancient world, to techniques of the self
and self-fashioning may now begin to seem a bit
less drastic and unprecedented.
A final point concerns the epistemological
plane: the position of Foucault himself, the
theoretician. Does not Foucaults very ability to
describe the modern disciplinary regime imply a
certain insight and freedom from its constraints,
at least on the part of one subject (and his many
readers)? Much the same could be said with re-
gard to Les mots et les choses. There too Foucault
the theoretician, in the very writing of his book,
shows himself capable of transcending the suppos-
edly blinding condition in which he himself must
residewhich in this case is not the Panopticon,
but the supposedly self-refuting and self-deceiving
condition of the empirico-transcendental doublet
and transcendental narcissism (the condition
in which, as Foucault himself says, we are still
caught). Foucault, at least, seems to have man-
aged to wake up from his anthropological sleep
(1966, 371) enough to be able to discern the very
forms of blindness within which the modern, self-
conscious self might have seemed to be entirely
enclosed.14 But this inevitably suggests that self-
consciousnessand at least some of the freedom
and insight it impliesmust be something more
than mere illusion. Yes, we may delude ourselves
about the extent or motivation of our autonomy
and self-control; yes, we may exaggerate the reli-
ability and scope of our self-reflection. But as we
have seen, this is very far from refuting the very
existence of a self or subject, or from dismissing
subjectivity, the focus of the phenomenological
tradition, as a theme of cardinal importance.
All these points, taken together, show the ab-
surdity of reading either Discipline and Punish or
The Order of Things as a simple attack either on
the self or on the possibility of some form of valid
reflection. Much the same can be said of the work
of Jacques Lacan. As we have seen, both authors
are preoccupied with distinctively human dimen-
sions of culture and the person. Both need to be
understood as making important contributions to
the philosophy as well as the history of the subject,
with the latter conceived, in large measure, as a
quintessentially phenomenological project.
Notes
1. Bergsonian vitalism is evident in work of phenom-
enological psychiatrist Eugene Minkowski. Delacam-
pagne (1995, 210) dates the triumph of Heidegger in
France to a 1955 meeting at Cerisy-la-Salle organized
by Jean Beaufret and attended by Lacan; Heideggers
influence began much earlier however.
2. The French, especially in philosophicalcontext,
distinguish between le sujet, or le je, and le moi (the
subject, or the I, versus the me), the former referring to
the subjective pole of experience and action (the expe-
riencer or actor), while the latter refers to something
more like an image of oneself, taken as an object. The
English term self is used in both senses.
 Sass / Lacan, Foucault, and Crisis of the Subject 339
3. Like most such terms, post-structuralism is a
loose label with fuzzy boundaries. It covers a diverse
set of works and positions influenced by structuralism
(including its critique of phenomenology and the Carte-
sian ego and its focus on underlying systems), but that
also criticize structuralism (e.g., Derrida 1967b/1978)
and/or move beyond its usual concerns into other issues,
including politics, psychology, and problems of identity.
4. I am aware, of course, that Heidegger would reject
the word subjectivity as irredeemably Cartesian. In an
essay of this kind, concerned with comparative issues,
it would be fruitless to attempt to adhere strictly to
Heideggers own preferred vocabulary.
5. Re different experiences of being in psychotic de-
pression and schizophrenia, see Sass and Pienkos 2013.
6. Foucaults own approach is of course akin to
structuralism in the broad sense of focusing on dis-
course and seeking underlying principles or forms of
knowledge.
7. Foucault describes the profound invisibility of
what one sees [as] inseparable from the invisibility
of the person seeingdespite all mirrors, reflections,
imitations, and portraits (1966, 17). He speaks of
an essential void: the necessary disappearance of that
which is its foundationThis very subjecthas been
elided (p. 18). Within that reality itself, it [the subject]
cannot not be invisible. (p. 16).
8. To understand the complexities of modern or
contemporary (post-Kantian) forms of subjectivity and
self-consciousness, one should consider Foucaults dif-
ficult but illuminating analysis of the self-inflationary
yet self-undermining paradoxes of our modern forms of
transcendental narcissismwhat Foucault describes
as a sleep so deep it experiences itself as vigilance
(1969, 203; 1966, 341). I have tried to do this in several
works: Sass 1992 chap 11, 1997, 2008, 2009.
9. There is another way in which Foucaults analysis
of Cervantes and Velasquez contradicts the standard
anti-humanist reading of his book. I noted that Don
Quixote, written toward the end of the Renaissance
(1605/15), is described as anticipating the looming
Enlightenment episteme. Even more remarkable is the
fact that Las Meninas, painted near the beginning of
the Enlightenment (1656), seems to suggest an acute (if
problematic) awareness of the lacuna of its own pre-
sumed episteme, emblematized by the looming absence
of the royal viewers. Indeed, it is almost as if Velasquez
were able, somehow, to look back on the Enlightenment
from the standpoint of the still-distant modern age,
an era when the observers role will be more explicitly
acknowledged. In both cases we are presented with a
work of art that is interpreted as transcending its own
episteme. Both analyses suggest that at least some per-
sons (only geniuses perhaps?) may indeed possess the
kind of intellectual freedom and reflective self-awareness
(of their own constituting perspective) that should be
impossible on a strictly anti-humanistic reading of the
supposedly all-determining nature of an episteme.
10. The very rhetoric of the mirrorstage essay, in
fact, clearly presupposes, on the part of the reader,
at least some capacity to evoke in oneself, to reflect
upon, and to assess experiences like those of standing
before a mirror or in the gaze of another. In this sense
a significant degree of, if not self-transparency, at least
self-translucency does seem to be assumed on the part
of the reader. Indeed it is difficult to see how a medita-
tion like that of Lacan on the Imaginary could get off
the ground without some such assumption. In this sense
the mirror-stage essay and analysis simply assumes the
possibility of phenomenology. In the context of another
of his analyses, Lacan asks, Is this a correct phenom-
enological analysis? (1964, 84).
11. Lacan (1956) translated into French Heideggers
important Logos essay on Heraclitus, in which Being
is identified with language itself.
12. Lacans formulations of the Real do not empha-
size the experiential dimension alone. He writes that
the real is radically distinguished from the symbolic
and the imaginarythe real is the impossible also in
a logical sense; there are logical obstacle[s] to its
formulation or conception (Lacan 196970, 123).
13. Derrida (Nancy 2009) seems to have recognized
this point re Lacan, as in this statement: Did Lacan
liquidate the subject? No. The decentered subject of
which he speaks certainly doesnt have the traits of the
classical subject (though even here, wed have to take
a closer look).
14. Various writers have pointed out that this tran-
scending or awakening raises the issue of performative
self-contradiction. For a critical perspective see Seigel
2005; for defense of Foucault on this issue: Sass 2008,
2009.
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