This book concerns the notion of time in Jacques Lacan’s work. As one of the most influential theorists of the twentieth century, Jacques Lacan addressed a wide range of topics in his writings, yet whether Lacan’s work offers a theory of time remains a question. Lacan’s well-known theoretical debt to Saussurean linguistics, which emphasises the primacy of synchronic analysis to understand the inner function of language rather than a diachronic approach to its historical evolution, is the main reason that prevents the reader from exploring the temporal dimension of his theory. Even the ostensible historical accounts in Lacan’s writings, as Žižek accurately points out, are often taken as “a temporal projection of the possibilities of variation within the ‘timeless’ structure itself.” 1 Considering the fact that time has long occupied an important role in the tradition of continental philosophy and was systematically discussed in the twentieth century by Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida and many other intellectual figures, it is unclear how Lacanian psychoanalysis, which has a deep engagement with continental philosophical thought, can join this conversation about time and have its voice on questions of the temporal nature of meaning, body, language and subject formation.
Against this background, the present book will argue for the significance of time in helping us understand Lacan’s key ideas and themes, particularly his theorisation of subjectivity. Through a detailed reading of Lacan’s work with a focus on his various presentations of time, I will demonstrate that time is not a marginal topic of concern absent from Lacan’s basic theoretical framework, not is it merely a clinical issue encountered in the practice of psychoanalysis to which he responds with the infamous “short session.” Instead, time is a notion of definitive importance around which different threads of Lacan’s thinking congregate. It functions as the inner logic that gives consistency to Lacan’s theoretical development. In this introduction, I will first discuss why it is important to understand Lacan’s notion of time both in his own theoretical structure and in the broader context of the philosophy of time. Then I will present the methodology of my reading, explaining several principles of interpretation I am going to follow throughout this book. The last part will be a brief overview of the five main chapters of this book.
The reason for highlighting the notion of time among a variety of topics covered by Lacan’s writings is that this notion is key to understanding Lacan’s theory as a whole. Time was contemplated by Lacan throughout his theoretical development, from his early paper “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism” to his last seminar which focused on the topic of topology and time. In Lacan’s work where time is not explicitly mentioned, there is still considerable attention paid to time-related problems, such as memory and history in SeminarI and II, sexual development in Seminar V and the idea of contingency in Seminar XI. By tracking Lacan’s approach to time across different stages, we can endow a sense of continuity to Lacan’s divergent theoretical explorations and also provide coherence to his fragmentary style of writing. Moreover, I argue that many of Lacan’s fundamental concepts and themes cannot be comprehensively understood if we fail to recognise their relations to time. Lacan’s discussion of time is not limited to its ontological status but extends to its epistemological function, which results in a renewed understanding of many salient characteristics of human experience from a new perspective. For example, in Chapter 2 of this book, we shall see how Lacan’s rework of Freud’s idea of the death instinct is grounded upon his critical reading of Freud’s theory of time. In Chapter 3, I discuss how Lacan’s symbolic order is constructed out of a specific temporal register. As such, the addition of a temporal dimension offers new insights into established conceptual models. It allows us to appreciate the dynamic aspect of Lacanian psychoanalysis without retreating to the stereotypical impression of structuralism.
Lacan’s contribution to our understanding of time goes beyond the field of psychoanalysis, as his work responds to both the classic and the contemporary problems about time in the history of philosophy. In fact, many references to time in Lacan’s writings only make sense if they are understood as interactions with the philosophical work of others. On the one hand, Lacan continues the investigation of the nature of time since ancient Greek times. We will see how he contemplate time as an object of metaphysics and deals with the residue of Kantian transcendental philosophy in Freud’s metapsychology, which takes time as an a priori intuitions. On the other hand, Lacan’s theorisation of time also reflects the distinctive way in which time is experienced in modernity and the development of the twentieth-century continental philosophy which situates time in the lived world of history and society. Similar to the work on time achieved by Henri Bergson in Time and Free Will, by Heidegger in Being and Time, and by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, Lacan offers not only philosophical interpretations of time per se, but also an account of the subjective existence in time and the meaning of living temporally. How does the interplay of self and the other give rise to an embodied experience through which the subject relates to time? Is it possible for the subject to exert self-determination or agency against temporal constraint imposed by symbolic structure? What is an adequate ethical attitude towards modern life, which has replaced the consistent repetition of natural cycles with unpredictable encounters with a series of fragmented moments? Although Lacan may not directly answer these questions, his work entails a theory of time closely associated with the wider psychological, social and political dimensions of human existence that has the potential to offer powerful responses to these issues.
In terms of methodology, this is an interpretative study of Jacques Lacan’s writings. I focus on presuppositions, methods, reasoning and conclusions in Lacan’s work that contribute to our understanding of time. This book pays unequal attention to Lacan’s writings at different stages. The reader may notice that the later Lacan could have been given greater emphasis. Although the issue of time was not overlooked during this period when Lacan’s teaching had been taken up by mathematics and topological images, as his last seminar on “Topology and Time” continued to assign time to a position of importance, these discussions, most of which are Lacan’s own elaboration, free from classic psychoanalytic references, require the dedicated work of exegesis that cannot be achieved within the scope of this book. What I will present is a theory of time that is faithful to the arguments and the text of Lacan’s work till the early 1970s, the value of which cannot be dismissed regardless of Lacan’s late theoretical development. In addition, this book focuses more on Lacan’s theoretical elaboration of time rather than his use of time in the clinical practice, which is characterised by the technique of “short session.” These two aspects are inevitably related and may have enlightened each other, but I am not in the position to evaluate Lacanian clinical techniques and my interests lie in the broader philosophical and social relevance of Lacan’s theory of time beyond the clinic. Nevertheless, it is my hope that this book will lead to productive discussions with Lacanian practitioners and generate new approaches to time in the clinical setting.
This book includes a large number of references to Freud’s work to demonstrate a theoretical continuity and development between these two important figures in the history of psychoanalysis. Freud’s theory is not only a significant source that inspires Lacan’s thinking about time, but it also provides the necessary context in which Lacan’s own presentation can be understood. Lacan’s famous call for the “return to Freud” itself is a perfect metaphor for time that does not intend to recollect what has always been there but to discover what was not there in the first place that can only be grasped afterwards. My returning to Freud follows the same principle, as I read Freud’s work “not as a domesticated, reassuring answer but as an irreducibly uncanny question,” 2 to which Lacan’s theory of time is a response. Meanwhile, I will also bring Lacan into contact with a range of philosophers, not only because Lacan himself often comments on other philosophers and constantly borrows ideas from phenomenology, existentialism and constructionism in his teaching, but also because Lacan’s understanding of time offers a response to problems of time in other lines of investigation undertaken by philosophers both before and since. My intention is to explicate Lacan’s theory of time in a web of signifiers where questions, presuppositions and results of other philosophies of time have already existed. I do this to prove that Lacan’s theory of time not only has its roots in the history of philosophy but also remains relevant to contemporary thinking.
This book deploys an interpretive strategy in line with the Lacanian interpretation. For Lacan, interpretation is not a method to elucidate a pre-existing truth embedded in the text or to delimit a single substantive concept of rationality, nor is it, according to postmodernists, a process of textual reproduction by readers who complicate and displace the narrative of the author in favour of an infinite play of meaning. What Lacan learns from the practice of psychoanalysis can also apply to textual analysis and interpretation: “There are two dangers in anything related to the understanding of our clinical domain. The first is not to be sufficiently curious,” 3 as if it is only the patient’s (author) own work to remember, while the analyst (reader) merely receives the information passively; “the second is to understand too much,” which is the case when the analyst (reader) assigns the role of meaning-making to one’s own ego. Lacan makes the second point clear in Seminar XI: “It is false to say, as has been said, that interpretation is open to all meanings under the pretext that it is a question only of the connection of a signifier to a signifier, and consequently of an uncontrollable connection. Interpretation is not open to any meaning.” 4 Refusing the idea of multiple interpretations does not mean that Lacan is trying to revive the traditional authorship which suppresses difference embedded in the flow of signifiers, or to privilege the intentionality of the author as the origin of all the work’s meaning. For Lacan, a good interpretation in psychoanalytic treatment must have the effect of isolating “in the subject a kernel, a kern, to use Freud’s own term, of non-sense.” 5 It is this non-sense that is given a particular ...