Lacan with Scholasticism: Agencies of the Letter

To consider Lacan as scholastic may seem to some as a statement of dismissal, a way of marginalizing psychoanalysis or Lacanian theory in light of the current pragmatic concerns of the post-high-theory climate. To others such a statement could be taken as a distortion of scholasticism itself, where contemporary theory once again reads the past without regard to its particularity. However, my reading of Lacan in terms of scholasticism/of scholasticism in terms of Lacan points at something quite precise in the structure of the human subject within language, a structure that is explicit within Lacanian psychoanalysis as well as in the medieval epistemology that grounds the scholastic project. For both Lacanian psychoanalysis and medieval scholasticism, language functions as the limit of the human subject, the limit within the epistemological and ontological considerations of subjectivity itself. In this essay, I will explore Lacan's debt to medieval cosmology through an exploration of the structural similarities in both Lacanian and scholastic considerations of causality, focusing explicitly on their reliance on Augustine's theory of language and knowledge.

Contemporary considerations of Lacanian psychoanalysis have consistently entered into Lacan's theory of language through structural linguistics, tracing Lacan's use of Saussure and Jakobson as a way of grounding his project in linguistic terms. Samuel Weber's Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan's Dislocation of Psychoanalysis for example, has two chapters dedicated to Lacan's dependence on structural linguistics for his consideration of language. Lacan, however, did not begin with Saussure or Jakobson. From his first seminar of 1953-4, Lacan placed his investigation of language within Augustine's examinations of signs and teaching. By focusing on how language works particularly for each subject, Lacan developed a way of