Lacan and History

The reflections that follow concern the terrain of the philosophy of history, meaning the terrain of systematic interpretation of past events in accordance with a principle by which they become unified and acquire a certain meaning (Lowith 1). The past is irretrievably lost, and history can only make sense, can only be constituted as a meaningful discourse, by introducing into a series of floating traces (that as such have no fixed meaning) “some transcendent purpose beyond the actual facts” (Lowith 5). This was already pointed out by Hegel in the Philosophy of History: The spirit of the historian is quite other than that of the times that he treats but the historian, as a “workman,” can only approach “his task with his own spirit; a spirit distinct from that of the element he is to manipulate” (Hegel 4-5). For Hegel even the “original historians” (meaning Thucydides, Herodotus, etc.) had to organise their material in such a way—like poets. The only difference was that since they had limited their interest within their own times, their own spirit was not different from that of these times in general. History thought without the introduction of this organising spirit, without Lowith's transcendent purpose, can only be “a vast picture of changes and transactions; of infinitely manifold forms of peoples, states, individuals, in unresting succession” (Hegel 72). This anarchical meaningless ensemble can only acquire meaning through its articulation in a meaningful historical narration. And this narration is taking place in the present. As Lacan points out “history is not the past. History is the past in so far as it is historicized in the present,” it is always a present synthesis of the past (Lacan in Evans, “The Lure” 144).

This problem, the problem of meaning in history, cannot be resolved by recourse to some kind of extra-discursive “evidence” that invests the discours