When I hear talk of enigmas, I prick up my ears.
[Quand j'entends parler d'énigme, je dresse l'oreille.]
(Laplanche 1992b: 254)
To what precisely does psychoanalysis refer when it invokes, as it so frequently does, the category of the ‘human’? Upon what specific exclusions does the delimitation of this category depend within psychoanalytic thought? With what critical rigour has psychoanalysis put in question the theoretical propositions and presuppositions which dominate Freud's thinking in this regard? And with what confidence and legitimacy is psychoanalysis capable of answering for the conceptual circumscription—or circumscriptions—of the ‘human’, on which it relies?
The urgency and the complexity of questions such as these are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Recent years have witnessed a steady upsurge of critical interest in conceptual delimitations of the ‘human being’, not just within psychoanalytic discourse but in diverse fields far beyond it. The essential concern which has driven this work has frequently been with interrogating the authority of theoretical distinctions between human and non-human animals—distinctions which have formed implicit but constitutive points of orientation within even the most prevalent branches of philosophy, ethics, critical theory and the ‘human sciences’. Broadly speaking, the aims which govern this work have been to aggravate putative human/animal distinctions, to identify the significant but often marginal voices of historical resistance to them, and to open the way towards a thought which would not be governed by a manifest or latent anthropocentrism.
With respect to psychoanalysis specifically, critical work in the area of what is sometimes broadly termed ‘animal studies’ remains at a fairly incipient stage. There have, to be sure, been some groundbreaking interventions
by major philosophical authors—in particular Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri (1980) on Freud, and more recently Jacques Derrida (2004) on Lacan—as well as some important clinically based reflection led by practitioners such as Salman Akhtar and Vamik Volkan (2005a and 2005b). However, the so-called ‘question of the animal’ still has a relatively limited circulation within psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic studies. The human/animal relation has yet to become a subject of common or even broad critical reflection among theoreticians and clinicians, and the immense task of examining the theoretical evolution of the human/animal relation across the different analytic traditions has barely begun.
The present essay is conceived as a contribution to this incipient field of study. It is an attempt to track the conceptualisation of the relation between human and non-human animals in the work of the distinguished French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche. This conceptualisation is, I suggest, a key aspect of his thinking which has yet to attract any substantial critical commentary or development among his readers. Broadly speaking, the theme of the animal manifests itself in two different ways across Laplanche's oeuvre. Firstly, and for the most part, it plays a continuous yet largely functional role in Laplanche's ongoing account of human subjectivity. Here, it is the object of relatively little sustained or systematic development; rather, a mostly cautious but relatively emphatic set of delimitations between human and non-human animals underpins the entire theoretical apparatus. And secondly, there are the more localised moments, notably in some papers dating from the late 1990s, in which Laplanche tackles the question of the animal in an explicit and decisive way within his broader reflections on sexuality, cruelty and the figure of the ‘beast’ (bête). My purpose in the essay is threefold:
To examine these related and hitherto overlooked aspects of Laplanche's work, and to situate them within the overall trajectory of his thought;
To demonstrate the ways in which they respond to and recast the human/animal relation as it emerges in certain aspects of Freud's own thinking;
To propose that in spite of what may sometimes appear, superficially, to be an anthropocentric tendency in Laplanche, his work overall offers an account of the human/animal relation which is marked by a profound theoretical and ideological vigilance.
I shall begin with a broad recapitulation of the way in which Laplanche frames his ongoing theoretical project.
To many in the Anglophone world Laplanche remains best known for the vocabulary of psychoanalytic terms which he co-authored with Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis . Two further texts on Freud—a paper from 1964 on fantasy, also co-written with Pontalis, and a monograph on Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1970)—have also generated serious interest in the UK and the US and have done much to establish Laplanche's reputation as a rigorous and brilliant explicator of the Freudian corpus. However, Laplanche's trajectory as an independent thinker in his own right has evolved across a series of subsequent lectures, books and articles many of which have yet to be translated into English. It is in these works that Laplanche has systematically developed a radical metapsychology and laid down very distinctive ‘new foundations’ for psychoanalysis.1
In the present context, the most pertinent point of entry into this work is its ceaseless invocation of the ‘Copernican’ dimension of psychoanalysis. Since the early 1990s Laplanche has characterised his theoretical project as a critical development of what he calls Freud's unfinished Copernican revolution . This nomenclature derives from Freud's 1917 paper ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis’ where the psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious is equated with the blow struck by Nicolaus Copernicus against human narcissism: as the Copernican revolution revealed the earth not to be the centre of its universe, so psychoanalysis revealed the conscious human subject not to be the centre of his.
Laplanche has repeatedly demonstrated that although Freud expressly seeks to ‘de-centre’ human subjectivity—displacing the ego
from its illusory position of mastery—he is rarely able to avoid recentring it elsewhere by comfortably re-grounding the subject in some other essential core. The most illustrative example of this Laplanche frequently derives from the same 1917 essay (see Laplanche 1992c and 1997b). There, Freud insists that the psychoanalytic postulation of man's heteronomy is founded on its discovery of an otherness, something ‘alien’ or ‘foreign’ (i.e. the unconscious) which dislodges the centrality of the ego: ‘In certain diseases’, Freud says:
thoughts emerge suddenly without one knowing where they came from […] These alien guests even seem to be more powerful than those that are at the ego's command […] Or else impulses appear which seem like those of a stranger, so that the ego denies them; […] the ego says to itself: ‘This is an illness, a foreign invasion’. (Freud 1917: 141–142)
No sooner has Freud described this decentring foreign presence, however, than he proceeds to reduce its foreignness altogether. ‘Psychiatry [in general]’, he continues, ‘denies that such things mean the intrusion into the mind of evil spirits from without’; and ‘psychoanalysis [specifically] sets out to explain these uncanny [unheimlich] disorders’. It says to the ego:
Nothing has entered into you from without; a part of the activity of your own mind has been withdrawn from your knowledge and from the command of your will […] [Y]ou do not recognise it as a derivation of your own rejected instincts […]. (142).
The domesticating gesture which Freud commits upon the alien of the unconscious in 1917 can, Laplanche argues, be endlessly demonstrated throughout Freudian thought. Laplanche terms Freud's ceaseless retrograde theoretical movements—of which there are multiple manifest avatars—‘goings-astray’ (fourvoiements). Within them Laplanche sees endless attempts to give the subject a ‘foundation’, but one which is already somehow proper to the subject, which as it were already ‘belongs’
to him, and leaves the notion of a centred subject ultimately intact. Data presented in an analysis is thus always reducible to the depths of the subject's own interior, his self which it is the task of analysis to enable him to know better.
To return to Laplanche's Copernican reference, it is true, as Lacan pointed out many years ago, that Copernican astrology effectively replaced geo-centrism with helio-centrism (Lacan 1960). However, within the latter system the apparently fixed position of certain stellar constellations also led to the conclusion that they were at a distance from earth incommensurable with the internal distances of the solar system. Copernican heliocentrism, in other words, made conceivable the infinity of the universe and thus the possibility of the absence of any centre whatsoever. It is this more radically de-centring aspect of the Copernican revolution which Laplanche pursues analogously within the psychoanalytic field.
Below I shall offer an account of precisely how Laplanche effects this pursuit. First of all it important to note what is a striking point from an animal studies perspective: namely, that by inscribing his theoretical project under the heading of the Copernican revolution Laplanche appears to dispense explicitly with the other great precursor cited by Freud in ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis’. On Freud's view the discoveries of Charles Darwin, which had abolished the grounds on which human beings had for so long asserted their essential separation from animals, was the second of the great scientific blows to human narcissism before psychoanalysis. Darwin's complementary presence in the ‘Difficulty…’ paper begs the question of what motivates Laplanche's consistently exclusive theoretical appeal to ‘the Copernican’.
Unsurprisingly, the exclusion is not arbitrary. It is motivated by the conviction that the Darwinian discovery is in fact at odds with the Copernican potentiality of psychoanalysis. In a brief passage in ‘The Unfinished Copernican Revolution’ (1992c)(Laplanche gives two reasons for this. The first is that he doubts whether the Darwinian gesture per se of ‘reconnect[ing] man to his biological, animal lineage’ really does ‘decentre
and humiliate' the human being (Laplanche 1992c: 80). On the contrary, Laplanche argues: since the revelation of the human connection to the chain of evolution has not inhibited humans from perceiving themselves as its telos and crowning glory, the Darwinian discovery has in fact given man the assurance of ‘a much firmer basis’:
Solidly in place, firmly centred on the animal pyramid, man does not fail to consider himself its culmination, the blossom of the family tree: a doctrine like that of Teilhard de Chardin's has clearly wiped away the so-called humiliation of evolutionism. (Laplanche 1992c: 81).
If these observations give Darwin himself rather short shrift—as though an overtly religious reinscription of the theory of evolution has somehow demonstrated the theory's essential critical limitations—Laplanche offers a second reason for dispensing with the Darwinian reference, this time with a more immediate pertinence to the Freudian project. It consists in the ‘dangerous’ magnetism exerted upon Freudian thought by the doctrine of evolution. This influence is typically manifested in the major fourvoiement of Freud's work—its countless appeals to heredity of one form or another.
Whereas for Freud the figures of Darwin and Copernicus are complementary models of revolutionary thought, for Laplanche they are essentially contradictory and even mutually exclusive—at least as inspirators of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic thought is most ‘Copernican’ when it is least ‘Darwinian’, most radical when it is most free of the impulse to reduce what is psychically ‘alien’ in the human being to what is most ‘animalistic’ within him.
Laplanche's thought, then, and his entire re-elaboration of metapsychology under the aegis of what he calls the ‘general theory of seduction’, is partially organised around the rejection of that tendency in Freud's own work to view desire and unconscious psychic life as a primordial or ‘natural’ dimension of human existence, as the genetic link to human prehistory and thence to man's animal ancestry. This is a tendency
which reaches its apex with the postulation of a primordial id in the second topography, but which is present in Freud from a much earlier date.
The passages from Laplanche (1992c) cited above offer numerous points of entry into the problem of heredity in Freud: phylogenesis, fantasy and the drives. However, in order to delimit my focus here I shall take up explicitly only the theme of the sexual drives, since it is in relation to this theme that the human/animal relation becomes most manifest in Freud and becomes most overtly resituated in Laplanche's subsequent theoretical developments.
And yet, as Laplanche has repeatedly shown, however suggestive the Trieb / Instinkt distinction might initially appear in the Three Essays, Freud's work will henceforth ‘unceasingly collapse the drive back into an instinctual model’ (Laplanche 2000a: 11).2 Freud's explicit endorsement of Strachey's conflation of Trieb and Instinkt in the single word ‘instinct’ is instructive here. But the progressive ‘instinctualisation of the sexual’, as Laplanche terms it, is also abundantly identifiable in Freud's own writing (Laplanche 2003: 26). Most obviously one can track the increasingly ‘organised’ account of infantile sexuality in the successive re-editions of the Three Essays (in , 1915, 1920 and ). Here, in contrast to the first edition,3 we see an ever deepening emphasis on progressive ‘stages’ of sexuality, each with its appointed time of efflorescence, biologically grounded in the organic development of the soma and teleologically oriented towards genital maturity. This movement reaches its apogee in the second theory of the drives from 1920 onwards, when sexuality is entirely absorbed to the life drives, to reproductive functioning and thus to the survival of the species. In this connection, Laplanche is quick to point out the contradiction in Freud's two major invocations of the Aristophanic myth of the hermaphrodite from Plato's Symposium. In the Three Essays of 1905 this myth is attacked precisely insofar as it relates to the ‘popular’ opinion of sexuality as a preformed instinct for reproduction (Laplanche 1996: 46ff).
Thus, although Freud continues to use the term Trieb in this context (Lebenstrieb, Todestrieb) its initial specificity has been lost, and with the postulation of ‘Eros’ we are in fact decisively back in the domain of instinct. The importance of this from our perspective is that the progressive
instinctualisation of the drives entails the inevitable corollary of an animalisation of them. Animals are thus increasingly called upon as the behavioural model and biological guarantor of human drives. Sexuality as Eros now emerges as a fixed, adaptive impulse shared by human and non-human beings alike, illustrated and authorised by Freud's ‘admiring invocation’ of animal behaviours—‘of the great animal migrations, the upstream climbs of salmon […], migrating birds impelled by instinct’ (Laplanche 1993: 120). In a word, what Laplanche characterises as Freud's great biologising fourvoiment (1993) is accompanied by an increasing emphasis on the kinship between human and animal in which the drive risks being depleted of its erstwhile specificity. Thus by 1925 – in a paper which again invokes Copernicus and Darwin—Freud cites precisely this emphasis as one of the major causes of ‘resistance to psychoanalysis’. His critics, he observes (filtered by Strachey's translation), bridle at the scandalous psychoanalytic revelation that all ‘cultural achievements’, including ‘art, religion and social order’, are ‘derived from elementary animal [elementaren animalischen] instinctual sources [Triebquellen]’ (Freud 1925: 218).
One of Laplanche's principal concerns has been to resist this biologising reduction of drive to instinct, and thus to disintricate and develop the specific character of Freud's earliest formulations of the Triebe. In the following two sections we shall explore the means by which he does this under the Copernican rubric of the ‘general theory of seduction’, but with a vigilant focus on the implications of Laplanche's position with respect to the question of the animal. As a theoretical endeavour, Laplanche's project in this regard is, of course, fraught with problems. For if the drive is one of the major conceptual sites on which Freud will increasingly assert the supposedly scandalous kinship between human and non-human animals, the effort to resituate drive with respect to instinct can easily collapse into the most traditional form of anthropocentrism, merely re-inscribing and re-securing the caesura between man and animal. In order to address this critical in some detail, let us examine some of Laplanche's fundamental propositions about the human animal.
From his earliest to his most recent metapsychological work, Laplanche has laboured to situate his account of seduction within a field that is peculiarly human. In his first major monograph on metapsychology, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, the early chapters on sexuality and seduction offer several attempts to differentiate between, for example, ‘the elementary vital mechanisms in the newborn infant’ and ‘what happens in animals’ (Laplanche 1970: 47), or the ‘denaturation of sexuality in humans in relation to animals’ (35). In this regard, Laplanche's remarks in Life and Death sometimes risk the appearance of a fairly standard brand of generalised anthropocentrism. The tradition to which I refer is the one recently scrutinised by Jacques Derrida (2004), in which the category of ‘the animal’ appears massively undifferentiated—a homogenising terminological repository for every non-human living being, which is almost invariably pressed into service as a means of shoring up differentially the ontological specificity of homosapiens.
A first point on which to lay emphasis is that the category of instinct, as a point of contact between human and non-human animals, remains an essential dimension of Laplanche's thought and, significantly, of the fundamental anthropological situation. There are two aspects to this, which we shall deal with in turn. First of all, self preservation.4
On Laplanche's account an instinct for self-preservation is shared by all living beings. However, he makes a critical distinction between those self-preservative behaviours which require the intervention of an other, and those which do not. In the latter category he includes automatic functions, such as the homeostatic operations which maintain the level of carbon dioxide or serum glucose in the blood. Among the self-preservative behaviours which cannot operate autonomously, he includes the need for warmth, food and attachment. It is among these behaviours that we begin to witness more emphatic differentiations between species, since it is first of all on this territory that different levels of communication between infant and adult are made necessary.
On Laplanche's view, what distinguishes the human in this context is, critically, the extent of its instinctual insufficiency at birth. His gesture here is certainly comparable with that made by Lacan in his early text on ‘The Mirror Stage’. There Lacan deploys a wealth of secondary ethological
research on animal maturation and mimicry in order to support his account of the infant's imaginary capture by its mirror image. But, as is well known, Lacan also distinguishes the human infant from the privileged examples of the pigeon, the locust and the monkey on account of the ‘dehisance at the very heart of the [human] organism’, the human's ‘specific prematurity of birth’ (Lacan 1949: 78) i.e. precisely its inability to fulfil certain of its instinctual functions in an autonomous fashion. It is worth emphasising in this context, however, precisely how it is that in attempting to conceptualise the human from his own ethologically informed perspective, Laplanche's account of the human being remains very much an account of a ‘human animal’. For not only does Laplanche recall the autonomous instinctual functioning which links human beings to the most elementary living organisms; he stresses that the other insufficiencies of the instinct for self preservation within humans—the point on which Lacan, and Freud before him, laid emphasis—are definitively not peculiar to homo sapiens. Thus, before any differentiation which might isolate the ontological specificity of the anthropological, the human being is for Laplanche characterised by its kinship with other homeothermic animals whose instinctual mechanisms necessitate a significant degree of interaction with the (adult / parental) other. That is to say, ontologically speaking, that the human / animal distinction must be regarded as secondary to a more elementary differentiation between species where individual survival depends upon parental interaction and communication, and species where it does not.5
It is, then, on the basis of this prior differentiation that what Laplanche calls the ‘fundamental anthropological situation’ emerges. In what does it consist? Firstly, and on the side of the infant, there is the sheer extent of functional or instinctual dependence, which exceeds that of other non-human animals. The need for communication and interaction with the adult world is an essential point of contact between homo sapiens and many other animal species, ‘but it is perhaps man’, argues Laplanche, ‘who has the greatest need of [such] interaction’ (Laplanche 2000a: 17). In support of this claim, Laplanche frequently calls on the evidence of experimental psychology and on Freud's intuitive discussions of the human infant's helplessness. A typical example is the absence in the child of any adaptive notion of danger or fear.6 Human beings are in no sense the only animals which come into the world
insufficiently adapted to its elementary exigencies, but they are the least well-equipped in this respect. With regard to instinctual functioning at least, the anthropological situation is made distinct on the side of the infant by virtue of a quantitative rather than specifically qualitative difference.
It is on the side of the adult in the infant / adult relation that a qualitative difference from non-human animals emerges. If the peculiar dependency of the human infant makes its exposure to adult intervention and communication more prolonged and intensive, the developmental imbalance between the two protagonists also makes the adult intervention peculiarly enigmatic.
In this connection it is worth recalling a short excerpt from Freud's Totem and Taboo which, tellingly, Laplanche takes as an epigraph to his expository essay on ‘The Theory of Seduction and the Problem of the Other’:
Children [says Freud] have no scruples over allowing animals to rank as their equals. Uninhibited as they are in the avowal of their bodily needs, they no doubt feel themselves more akin to animals than to their elders, who may well be enigmatic to them. (Quoted in Laplanche 1997b: 653).
What is notable about this passage is the suggestion that the relationship between children and animals is in fact more symmetrical than with adults of the same species. In other words, the adult human other is more other to the infant than is the animal! This is because the human adult is first of all other to himself, that is: he is possessed of that ‘other thing’ (das Andere) which psychoanalysis terms the unconscious—unlike the human infant. For Laplanche, this point is the great theoretical repression which has inhibited the Copernican project of psychoanalysis, during and after Freud's lifetime. It is on the basis of its recognition that Laplanche's ‘general theory of seduction’ is founded. The human infant shares with other infant homeotherms an essential dependence on the adult world. But the presence of an unconscious in the human adult (as distinct from non-human adults) places an emphatic dissymmetry at the heart of their relation—a dissymmetry which is more radical than that between animal infant and
animal adult, and more radical even than that between human infant and non-human animal. The presence of the unconscious in the adult human means that the bilateral exchanges of attachment whereby the infant's instinctual needs are met are consistently infiltrated and compromised by the repressed desires and fantasies of the carer. If Freud's special theory of seduction, elaborated between 1895 and 1897, attempted to identify datable acts of infantile trauma in which adult sexuality was violently introduced into a passive victim, Laplanche's general theory removes seduction from the realm of pathology and places it at the heart of normative psychosexual development. On his account, the intrusion of the adult other's sexuality into the infant's world is not a single or punctual event but a structural condition of the human infant's relation to the adult and an indispensible correlative of the other's attention to its basic instinctual requirements.7
The attachment relation in humans is therefore never purely functional. Within the very first hours of life, the adult contribution to the care of the infant consists also of verbal and non-verbal messages which are ‘enigmatic’—not only to the little addressee who is unequipped to decode them, but to their originator, since their unconscious sexual determination exceeds his or her intentional capacity. For the infant, the other's enigmatic messages are at once exciting and baffling. They demand active work in order to respond to and interpret them. What has been addressed to—or, ‘implanted’ in—him/her by the other must be broken down, bound and integrated. In a letter to Fliess in 1896 Freud proposed a definition of repression as a ‘failure of translation’ (Freud : 6/12/1896). In Laplanche's view, the work the infant must do with enigmatic messages is specifically a work of translation from verbal and non-verbal adult language. But this labour, like all translation, is necessarily imperfect. It entails, as a by-product, a residual space of non-translation. The unconscious is born of the unmasterable residue of this translation of the other's messages, of the irreducibly opaque elements which remain excluded, unsymbolised and uninteg-rated by the infant.
Now, this model of originary seduction has massive critical implications for the metapsychology, which Laplanche has developed extensively over many years of teaching. Given our present concerns, let us stick to examining its implications for the theory of the drives. In
Freud's Three Essays, where the specificity of the Triebe first comes into view, the sexual drives emerge as a natural by-product of the satisfaction of the infant's basic needs, and remain anchored to the zones associated with those needs. The paradigmatic example here is the mouth, where the experience of enjoyment concomitant with the instinctual function of sucking at the mother's breast gradually becomes detached from the function, and emerges as an enjoyment sought for its own sake in autoerotic activities such as thumb-sucking. But as Laplanche has pointed out, ‘already in the [non-human] animal, the sites of passage and exchange which are the body's orifices are also the preeminent focus of care and cleanliness’ (Laplanche 1993: 62). Laplanche's account of primal seduction rewrites the Freudian structure significantly, emphasising the constitutive dissymmetry which he sees as being peculiar to the situation of human animals:
It is because the [human] adult's gestures of self-preservation are the bearers of sexual messages that are unconscious for the adult and unmasterable by the child that, in the so-called erotogenic zones, they produce the movement of splitting and drifting that may lead to autoerotic activity. But the obligatory vehicle of autoeroticism, that which stimulates it and brings it into existence, is the intrusion and then repression of the enigmatic signifiers supplied by the adult. (Laplanche 1984: 129)
From this perspective the paradigm of the suckling infant may be recast to include an acknowledgement that the breast itself is a sexual organ for the adult, and as such is a carrier of maternal fantasy and desire. It is this that introduces the sexual into the infant, but in an essentially opaque fashion, which is ‘impossible to circumscribe’ (1984: 128). This uncircumscribable remainder of the enigmatic encounter then constitutes the ‘source’ (Quelle) of the drive—or ‘source-object’, as Laplanche re-names it so as to recognise its initially exogenous derivation.
Thus the Laplanchean drive is in effect ‘a measure of the difference or disequilibrium between what is symbolisable and what is not in enigmatic messages supplied to the child’ (1984: 130). As such, whereas for
Freud the source of the drive is the organic stimulation of a localised somatic zone (mouth, anus etc), upon which repression will eventually supervene, for Laplanche the drive is itself a consequence of the translation-repression of enigmatic stimulation from the adult world.
In New Foundations for Psychoanalysis Laplanche draws a remarkable conclusion from this difference, which is worth stressing in the present context. ‘If’, he argues, ‘the drive originates in messages […] we have to conclude that there is no initial or natural opposition between the dimension of the drive and the intersubjective, or between the dimension of the drive and the cultural [entre le pulsionnel et l'intersubjectif, entre le pulsionnel et le culturel],’ (1987: 137).8 On Laplanche's account, in other words, the drive is definitively not reducible to an internal or purely organic pressure which would subsequently come into conflict with the cultural world; it is the very mark or imprint of the earliest modality of acculturation itself. The entire apparatus of Laplanche's thought, then, while being founded on an acknowledgement of the instinctual continuity between human and non-human animals, guards rigorously against any ‘animalisation’ of drive as such. Drive is neither ‘elemental’ nor ‘animal’, as Freud is led to describe it in the late paper on ‘Resistances’. It is an epigenetic acquisition which marks the very trace of differentiation between human and non-human beings.
The obvious question from an animal studies perspective is, what in the end prevents this account from becoming another avatar of a very familiar model of theoretical humanism? In spite of the prior emphasis on homo sapiens' initial instinctual continuity with certain animals, to what extent does the Laplanchean drive amount to yet another addition to the vast epistemological repository of what Derrida (2004) calls ‘propers’—attributes, characteristics or dispositions which are endlessly ascribed to man alone and which ultimately function to shield the privileged ontological integrity of the human being in its very difference from ‘the animal’ (laughter, reason etc)? Does not this apparently decentred account of human sexualisation work to re-inscribe or essentialise the human/animal divide in such a way as to risk itself the charge of anthropocentrism?
Yes and no. There are two major points to be remarked on this head. Firstly: to be sure, Laplanche is not averse to making eminently ‘deconstructible’ claims of precisely the kind of which Derrida is wary;9 but the implications of his account of human subjectivity are further reaching than such explicit but relatively localised statements might initially suggest. While the drives and the unconscious itself are articulated as being ‘fundamentally anthropological’ Laplanche's account of their genesis has the virtue of precisely unsettling their putative ‘properness’ to the human being. At various points in his work, and from as early as Life and Death, Laplanche has equated the sexualisation entailed in originary seduction with becoming human. Thus, in one of his most sustained elaborations of his theory of the drives he explicitly describes ‘the early sexualisation of human beings’ as a process of ‘humanisation’ (Laplanche 1984: 126). Now, it must be emphasised that Laplanche guards himself against the charge of positing an originally ‘innocent’ moment of infancy, by insisting that a phase anterior to the humanising intrusion of the adult other can only ever be theoretically or speculatively deduced: seduction, Laplanche argues in Life and Death, is ‘primal […] in the sense that it is so linked to the process of humanisation that it is only through abstraction that we can suppose the existence of a small human ‘before’ [it]. For […] to speak of a child who was initially ‘innocent’ would be to forge a myth exactly symmetrical to the myth of seduction [in Freud's special theory of the 1890s]’ (1970: 46). In this way Laplanche's account of primal seduction navigates carefully between on the one hand the Scylla of a metaphysics of innocence, and on the other the Charybdis of psychosexual Ptolemaism in which everything is supposed to come organically or spontaneously from the inside. The drives and the unconscious are at once They are the epigenetic derivatives of an intersubjective process, but one which is always already in motion. As such, if Laplanche posits drive as a distinctive trace of differentiation between human and non-human animals, his account of the origination of drive simultaneously aggravates the notion of its ‘properness’ to the human being. It is an acquisition, a time before which, however, would only ever be hypothetical. What is thus ‘proper’ to the human animal—that which ‘makes him human’—is also ultimately ‘improper’ to him. A secondary acquisition in relation to which we can
The second point to emphasise is that if the dimension of drive is, on Laplanche's view, a distinctive characteristic of the human animal, this does not mark off human sexuality in its entirety from that of non-human animals. It was stated above that there are two aspects of instinctual life which in Laplanche's account mark points of continuity between human and non-human beings. Having dealt above with the self-preservative instincts, it must be underscored that Laplanche also placed increasing stress on an innate sexual instinct in humans—an instinct which, once again, represents a major point of contact with ‘the animal’ (: 48).
The drives must be integrated into the instinct—Laplanche sometimes invokes the Freudian example of their being redeployed in ‘foreplay’—but there is no organic determination which would secure this articulation coherently. The integration of the drives into the instinct is thus always only partial. Total non-integration, of course, characterises what Freud in the Three Essays names the ‘fixation on preliminary sexual aims’, and thus perversion. On the other hand, Laplanche has asked in a brief but suggestive observation in ‘Pulsion et instinct’, ‘what would become of human creativity if the drive's pursuit of excitation were totally integrated into the instinct?’ (: 24). The implications of this question are relatively straightforward if it is taken on its own: sublimation operates not upon the instinct—which is not susceptible to transformational ‘vicissitudes’10—but upon unintegrated remainders of the demands of drive sexuality. However, its significance for us emerges in its distance from the position taken by Freud in the ‘Resistances’ paper cited above. In ‘Resistances’, it will be recalled, Freud imputes the scandalous character of psychoanalysis to its demonstration that even our greatest ‘cultural achievements’ derive from what is most animal within us. Laplanche's account turns this Freudian model on its head. Cultural production is not the sublimated artefact of what is most animal in human beings. On the contrary, cultural production is the sublimated trace of what within man has not been adequately integrated or assimilated into what is most ‘animal’.
To be sure, Laplanche's work affirms the heterogeneity of drive and instinct; but one of its most significant strengths from an animal studies
perspective consists in its emphatic refusal to identify that difference exclusively with a binary separation between non-human and human animals, the one being confined to ‘hardwired’ patterns of sexual behaviour, the other defined specifically by its irreducibility to such hardwiring. The division between drive and ‘animal’ instinct already inhabits, and in a constitutive fashion, the sexual conflict identified with the specifically ‘human’ domain of being.
Thus Laplanche's metapsychology at once ‘humanises’ drive, even as it undermines its very properness to the human, and carefully rein-scribes the constitutive function of a ‘hardwired’ sexual instinct whose behavioural fixity humanistic thought has traditionally ascribed to animals. What these points enable us to observe is that Laplanche's thought simultaneously guards against a naïve conflation of human and non-human animals and theoretically repositions their profound instinctual kinship in a subtler yet more trenchant way. Insofar as it thus links the radical decentring of subjectivity to that which is ‘fundamentally anthropological’, the general theory of seduction ought to be characterised as anthropo-decentric without being anthropocentric in any unreconstructed sense. Laplanche does not seek as it were to throw out the Darwinian baby with the bathwater of psychoanalytic Ptolemaism. In spite of certain appearances, his work does not repudiate the ‘Darwinian revolution’ which Freud was so fond of invoking; it resituates the function of that revolution more rigorously and consistently within a renewed theory of the human subject—a subject whose very ‘humanness’ is as derived and internally conflicted as it is essential.
Having explored Laplanche's ongoing endeavour to recast the psychoanalytic understanding of the biological kinship between human and non-human animals, I would like, finally, to touch on his related treatment of what he describes as the bio-ideo-logical position of animals as a point of reference in man.
Laplanche's account of psychic translation positions the human as a hermeneutic, self-theorising animal, continuously endeavouring to narrativise and process the other's alterity and, eventually, its own. But the operation of translation does not presume that the human being translates
in a vacuum. It is enabled by ‘narrative structures, codes and myths offered to the infant by the social world’ (1998: 29). These schemas—insofar as they derive from the social world—are not innocent or objective but ideologically tendentious. ‘[Their] knowledge value […] is non-existent’, Laplanche observes, ‘but their potential for binding and giving form is undeniable’ (Laplanche 1998: 29). Laplanche's elaboration of their function leads to a critical relocation of many of the most sacrosanct components of psychoanalytic theory. He takes psychoanalysis to task for having consistently misrecognised as irreducible structures or primal fantasies what are in fact ‘infantile sexual theories’, facilitated by such culturally offered codes, whose function is essentially defensive. On Laplanche's view even structures such as castration and the Oedipus must be theoretically resituated accordingly. Far from being sources of anxiety, these represent translational schemas called upon by the infant to master anxiety and bind the enigmas which impinge upon it initially from the outside world, and then increasingly from its own psychic recesses.
In ‘Psychanalyse et biologie’ Laplanche suggests that perhaps the most pervasive and enduring of the myths and codes available to the human being in his ongoing task of self-theorisation is a bio-logy (biologie)—not the science of biology but an evolving and ideologically freighted set of theories about living beings (vivants), which it has sometimes been the mistake of psychoanalysis to confuse with biology proper. One of the most significant aspects of such foundational biotheorisation—certainly its most ‘universal’ aspect (Laplanche 1998: 138)—is its constitutive role in ‘forging a myth of animality’ (Laplanche 1998: 139). In this connection Laplanche insists, crucially, on the necessity of distinguishing between ‘the animal’ (l'animal) as an empirical entity, and ‘the beast’ (la bête) as a wholly ideological formation which defensively regulates the human relation to ‘the animal’. He offers two key illustrations of this structure. Firstly, in relation to classical myth Laplanche cites the Minotaur—a hybrid of man and bull who, in molesting as well as devouring his victims, is at once grossly sexualised and an embodiment of cruelty. Secondly, he cites the wolf as a figure of voracious savagery. Here he acknowledges the adage Homo homini lupus (‘man is a wolf to man’) which is taken up by Hobbes, and later by Freud in Civilisation and its Discontents in support of the claim that the
‘horrors’ and ‘atrocities’ of history ‘[reveal] man as a savage beast’ (Freud 1930: 111–2).11 Here, however, Laplanche attempts to separate biological reality from the defensive work of human self-theorisation. He observes that what is imputed to the beast within man (the bull component of the Minotaur; the savage wolf inside us all) has little to do with the biological animals which such imputations invoke: ‘the wolf, the real wolf, is cruel neither to other wolves, nor to its victims, nor to man’; its attitude to its prey is—with ‘rare exceptions’, Laplanche cautiously adds—governed by a need for self-preservation and not by the sheer enjoyment of destruction (: ). Thus, paradoxically the category of the beast, of the bestial, emerges as the displaced expression of what is ‘proper’—with all the caveats indicated above—to man: that is, precisely, the unconscious and the sexual drives ( (Laplanche : )):
Man is sometimes a beast [bête] […], depraved and sexual. He is often a cruel Leviathan; and more often still he is both. But this reference back to the animal is purely ideological: it allows us to discharge our own unconscious by attributing it to the non-human within us, to the so-called ‘pre-human’ which would be hidden deep inside, while in reality it is man who has created within him this bestial non-human, this it/id [ça]. (Laplanche 1997a: 139)
Laplanche's point here, of course, is that despite appearances the acknowledgement of what is called human ‘bestiality’ in fact has a reflexive and stabilising function whereby man narcissistically misrecognises both himself and the animal. The ostensible acknowledgement of the scandal of drive sexuality and unconscious desire is immediately undermined by their being simultaneously imputed to what is inhuman within us. As such, the ‘humanness’ of the human being is left ultimately intact—defined precisely in opposition to a supposedly animalistic core—while the animal is made to represent tendencies with which its peculiar alterity can only very rarely, if ever, be said to be compatible.
The constitutive role of this myth of animality is clearly indicated in Laplanche's claim that the ‘whole history [of man] is the history of emancipation from the order of living beings [vivants]’ (143). In this recognition
his thought comes perhaps surprisingly close to that of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.12 In The Open (2002) Agamben offers a description of the human being as ‘the animal that must recognise itself as human to be human’ (26; Agamben's italics). Critically, this imperative is not simply a matter of determining how other animals are not human—although this is inevitably entailed. Agamben is more preoccupied with the ways in which epistemological separations of that kind are made possible because ‘the caesura between the human and the animal passes first of all within man’ (16):
It is possible to oppose man to other living things, and at the same time to organise the complex – and not always edifying – economy of relations between men and animals, only because something like an animal life has been separated within man, only because his distance and proximity to the animal have been measured and recognised first of all in the closest and most intimate place. (15–16).
In other words, the systematisation of the differences between humans and animals is a correlative of man's own bio-political (or, ‘bio-ideological’) endeavour to distinguish between what is human and what is animal within him. Far from the traditional conception of a conjunction of body and soul, nature and logos, the human being on Agamben's account is constituted as a result of an internal separation between human and animal.
Freud's progressive ‘animalisation’ of the drives is a veritable exemplum within psychoanalysis itself of exactly the reflexive production of the mythical ‘beast within’ which Laplanche and Agamben set forth. It thus represents a deeply problematic conflation of ‘theories’: the self-stabilising theorisation of the human individual adopted into, and so perpetuated by, the supposedly analytical apparatus of Freudian theory.
The anthropo-decentrism of Laplanche's work is not simply a reconfigured humanism, since it is oriented towards resisting at the level of formal theory those constitutive myths of the animal-in-man which, beyond their superficial audacity, function primarily to insulate the category of the human. If any traction is to be gained on the broad critical questions with which we opened, regarding the consistency and
vigilance of psychoanalytic delimitations of man and animal, an essential starting point is to ask how deeply the constitutive myth of the beast pervades the rhetoric and the conceptual apparatuses of psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalysis must continue to rethink the human / animal relation, but it must also work to retain a critical distance from the almost ineluctable bio-ideo-logies which have sometimes obscured its thinking. The general theory of seduction stresses the radical alterity of what is ‘fundamentally anthropological’, even as it productively complicates the human / animal relation and urges a consistent vigilance with respect to the risks of any such theoretical formulations. As such Laplanche's ‘new foundations for psychoanalysis’ offer one, very rigorous means for post-Freudian thought to resist becoming another cog in the great ‘anthropological machine’.
As I have argued elsewhere (Ray 2006) there is, however, no clear separation between Laplanche's intensive critical re-readings of Freud and the gradual elaboration of these ‘new foundations’.
My translation. Throughout this paper quotations in English from untranslated texts have been translated by me.
On the evolution of the Three Essays across its re-editions see Laplanche 2005.
I shall address the second aspect in the following section.
It is worth noting Laplanche's support for the claim of Michel Jouvet that the dividing line between animals which dream and animals which do not is the same line as that dividing homeotherms and poikilotherms. ‘It seems to me’, Laplanche argues, ‘that this dividing line is also that between species with infant / adult communication and those species without such communication’ (Laplanche 2000a: 16–17).
‘The behaviour of a young child faced with a void can be compared with that of a young bird belonging to a species which normally nests in holes in cliffs. It is a simple experiment: a completely transparent sheet of glass is placed over a hole and the subject is placed on the glass. The baby steps forward as though nothing were wrong, whereas the bird refuses to walk out over the void’ (Laplanche 1987: 99).
Laplanche's account of this fundamental relation of human dissymmetry clearly owes much to Ferenczi's well known elaboration of developmental inequality between the adult and child in ‘Confusion of Tongues’ (1933). Ferenczi's account does, however, remain preoccupied with adults whose behaviour towards children is explicitly pathological. Laplanche's development is to insist that even the most quotidian adult behaviours towards the child are parasitized by opaque significations from the parental unconscious. Cf. Laplanche 1993: 77ff.
I have altered Macey's translation here. In this passage Macey renders Laplanche's pulsionnel as ‘instinctual’, which seems to miss Laplanche's point entirely and return us to precisely the terminological confusion of Strachey's Freud from which Laplanche is labouring to exit. Since there is no adjectival form of ‘drive’ in English I have opted for ‘dimension of the drive’, which is inelegant but has at least the virtue of not confusing Laplanche's precise terminological choice here.
See especially ‘Time and the Other’ (1992b): ‘[T]here are many things proper to man: erectus, habilis, sapiens, or rather sapiens sapiens; laughter is proper to man, language is proper to man’ (241). On the latter point cf. Laplanche's extraordinary claim in the otherwise careful paper ‘Pulsion et instinct’ that ‘there are systems of animal communication, but animals do not have true language [langage vrai]’ (18)—a statement which of course only begs the question of what on earth Laplanche means by ‘true’ language. As will be seen below it is precisely claims of this kind which Derrida criticises in the account of the symbolic order given by Laplanche's old teacher Jacques Lacan.
See note 4 above.
Laplanche's reflections on the lupus may owe something to Lacan's discussion of the same adage (Lacan 1950: 120ff.). If so, the debt goes unacknowledged.
In the space available I am unable to develop a further, related area of interest shared by Laplanche and Agamben: the figure of the werewolf. Laplanche's rich but condensed account of the fantasy of the werewolf as the untranslated ‘residue’ of the domestication of the dog (1996: 58–59 n. 12) no doubt warrants sustained and
detailed comparison with Agamben's more overtly political discussion of the wargus as ‘outlaw’ in Homo Sacer (1995: 104–111).
only deduce a virtual primary condition, the drives are at once essential and non-indigenous, proper precisely insofar as they are improper and structurally derivative.