ABSTRACT
This is the first of two chapters exploring the relation between conceptualizations of the unconscious and conceptualizations of discourse. Taken together these chapters constitute a comparison between a Foucaultian understanding of discourse and the meaning of discourse in recent work by more Lacanian theorists such as Zizek (1989) and Laclau and Mouffe (2001). More Lacanian conceptualizations of discourse, which can be seen as a development of the Freudian/Althusserian idea of overdetermination, seem to take the notion of the unconscious for granted. Laclau has explicitly stated: ‘I think that the psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious is one of these epoch-making events whose ontological dimensions we are only starting to glimpse’ (2004, p. 315). He goes on to clarify this, suggesting that for him the concepts associated with a Lacanian understanding of the relation between the subject and discourse cannot be limited to a ‘particular region of human reality’. Rather, he suggests, ‘when one realizes their full ontological implications they transform any field, the political field included’ (ibid., p. 316). For Laclau, the category of ‘discourse’ must incorporate these psychoanalytic understandings of the subject and the unconscious. In contrast, Foucault’s account of discourse seems to suppress a relation to a psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious. In his account of resistance, discussed in the next chapter, this allows him to foreground the potential of regional, diverse instantiations of discourse, in a way that contrasts with Laclau’s more universalizing, ontologizing move. For Laclau, it seems to me, discourse is essentially related to a notion of the unconscious; for Foucault, discourse is plural and irregular. In both cases, I find it interesting to think about the relation between empirical analysis and speculative theorization: the speculative impulse to constitute a notion of the unconscious, or some alternative to the unconscious (power for example), to account for something that is probably empirically unaccountable, emerges in very different ways, it seems to me, in these two conceptualizations of discourse.
