ABSTRACT
In the continuing task of that deconstructing or ‘overcoming’ of Western metaphysics which contemporary thought has inherited from Heidegger, as well as Nietzsche, it is becoming apparent that the redefinition of Western models of ‘thinking’ is inseparable from the articulation of a new position and ‘subject’ of knowledge.1 While in the first instance this implies that the current discourse in relation to or around philosophy cannot avoid a simultaneous engagement with some version of psychoanalytic discourse (specifically, with the legacy of Lacanian psychoanalysis, which began so influentially to extend the phenomenological critique of Western metaphysics to the unified subject of metaphysical speculation, the ‘subject who is supposed to know’), several of the most recent contributions to this interrogation of subjectivity point beyond the established boundaries of psychoanalysis, as well as of philosophy, in the direction of states and experiences which both these discourses have typically treated with mistrust. Thus the intersection of psychoanalysis with philosophy, although it was first explicitly negotiated by Lacan, has borne some of its most challenging fruit in the works of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, who have both, to different degrees, gone beyond the Lacanian limit, in exceeding the master’s conception of his project. Although these thinkers have often been contrasted in recent years, it is my view that the intersection between key aspects of their work is far more extensive than their commentators have suggested.
