ABSTRACT
Modern subjectivities have been increasingly historically linked to diverse expressions of mentation, psyche, and struggle. This chapter follows the influence of Foucault with two points of emphasis. First, as manifested by the late Foucault’s avowal of Heideggerian thought, to situate the former within a hermeneutic orbit. Second, both positive knowledge as possibility and aporia deserve an accounting. Among the lacunae of the analytic of finitude – with its doubling of “man” – that emerge in the modern period, it is the strange occurrence of the unthought that prompts the instant analysis. Moreover, Foucault’s insight into the occurrence of unthought as the unconscious may be read both through Heidegger’s understanding of the withdrawal of being, or un/concealment, as well as the former’s work on subjectification. Thus, the linkage of the problem of the unconscious and concealment, the latter as set forth in Mark Wrathall’s commentary, will allow the problem of the unconscious to come into relief in relation to subject’s self-knowledge. To these ends, after sketching a Foucauldian understanding of modern conditions of knowledge through a Heideggerian angle on the unconscious, the essay will examine Lacanian conceptualization of the unconscious premised on repression via the operation of the signifier and resultant lack in being. Finally, insight is offered into the ethical and biopolitical consequences that follow from such an historical problematization.
