ABSTRACT
Lacan is raising the question of how to differentiate between lowercase ‘b’ and capital case ‘B’ in Heidegger when speaking of ‘being’, which is where Lacan borrows these terms (possibly from Sartre rather than Heidegger). So, there is something more than the stimulus and the response, or the conditioned behavior or the hunger being the stimulus and then the behavior being the response that he thinks of as being. Now, we do not know if he is going toward capital “Being” or lowercase “being”, but it reminds us of the Buddha’s saying that all beings have the Buddha Nature. There is a famous koan: “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not”? Now we could ask, “Does the rat have Buddha Nature or not?” Does the rat have being or not! This is the translation of the question into secular language.
In interdependence or self-other relations and so on, you have beings – small case ‘beings’— but do you have capital case ‘Being’? In Buddhism, ‘Being’ is something more than interdependence. Being represents interdependence in emptiness because all beings have no self. So, because we do not have a substantial self, then our self is made by the interactions. But once you have all the interactions, you can think of the interactions among signifiers, too. Once you have yourself as a metaphor, as an interaction with somebody else, then something about yourself that is not defined by the interaction is lost if you only consider the Symbolic dimension. So, what is lost in the interaction is the Real. The Real doesn’t depend on interaction. And yet, it is something that we are made of, too, while we are made by these interactions and relationships.
Lacan notices again and again how there is an element of jouissance in knowledge and learning that science doesn’t always give credit to. One must have discrete units of letters and signifiers, although the Symbolic is more just than letters and signifiers. This goes back to the question of Being and savoir. Savior requires language and jouissance. We do not know what of the ‘rat experience’ is truly jouissance, although, obviously, the rat experiences instinctual pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain are regulated by semiotic codes if they are not regulated by Symbolic codes. The Symbolic also seems to have a dimension of something acausal or unconditioned in it, too, like Tyche, for example. There is something in the Symbolic that cannot be entirely reduced to the body and to the machine, which has to do with the question of Being. The rat, you could argue, doesn’t have being and doesn’t have language. So, what he is calling language here in the experiment is more of a semiotic montage, just like you find in biological systems or computer systems.
Let us have the working hypothesis that learning can be semiotic or Symbolic, while language is distinctly Symbolic. Knowledge would be associated with language and jouissance, while learning is instinctual and semiotic and tied to the pleasure principle. With jouissance, there are different levels – there is an evolution of the pleasure principle to forms of jouissance that are something more distinctly human.
Conceptual metaphors are given meaning by other conceptual metaphors. Theory is a signifying structure. But is thinking the same as language? And can you say that a theory is constituted as a language or that language is constituted as a theory? Language seems to involve a lot more jouissance than a theory.
