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Everyone knows, of course, that the laws of history are worth as little for directing research into the recent past as they are for making any reasonable presuppositions about tomorrow’s events. Besides, they are modest enough to postpone their certainties until the day after tomorrow, and not too prudish either to allow for the adjustments that permit predictions to be made about what happened yesterday.
If, therefore, their role in progress is rather slight, their interest nevertheless lies elswhere: in their considerable role as ideals. For it leads us to distinguish between what might be called primary and secondary functions of historicization [...]
Events are engendered in a primal historicization– in other words, history is already being made on the stage where it will be played out once it has been written down, both in one’s heart of hearts and outside.
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–Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”, The Complete Ecrits, p. 216
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Wow, that is a brilliant quote, thanks for posting it.
The ellipsis elides a potentially clarificatory paragraph:
“For to say of psychoanalysis and history [and anthropology?] that, qua sciences, they are both sciences of the particular, does not mean that the facts they deal with are purely accidental or even factitious, or that their ultimate value comes down to the brute aspect of trauma”.
OK, we appear to have the following:
1. The laws of history, while useless for explaining events in the contemporary (recent past/near future), nevertheless have an important function as ‘ideals’. (NB: they do not necessarily have the function that some proponents such as the much-maligned Fenichel would claim for them, i.e. of being able to actually explain developmental processes over a longer duree).
2. The laws of history function as ideals insofar as their very existence serves the primary and primal function of historicization, which is to instantaneously inscribe events both inside and outside the subject. Rather, that is, than projecting them into some external, collective, linear or cyclical, process, such as a Hegelian Entfaltung [unfolding] of spirit, Buddhist circulation of karma [i.e. the laws of cause, effect and affect], Nietzchean/Kunderan ‘eternal return of the same’, etc.
Key word: instantaneously. Events are represented here as idealized inscriptions of a particular form of history within/outside the subject; events are like a tattoo that the subject forever bears on his/her body, like a chord forever resonating through the space outside the subject (presumably including the social, the discursive, etc.) In this analogy, the ‘laws of history’ would be the pattern on which the tattoo is drawn, the arrangement of the notes in the historical chord.
Hence Lacan’s claim on the following page that in psychoanalysis, we merely teach the subject to “complete the current historicization of the facts that have already determined a certain number of the historical ‘turning points’ in his existence”. Hence his equation of a subject’s ‘fixation’ with a historical ’stigma’. And hence an acute comment that Monique David-Menard made to me last year: “The only [therapeutic] goal of psychoanalytic practice is to facilitate repetition.”
All three of these hences point to the idea of factual de-scription in psychoanlysis, and perhaps the human sciences more generally, as a progressive retracing of the inscription that events have left on the subject, which cannot be accomplished without recourse to intersubjectivity, that is, to language with all its potentials and perils.
3. This inscription and de-scription of events both inside and outside the subject remains symbolic and fictitious (fact and fiction, after all, have the same root). It has nothing to do with the secondary, real-istic function of historicization, which pertains to ‘progress’ and presumably has to do with the causative, linear succession of events or other schemas of how events are interrelated (see 2.)
4. Nor does this inscription have anything to do with an exegesis of past events as ‘brute trauma’, as a rupture to which restitution must be made, a hole which therapy must fill. Rather, like the subject’s constitutive lack, these events historicize him/her insofar as they give him/her somewhere to return to in analysis, a pattern which is determining if not always pleasant.
What might we learn from this?
5. Events engender the facts encompassed by sciences of the particular (the human sciences and their cases), facts which do NOT all point back to trauma as some primal and originary locus of signification and do NOT all point forwards to progress as the primary domain of inscription and veridiction.
Rather, facts represent ‘inconvenient truths’ or ‘obstacles to knowledge’, the overcoming of which, as for Canguilhem and Bachelard, motivate, locate and historicize the incessant activity of an incomplete, essentially fictional subject’s life/work.
I am curious about what is meant by ‘ideal’ here. And wondering if we could say something similar about ’society’: worthless for explanation, but carrying powerful effects as an ideal. As in, for example, Karl Polanyi’s ‘Great Transformation’ in which ‘the discovery of society’ is more a spiritual resignation than a scientific object.