Abstract

Lacanian theory is not only a theoretical support for a certain kind of clinical practice, but also a powerful intervention in the traditional field of philosophy. The article aims to develop the sense in which the concept of the unconscious can be understood as a genuinely speculative concept. It starts from two different readings of the Cartesian cogito proposed by Lacan and insists on the significant fact that Lacan develops his second reading of the cogito in the context of his discussion of the logic of fantasy. It has been suggested by some interpreters that Lacan’s concept of fantasy – as that which gives us access to reality – echoes the Kantian notion of the transcendental. The article explores their similarities and differences in order to show what constitutes Lacan’s truly revolutionary contribution to modern philosophy, particularly when it comes to questions of objectivity, objective knowledge and the subject’s place within it. It proposes to formulate this revolutionary contribution with the following thesis: the same thing that makes possible the formations of the unconscious also makes possible objective, scientific knowledge. And this something is the gap, the hole that the subject bores in reality when it is constituted as the subject of knowledge vis-à-vis or in relation to reality. For this is precisely the gap, the rupture, where the signifier, the signifying chain, takes hold of the real and becomes something other than a mere reflection or symbolic reproduction/redoubling of reality.