Report: EPISTEMOLOGIA DELLA PSICOANALISI TRA ALTHUSSER E LACAN

Abstract

The contributions included in this section of S&F_ focus on the problem of the epistemological status of psychoanalysis and its object, the unconscious. They were originally presented in Venice at the Ca’ Foscari University in December 2014, during a debate organized by Maria Turchetto and the Associazione Louis Althusser, following the first Italian translation of the two conferences on psychoanalysis delivered by Althusser at the École Normale in 1963‐64 (L. Althusser, Psicoanalisi e scienze umane, Mimesis, Milano 2014). The two conferences, centred around the alleged “epistemological break” brought about by the work of Lacan in the domain of human sciences, provide the authors with the opportunity to examine the relationship between Marxism, psychoanalysis and philosophy in the current theoretical context, and to address such problems as the relationship between the discourse of the unconscious and the theory of ideology, transindividual imaginary and subjective Cogito, body and language, as well as the status of scientific truth. The authors attempt to show the fecundity of an epistemological approach which allows us to reposition the problem of the unconscious in an “interstitial gap” separating body from language, phenomenology from biology, corporeal linguistic signifier (lalangue) from the pure axiomatic of science (matema).

Keywords

• psychoanalysis
• science
• moral philosophy