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8 o The Gods A re Born and Die Together
But still more grave than the sophistic interpretation that claims
to join the essence of appearance to will to power, only to turn it over
to representation, is the interpretation that based on the same pre-
suppositions, refuses that representation or certifies its absence, only
to abandon it to the night. The philosophy of the unconscious, of
representation, finds its ultimate avatar in m odern psychology.
9
Man's Monkey:
The Unconscious
The systematic elaboration of the fundamental structures of ap-
pearance, traced through the analysis of the inaugural problematics
of Descartes, Schopenhauer, and N ietzsche, now enables a radical cri-
tique of psychoanalysisa philosophical determination of the con-
cept of the unconscious. Freud undoubtedly knew that such a deter-
mination was totally lacking in psychoanalysis when he aggressively
attempted to rid himself of a question on w hich his recently founded
discipline rested completely: "The further question as to the ultimate
nature of this unconscious is no wiser or more profitable than the
older one as to the nature of the conscious. ' The originality of
psychoanalysis is therefore its refusal of any speculative, conceptual
approach to the unconscious, turning instead to incontestable patho-
logical material as its only possible key, as the only law capable of
explaining what without it would be nothing but incoherence and
enigma. This in turn leads to the claim that only the analyst, who
through hands-on experience of symptoms and resistances has per-
sonally and concretely dealt with the unconscious,
8
knows what he is
talking about, so that he can then laugh at abstract refutations. But
the decision to eliminate all theoretical legitimation in the name of
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Man's Monkey : The Unconscious
Man's Monkey: The Unconscious 283
practice is always suspect, and Freud apparently never thought that
only believers were qualified to deal w ith religion.
The unconscious, therefore, has no theoretical existence except as
the only possible explanation of the pathological material. But this
legitimation does not ultimately draw its authority from that explica-
tive principle but from the pathological material itself,
as incontest-
able data. How is the analytical material incontestable? In that it
appears. One can verbally reject a philosophy of consciousness, but
every psychoanalytic problematic rests on the prior deployment of
the essence of the ve ry consciousness it pretends to reject.
Furthermore, Freud explicitly makes consciousness his work's site
or source: The attribute of being conscious . . . forms the point of
departure for all our investigations."
9
It is true that this beginning has
a sort of double mo tivation. One is explicit and continually repeated
throughout the work the incomplete nature of the conscious data,
which remains unintelligible in that state and to be understood de-
mands the intervention of other, nonapparent processes, which anal-
ysis, however, proves capable of reconstructing. Even as late as 1938,
in the
Outline of Psycho-Analysis,
Freud continues to say: "It is gener-
ally agreed . . . that these conscious processes do not form unbroken
sequences which are complete in themselves." :
But when confronted
with such a situation,, the philosophy of consciousness suddenly sur-
renders all its ground, leaving it to a physiological substructure to fill
the voids and reestablish continuity, so that the physical organism
appears to constitute the true foundation of conscious life, which,
whether we like it or not, is reduced to the status of epiphenomenon.
Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, puts up an admirable struggle to
keep psyche as its explicative principle. Admittedly, it does not avoid
classical thought's great split between appearance and being, taking
the first as the mere appearance of the second, an appearance that
hides more than it reveals or in psychoanalysis, reveals nothing but
disguises. But in psychoanalysis, being at least remains compatible
with appearance since both of them belong to psyche, so that the
unity of psyche, of man and his life, is preserved.
Being, however, is not only compatible with the appearance it
claims to found but secretly stems from it, always arising from and
finally being determined by it. For as Nietzsche says: What is 'ap-
pearance' for me now? Certainly not the opposite of some essence:
what could I say about any essence except to nam e the attributes of its
appearance "
;
This is the real reason why the problematic of the
unconscious must seek its origin and foundation in consciousness:
not the incomplete and enigmatic nature of the conscious contents
but its very existence as appearance, as consciouscon sciousness it-
self as such.
The concept of consciousness is s imultaneously ontic and on-
tological. In its immediate, naive connotation, as in everyday lan-
guage, it designates
what
is conscious; for example, symptoms, para-
praxes, dreams, ticsbehavior in general. But the being-given of this
analytical given, the fact that it shows itself, the pure fact of ap pear-
ing, considered in itself and independent of w hat appears in it (inde-
pendent of any particular symptom or behavior), is consciousness in
its ontological conception, pure consciousness drawing its essence
from the pure fact of appearance and identical to it. It may well
be that the philosophy of consciousness usually confounds what is
conscious with consciousness itself and, in the phenomena, what
shows itself with the very fact of showing, but the latter remains its
implicit theme, what makes it a philosophy, wh at enables and neces-
sitates, alongside the sciences, which always thematize beings, some-
thing like philosophy in general.
In any case, beyond consciousness and as its explicative principle,
psychoanalysis posits what is not conscious, the unconscious. Just
like the concept of consciousness, the concept of the unconscious is
equivocal, simultaneously ontic and ontological. In the ontic sense,
the unconscious consists of drives and their representatives, uncon-
scious representations with their adjuncts,