The entire tradition from pre-philosophy (Parmenides: 'thinking and being are the same') to Heidegger's post-philosophy ('being-in-the-world') relies on a kind of primordial 'accordance' between thought ('man') and world - even in Heidegger, Dasein is always-already 'in' the world (or, as Heidegger puts it in his famous reversal of Kant: the scandal is not that the problem of how we can pass from ideas or representations in our mind to objective reality remains unresolved; the true scandal is that this passage is perceived as a problem at all, since it silently presupposes that an unbridgeable distance separates the subject from the world...).

Lacan, however, insists that our 'being-in-the-world' is already the outcome of a certain primordial choice: the psychotic experience bears witness to the fact that it is quite possible not to choose the world - a psychotic subject is not 'in-the-world', it lacks the clearance [Lichtung] that opens up the world. (For that reason Lacan establishes a link between Heidegger's Lichtung and the Freudian Bejahung, the primordial 'Yes', the assertion of being, as opposed to the psychotic Verwerfung.) In short, 'subject' designates this primordial impossible-forced choice by means of which we choose (or not) to be 'in the world' - that is, to exist as the 'there' of being.

Pp. 184-5

¶ 2:04 PM