Which Method is Cartesian? Descartes, Lacan, and the “Accumulation of Knowledge”

Abstract

Most philosophical Lacanians instinctively take Lacan’s engagement with Descartes – not to mention his explicit formulations about not only the identity of the psychoanalytic and Cartesian methods but also, moreover, that of the subject of psychoanalysis and the cogito – as comprising a crucial and unequivocal philosophical repère. Nonetheless, there is a line of thought in Lacan’s oeuvre that this orientation leaves completely unaccounted for: Lacan’s decisive point regarding knowledge as accumulation. In his recently published twelfth Seminar (Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse) from February of this year, Lacan argues that the cogito is a hinge between knowledge “in its pre-accumulative state,” to the extent that it is capable of being doubted, and knowledge as a “mode of production” which predates and even motivates capitalist accumulation. It is on this basis that we can comprehend Lacan’s seemingly conflictual or even contradictory claims that, on the one hand, Descartes inaugurates modern science by leaving the eternal truths to God (Seminar XI) and, on the other hand, that modern science forecloses truth (“Science and Truth”).