Métis, Cogito and Psychoanalysis: on Knowledge and the Production of Subject [1]
In this paper I aim to discuss how a discourse produces a subject, which emerges from it as its effect. Seeking to examine the constitution of both discourse and subject through a psychoanalytical perspective, I will analyze two moments of knowledge production in which speech produces a sort of gap which unfolds unprecedented possibilities for the speaker. They are the epic notion of Metis as it shows in Ancient Greece and the Cartesian Cogito, the latter approached through the remarks of Jacques Lacan.
I would therefore like to initiate this writing by making a foray into a literature to which not only the title of this issue suggested, but also the very signifiers employed, psyche and techne, invited me from the start.
Metis as techne, and its effect on psyche
In Greek epic poetry, a particular modality of expertise called metis appears as highly appreciated. In contrast to what would later constitute philosophical knowledge, which aims what is eternal, unified, immutable and necessary, metis comprehends a knowledge which is fluid and multifaceted, made of entanglements, twists, and that lurks on the opportunities which arise momentarily[2]. A competence belonging to the hunter and the fisherman, and later to the sophist and the politician, it does not exclude deceit[3], disguises, tricks, plots, concealments and lies in the pursuit of its objectives. Being the attribute of some deities and heroes, metis configures the “curved counsel” of Cronus and Prometheus, as well as the cunning of Odysseus; it belongs to the timai, the honors or proper attributes of Athena and Hermes, and characterizes the constant vigilance that makes up one of the determinant aspects of Zeus’ sovereignty, the god thus being intitled metieta for having swallowed the Goddess Metis herself, whom he had first espoused[4].
The main aspect I would like to emphasize, however, does not concern this modality of techne as such, but rather a certain relationship which it seems to have with something which this literature shows in an incipient way, but it nonetheless remarks: this knowledge does not operate without producing a certain kind of splitting, a fracture in the very being of the one who employs it. This sort of division appears in the famous epithet given by Homer and Hesiod both to Cronus and Prometheus: ankylometes, “of curved counsel”[5]. It is also present in the harsh words Achilles addresses to Odysseus, in Iliad Book IX:
For hateful in my eyes, even as the gates of Hades,
is that man that hideth one thing in his mind and sayeth another[6].
The “curved counsel” proper to metis characterizes someone who plots something while acting in the opposite direction, and who thus leaves open the gap not only between word and action, but also, more importantly for what I seek to point out, between the saying and the said. It is note worthy that Greek poetry marked this separation through the metaphor of the curve or angle, as opposed to the straight path, free from deviations and dotted lines, which ordinarily goes from word to act, or from what is said to its referent. In this sense, the wisdom of metis would be the most faithful unfolding of the power proper to language, enunciated by the Muses themselves to Hesiod in the proem of Theogony. In this self-proclamation by the poetic word to one who would turn into a poet by listening to it and becoming aware of its powers, what it enunciates is the need for this gap opened in, by and through logos:
“(…) we know how to speak many
false things as though they were true; but we know,
when we will, to utter true things”[7].
The cunning of how to lie, to deceit, and to act with second intentions, characteristic of metis, appears in the Muses’ speech unfolding the power proper to language. And this power in particular generates the effect of a separation or splitting in those who exercise it: the speaker becomes complex at the moment in which their saying points to something beyond what is said. A rift or hiatus opens up in this case, leading to the necessary question: “this is what they says, but what does they mean by what they says?”. Such duplicity appears as odious to the direct warrior excellence of an Achilles, for example. And yet, it opens the dimension of something unfathomable, in which language appears to better hide the speaker's designs, instead of being taken as a simple clear means of communication.
There is something in this art that eludes the established entanglements, the previous links of meaning constituting what we understand as reality. Along the same lines, it is necessary to recall the excellence of Odysseus’ grandfather Autolycus, mentioned by Homer, who exceeded everyone in cheating and in false swearing[8]. I would like to suggest that such a virtue may be understood not necessarily as the breaking of the pledged word that takes place in perjury, as it is recurrently translated and interpreted. This cannot be configured as a virtue, and it incurs the wrath of men and gods for being the breach of the symbolic pact, founder of human societies and their commerce with the divine, which the oath sustains[9]. Perhaps the excellence of Autolycus mentioned by Homer may rather be thought of as that of someone who tangles differently the words of promise, therefore of commitment, so as to leave between them a gap or room for manoeuvre: this would configure the very space through which the words in their ambiguities, why not say the signifiers, can slip, be used in an equivocal way, and thus release the speaker from what they had apparently promised[10].
This word, which is equally released, so to speak, from its uniqueness of meaning, does not fail to conform to the real that, according to Lacan, the gods themselves configure. It is the divinities themselves who sometimes send deceiving dreams, indicating that there is always a chasm between the dream’s signifiers and their signification, and that suturing this gap relying on a univocal understanding is the responsibility of each interpreter, who will have to assume the consequences of their act of interpretation.
But in order to the psychoanalytical subject in its contemporary configuration emerge from this hiatus, it would still be necessary that another moment took place in the Western history of thought. As Lacan repeatedly emphasizes, the subject of psychoanalysis arises from the subject of the Cartesian cogito, the former being to the latter at the same time its heir and its point of subversion.
Psychoanalysis and the subject of cogito
Psychoanalysis emerged from the point when science was constituted in Modernity, in rupture with the ancient episteme. This point is, for Lacan, the Cartesian cogito[11]. It is anchored in the discourse of science and not in the field of myths that Freud pursued the unconscious, and the psychoanalyst proceeds in relation to it as the decipher of a text – lacunar and in the form of a rebus, but still a text – provided with a logic to which access must be gained.
An important reason for affirming such proximity is that, through the cogito, certainty, knowledge and truth began for the first time to articulate themselves in a radically innovative way in relation to previous thinking. Descartes starts from a point of rupture between knowledge and certainty: it is only after having received all the traditional knowledge inherited from his Jesuit formation that he sets out in search for the still unfound certainty as his Archimedean point, the only capable of grounding true knowledge[12]. This certainty is effectively found by Descartes, through radicalizing his doubt, in the cogito to which it eventually leads him. However, the finding of the first certainty is not yet capable, at that moment, of guaranteeing the finding of the first truth[13]. This would only be affirmed after the institution of the Other, or rather, God, in the quality of truthful, once proved the need to affirm Him as infinite substance[14] and as existent[15].
In the same way, Freud seeks the certainty that the unconscious is there in the dreams’ lacunar report, which always brings doubt to the patient as to the veracity of what they reports. Here, however, the operation unfolds, in the sense that the doubt belonging to the patient meets the analyst's certainty, that it is precisely in their impediments, pauses, lapses, flashes of wit, that it can be assured that the unconscious thought presents itself.
Another reason for such statement concerns the fact that the operation of cogito takes place in two different levels: from the statement (énoncé) that attests to the maximum radicalization of doubt, Descartes moves to the level of enunciation (énonciation) to affirm that, even where he doubts, and while he doubts, he thinks[16]. The cogito then takes place in this gap between statement and enunciation, or between the saying (dire) and the said (dit).
It will be therefore necessary to sustain the special status of the subject unfolded through the via of the cogito, since it comes forth in this very chasm[17]. What Lacan states as constituting the subversion of psychoanalysis in relation to the route opened by the Cartesian way is that only for psychoanalysis, due to its understanding of the unconscious status of the subject, it is possible to affirm it in its evanescent, fleeting character. The subject’s fugacious quality is opened by the enunciation of the cogito and at the same time denied by Descartes' quest to affirm it as “a thinking thing” and his effort to guarantee its status as a thinking substance, as he proceeds in his path of thought.
The cogito’s subject, as it appears in Descartes' second meditation, is made of thought: it can only state "I am" as long as the act of thinking lasts, in any of its modalities – such as doubting, willing, affirming, fearing, etc. Its time of existence is itself the time in which these activities last. Once psychoanalysis avoids resorting to what Lacan calls the “homunculus’ theory” – the thought presupposing a substantial individual at the base of the operation of thinking, the referral taken by Descartes – what the cogito brings is the possibility of sustaining that the subject comes forth, rather, as an effect of these various operations of thinking.
It is then from this place that Lacan will state that a signifier represents a subject for another signifier[18]. A signifier is constituted as such when it reports to other signifiers, establishing relationships with them: relationships of opposition, proximity, among others. However, every time something appears as a signifier –let us remember that Lacan’s understanding of the signifier is quite vast, being able to encompass words, particles, whole sentences, images–, there a subject is assumed to be its author, emerging in this space between signifiers. And, in the gap opened by the signifier in relation to the signified, emphasized in the experience of analysis, the possibility of a subject emerges in a glimpse, and soon disappears, or crystallizes once again into a signifier. “There is no subject without, somewhere, aphanisis of the subject, and it is in this alienation, in this fundamental division, that the dialectic of the subject is established.”[19].
A new metis?
Can we affirm psychoanalysis as a kind of contemporary metis? It would thus be a knowledge which stalks the unconscious in its constant movement of closure, hunting the evanescent subject in the patient’s sayings, not to retain it, but to better point out its always present possibility of arising, even if it comes each time as already fading, each time already being lost. This would be a metis which had to go through the modern constitution of the subject of science, to better affirm its knowledge as being distinct from it, and to sustain another modality of subject: a subject at once presupposed as a possibility open to every speaker and repeatedly lost, given the very constitution of speech.
This new knowledge does not lack its oracular enunciation, which I emphasize here in parody with the utterance of the Hesiodic Muses: “I, truth, speak”[20]. Much more loquacious than these, in fact, what the truth enunciates goes beyond affirming poetic speech as a place of imbrication between revelations and lies. In first place, the Lacanian saying overlaps truth and speech. It is not circumstantially that the truth speaks, it is only in speech that truth is instituted. For, when enunciating “I speak”, it adds: “There is no speech without language”[21]. And, in language, truth runs through the instances which promote gap spaces: “(…) since I slip in not only via falsehood, but through a crack too narrow to be found at feigning's weakest point and through the dream's inaccessible cloud, through the groundless fascination with mediocrity and the seductive impasse of absurdity”[22]. The way of the signifier as the way of equivocation, such is the way of truth, always half-spoken of[23], demanding from the psychoanalyst the cunning of lurking and pursuing it “on the edges”. And what this path that borders the sayings pursues and simultaneously promotes is the subject, always on arrival and always already departing, coming from the statements to enunciate itself in a saying always too early and already too late.
Notes:
[1] This paper was written during a post-Doctorate in 2022 at GHU Neurosciences Sainte-Anne, Paris, financed by CAPES, Brazil, under the supervision of Dr. Luc Faucher, whom I sincerely thank.
[2] See Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Cunning intelligence in Greek culture and Society. Translated from the French by Janet Lloyd. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, ‘978.
[3] See Hesiod. “Theogony”, IN: Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica. With an English translation by H. G. Evelyn-White. London: William Heinemann and New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1920, v. 560, Where this cunning is presented as dolie techne.
[4] Idem, Ibid., vv. 886-900.
[5] See for example Hesiod, ibid., vvs. 18, 495, 546, and Homer. The Iliad I. With an English translation by A. T Murray. London: William Heinemann Ltd, New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1924, Book IX, v. 37.
[6] Homer. Ibid., Book IX, vv 312-314.
[7] Hesiod, Ibid. Note 3, vv. 27-28.
[8] Homer. The Odyssey. II. With an English translation by A. T. Murray. London: William Heinemann Ltd., New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1920, vv. 395-396. These verses present many widely different translations. The passage in Greek says: hòsanhrópousekékastokleptosýneth’hórkote.
[9] See Émile Benveniste. “Le sermenten Grèce”. IN: Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes. II. Pouvoir, droit, religion, pp. 165-175.
[10] As an example of this cunning wisdom, see: Herodotus. Herodotus II. Books III and IV. With an English translation by A. D. Godley. London: William Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Book IV, 154.
[11] See Jacques Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Book XI. The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998, p. 47. “I dare to state as a truth that the Freudian field was possible only a certain time after the emergence of the Cartesian subject, in so far as modern science began only after Descartes made his inaugural step”.
[12] Id., Ibid., p. 222.
[13] See René Descartes. Meditations on First Philosophy. With selections from the Objections and Replies. Translated and edited by John Cottingham. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 16-17.
[14] See Lacan. Ibid. Note 11, pp. 36-37 and Descartes. Ibid. Note 13, 40-41.
[15] See Descartes., Ibid., 46-48.
[16] See Lacan., Ibid Note 11, p. 44.
[17] Id., ibid., p. 126. “The unconscious is the sum of the effects of speech on a subject, at the level at which the subject constitutes himself out of the effects of the signifier. This makes it clear that, in the term subject (...) I am not designating the living substratum needed by this phenomenon of the subject, nor any sort of substance, (...), but the Cartesian subject, who appears at the moment when doubt is recognized as certainty – (...)”.
[18] Id., ibid., p. 198.
[19] Id., ibid., p. 221.
[20] Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis”, IN: Écrits. The first Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink, incollaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006, p. 340.
[21] Id., ibid., p. 343. The statement in French is: “Il n’est parole que de langage”. Lacan. Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966, p. 412.
[22] Id., ibid., p. 342.
[23] See Jacques Lacan. On feminine sexuality, the limits of love and knowledge, 1972-1973. Encore – The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 20. Translated with notes by Bruce Fink. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999, p. 94.
Carla Francalanci is Professor at the Philosophy Department in Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Author of Amor, discurso, verdade. Uma interpretação do Symposion de Platão. She studies psychoanalysis since 2015 at Escola Letra Freudiana, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her main areas of interest are in Ancient and Contemporary Philosophy and Psychoanalysis.
2