Lacan's War Games: Cybernetics, Sovereignty and War in Seminar II ; Lacanove vojne igre: kibernetika, suverenost in vojna v II. seminarju

Abstract

Članek ponuja novo branje Lacanove materialistične definicije zavesti iz Seminarja II: Jaz v Freudovski teoriji in psihoanalitični tehniki 1954–1955, ki ga interpretira kot delo politične, celo vojaške, teorije. Če povzamemo argument, članek poskuša umestiti Lacanovo predavanje o miselnem eksperimentu v zgodovinski kontekst ne zgolj pojava povojne kibernetske teorije, temveč v daljšo zgodovino filozofije »stroja«, ki se razteza od Descartesa in Hobbesa vse do sodobnih filozofov kot so Koyré, Schuhl in Kojève. Če ima metafora stroja dolgo zgodovino znotraj filozofske antropologije, kjer je različno uporabljena za rešitev problemov svobodne volje, zavesti itd., pa avtor trdi, da je metafora stroja tudi dolgotrajen politični trop, ki je bil vse od začetka razvit za opis razmerja med suverenostjo in vlado, med pravilom in izjemo ter celo med vojno in mirom. Avtor v zaključku sklene, da Lacanov miselni eksperiment ne dramatizira zgolj fenomenološke nadomestitve suverenega jaza s »strojem« zavesti, temveč politično strmoglavljenje predmoderne suverene osebe s strani »stroja« modernega pravnega, političnega in celo vojaškega reda. ; This essay offers a new reading of Lacan's materialist definition of consciousness in Seminar II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-5 which interprets it as a work of political, or even military, theory. To summarize the argument, I seek to position Lacan's thought experiment seminar within the historical context not only of the emergence of post-war cybernetic theory but within the longer history of the philosophy of the "machine" that stretches from Descartes and Hobbes up to contemporary philosophers like Koyré, Schuhl and Kojève. If the machine metaphor has a long history within philosophical anthropology – where it is variously used to solve the problem of free will, consciousness and so on – I argue that it is also an enduring political trope which has, from the beginning, been deployed to describe the relationship between sovereignty and government, rule and exception and even war and peace. In conclusion, I argue that Lacan's thought experiment does not merely dramatize the phenomenological supersession of the sovereign ego by the "machine" of consciousness, but the political overthrow of the premodern sovereign person by the "machine" of the modern juridical, political – and even military – order.