In “Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious,” Dolar comments in detail on Lacan’s two
allegedly opposed accounts of the cogito, both of which imply a choice between thought
and being (“either to think or to be,” ibid., p. 18 ). If the first account—which Dolar shows
to overlap with Lacan’s explanations in Seminar XI (19 6 4)—locates thought on the side
of alienated consciousness and being on that of an “impossible choice” which “would
entail desubjectivation,” the second account—which Dolar takes from Seminar XIV
(1966‒1967)—reverses these coordinates and suggests that “I cannot do otherwise but
to choose being... a false being... which serves as the support of consciousness”
(ibid., pp. 19 , 28 ). While I generally agree with Dolar’s argument, I nevertheless believe
that the periodization he proposes is untenable: the “second” account is already present
in “The Agency of the Letter” ( 1957 ) (see Écrits: A Selection,p.16 6). In other words, the
“two” readings of the cogito are always present in Lacan since, beyond terminological
confusion, they both presuppose the general equation unconscious =“real” thought =
“real” being. Badiou is therefore correct when he observes that, despite his repeated at-
tacks against the “fundamental axiom of all philosophy” for which being is supposed
to think, Lacan nevertheless recuperates this Parmenidean equation on the level of the
unconscious: “But that the unconscious thinks, or, if you like, that ‘it’ thinks, is this
really different to the philosophical idea according to which being thinks?” (A. Badiou,
“Psychoanalysis and Philosophy,” Analysis 9 [ 2000 ], p. 8 ).
See The Seminar. Book III,p. 240.
19 .Le séminaire livre V,p. 103.
See Écrits: A Selection,pp.48‒50.
Ibid., pp. 49 , 86.
22 .The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954(New York: Norton,
1988 ), pp. 274 , 217 , 256. Note that, in later years, Lacan will increasingly associate the
term “intersubjectivity” with the imaginaryrelation between the ego and the other.
See Écrits: A Selection,pp.88‒90.
See, for example, ibid., p. 85 ; and J. Lacan, Écrits(Paris: Seuil, 19 6 6), p. 41.
25 .The Seminar. Book III,p. 24.
Ibid.
J. Lacan, Le séminaire livre IV. La relation d’objet, 1956–1957(Paris: Seuil, 199 4), p. 12 (emphases
added).
On this issue, see S. Zˇizˇek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991 ), p. 181.
29 .The Seminar. Book III,p. 112 (emphasis added).
30 .Zˇizˇek, Looking Awry,p. 131.
See, for example, Écrits,p. 16.
The unconscious is deindividuated and understood as a locus as early as 195 6. In Semi-
nar III, Lacan states that calling the unconscious an internal dialogue “already falsifies
everything,” since “this so-called internal monologue is entirely continuous with the
external dialogue” (The Seminar. Book III,p. 112 ).