Presentation short abstract

Shows how psychoanalytic insights can challenge the entrenched human/nonhuman binary without idealising nature or seeking reconciliation with it.

Presentation long abstract

In the speculative zone between psychoanalysis and new materialism, this paper proposes a posthuman concept of the unconscious. de Vries and Kapoor have recently argued that ‘the relation of nature to society is characterized by the coincidence of two lacks’, in that neither human subjects nor ‘nature’ corresponds to a coherent whole (p. 2). And yet, in most psychoanalytic work, the recognition of lack and its consequences remains fully located on the side of the human. The unconscious remains tied to the ‘speaking being,’ whose alienation from the environment is cast as uniquely human. This paper at once challenges psychoanalytic thought to reach beyond the human while introducing the disruptive force of unconscious knowledge into the predominantly phenomenological realm of new materialisms. Drawing evidence from fields of scholarship that have addressed questions of elemental behaviour, I propose the idea of a posthuman unconscious that is manifest (that is, observable) in the effects to which it gives rise. To articulate this, I turn to Lacan’s later work on the real unconscious, or the unconscious in the real, where Lacan elaborates the unconscious not in terms of repressed meaning but as enigmatic enunciation: something that has arisen from ‘the body’ (or the material sensorium) and has ‘a sense beyond meaning’ (Moncayo, 2017: 57). I thus aim to show how psychoanalytic insight can challenge the entrenched human/nonhuman binary without idealising nature or seeking reconciliation with it.