“What Comes After ‘The Death of Man’? Foucault and Lacan on Sexuality and Freedom
Foucault’s relationship to psychoanalysis, and especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, is a highly complex one. From his early enthusiasm in The Order of Things, in which psychoanalysis is assigned a privileged place in the account of the birth of the human sciences and their possible “beyond,” Foucault ends up, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, becoming one of its most powerful critics, denouncing the “repressive hypothesis” as one of the prevalent myths of modern power. Yet some years later, in his lecture course The Hermeneutics of the Subject (1981-82), Foucault praises Lacan as the one of the few thinkers to thematize the relation between the subject and truth. In this talk, I will disentangle this relationship by focusing on one key moment: Foucault’s and Lacan’s interpretations of Diego Velázquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas, and how they reflect different understandings of subjectivity and modernity. I will show how Foucault and Lacan draw two contrasting conclusions from the “death of Man,” i.e. the crisis of the human sciences and the eclipse of their vision of a central constituting subject or transcendental ego. I will then look back on Foucault’s “history of sexuality” project, and examine how these competing conceptions of subjectivity impact on the understanding of sexuality and the possibility of emancipation.”