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8 o The Gods A re Born and Die Together

But still more grave than the sophistic interpretation that claims

to join the essence of appearance to will to power, only to turn it over

to representation, is the interpretation that based on the same pre-

suppositions, refuses that representation or certifies its absence, only

to abandon it to the night. The philosophy of the unconscious, of

representation, finds its ultimate avatar in m odern psychology.

9

Man's Monkey:

The Unconscious

The systematic elaboration of the fundamental structures of ap-

pearance, traced through the analysis of the inaugural problematics

of Descartes, Schopenhauer, and N ietzsche, now enables a radical cri-

tique of psychoanalysisa philosophical determination of the con-

cept of the unconscious. Freud undoubtedly knew that such a deter-

mination was totally lacking in psychoanalysis when he aggressively

attempted to rid himself of a question on w hich his recently founded

discipline rested completely: "The further question as to the ultimate

nature of this unconscious is no wiser or more profitable than the

older one as to the nature of the conscious. ' The originality of

psychoanalysis is therefore its refusal of any speculative, conceptual

approach to the unconscious, turning instead to incontestable patho-

logical material as its only possible key, as the only law capable of

explaining what without it would be nothing but incoherence and

enigma. This in turn leads to the claim that only the analyst, who

through hands-on experience of symptoms and resistances has per-

sonally and concretely dealt with the unconscious,

8

knows what he is

talking about, so that he can then laugh at abstract refutations. But

the decision to eliminate all theoretical legitimation in the name of

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Man's Monkey : The Unconscious

Man's Monkey: The Unconscious 283

practice is always suspect, and Freud apparently never thought that

only believers were qualified to deal w ith religion.

The unconscious, therefore, has no theoretical existence except as

the only possible explanation of the pathological material. But this

legitimation does not ultimately draw its authority from that explica-

tive principle but from the pathological material itself,

as incontest-

able data. How is the analytical material incontestable? In that it

appears. One can verbally reject a philosophy of consciousness, but

every psychoanalytic problematic rests on the prior deployment of

the essence of the ve ry consciousness it pretends to reject.

Furthermore, Freud explicitly makes consciousness his work's site

or source: The attribute of being conscious . . . forms the point of

departure for all our investigations."

9

It is true that this beginning has

a sort of double mo tivation. One is explicit and continually repeated

throughout the work the incomplete nature of the conscious data,

which remains unintelligible in that state and to be understood de-

mands the intervention of other, nonapparent processes, which anal-

ysis, however, proves capable of reconstructing. Even as late as 1938,

in the

Outline of Psycho-Analysis,

Freud continues to say: "It is gener-

ally agreed . . . that these conscious processes do not form unbroken

sequences which are complete in themselves." :

But when confronted

with such a situation,, the philosophy of consciousness suddenly sur-

renders all its ground, leaving it to a physiological substructure to fill

the voids and reestablish continuity, so that the physical organism

appears to constitute the true foundation of conscious life, which,

whether we like it or not, is reduced to the status of epiphenomenon.

Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, puts up an admirable struggle to

keep psyche as its explicative principle. Admittedly, it does not avoid

classical thought's great split between appearance and being, taking

the first as the mere appearance of the second, an appearance that

hides more than it reveals or in psychoanalysis, reveals nothing but

disguises. But in psychoanalysis, being at least remains compatible

with appearance since both of them belong to psyche, so that the

unity of psyche, of man and his life, is preserved.

Being, however, is not only compatible with the appearance it

claims to found but secretly stems from it, always arising from and

finally being determined by it. For as Nietzsche says: What is 'ap-

pearance' for me now? Certainly not the opposite of some essence:

what could I say about any essence except to nam e the attributes of its

appearance "

;

This is the real reason why the problematic of the

unconscious must seek its origin and foundation in consciousness:

not the incomplete and enigmatic nature of the conscious contents

but its very existence as appearance, as consciouscon sciousness it-

self as such.

The concept of consciousness is s imultaneously ontic and on-

tological. In its immediate, naive connotation, as in everyday lan-

guage, it designates

what

is conscious; for example, symptoms, para-

praxes, dreams, ticsbehavior in general. But the being-given of this

analytical given, the fact that it shows itself, the pure fact of ap pear-

ing, considered in itself and independent of w hat appears in it (inde-

pendent of any particular symptom or behavior), is consciousness in

its ontological conception, pure consciousness drawing its essence

from the pure fact of appearance and identical to it. It may well

be that the philosophy of consciousness usually confounds what is

conscious with consciousness itself and, in the phenomena, what

shows itself with the very fact of showing, but the latter remains its

implicit theme, what makes it a philosophy, wh at enables and neces-

sitates, alongside the sciences, which always thematize beings, some-

thing like philosophy in general.

In any case, beyond consciousness and as its explicative principle,

psychoanalysis posits what is not conscious, the unconscious. Just

like the concept of consciousness, the concept of the unconscious is

equivocal, simultaneously ontic and ontological. In the ontic sense,

the unconscious consists of drives and their representatives, uncon-

scious representations with their adjuncts,