Lacan and Phenomenology (3): The Lacanian twist

Jacques-Alain Miller helps us appreciate the various phenomenological and existential ideas that Lacan is indebted to. These include Heidegger's critique of interiority and his notion of ex-sistence. Equally important is Sartre's conceptualization of consciousness as nothingness, which informed Lacan's idea of subject as lack (or "want-to-be", 'manque-a-etre'). Lacan's ideas of logic time show how he takes a third option as opposed to both the realism of objective time (the time of the clock) and the phenomenological orientation of subjective time, in so far as he foregrounds 'logical time'. We note J.A. Miller's argument that Lacan took up the 'anti-objectivism' of phenomenology, and utilized it, although with a crucial twist. Lacan, in other words, transferring the phenomenological view of consciousness to the subject and the unconscious.