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There is no neutral reading of Freud – by “neutral” I mean approaching Freud directly by way of ignoring later interpretations. We have a Lacanian Freud, a Winnicott-Kleinian Freud, the American ego-psychological Freud, and (what comes closest to hegemonic position) the Anna-Freudian reading which predominated in the International Psychoanalytic Association. My position is, of course, Lacanian, as the title of this text indicates: as is usually the case with “returns to” the original figure, Lacan’s “return to Freud” approaches Freud’s texts from a tradition totally foreign to Freud himself (Hegelian dialectics, structural linguistics, and anthropology), in the same way as Martin Luther’s return to original Christianity depicts an image of Christ which is totally foreign to original Christian texts.

This is in no way meant as a critical remark: since a founding figure by definition is not aware of the true dimension of its discovery, a return to this figure is possible only from an external position. To take a different example, the same holds for Marx: to properly understand his notion of commodity fetishism, one has to read him through Freud – as Adrian Johnston pointed out, Marx did not discover only symptom but also drive in the Freudian sense of these two terms.1 And the same holds also for Hegel – “everything you wanted to know about Hegel but were afraid to ask Lacan.” Only if we read Hegel through Lacan do we get the key point that Hegel’s Absolute Knowing is his name for absolute openness of history to contingency.

The general formula we are dealing with here is: everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask – with the implication: because you already knew it but did not really want to know it, so that you preferred to act as if you are still in search of it. In contrast to positive sciences where we are always in search of the final result and cannot ever be sure that we’ve reached it, a properly dialectical approach turns the relationship between searching and finding around: we pretend to search for something because we do not want to admit that we’ve already found it.

Since I am a Lacanian, I will begin with a different (tautological) version of this formula that holds for Lacan himself: everything you wanted to know about Lacan but were afraid to ask Lacan. When all too many of us talk about Lacan, we rely on some well-known interpreter of Lacan and refer to Lacan only to reconfirm our claims. Such a situation is quite normal when we are dealing with a really big name difficult to read like Lacan himself or Hegel or…, but from time to time, at least, we should take a close look at Lacan himself, at what he says or writes, literally.

However, we will focus on reading Freud through Lacan since the Lacanian reading of Freud’s texts has an almost magic effect of bringing out distinctions which, once we become aware of them, seem self-evident: “How was it possible that I didn’t already see it myself?” At the same time, we will also be attentive to the other side of such an approach: is there an important dimension of Freud which gets lost in Lacan’s reading, or does Lacan just ignore in Freud what deserves to be ignored, like his occasional naturalist naiveties?

Let’s take the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and politics. Étienne Balibar is fully justified in pointing out that, in his description of the formation of a crowd and the genesis of the superego, Freud doesn’t provide a “psychoanalysis of politics” (an explanation of the political dynamic of crowds through libidinal processes which are in themselves apolitical) but rather its opposite, the politics of psychoanalysis (the explanation of the rise of the triadic structure of Ego-Id-Superego through the familial “political” power struggles) – or, as Lacan put it, the Freudian Unconscious is political.

The Unconscious as political means that the Unconscious is not some kind of primordial domain of instinctual archetypes (as in Jungian theory) but a proto-political space of contingent struggles grounded in a primordial abyss. We have two main terms for this abyss: what Hegel calls absolute (self-relating) negativity and what Freud called death drive. So where do we stand today with negativity? The least one can say today about negativity in all its aspects is that it has seen better days – it definitely has shot its bolt, its philosophical potentials seem to be exhausted. In philosophy of the last two centuries it was mostly valued as positive (negativity as a permanent feature of subjectivity in all its guises, from Hegel through Marx to Freud), while positivity relates to the existing order that should be undermined, transcended, etc. Already in a letter to Ruge from 1843 Marx demanded “die rücksichtslose Kritik alles Bestehenden“ (“the reckless critique of all that exists”) not only in theory but also in social practice. Along the same lines, Engels wrote in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy: “all that exists deserves to perish” – an implicit reference to what Mephistopheles said in Goethe’s Faust, part 1:

“I am the spirit that negates.
And rightly so, for all that comes to be
Deserves to perish wretchedly;
‘Twere better nothing would begin.
Thus everything that that your terms, sin,
Destruction, evil represent—
That is my proper element.”

But when Mephisto was asked by Faust, “Well now, who are you then?” (“Nun gut, wer bist du denn?”), he gave the well-known answer, “Part of that force that always wills the evil and always produces the good” (“Ein Teil von jener Kraft, die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft”). There is an obvious link here to Mandeville and Smith, to the invisible hand of the market which makes the egotism of individuals work for the common good. However, from today’s (but also already Hegel’s) experience, the opposite also holds: “that force that always wills the good and always produces the evil” – Rousseau definitely wanted the good but his disciples produced political terror, Communists wanted solidarity but produced paranoiac suspicion… There is a further ambiguity in Faust: the very last lines pronounced by Chorus Mysticus are:

“Alles Vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis; / Das Unzulängliche, / Hier wird’s Ereignis; / Das Unbeschreibliche, / Hier ist’s getan; / Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan.” / “Everything transient / Is but a simile; / The insufficient / Here finds fulfilment; / The indescribable / Here becomes deed; / The eternal-feminine / Draws us on high.”

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Dissidents who escape from the eastern authoritarian regimes (Russia, China, Iran…) to the “civilized” Western liberal-democratic countries and engage in criticizing their countries of origin for their lack of freedom and democracy are then celebrated in the West as heroic figures (with some important limitations – Jewish refugees from Israel are mostly ignored or treated as traitors). Only a few of them are ready to make the next step: to discern other, more subtle but no less brutal and effective, forms of oppression in the free-and-democratic West itself. This second step is crucial: if we abstain from it, we remain caught in an ethically catastrophic choice. We either resign ourselves to the conclusion that, in spite of its limitations, Western liberal democracy is nonetheless the lesser evil of the two bad choices, or we come to the no less sad conclusion that, from the standpoint of social life, China or even Russia are nonetheless better than the decadent individualist and corrupted liberal West. Everything thus hinges on our readiness to refuse this debilitating choice.

There is a long history of figures who risked their easy fame and made the second step. The fate of Victor Kravchenko, the Soviet diplomat who, in 1944, while in New York, defected and then wrote his famous bestselling memoir I Chose Freedom, is worth mentioning here.1 His book is the first substantial first-person report on the horrors of Stalinism, beginning with the detailed account of the forced collectivization and mass hunger in Ukraine, where Kravchenko himself, in the early 1930s still a true believer in the system, participated in enforcing collectivization. The publicly-known story about him ends in 1949, when he triumphantly won the big trial against his Soviet accusers in Paris who brought to the court even his ex-wife to testify to his corruption, alcoholism, and family violence. What is much lesser known is that, immediately after this victory, when Kravchenko was hailed all around the world as a Cold War hero, he got deeply worried about the McCarthy anti-Communist witch hunt in the US, and issued warnings that such a way to fight Stalinism courts the danger of starting to resemble its opponent. He also became more and more aware of the injustices of the Western world, and developed almost an obsession to critically change also the Western democratic societies. So, after writing a much less known sequel to his I Chose Freedom, significantly entitled I Chose Justice, he engaged in a crusade to find a new, less exploitative, mode of the organization of production. This led him to Bolivia, where he put (and lost) his money into organizing poor farmers into new collectives. Crushed by the failure of his endeavours, he withdrew into private life and shot himself at his home in New York; his suicide was due to his despair, not to some dark KGB blackmail – a proof that Kravchenko’s denunciation of the Soviet Union was a genuine act of protest against injustice.

Today new Kravchenkos are emerging everywhere – is a new incarnation of Kravchenko not the famous Chinese dissident activist and artist Ai Weiwei who, in an interview for Fox News, said that “today in the West we are doing exactly the same things and sometimes even more ridiculous than [what the Chinese were doing in] the Cultural Revolution.”2 Weiwei thus placed himself into a long line of authentic dissidents to whose ranks one has to include thousands of Jews critical of today’s Israeli politics. The price he paid came immediately.

Born in Beijing in 1957, Weiwei grew up in labour camps in northwest China after the exile of his father, the poet Ai Qing. Though a longtime communist, Ai Qing became a target first of the official Anti-Rightist Campaign, in 1957, and then of the Cultural Revolution. As a result of this, Weiwei has long been an outspoken critic of the Chinese authorities and an advocate for human rights.3 After being excluded from the public space and imprisoned for 3 months, he emigrated to the West where he was instantly celebrated. In June 2011, he was appointed an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, a move that highlighted his status as a key cultural figure amid his detention by Chinese authorities. In 2015, the Academy hosted his first major UK retrospective, featuring works on human rights and censorship.

And then… Weiwei faced a vote of no confidence by the Academicians after posting a controversial tweet about the war in Palestine; Lisson Gallery in London, which represents the artist, subsequently postponed a show of the artist’s works. The tweet began: “The sense of guilt around the persecution of the Jewish people has been, at times, transferred to offset the Arab world.” A vote was held at the RA to determine whether his membership should be revoked because of accusations that the post was antisemitic. The RA subsequently voted to retain his membership. But an article he wrote for the RA Magazine was withdrawn.

A spokesperson for the Royal Academy said that in 2023 Weiwei “posted a message on social media—subsequently deleted—which caused offence.” We have to ask here immediately the Leninist question (modelled upon Lenin’s famous line “Freedom – for whom? To do what?”): what Weiwei wrote caused offence – to whom? In what way? Didn’t he say something that millions (even a majority in all Western countries) think, something that offends only hardline Zionists? In its reaction to Weiwei’s tweet, the Royal Academy stated that it “supports freedom of expression, which is of fundamental importance to artists and the RA. Plurality of voices, tolerance and free thinking are at the core of what we stand for and seek to protect.” Yes, but the RA’s reaction to Weiwei’s tweet made it clear what kind of “freedom of expression” they have in mind: a freedom that offends… not no one, but those who are prohibited to be offended. And who decides on this prohibition? In an interview with The Art Newspaper, Weiwei said:

“I did what I should. And that sacrifice is very little compared to all of the lives lost and compared to those children who cannot talk about the future. They don’t even exist. What I did is nothing. I feel I’m a little bit ahead of time. Everybody would say whatever I said was very conservative. It’s not controversial at all.”

This is a properly ethical stance: not to boast that one did a big controversial daring act, but to insist that “whatever I said was very conservative. It’s not controversial at all.” The true problem is societies which censor such acts. In his new publication On Censorship4, Weiwei discusses issues around censorship, saying: “Every society – whether authoritarian or part of the so-called free West – employs different forms of indoctrination to guide behaviour, shaping people’s cognition, capacity for action and modes of thinking.” His main argument is that censorship is neither a uniquely Chinese phenomenon, nor something confined to “countries defined as autocratic and authoritarian”. In the West – “the so-called free world”, with its “ostensibly democratic societies” – free speech is a chimera, regulated through “more covert, more deceptive and more corrosive” means. Flexing his rhetoric, he describes censorship “as both an indispensable tool of mental enslavement and a fundamental source of political corruption”.5 This is how one can accomplish an authentic ethical act in our “confused” situation.

Let me finish by addressing a question directed at me as a Hegelian: what has all this to do with Hegel? Nothing… and everything: is the two-step criticism we celebrated not a clear-cut example of what Hegel called “negation of negation”?

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