The Foundry of Immanence
If as Lacan suggests the unconscious is structured like a language, then I’m surely illiterate. Ricouer sees the unconscious as a hermeneutic foundry, a place of concealment and revealing. There is a constant tension between the repressed and the revealing, the two representing a binary opposition, the one hiding from the other, the other prying and pushing and cajoling the hidden to reveal itself. What is revealed is never the hidden, but a reification or reconstitution or translation of a supposed hidden, a yet to be revealed. What exists in this foundry, this storehouse called the unconscious, is nothing but symptomology, aphasia, the inability to express the inexpressible, the yet to be expressed or revealed. To say, as Lacan does, that the unconscious is structured like a language is like saying that black is white and white is black depending on how I reveal or conceal it. Everything is black and everything is white, things yet to be revealed, yet to be concealed, hidden in the structure of an inexpressible language. If the unconscious is structured like a language, then it is a poetics of hidden and revealed, white and black, a symptom of revealing and concealing, a language without grammar, syntax or meaning, a hermeneutics of immanence.
