Give Lacan A Cookie

I've been reading Lacan as a part of a survey course, and I was quite amused to run into this critique of "evolutionism". I've thought something like this before, but it's interesting to hear it coming out of the mouth of a radically skeptical psychoanalyst:

"It is paradoxically only from a creationist point of view that one can envisage the elimination of the always recurring notion of creative intention as supported by a person. In evolutionist thought, although God goes unnamed throughout, he is literally omnipresent. An evolution that insists on deducing from continuous process the ascending movement which reaches the summit of consciousness and thought necessarily implies that that consciousness and that thought were there from the beginning. It is only from the point of view of an absolute beginning, which marks the origin of the signifying chain as a distinct order and which isolates in their own specific dimension the memorable and the remembered, that we do not find Being [l'etre] always implied in being [l'etant], the implication that is at the core of evolutionist thought." - Jaques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

In other words, evolution implies a movement from "worse" to "better" - a system of valuation with a definite, preexisting goal. Such an austere philosopher as Lacan can hardly bear this kind of mushy, rhetorical nonsense. Far from letting his philosophical brethren have their cake and eat it too, he is only too eager to remind them that the choice must remain clear - either there is Meaning or there isn't. Either something came from nothing at some point (and of course he thinks it did, even if the only thing that came into being was the false perception of order due to an arbitrary and ultimately illusory function of our psyche), or there has never been anything at all. "Nothing exists" cries Lacan. "It's all a sham - a chain of chaotic representations that make 'objects' out of random fields of energy."

We can only thank him for making the stakes clear, and remember our dear friend Puddleglum, whose words, as timely now as they were when Lewis wrote them, always seem to make the choice clear:

"Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand for the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper... we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's a small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say." - C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

Selah...