The Indeterminate Ontology of the Freudian Subject

By examining the post-psychoanalytic subject via the logic of the Freudian trace, this book reframes the antagonistic relationship between continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. The trace features in psychoanalysis as an enigmatic quality both of memory and of subjecthood itself: it describes the reproduction of an incomplete or non-existent origin, a recollection which formulates the very scene that is recollected, or the incomplete relation between presentation and representation. Precisely this disjunctive logic of the trace is a recurring yet fragmentary feature of Freudian and later French psychoanalytic thought and—as this book argues—can act as a bridge to our understanding of 20th-century philosophical appropriation of psychoanalysis. Additionally, the paradoxical function of the trace, which can be derived from psychoanalytic thought from Freud to Badiou, finds an important mirror in German Idealism (specifically Kant, Schelling, and Hegel) and, in doing so, reveals the importance of this philosophical school to understanding psychoanalysis. Through a comparative study of these authors, while developing an extensive description of the operation of the trace in relation to the unconscious, the subject, and its ontological ‘ground’, Rafael Holmberg reveals that a more rigorous formulation of the psychoanalytic subject is possible.