Recognition and identification: the subject between the Hegelian dialectic and the Lacanian mirror stage

Abstract

This article examines the approximation, recurrent in Portuguese-language psychoanalytic literature, between the dialectic of recognition set out by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the mirror stage formulated by Lacan. It is argued that the approximation is legitimate and historically grounded — the mediation of Kojève, whose seminar Lacan attended in the 1930s, is unavoidable — but that it becomes sterile when correspondence is converted into synonymy. Three terms concentrate the risk: subject, knowledge and desire. In Hegel they designate moments of a movement tending towards reconciliation; in Lacan they name a division without synthesis, a knowledge that does not know itself, and a structurally unsatisfiable lack. The path first reconstitutes the figure of lordship and bondage in its own terms, then the mirror stage as a theory of imaginary identification, and subsequently confronts the three concepts under their double acceptation. Recognition and identification are shown not to be homologous operations: the former is intersubjective and dialectical, the latter specular and productive of méconnaissance. It is concluded that the approximation yields an instrument for reading subjective division and transference, but does not authorise supposing, in the clinic, a term in which that division is resolved.