At the very outset, I should like to specify that this paper is part of a much larger undertaking whose aim is to understand as a whole the evolution of Lacan's thought in an effort to bring to light the underlying axiomatics. I deal here only with the beginnings (from 1930 to 1950) and within the limits of his relation to Freud and German culture with which he was imbued. What I have to say of the political ideas that seem to run through his work in the Thirties should not prejudge the later development of his thought anymore than my own political views. For that matter, it does not seem to me feasible to approach the extremely complex question of what might have given rise to and perpetuated the various fascisms, in particular national-socialism, without having been its victim or having felt in one manner or other its temptation, by which I mean, without having identified with it, even on the level of negation as is betokened in the very time spent in plunging in the strange European world of the Thirties. In fact, we will be dealing precisely with the structures of identification which seem to be at the very crux of social change in the Thirties.

To address the question in these terms does not imply the shelving of economic factors and determinisms, but is rather an attempt to shed light, from a different angle, perhaps in somewhat discordant tones and with presuppositions at odds with the primacy of economics, on what constitutes the social bond. I am not unaware that I thereby run the risk of bringing forth upon myself the anathema of Marxists faithful to Lukàcs, indeed of disquieting our friend Régine Robin who is at times apprehensive of my letting myself fall prey to the dark abyss which broke asunder in the Europe of the Thirties and which, although gives the impression of having closed shut, has by no means disappeared, in fact, quite to the contrary.

In order to facilitate the study of the nature of the social bond, Freud in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, made use of the Church and the army as restricted models of investigation. We will use the army as a connecting theme in our observations in that it emerges as the pivot of Jacques Lacan's reflections on social structure and, secondly, that it is equally very present in the work of a German writer whose socio-political thought during the Thirties seems to us rather close to that which can be adduced in the Lacan of the same period, indeed serves to illustrate and extend its scope - Ernst Jünger.

For Freud, the army is thus characterized by the mirage or illusion that a supreme leader is present "who loves all the individuals in the group with an equal love. Everything depends on this illusion; if it were to be dropped, then ... (the) army would dissolve, so far as the external force permitted (it) to." Whereas in the Church, this structure forms a unique pyramid with Christ at the apex, the object of universal love and wherein all men are brothers united in the same love for Christ, in the army, on the other hand, one is dealing with a multitude of pyramids of the same type. "Every captain is, as it were, the Commander-in-Chief and the father of his company, and so is every non-commissioned officer of his section." This libidinal structural is in Freud's view of greater consequence in assuring the cohesion of the army than what today would be called an ideological bond: the ideas of country, national glory or of cultural and racial superiority, etc. He adduces as proof the fact that these ideas could hardly play any rôle in the very heterogeneous and yet quite efficient armies of Cesar, Wallenstein or Napoleon.

To neglect this libidinal tie in the army "seems to be, observes Freud, not merely a theoretical omission but also a practical danger." It is for example due to the Prussian army's failure to understand this bond, that Freud explains its disintegration, in spite of all such a "splendid instrument," as well as the German defeat of 1918, and the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versilles imposed upon the Germans by a man he disliked: President Thomas Woodrow Wilson.

Within the army, each individual is bound by libidinal ties, on the one hand, to the leader, and on the other, to the rest of the members of the group all united in the same love for the leader. It is amusing to note in passing that this leader does not necessarily have to demonstrate strokes of genius in order to become a "great man"; he can turn out to be a perfect imbecile, but he must nonetheless be in a position such that the pattern of identification with the father's imago can be enacted upon him. Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past contains several admirable pages on this theme, when the narrator visits his friend Saint-Loup stationed at Doncières. Saint-Loup explains at length to the narrator why - in spite of the fact that the Prince of Borodino, commander of his regiment, is an imbecile and making matters worse issues from a social milieu quite different from his (the prince being a Napoleonic prince), he, Saint-Loup, nevertheless considers him a good leader capable of rousing and sustaining the admiration of his men.

This vertical identification acts as the spinal cord of the horizontal structures of identification that unite the soldiers among themselves. This is true to the extent that if vertical identification ceases to function due to the "resignation" of the leader, the army as a group is shattered into pieces. "The loss of the leader in some sense or other, the birth of misgivings about him, brings on the outbreak of panic," which in the group is analogous to that of neurotic anxiety in the individual, "though the danger remains the same."

It is indeed interesting to note that the nature of the libidinal tie in question, identification, is a regressive form of sexuality. Predating the possibility of relating to a sexual object and deriving pleasure from it, the subject is initially bound to a dialectic of being this object by identifying with it. We shall shortly see that Lacan takes up the matter somewhat differently. Both for the girl and boy, the father's imago is the first object of identification long before the Oedipal complex asserts itself.

Freud instituted this concept of the father image as the pivotal mark of identification based on his Darwinian myth of the primal horde. We won't refer to it again, only to underscore this point which remains fundamental throughout Freud's work, namely that the accomplishments of a group (as much on the level of the army as on the level of civilization in general) are a function of the degree of renunciation to sexual gratification and of the substitutive valuation implied in a pre-genital, indeed pre-cathectic libidinal tie: this tie corresponds precisely to identification or rather identifications.

In a hardly known article, "British Psychiatry and the War" (1947), Lacan suggests that as the leader's imago weakens in authority, certain forms of intermediary sexuality between identification and object-relation are increasingly reactivated. This would explain homosexuality in the army which should be considered more as a happenstance narcissistic choice than as, strictly speaking, a "perverse" structure.

In his text on the family (1938), Lacan re-interprets in a profound sense the Freudian concept of the Oedipus complex by dismissing the myth of the primal horde in favor of the anthropological discoveries made by Bachofen with respect to the existence of matriarchal social groups, and, on the other hand in taking note of the disintegration, the "social decline" of the father imago during the inter-war years. Ostensibly, the rôle of the father remains active in assuring within the Oedipal context, the function of both sexual repression and sublimation. We should furthermore note that it is qua father that he stands in opposition to the child's pleasurable hold (jouir de) on the mother and, convesely, that the father constitutes the primary object of identification. In addition, he offers the childl an ideal that he can strive for through sublimation. Although there still obtains for Lacan an ideal model of Oedipal structuring necessary to the civilizing aims of our culture, and although "the rôle of the father's imago is discernible in a striking manner in the formation of most great men," at least in past ages, he is nonethless impelled ot ascertain a large number of collective psychological effects that derive as it were from a decline of the father imago during the inter-war years. As Lacan states, this is "a decline conditioned by the reversion upon the individual of the extreme effects issuing from social progress, a decline that is underscored, especially in our time, in the collective entities the most hard-hit by these effects: economic merging, political catastrophes... a decline that creates a psychological crisis that one can posit at the very foundation of an overwhelming contemporary social neurosis. Our experience," Lacan specifies, "leads us to designate the principal determining factor in the personality of the father, always in default in one way or other, absent, humiliated, divided or deceptive... It is this defaulting (carence) that succeeds in tainting the dialectics of sublimations. As sinister godmothers present at the cradle of the neurotic victim, powerlessness and utopia constrain his ambition, such that he either stifles within himself the creative acts that are expected of him in the world to which he is delivered, or that in the object he tenders to his revolt, he misconstrues his own act." And from, this, Lacan perceives in the advent of German nazism one of the most terrifying forms of identification to an imago all the more pernicious in that it was more fraudulent and less viril, which is to say that it was reduced to a grotesque caricature of a father imago fated for extinction. It is possible to see in this desintegration of the father imago, one of the manifestations of the death drive, that is "the restoration of an earlier state of affairs."

Let us bear in mind briefly that if the father imago reveals itself finally to have lost its function of pyramidal grouping through the process of identification with a great man, the structuring and formative function of the subject assumed by the image of the other in the mirror, remains for Lacan the essential phase in the formation of the subject, wherein it passes from the symbiotic auto-eroticism of the infans stage to dual narcissism in which the child succeeds, through and within the other's image, in reching awareness of himself as subject, and in establishing identity with himself. Therefore, for lacan, vertical identification with the father is not the most fundamental instance of identification, but rather horizontal identification with the other: "mon semblable, mon frère."

With regard to this point, Lacan finds an experimental basis as it were in the early research of Bion that dealt with experiments carried on in 1943 during the Second World War with deserters of the British army. Bion observed that these soldiers more often deserted due to rather marked mental or physical differences:

Bion pursues his investigation on the basis of horizontal processes of identification by forming in the psychiatric ward in which these deserters ended, groups with the same mental and physical profile and by prescribing a very simple set of rules allowing for the structuring and reinforcement of this type of identification. He himself, both psychiatrist and commissioned officer, and thus perfectly situated to act as a leader, maintained his distance in order to prevent the onset of vertical identification, but nevertheless availed himself of his authority to remain silent, give an ear to the grievances of the soldiers and eventually send them back to their respective group. They were thus compelled to find, on their own, solutions to their problems by first identifying the major difficulty - namely the common disturbing factor that had brought them together in the first place in the hospital - before resolving the secondary problems of collective life, and finally manage to return to duty and continue the struggle, considerably less anguished.

For Lacan, the absorbing interest of Bion's work is not so much that it might have helped the British forces win the war in encouraging - in the absence of any "great man" or officers apt to exhibit such traits - a new type of identificatory cohesion. Rather Bion's research showed the possibility of organizing, within the framework of a social group united initially by a narcissistic identificatory tie, a common ideal image. A process of identification with this ideal image ensued in a second phase of development, such that an individual would be freed from his own narcissism, reintegrate in the larger collective group with which he can identify without the necessity to recreate an illusory "great man." If indeed a leader were to surface in the collective units of Bion, he would no longer act a respondent to the father image, a veritable carnaval image, but rather as leader of the group the most apt to identify compleely with the common ideal, delineated on the basis of recognizable needs and commonly held problems subject to resolution.

It is on this point in his observation of Bion's work that Lacan intimates the most clearly that a social imago can emerge from a collectivity by transcending it and in serving as an identificatory substratum, as a new organizing structure of a collective unit, and hence eventually of a society. It is, moreover, on this point that his views are akin to the theoretical precepts that Jünger was developing as of 1932 in his essay entitled Der Arbeiter translated this year for the first time into French by Julien Hervier with the title, Le Travailleur.

Time will not allow me speak of this rather complex book that in the opinion of Jünger himself has given rise to the most blatant misunderstandings and to the most virulent controversy. I will limit myself to discussing somewhat briefly several aspects of the principal thesis, which to some degree concurs with the early theoretical formulations of Lacan. I am thus embarking, one might as well admit it, on a re-mapping (détournement) of Jünger's text to the degree that I am retaining what Lacan did not go so far as to state, at least publicly, but in the direction towards which his theory of the image and its numerous allusions tend with regard to its relevance in exploring the social field. Did Lacan know Jünger, did he ever read Der Arbeiter? It is possible, but not certain, and for that matter without the least degree of importance if one is willing to grant with Lacan that in the world of intellectual thought "private property simply does not exist," and, moreover if one recognized what the history of idead repeatedly shows us: certain new theoretical ideas seem to take hold of certain thinkers who do not necessarily know one another and who more often than not are unaware of one another's work. From this vantage point, it would be one of the most striking "displays" (monstration) of the material reality of the Other as the locus from which it is not the subject who speaks but where it is spoken by the discourse of the Other. As Lacan never tired of repeating to all receptive ears, "the discourse of the subject is the discourse of the Other."

But beforehand, I would like to fire my own Parthian shot at a certain Parisian doxa that still thrives in unearthing in Jünger's work an air of complacency towards fascism and anti-semitism, by commenting on the formal composition of the text and on its readability.

It seems to me that if a reading of The Worker is undertaken by situating the work in the historical context of 1932 and the political involvement of Jünger before and during this period, from a Marxist perspective - as Luckàcs did - then, if only for reasons of political struggle, one would have little leeway in reading the book other than as fascist in the German sense of the term, at least tending towards fascism, even though Jünger quite explicitly kept aloof of national-socialism. Contrariwise, if the theme of the Worker is read in the context of its successive ample reformulations and its expanded conceptual scope (for example the recourse to the forest, the treatise on the rebel, etc.) in the historical context of Germany from 1932 to 1948, and keeping in view the moves in Jünger's political acts leading to the pamphlet on Peace (1944) whose goal was the destruction of the Nazi regime to be replaced by agovernment under Rommel, a document that would have finally allowed the SS to execute him if the war had lasted a few more weeks, then, in this case, The Worker must be read a s first attempt - awkward perhaps, laden with questionable imagery rendered all the more dubious by the use to which it was put by the national-socialists of the same period - indeed, the first attempt to deliberate on contemporary history in a manner radically different from anything undertaken until then. This implies a concept of history whose philosophical basis if it is not surely that of Hegel or Marx would perhaps, though this is not certain, find a kinship in that of Heidegger and Nietzsche, or indeed, and this is my hypothesis, it conceals in effect an originality that remains to be disclosed through a serious reading (structural Lacan would have said) of the entire oeuvre of Jünger.

Somewhat in the manner of Dante visiting Hell in the company of Virgil, Jünger similarly invites a traveling companion better suited than any offspring of the bourgeoisie and its intelligentsia to cast a critical look on the world that he has traversed through and through. This companion is Ahasverus the wondering jew who - because he is a Jew - can better discern what according to Jünger remains veiled by bourgeois culture in the throes of its decay. As a book published in the Germany of 1932, it was quite the thing to do! One can easily understand Goebbel's relentlessness in demanding the head of Jünger, although less easily understood is Hitler's stubborn refusal from complying saying at every instance the matter was brought forth and without having ever read a single line of the potential victim, "Jünger is a great writer."

Jünger wants to show Ahasverus that behind the mask of the bourgeois world in the process of splintering apart and beyong its patriarchal structure in full disintegration, a new principle of identification is emerging from the ruins: the Worker. This particular Worker is neither the prototype of the model working man as was the case in the first Soviet propoganda films, nor the hero who identifies with a certain national and collective ideal as the splendid Alexander Newski, it is rather a Gestalt. The word has been translated in French as "Figure," but one could have chosen the word "image" in the Lacanian sense of the term, or Imago. The Gestalt of the Worker (and it is in this defining characteristic that it appears to me structurally and functionally identical with the specular image in Lacan) is only "accessible to the gaze capable of understanding that the world can be comprehended as a whole according to a more decisive law than the law of cause and effect, although it does not discern the unity by which this comprehension is fulfilled." This Gestalt is traceable, better than anywhere else, in the army. For reasons we shall soon see, the Worker is not only the working man or the peasant, he is foremost the soldier, the warrior (even if he is something more than the preceding combined).

Without doubt, Lacan was bound to revert to the question of imprint and seal by positing the signifier as the mediating agent of the imprint of the image of which it becomes the seal, the cipher. This in turn will lead him to posit the Other (the locus of the signifiers) in the field where in previous years he inscribed the network of social tensions, and, to advance a new ethic founded on the silencing - through the intervention of the Symbolic - of a fundamental and incontrovertible evil linked to the primacy in man of the death drives which incessantly tug at us backwards, against the drift of life, towards the Thing (das Ding). And likewise, Jünger, in light of the events that followed the publication of his essay would be impelled to reexamine thoroughly his initial optimistic conception (and presumably tending towards fascism) of the Gestalt of the Worker, finally to recognize, and certainly once more owing to the appalling and emblematic fate of the Jews, its dark side and the danger that haunts it, as well, in the form of an Evil consubstantial to man. An Evil that he evoked in his Journal of 1945 on learning of the arrest and suicide of Himmler in chilling and premonitory words: