Being a Stranger to Oneself

The Letter, Issue 66/67, Autumn 2017/Spring 2018, Pages 19 - 25

BEING A STRANGER TO ONESELF[1]

Guy Le Gaufey

Is there any kind of relationship between knowledge and fatherland? Between the fact of knowing something (a lot of things) and the fact of belonging to a land, a language, a culture? To answer such a question, I will rely on two strange statements, the first one coming from Heidegger in The Principle of Reason: ‘There is a mysterious play of correspondences between the appeal to provide reason and the withdrawal from native ground’. And the second one coming from Lacan, when he enigmatically uttered as a ‘formula’ of his, in the seminar On Anxiety: ‘As soon as it is known that something depends on knowledge (tient au savoir), there is something lost; and the surest way to approach this something lost is to conceive it as a fragment of the body.’

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