Being and Non-Being

Being and Non-Being, as it appears in jacques-lacan-seminar-1, designates the philosophical pair that structures the analytic terminus: the moment when the contingent, accidental, traumatic dimensions of a subject's history fall away, and being — essence — is constituted in its place. Lacan draws on Angelus Silesius's mystical poetry to stage this transition, aligning the end of analysis with a classical metaphysical distinction between essence (what a thing necessarily is) and contingence (what merely happened to it). The analytic work moves through the accretion of historical accidents — traumas, symptomatic formations, imaginary misrecognitions — until these contingent overlays are traversed, allowing being to emerge as what has been all along: not a hidden substrate, but what is retroactively constituted once the noise of contingency is stilled.

The pairing of Being and Non-Being thus marks an asymmetry: non-being is not simple nothingness but the mode of existence proper to contingent, traumatic historical material — things that are real in their effects yet inessential to the subject's being. Being, by contrast, is what the analytic process constitutes at its end, a moment that echoes the Hegelian formulation that essence is always already past (Wesen ist was gewesen ist). This is not a mystical recovery of some pre-given essence but a retroactive constitution: the subject, having worked through the contingent, arrives at the structure of what it is — a being articulated in and through language, yet no longer captured by the imaginary and traumatic residues that had obscured that structure.

This concept appears in jacques-lacan-seminar-1, placing it at the very beginning of Lacan's teaching. Here the clinical and the philosophical are intimately joined: Lacan is still working close to Hegel and to Freud's structural account of trauma, and the mystical poetry of Silesius provides an unexpected but telling touchstone. Being and Non-Being sits at the intersection of several canonical concepts from the corpus. It relates to Essence by instantiating precisely the temporal, retroactive structure that the Hegelian reading of essence insists upon: essence is not a prior ground but is constituted after the fact, once contingency has been worked through. The analytic end is the moment this constitution occurs. It relates to Trauma as the name for the contingent, historical, accidental material — the non-being — that analysis must traverse; trauma is what occupies the place of non-being, the real-in-the-subject that is not yet essence. The concept also implicates Language, since it is through language that being is both founded and initially robbed from the subject, and the analytic work in speech is what allows the retroactive constitution of being to take place. The gesture toward The Act is implicit: the analytic terminus, in later Lacan, becomes the analytic act proper, but here it is staged philosophically as the moment of ontological clarification. Imaginary registers are what the traversal of contingency clears away — the specular identifications and méconnaissance that pass for being but are forms of non-being in this schema.

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on TechniqueJacques Lacan · 1953 (p.235)

it is being which then comes to be constituted

The phrase "comes to be constituted" is theoretically decisive: it signals that being is not revealed or uncovered (as in a hermeneutics of depth) but produced retroactively — a Hegelian-Lacanian move in which essence is never simply there but is the result of a process. The verb "constituted" refuses any simple ontology of presence, insisting instead on the constructive, après-coup character of the analytic end.