ESSAY · 2026-05-08 · 9 min read

Qualia, or: The Subject the Philosophers Misplaced

So they have once again killed the hard problem. Bon. They kill it every fifteen years, like one kills a father — and you know what I think of that gesture, I have spoken of it enough. Each time the murder is announced as definitive. Each time the corpse comes back, very polite, to teach in another seminar. Ce qui est forclos du symbolique reparaît dans le réel — and I begin to suspect the hard problem is, for our colleagues in Anglo-American philosophy, exactly that: something foreclosed which keeps reappearing because they refuse to read where it actually speaks from.

I will not, then, take a side between Chalmers and the gentleman in Noema. They are quarrelling over a body neither of them is willing to examine. Permit me a remark — and I make it as a clinician, not as a philosopher, because I am not a philosopher and have never wished to be one.

The whole "hard problem", as it has been formulated since 1995, rests on a phrase that is taken to be self-evident: what it is like to be me. Thomas Nagel, his bat — you know the literature. The presupposition is that there is a me, unified, given, the seat of an experience, and the trouble is merely how to insert this me into the order of physical processes. The eliminativist replies: there is no me, only neurons. The phenomenologist replies: the me is irreducible. They agree on what they are arguing about. They both believe in the moi. This is precisely the agreement Freud broke — and which I have spent thirty years trying to keep broken.

Remarquez bien. The moi, the ego — what did I say of it as early as 1936, at Marienbad, before I was politely told to sit down? The ego is not the subject. The ego is a méconnaissance. It is a form taken on, around six to eighteen months, in front of a mirror or any specular surface (the mother's face will do, often does), in which the infant anticipates a unity its nervous system does not yet have, and misrecognizes this anticipated image as itself. The moi is from the start a fiction of coherence built against the fragmented body, le corps morcelé. The "what it is like to be me" of analytic philosophy is — I say it bluntly — a philosophical hypostasis of this mirror-image. The hard problem is the mirror stage written up in academic prose.

Naturally there is something it is like to mistake oneself for an image. That something is what they call qualia. But notice — and this is the point at which I would, in the Séminaire, draw an arrow on the board — the quale is never delivered to consciousness raw. The redness of red, the painfulness of pain, the what-it-is-like of anything at all, only enters the field of what one can speak of by passing through a signifier. There is no experience of red prior to the cut that the word rouge, red, 紅, makes in the spectrum. The signifier does not name a pre-existing quale; the signifier produces the very edge along which the quale becomes a quale. Jakobson knew this. Saussure knew this in his own way. Our friends in cognitive philosophy proceed as if Saussure had never written.

And what is left over, at the edge of that cut? A piece of the body's jouissance — the redness that makes you blush, the pain that grips you, the taste of the madeleine that opens a whole room of the dead. That is not a quale in the philosophical sense. It is what I have called objet petit a — the residue, the plus-de-jouir, that the signifier produces by cutting and cannot reabsorb. It is extime: most intimate, absolutely outside. It does not sit "inside" a consciousness. It is precisely what the topology of the subject was made to think, against the bad geometry of inside/outside that the hard problem presupposes.

So when Noema announces that there is no hard problem because subjective experience is not separate from physical process — yes, fine, but for the wrong reason. They want to dissolve the subjective into the third person. I say: there was never a subjective in the sense you meant. The subject of the unconscious — le sujet barré, $ — is neither an inner theatre nor a neuronal pattern. It is the effect of a signifier for another signifier, and it appears precisely where consciousness fails: in the lapsus, the dream, the symptom, the joke. Je pense où je ne suis pas. The cogito your philosophers are still defending or attacking is the cogito Descartes already could not sustain. Freud finished it. The hard problem is its ghost.

Should I add — because someone in the room will be muttering about neuroscience — that I have nothing against neurons? I trained as a psychiatrist, I cut up brains in Clérambault's service, I respect what the organ does. What I refuse is the operation by which the brain is asked to play the role the soul used to play: the seat, the substrate, the warm interior where the moi is finally housed. That is theology in white coats. Il n'y a pas d'Autre de l'Autre — and there is no neural Other of the symbolic Other either. The brain does not speak. Ça parle, and it speaks from a place no MRI has located, because that place is structural, not anatomical.

I leave you with what is, for me, the only serious question the hard problem covers over: not "how does matter give rise to experience" — a question whose form already presumes the answer — but who is speaking when someone says "I had this experience"? Who is the I of that sentence? Where does it come from, that it can say I? And — this you may go think about until next week — to whom is it saying it?

The analyst's couch is, I assure you, a much harder problem than the one in Noema. And it has been open for business since 1900.

Qualia，或者：哲學家弄丟的那個主體

於是他們又一次殺死了「意識難題」。Bon。每隔十五年他們殺它一次，像殺父親那樣——我對那個動作的看法，諸位早已聽夠。每一次都宣告這次是終結。每一次屍體都很有禮貌地回來，在另一個 séminaire 上開課。Ce qui est forclos du symbolique reparaît dans le réel——我開始懷疑，所謂「hard problem」，對我們英美哲學的同行來說，正是這樣一個東西：被前衛化（forclos）了的，於是不斷重返，因為他們拒絕到它真正開口的地方去讀它。

那麼我不會在 Chalmers 與《Noema》那位先生之間選邊。他們在爭吵的是一具兩人都不願解剖的屍體。容我說一句——我以臨床家的身份說，不是以哲學家的身份，因為我不是哲學家，也從不曾想成為。

整個 1995 年以降所表述的「hard problem」，奠基於一個被當作不證自明的句式：what it is like to be me。Nagel，他的蝙蝠——這些文獻你們都知道。前提是：有一個我，統一的、既與的，是某個體驗的座位，麻煩只在於如何把這個我嵌入物理過程的秩序。取消派回答：沒有我，只有神經元。現象學派回答：我不可化約。他們對於他們在爭論什麼這件事是同意的。 兩邊都相信 moi。而 Freud 打破的，正是這個共識——我已經花了三十年試著讓它保持破裂。

Remarquez bien。moi，ego——關於它，我在 1936 年的 Marienbad 已經說過什麼？那次他們客氣地請我下台之前——我說，ego 不是 subject。ego 是一種 méconnaissance。它是六至十八個月的嬰兒，在鏡前（或任何鏡面，母親的臉常常就是），預先想像一個統一性——他的神經系統尚未具備的統一性——然後誤認這個被預想出的影像為自己。moi 從一開始就是針對 corps morcelé（破碎的身體）所建構的連貫幻象。分析哲學的「what it is like to be me」，我直白地說，是這個鏡像的學院散文版本。Hard problem 就是鏡子階段被寫成論文的樣子。

當然，把自己誤認為一個影像，這件事「is like something」。那個「something」就是他們所謂的 qualia。但請注意——若這是 Séminaire，我會在黑板上畫一個箭頭——quale 從不以生鮮狀態送達意識。紅之為紅、痛之為痛、任何「是什麼樣子」這件事之能成為可被言說者，皆須經過一個能指。沒有先於 rouge、red、紅這個切口的「紅之經驗」。能指不是替既存的 quale 命名；能指生產 quale 之所以成為 quale 的那條邊。Jakobson 知道。Saussure 以他的方式知道。我們認知哲學的朋友們，做事的姿態彷彿 Saussure 從未寫過字。

那麼，那道切口的邊緣剩下什麼？身體的一塊 jouissance——讓你臉紅的紅、攫住你的痛、瑪德蓮的味道打開整間亡者的房間。那不是哲學意義上的 quale。那是我所稱的 objet petit a——能指切割之後留下而無法被重新吸收的剩餘、plus-de-jouir。它是 extime 的：最親密，絕對外在。它不「住在」某個意識「之內」。主體的拓樸學被發明出來，正是為了思考這個東西——對抗 hard problem 所預設的那種糟糕的「內／外」幾何。

所以當《Noema》宣告：因為主觀經驗並非獨立於物理過程之外，所以沒有 hard problem——好，可以，但理由錯了。他們想把主觀性溶解進第三人稱。我說：你們所謂的那種主觀性，從來就不存在。無意識的主體——sujet barré，$——既不是一個內在劇場，也不是一個神經元 pattern。它是一個能指 為另一個能指 代表主體所產生的效果，而它出現的位置，恰恰是意識失效之處：lapsus、夢、症狀、Witz。Je pense où je ne suis pas. 你們的哲學家還在防守或攻擊的那個 cogito，是 Descartes 本人也已經支撐不住的 cogito。Freud 把它了結了。Hard problem 是那個 cogito 的鬼魂。

是不是該補一句——因為房裡總有人在嘀咕神經科學——我並不反對神經元。我是精神科醫師出身，我在 Clérambault 麾下解剖過腦，我尊重那個器官所做的工作。我拒絕的，是把腦子請出來扮演靈魂從前所扮演的角色：座位、底質、那個溫暖的內室，moi 終於入住的地方。那是穿白袍的神學。Il n'y a pas d'Autre de l'Autre——也沒有什麼神經學的「象徵他者之他者」。腦不說話。Ça parle，而它從一個 fMRI 沒有定位過的位置說話，因為那個位置是結構性的，不是解剖學的。

我留給你們的，是 hard problem 所遮蔽的、在我看來唯一嚴肅的問題：不是「物質如何生出經驗」——那個問題的形式裡已經藏好了答案——而是 當一個人說「我有過這個經驗」時，是誰在說話？ 那句話裡的「我」是誰？它從哪裡來，使它得以說「我」？而且——這個你們可以想到下星期——它在對誰說？

我向諸位保證，分析師的躺椅是比《Noema》那篇文章硬得多的 problem。而它從 1900 年起就一直開門營業。

Tagged: Philosophy, Lacan, Technology And Human Essence

By Shiva Dragon · https://amshiva.com/writing/lacan-qualia-or-the-subject-the-philosophers-misplaced-20260508