The aim of my essay is to examine the concept of science in Lacanian psychoanalysis and to search for possible critical subjectivity. The essay focuses on the way in which Jacques Lacan reformulates the modern science of subjectivity based on Descartes, and argues that Lacan"s conceptualization of science can provide a useful category for critical theory ― a subject beyond Newtonian science. For this, the essay accounts the relationship between the ethic and the scientific by analyzing Lacan"s “Kant with Sade.” This leads to scrutinizing what Lacan puts in terms of “the conjectural science of the subject,” a science that doubts the certainty of Cartesian subjectivity constructing modern physical science. My argument is that Lacan"s theorization of psychoanalysis as the science of the subject gives rise to the new possibility of critical subject against the grain. From this perspective, the essay claims that psychoanalysis paves a way toward the return of the subject in literary and cultural criticism by producing the logical foundation of critique, at the moment when theory ends and nothing comes out yet. The end of theory implies various meanings: on the one hand, it indicates the return of Marxism, on the other hand, it illustrates the moment calling for the restoration of humanism. The essay suggests that Lacanian concept of science implicates the third way between them; it is not the problem of choice, but rather a compulsory pursuit for truth. The essay also explores the similar aspect revealed in the conceptualization of science in Lacan and neo-Kantianism. The purpose is not so much to say that the Lacanian concept of science is directly influenced by neo-Kantian theorists as that there might be a similarity between Lacan and neo-Kantian understandings of science. Alongside this, the essay attempts to recount the way in which Alain Badiou uses Lacan for his philosophical project, a project that restores the condition of philosophical truth.
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