Psychoanalysis and Scenes of Night in Narratives on Culture

My first issue lies in the metaphor of night constantly appearing in the narratives on culture, as for example in Heidegger’s remarks on the Weltnacht. Scenes of night appear not only in apocalyptic discourses, but also in common discourses on culture. In first part of this paper, I will try to explain briefly the reason of the frequent appearance of nocturnal scene, in commenting on two simple poetic texts from a structuralist point of view. The second part is concerned with the position in which psychoanalysis can deal with the scene of night. If psychoanalysis is a “nocturnal” science that investigates the dark world of the unconscious, what would be its critical effect on the metaphysical thinking as a helio-centrism? I will bring up the deconstructive aspect of psychoanalysis in terms of “dramatology,” a word that makes visible the overlap of psychoanalysis and Derridian grammatology. The third problem lies in the possibility of psychoanalysis to intervene in the historical passage into the Weltnacht in the Heideggerian sense. How can Lacanian psychoanalysis translate this unprecedented historical scene, in which the difference between the Orient and the Occident seems to disappear? In the last part, I will attempt to give an answer to this question, in commenting on Žižek’s thesis concerning Hegel with Lacan and Lacan with Hegel.