A posthumanist reading of loss in Zhuangzi and Jacques Lacan: the missing tally and the lack

This article argues for a posthumanist reading of loss in Zhuangzi and Jacques Lacan. Language separates human beings from the primordial oneness and channels them into the procrustean bed of cultural codes. Zhuangzi defines this severance as ‘loss.’ Likewise, Lacan rewrites ‘loss’ as ‘lack’ within the discourse of logocentrism. Language is both the cause of and the solution to the loss; however, these two thinkers have different understandings of the compensation mechanism of language. A Lacanian subject feels the imperative to use more signifiers to complement his lack and construct his anticipatory identity. Lacan confines the compensation for a lack within language. Zhuangzi goes beyond that confinement. Language and cultural codes are both fabricated discriminations imposed on things, so Zhuangzi instructs us to abandon these artificial demarcations, resume our capacity of ‘cross-species becoming’ with myriad things, and become architects of a posthumanist world of symbiotic coexistence with multiple species.