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Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics
In this volume, psychoanalysts, cultural theorists, and literary critics demonstrate the relevance of the unconscious economy to the field of cultural studies, applying psychoanalytic criticism to political and aesthetic issues related to the legal and ideological superstructure of contemporary society.These writers have adopted a variety of rhetorical positions when engaging cultural issues that deal with representation, ideology, class, and gender. Contributors include Willy Apollon, Richard Feldstein, Slavoj Zizek, Juliet Flower MacCannell, Judith Roof, Ellie Ragland, Elizabeth J. Bellamy, Bruce Fink, Maire Jaanus, Elizabeth Bronfen, Hanjo Berressem, Peter Widmer, Danielle Bergeron, Lucie Cantin, and Catherine Portuges.
341 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 1995
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July 6, 2018
Since I've been reading the secondary material about Lacan in roughly chronological order, I can say with some certainty that this book represents a dramatic shift in the discourse. In the book's first introduction - for some reason, there are two - Richard Feldstein, the book's co-editor (also two of those) notes how the 1980s brought to a close the "introductory" phase of thinking about Lacan in English-speaking circles. "[I]n the 1990s, we have entered a second phase in the transmission of Lacan's work," he claims. "Spearheaded by philosophical and literary activists like Slavoj Žižek and Juliet Flower MacCannell, this second wave of transmission applies Lacan's theories to cultural studies - to issues of race, gender, and class that help to delineate the boundaries of the new psychopolitical movements that are a part of the cultural ethos of our time" (p.xii).
The era of identity politics has arrived in Lacan studies, well and truly. That seems a strange thing to say, on reflection, because wasn't the primary force driving the interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis coming from feminism, both in France (Iragaray, Kristeva, Cixous) and the Anglophone world (Gallop, MacCannell, Grosz)? In spite of that, this collection of essays has an entirely different tone and style to such predecessors.
Just look at Judith Roof's essay on the paternal metaphor (a key Lacanian concept) and paternity law, which delves into all kinds of examples drawn from actual law and court cases that seem rather to strain the notion of paternity as merely a metaphor. Or Ellie Ragland's chapter on "The Discourse of the Master," undoubtedly the highlight of the collection, which seeks to explain the key difference that Lacan posits between truth and knowledge, a distinction that she elaborates in the context of the "four discourses" elaborated in Seminar XVII.
What has happened here? Why does the overall atmosphere of this book feel so substantially different to similar collections published only one or two years earlier? Certainly there is a new political dimension to this work, one that extends the work of the Lacanian feminists and deconstructionists that have gone before. The greater sophistication is also no doubt the increasing availability of Lacan's work in English, and hence a greater familiarity with the full range of his concepts. The focus is no longer on just the "structuralist" version of Lacan, but a new willingness to take on concepts of ethics, politics, and the concomitant notion of the real. There are also the efforts of people like Žižek and Joan Copjec to shift the discourse in a more revolutionary and sophisticated direction.
While all of these things are no doubt factors in what has made the tone of Lacan studies shift so dramatically, as reflected in this collection, I would argue that the biggest difference comes from the fact that Lacan's ideas have finally entered into the university discourse. The earlier commentators on Lacan, by this measure, can seem somewhat amateurish and outdated by the new standard that has been set, but there is a rawness and honesty to works like Jane Gallop's Reading Lacan or Elizabeth Grosz's Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction that is missing from this new generation of critics.
The collection's other co-editor, Willy Apollon, seems to me absurdly optimistic about the "revolutionary" potential of this new turn. "From my point of view, because I am an analyst and, secondarily, because I am Lacanian," he writes, "I think that the analyst acts as a heretic in the field of politics" (p.31). The tone of this collection suggests to me just the opposite: the increased sophistication of the discourse, the new power and pliability of Lacanian theory, its deployment as a tool of knowledge-generation, all this says to me that the hounds of Actaeon that Lacan imagined as being always on his tail have finally caught up to him, and he is finally being minced and devoured by the university discourse, just as he predicted.
The era of identity politics has arrived in Lacan studies, well and truly. That seems a strange thing to say, on reflection, because wasn't the primary force driving the interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis coming from feminism, both in France (Iragaray, Kristeva, Cixous) and the Anglophone world (Gallop, MacCannell, Grosz)? In spite of that, this collection of essays has an entirely different tone and style to such predecessors.
Just look at Judith Roof's essay on the paternal metaphor (a key Lacanian concept) and paternity law, which delves into all kinds of examples drawn from actual law and court cases that seem rather to strain the notion of paternity as merely a metaphor. Or Ellie Ragland's chapter on "The Discourse of the Master," undoubtedly the highlight of the collection, which seeks to explain the key difference that Lacan posits between truth and knowledge, a distinction that she elaborates in the context of the "four discourses" elaborated in Seminar XVII.
What has happened here? Why does the overall atmosphere of this book feel so substantially different to similar collections published only one or two years earlier? Certainly there is a new political dimension to this work, one that extends the work of the Lacanian feminists and deconstructionists that have gone before. The greater sophistication is also no doubt the increasing availability of Lacan's work in English, and hence a greater familiarity with the full range of his concepts. The focus is no longer on just the "structuralist" version of Lacan, but a new willingness to take on concepts of ethics, politics, and the concomitant notion of the real. There are also the efforts of people like Žižek and Joan Copjec to shift the discourse in a more revolutionary and sophisticated direction.
While all of these things are no doubt factors in what has made the tone of Lacan studies shift so dramatically, as reflected in this collection, I would argue that the biggest difference comes from the fact that Lacan's ideas have finally entered into the university discourse. The earlier commentators on Lacan, by this measure, can seem somewhat amateurish and outdated by the new standard that has been set, but there is a rawness and honesty to works like Jane Gallop's Reading Lacan or Elizabeth Grosz's Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction that is missing from this new generation of critics.
The collection's other co-editor, Willy Apollon, seems to me absurdly optimistic about the "revolutionary" potential of this new turn. "From my point of view, because I am an analyst and, secondarily, because I am Lacanian," he writes, "I think that the analyst acts as a heretic in the field of politics" (p.31). The tone of this collection suggests to me just the opposite: the increased sophistication of the discourse, the new power and pliability of Lacanian theory, its deployment as a tool of knowledge-generation, all this says to me that the hounds of Actaeon that Lacan imagined as being always on his tail have finally caught up to him, and he is finally being minced and devoured by the university discourse, just as he predicted.
January 10, 2020
some really great essays in here
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews