Another Look at Lacan and Literary Criticism

Abstract

deterritorialized version of was recently published in this journal.2 This turn of events would appear to call for a realignment in the critical debate. It would be absurd to begin this latest account by attempting to review psychoanalytic criticism, but equally absurd to make a foray into without giving some indication of the kind of it has displaced, if only in order to show how the presuppositions of traditional psychoanalytic have been challenged and made to serve a different purpose. This is not how the editors of the latest anthology of Literature and Psychoanalysis see it: spins ideological fantasies as he reinterprets and co-authors the text. As in actual analysis, anything goes. An ideological version of what the patient does in analysis is applied to the study of literature.3 This is surely right insofar as we all spin ideological But the implication of the above assertion is that am a critic, you are a reader, he is a spinner of ideological fantasies. The question to which I am addressing myself is what has made so attractive, both in the sense of attracting adulation and of attracting abuse. Thus the designation Lacanian criticism may be made to stand both for in the mode of Lacan and of the mode of Lacan. It may turn out that the second type, where it is grounded in an informed dissension, will prove to be more productive than the first. My presentation divides itself into three unequal sections: first, I shall briefly allude to the theory and practice of pre-Lacanian criticism, going rapidly over by now familiar territory; second, I shall try to explain in some detail what is implied by Lacan's return to Freud insofar as it has affected literary criticism; third, I want to illustrate how this new has lately become the scene for an anti-Lacanian which is nevertheless grounded in Lacan's return to Freud, which serves as a text providing the material for its own dis