Greimas Avec Lacan; or, from the Symbolic to the Real in Dialectical Criticism

Abstract

In this essay, I want to explore implications for a materialist dialectics of a reading of A. J. Greimas's semiotics, and in particular what Fredric Jameson has described as its supreme achievement, Greimas's otic rectangle1 (figure 1). My approach challenges what has become a commonplace assumption—advanced, for example, in both Paul de Man's classic essay The Resistance to Theory (1982) and Paul Ricoeur's three-volume opus Time and Narrative (1983—85)—that takes Greimas's work and tools he elaborates as quintessence of a structuralist drive to abstraction, marked by totalizing/totalitarian tendencies and an utter rejection of historicity (the diachronic) and indeterminacy. (In de Man's terms, this takes form of an absolute privileging of gram matical level of a text over rhetorical; and Ricoeur concludes, The whole strategy thus amounts to a vast attempt to do away with dia chrony.2) While such a reading may be accurate in certain deployments of these tools, a different set of possibilities emerges when semiotic rectangle is read in conjunction with work of Greimas's great con temporary, Jacques Lacan, and, in particular, the fundamental classifica tion system around which all his theorizing turns, three orders of Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real.3 Indeed, in this essay, I use rich semi otic resources of Greimasian rectangle to tell a number of deeply in terrelated stories: about history of novel; developments in last few decades in theory more generally and in work of Fredric Jameson in particular; and value of dialectical thinking for our present moment of globalization. This gesture of reading Greimas with Lacan takes its lead from Lacan's own work, by way of his essay Kant avec Sade. In a footnote to a recent discussion of this essay, Slavoj Zizek suggests that far from being restricted