Imagine there's no woman: ethics and sublimation

Abstract

Jacques Lacan claimed that his theory of feminine sexuality, including infamous proposition, the Woman does not exist, constituted a revision of his earlier work on the ethics of psychoanalysis. In Imagine There's No Woman, Joan Copjec shows how Freud's ragtag, nearly incoherent notion of sublimation was refashioned by Lacan to become key term in his ethics. To trace link between feminine being and Lacan's ethics of sublimation, Copjec argues, one must take negative proposition about woman's existence not as just another nominalist denunciation of thought's illusions about existence of universals, but as recognition of power of thought, which posits and gives birth to difference of objects from themselves. While relativist position currently dominant insists on difference between my views and another's, Lacan insists on this difference within object I see. The popular position fuels disaffection with which we regard a world in a state of decomposition, whereas Lacanian alternative urges our investment in a world that awaits our invention.In book's first part, Copjec explores positive acts of invention/sublimation: Antigone's burial of her brother, silhouettes by young black artist Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, and Stella Dallas's final gesture toward her daughter in well-known melodrama. In second part, focus shifts to sublimation's adversary, cruelly uncreative superego, as Copjec analyzes Kant's concept of radical evil, envy's corruption of liberal demands for equality and justice, and difference between sublimation and perversion. Maintaining her focus on artistic texts, she weaves her arguments through discussions of Pasolini's Salo, film noir classic Laura, and Zapruder film of Kennedy assassination.