Lacan and Romanticism ed. by Daniela Garofalo and David Sigler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lacan and Romanticism ed. by Daniela Garofalo and David Sigler Chris Washington (bio) Daniela Garofalo and David Sigler, eds. Lacan and Romanticism. Albany: SUNY Press, 2019. Pp. vii + 183. 2 illustrations. $95.00 (hard) / $32.95 (paper). Let’s set aside, for the moment, the Lacan part of Lacan and Romanticism to make clear the larger intervention this collection undertakes, which is more expansive than the title fully conveys. As Daniela Garofalo and David Sigler write in their introduction, while a “study of Lacan and romanticism might seem a quixotic enterprise” (xi), its dissimulative quixoticism is part of the charm of its contribution to the larger re-envisioning of the field that is currently underway, enabled by the fact that “historicism has just begun to loosen its three-decades-long grasp on the field” (xi). More, though, the collection also joins hands with the return to close reading and to the aesthetic without investing in a theoretical absolute: “far from asserting timeless truths of the unconscious, current iterations of Lacanian literary criticism, including the contributors to this volume, critically examine and even vastly destabilize the political uses to which texts might, or might have historically, been put. They do so by attending to, rather than displacing, the aesthetic aspects of texts” (xiii). In this expansive sense of close aesthetic reading, “Lacanian literary theory and cultural scholarship . . . participates in a recent scholarly reaction against the assumptions of historicism, distant reading, and data collection” (xiv). Turning from Lacanian literary theory to Romanticism is, they contend, necessary because Romanticism, “in Britain and throughout Europe, was closely involved in the representation, analysis, and production of human desire . . . and thus in many ways inaugurated psychoanalytic discourses” (xii). But Romantic authors are not mere myrmidons or advance-guard ambassadors of psychoanalysis; instead, they “commit errors of psychoanalytic interpretation that challenge and distort psychoanalytic orthodoxies,” thus the collection works to expand Lacanian psychoanalysis by “bringing Romanticism to Lacan,” even while the authors generally eschew the Lacanian theory revival brought about by the international, and sometimes suffocating, even befuddling fame of Žižek. A major strength of the collection is, in fact, that the scholars gathered here draw on a good deal of new Lacan writing that has only recently appeared [End Page 464] as well as helpfully and illuminatively reveling in some work that remains unpublished (xiv). The guiding thread that traverses the essays is the Lacanian principle of lack with subtending concerns like the gaze, the sublime, and utopia animating and organizing the essays into loose groupings. Paul Vatalaro and Rithika Ramamurthy both explore the gaze in Romanticism but in wildly—and welcome—different fashions. Vatalaro goes to that paradigmatic Romantic text, Frankenstein, for its Lacanian keystone, “the unavoidable peril of being exposed prematurely to the paternal gaze and, therefore, to the uncanny awareness of loss and lack we cannot escape” (2). For Lacan, the mirror stage involves the moment of the child’s recognition that it can see and can be seen, a symbolic castration Lacan calls the gaze, which Vatalaro’s wonderful reading tracks across the novel as controlling the creature’s subjective social and linguistic deformation. Ramamurthy, meanwhile, in a wonderfully illuminating essay, focuses on Francisco Goya de Luciente’s series of paintings, Los Caprichos, to study how they reveal “the impossibility of the sexual relation” and the “gaze as such” as “that which is presented as travesty” (21). On Ramamurthy’s mesmerizing interpretation the gaze makes women, in the paintings, both visible and invisible—the gaze “betrays an anxiety about the feminine” wherein “sexuality itself proves to be the problematic disaster of the social world” (28, 33). Colin Carman and Daniela Garofalo also deal with lack, though not as disastrous, but as loss (although this can, of course, be a form of disaster), with Carman exploding the common notion that took hold after Derrida’s critique of Lacan in The Animal That Therefore I Am that Lacan has not much to tell us about animals, while Garofalo takes the uncommon but cool and revelatory step to extend Lacanian methods to Jane Austen. As Carman notes, animals lack the ability to experience jouissance, since, according to Lacan, “bestial enjoyment, is especially...