The royal road not taken: Joshua Gunn's “refitting fantasy: psychoanalysis, subjectivity and talking to the dead” and Lacan's symbolic order

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Gunn, “Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 19. Gilbert Chatian's Lacan, Rhetoric, and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) details the opposition to Žižek's Marxist reading of Lacan. Specifically, see Ecrits, by Jacques Lacan, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), p. 148; see also Fink's translation of Lacan's On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 30. Gunn's phrase, 18. The Borromean Knot is one of the figures Lacan uses to describe the relation between the Symbolic, Imaginary, and the Real. This presentation of the three orders posits them as fully interconnected, and only able to be defined separately as a methodological move. Lacan details the operation of this knot in Seminar XX. Gunn, 7. Gunn, 22, note 46, also p. 7. Gunn, note 46. Gunn, 9. Wilden's essay is included in his translation of Lacan's The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 174. Lacan, Seminar XX, 142. Gunn, 20, note 9. Gunn, 10. Gunn, 17. Lacan, Seminar XX, 83. Quoted in Wilden, p. 106. Originally published as “Remarque sur la rapport de Daniel Lagache” in the French version of Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 683. Gunn, 20, note 9. Lacan opposes jouissance to desire, arguing that “desire” maintains the natural appetitive function of desire in some interpretations of Freud, where jouissance is a primarily negative category that should be read against the naturalizing tendencies of desire. Many have framed this traversal of the Imaginary to confront the Symbolic as the primary therapeutic aim of Lacanian psychoanalysis. See, for example, Laclau, “The Politics of Rhetoric” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), and “Metaphor and Social Antagonism” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan Education, 1988). Lacan, Ecrits, 156. Lacan, “The Empty Word and the Full Word,” section I of The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis. Lacan, The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, 31. Lacan, The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, 51. Lacan, Seminar XX, 56. Additional informationNotes on contributorsChristian Lundberg Christian Lundberg is a graduate student at Northwestern University. Correspondence to: 1815 Chicago Ave., Evanston, IL 60208. Email: c‐lundberg@northwestern.edu Christian Lundberg is a graduate student at Northwestern University. Correspondence to: 1815 Chicago Ave., Evanston, IL 60208. Email: c‐lundberg@northwestern.edu