Lacan Says Research Articles

Spectral Dickens: The Uncanny Forms of Novelistic Characterization by Alexander Bove

Reviewed by: Spectral Dickens: The Uncanny Forms of Novelistic Characterization by Alexander Bove Gillian Piggott (bio) Alexander Bove. Spectral Dickens: The Uncanny Forms of Novelistic Characterization. Manchester UP, 2021. Pp. iv + 242. $120.00. ISBN 978-1-5261-4793-6 (hb). This is an exciting read for those of us long troubled by the old adage that Dickens is a "failed realist" who does not create convincing characters. For George Eliot, Dickens failed to create interiority, while many a student has complained that Dickens's characters are sketchy distortions or caricatures, stagey, melodramatic, externally observed, unnatural. For the author of Spectral Dickens, this apparent failure in Dickens's characterization is more to do with limited critical horizons than with Dickens: the problem lies in the framing of the critical debate as to what character is. Dickens meanwhile escapes all coordinates; his haunting characters "inspire imaginative and nuanced critical responses and yet elude systemization" (2). Bove argues that there are two leading critical camps on "character": structuralist/poststructuralist theories which view characters as representations, an effect of a signifying system, and mimetic theories that see characters as "reflections of 'real-world' persons or selves" (2). Both of these critical camps miss the central problem of subjectivity and ontology. Harnessing a number of critical theories that debunk the idea of "the stable, whole Subject"–the Freudian "Uncanny," Derridean "specters" and "hauntology," and most importantly, the Lacanian "Real"–Bove argues that character stages our own existential/ontological lack. Indeed, character enacts a distinct kind of encounter with otherness/instability which expresses "the stumbling block" of being (Zupančič 43; qtd. in Bove 10)–the Subject's inability to be fully self-present to itself and to the world, our inability to access "the Real." To explain, and alas to simplify hugely: mimesis involves the idea that a character is a simulacrum of a "real" person, while a "real" person itself involves the concept of a self–present conscious "subjectivity." Yet this subject's self-present fullness is itself fatally problematic–it is plagued by the problem of the relations between the subject, language and "the Real." Lacan says our access to the "the Real" is obstructed by a dilemma: "reality itself is always already constituted for the subject by language, and the [End Page 532] Real is ultimately precisely the … element of nonrelation between reality and itself."1 As a result, according to Lacan, there is something originally wounded in the human relation to the world, in our entering into the social world of the Symbolic. Character for Bove, then, "can be said to stage not an encounter with a simulacrum of a 'real person,' but an encounter with the Real" (23). And he continues: "Character is specter … not limited to subjectivity or interiority, in a mimetic sense, nor to clusters of words. It is frequently ... made of various forces, some subjectivizing, some de-subjectivizing." Bove's view is that character enacts "an-other mode of the non-relation, the uncanny" (24). It's a wonderful idea–one could go as far as suggesting the reason characters are so important to us in life and often live with us beyond their literary or filmic context is because they enact the central problematic of our existence–they repeatedly return to and, as it were, pull at the scab of "the cut of the Real" (61). Staging our vulnerability, and foregrounding the incompleteness and instability of our subjectivity, characters continually gesture to a point in a meaningful universe where meaning breaks down, where there is a gap. "We … sometimes perceive character as uncanny forms–not as safely confined to the order of representation, but as haunting us with our own lack of presence from within that safely defined 'order of the real'" (11). Characters are "uncanny" because something familiar (a character) converts into its other, as its lack of presence in representation resembles our own. Bove uses the notion of "hauntology" interchangeably with "ontology," as if he sees "ontology" as framed by the process of the repetitive return of the repressed lack of self-presence, of wholeness, and the attempt to bury it again. It follows that "identification," a central tenet of mimetic theories, is...

Introduction: Ontology and Blackness, a Dossier

Introduction: Ontology and Blackness, a Dossier

방탄소년단 앨범 시리즈에 표현된 순수 욕망을 찾는 과정 - 「LOVE YOURSELF」 시리즈를 중심으로 -

This paper is studied for the purpose of exploring how to interpret popular music from a new perspective. For this purpose, this paper analyzes the lyrics and video expressions in BTS’s「LOVE YOURSELF」series based on the theory of pure desire in Lacan’s psychoanalysis. Pure desire refers to the inherent desire embodied in the form of life that exists to deviate from being equal to others, which is what Lacan says in the ethics of desire. The ethics of desire is a theory that informs the imperfections inherent in the universality or rationality based on our lives. The research method is to conduct a qualitative study to analyze the music video of 「LOVE YOURSELF」 based on the theory of pure desire shown in Lacan’s 『Seminar 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis』. Through the meaning inherent in the song lyrics of 「LOVE YOURSELF」, this paper figures out the correlation between the album trilogy and Lacan’s Imaginary Stage, Symbolic Order, and Real Order and analyzes the meaning of pure desire. The necessity of this study is to show that a certain area of popular music aims for pure desire, and suggest that popular music researchers pay more attention to pure desire.

O que passou?

Este texto é o resultado da escrita de uma passagem, feita de tantos passos que foram dados até a decisão do olhar/saber, do fim de uma análise e outros mais até o dizer/saber do passe, exame do que faz um analisante decidir colocar-se como analista, este que, como profere Lacan, “só se autoriza de si mesmo” no seu tempo. Ele foi escrito, num primeiro momento, para ser falado, de forma que é um texto que não perde essa característica de um relato da passagem, causada pela surpresa da nomeação e da experiência do fim de análise e do que isso pode representar. Portanto, fim de um lado e abertura de outro, iniciada por essa primeira fala, agora publicada, depois de um caminho já avançado de outras falas.

The Subject-Object Of Commodity Fetishism, Biopolitics, Immortality, Sacrifice, and Bioracism

The Subject-Object Of Commodity Fetishism, Biopolitics, Immortality, Sacrifice, and Bioracism A. Kiarina Kordela (bio) PREFACE As the editors of the present volume state in their introduction, the "what" in their title aims at preventing the latent anthropomorphism entailed in the question "Who comes after the subject?" Both questions share the assumption that the advent of postmodernism amounts to the death of the subject as had been gradually conceived since early modernity up until and including modernism. Yet the editors' shift from "who" to "what" is instrumental in reflecting the fact that, whatever it is that recent theories may propose as the postmodern successor of the subject, they unanimously conceive it as transcending human-centered models and their entailed dichotomies, such as subject-object, individual-collective, human-animal, or human-machine. This is why that which "comes after the subject" is often also referred to as the posthuman. Here I am embarking on a double project. On the one hand, I shall argue that the subject of all secular capitalist modernity, since roughly the seventeenth century, has essentially always already come after itself—that is, it has always been posthuman—even as it is first the postmodern discourse that becomes acutely aware of the posthuman character of subjectivity and advances it as what is increasingly becoming a point of no contention, at least among certain theoretical circles. As I shall show, the fact that the subject of secular capitalist modernity has always been the posthuman subject-object is due to the two central, and concomitant, processes that define modernity: the development of the capitalist mode of production and the secularization of thought. As for the belated self-consciousness of the [End Page 37] posthuman character of humanity in the postmodern era of advanced global capitalism, this owes to the general tardiness of consciousness, which can grasp the structures and logic of its own conditions—in this case, capitalism and secularization—only once the latter's potential approximates, if it has not reached, its fullest actualization. On the other hand, I shall turn to another postmodern concept, biopolitics, to redefine it according to the posthuman character of subjectivity. Both lines of thought will eventually lead us to examine the biopolitical reappropriation of certain Judeo-Christian, which is also to say strictly speaking premodern, concepts, specifically: eternity, immortality, Jubilee, and sacrifice. I shall conclude by briefly hinting to the consequences of this reappropriation of religious categories for understanding contemporary racism.1 THE SUBJECT-OBJECT OF COMMODITY FETISHISM If today we speak of the posthuman condition or the subject qua subject-object, and if bodies of knowledge and science become possible that enable the existence of humans as living organisms with intraspecies biological and machinic components, it is because in the capitalist mode of production humans become inseparable from the means and the products of production,2 which by now range from plants and animals to machines and biogenetically produced life, to information, language, and affects. When Jacques Lacan says that "man thinks with his object," we must take him literally—man thinks with his product (1981, 62). Karl Marx spells out more clearly Lacan's point in his notorious theory of commodity fetishism. The radically new and, as Marx calls it, "mysterious" "character of the product of labour—as soon as it assumes the form of a commodity"—lies in "the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things" (1990, 164–65). While struggling to grasp this mysterious phenomenon in Capital, Volume 1, Marx can barely believe his own words when he writes that "the fetishism of the commodity" designates the fact that a "definite social relation between men themselves … assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things," or that "to the producers … the [End Page 38] social relations between their private labours appear … as material [dinglich—thingly] relations between persons and social relations between things" (165–66). As Étienne Balibar comments in his La Philosophie de Marx (1993), this fetishistic inversion is paradoxically possible not because of the thingliness or materiality of the commodities, but...

O juízo íntimo do analista

Several studies have been presented concerning the “pay in words” inherent to the interpretation of the analyst, many others about the “pay with his person” in his transfer manoeuvre. We propose in this work to question the “pay with his intimate judgment” required to the analyst, in the level where ethics of psychoanalysis and its policy towards the act of the speaking being are decided. In that level, “his action on the patient escapes him along with the idea he conceived about him”, writes Lacan. We develop two lines of questions. The first is what is meant by “to pay with the intimate judgment” in Lacan teaching? How the analyst can get his ethical knowledge – in terms of Kant and Brentano –, its praxis and its consequences? How will carve the notion of subjective destitution, introduced by Lacan at the same time that his notion of analytic act, years after “The direction of the cure”? The second line of questions focuses the testing by the analysant of the analyst’s difficulties to make that payment. In what diverse ways such difficulties affect the analytical process for different clinical types of symptoms? In concise paragraphs Lacan says that psychoanalyst is always at the mercy of the analysant, which can’t save him from nothing if he stumbles as a psychoanalyst, and if he does not stumble, even less (Discours prononce le 5 decembre 1967 a l’EFP).

Surviving Christianity

In his essay ‘The Deconstruction of Christianity’, Jean-Luc Nancy identifies Christianity with the heart of the West, thus following René Girard's claim that Christianity is the religion that exposes the workings of scapegoating and mimetic violence that drive most religions and cultures. However, in On Touching, Derrida distances himself from Nancy's project, and I argue that this is precisely because he is aware that a straightforward embrace of the deconstruction of Christianity is a ruse, as it will end up in a Christian victory that ultimately overcomes deconstruction. The problem, however, is that a simple opposition to Christianity is also insufficient because it gets caught in a similar trap where Christianity ultimately wins (religion will always triumph, as Lacan says). The workings of this ‘trap’ will be explored through a reading of Derrida's essay ‘What is a Relevant Translation?’ and particularly his discussion of Shylock's situation in Merchant of Venice, where Derrida recognizes the ruse of Christianity in its ability to trump Shylock's literal translation of the law, but still he ‘insist[s] on the Christian dimension’. Why? To answer this question this paper turns to another: how do we survive Christianity?

Black Boy's Comedy: Indestructibility and Anonymity in Autobiographical Self-Making

In his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, the French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan says that comedy, like tragedy, is a relationship between action and desire. While tragedy functions in the direction of a triumph of (Ethics 313) and while its action is toward death, an end game of sorts, comedy, Lacan says, has to do less with a triumph of life over death and more with what he calls the flight of life. In comedy life flies, slips away, runs off, escapes all those barriers that oppose it, including precisely those that are the most essential, those that are constituted by the agency of the (Ethics 314). So, while in a tragedy the hero submits to desire and to the signifier, dying in the process, in a comedy the action continues despite the encounter with the signifier and despite the disruption this encounter creates. In a comedy, this is to say, the hero is not a character defined by her mortality (as the tragic hero is), but an agent of the endurance of life (a kind of manyin-one), where life is understood as a process of generation, a line of derivation from one individual to another and so on, following life's seemingly inexhaustible chain of transformations. What interests me most in Lacan's understanding of comedy is the indestructibility of the comic hero, his ability to escape all obstacles and to be renewed over and over again, since this figure resembles closely the self-restoring character we find in two different works whose main subject is autobiography-Richard Wright's Black Boy (American Hunger), the work that, arguably, defined African American autobiography for the twentieth century, and Paul de Man's seminal examination of autobiographical writing, Autobiography as De-facement, which set the terms for subsequent treatments of this genre. My goal in this article is, first, to describe this figure and then to use it to understand autobiographical writing (in de Man's sense) and Wright's autobiography. What is pertinent for this article is, hence, not that psychoanalysis, black writing, and deconstruction, or the three authors, share some common or essential characteristics, but only that these specific works-Lacan's Ethics, de Man's Autobiography as De-facement, and Wright's Black Boy (American Hunger)-make

"Some Little Language Such as Lovers Use": Virginia Woolf's Elemental Erotics of Simile 1

For Hana I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement (The Waves) "Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? (The Waves) He had no command of metaphor (Between the Acts) Is it possible to speak origin, to linguistically articulate primordial sexuality? The unconscious, Lacan says, "is neither primordial nor instinctual" and knows nothing about "the elemental" other than "the elements of the signifier" (1970, 170). These elements are semantically empty, not referring "to any object" yet "structured like a language" (Lacan 1997, 167). Could there be a linguistic form wherein the unconscious accesses the elemental the unconscious can never fully grasp? Lacan, in his suspicion of origin, would seem not to encourage such a search. Yet the writing of Virginia Woolf, considered in terms of its narrative and rhetorical patterns as structures and hence modes of organization of the unconscious suggests a linguistically specific way of speaking the primordial as a zone of the real within the symbolic. 2 This article rhetorically maps Woolf's writing of the elemental, in particular in her last novel Between the Acts. I trace Woolf's writing of the elemental in terms of Michèle Montrelay's theorizing of an elemental signifier, part of the shadowy, ancestral zones of the real, and in terms of the tradition of elocution, of the theorizations of the figures and tropes of [End Page 567] style. These theorizations of forms of language more numerous by far than the forms invoked by Lacan, Montrelay, and other psychoanalysts alert to the linguistic substrate of the unconscious, provide precise grids for mapping the linguistic structures of the psyche. 3 Rhetorical theory, a taxonomy of the symbolic, has always included forms rhetoricians associated with the elemental or archaic. This theory can help us do more than detect and even explicate the thinking of the elemental in Woolf's fiction. It can help us map the specific linguistic structure of an elemental signifier. Woolf's last novel, Between the Acts, ends on the verge of an ecstatic "tearing asunder" (156). As the reality of an English village at the time of World War II devolves into the "prehistoric" (158), the novel's two main characters, Isa and Giles, are at the threshold of a moment of intimacy as alluring as it is frightening: Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared, also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night . . . It was the night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high places among rocks. Then the curtain rose. They spoke. (158-159) The rest is silence. Or seems to be. The language spoken by the pre-historicized Giles and Isa seems to remain beyond the novel and the personal history of Virginia Woolf, who took her life before the novel went to press. Is the language of the psychic pre-historic what can never be re-articulated within the symbolic? Is it, although "spoke[n]," part of the unrepresentable, what Lacan would theorize as the real? Woolf described the writer's helplessness in the face of the cataclysmic real of death, saying she would never be able to represent "the crushing of my bone shade in on my very active eye and brain" (1980, 327). Does Between the Acts suggest that [End Page 568] when fiction and language meet impending apocalypse, when the imaginary and the symbolic are at the point of colliding with the real of death, what is...

Lacan with Runt Pigs

When Fern Arable realizes that her father is headed out to barn to kill a runt pig, she is immediately engulfed in identificatory existen- tial angst: But it's unfair, cries Fern. The pig couldn't help being born small, could it? If/had been very small at birth, would you have killed me? (Charlotte's Web 3). In a flash of horror and insight, she articulates truth of Lacan's assertion that all humans (and some pigs) are born prematurely,1 and she understands that it is task of an to save their lives and bring them into human commu- nity as subjects. In fact, reading Charlotte's Web through Lacan's theory of subjectivity (and reading Lacan's theory through Charlotte's Web) enables us to come to an understanding of just how implicated Other (as other people, as our own unconscious, as language itself) is in formation of our own identities. Through effects of speech, Lacan says, the subject always realizes more in Other, but he is already pursuing there more than half of himself (Four Fundamental Concepts 188). When John Arable makes his daugh- ter a mother, he initiates a process of subject formation that shows clearly how each of characters in book is already more than half in Other; Fern, Wilbur, Charlotte, and ultimately child reader all emerge as effects of their encounters with others and of their encounters with language. In this essay, then, I explore one pos- sible way of opening a text through a Lacanian poetics, with result (I hope) that both text and theory are made richer thereby. Written in 1952 by E. B.White, Charlotte's Web is a homely, comfort- ing story about friendship. It is often, as noted by Perry Nodelman, first chapter book adults choose to read to children; it has all elements that make a story feel right for very young—a main character with whom child can identify, a wise and loving mother figure, villains that aren't too frightening, and a triumphant story line, all woven together with gentle humor and carefully crafted language that emphasize glories of natural world. More than that, story is empowering for young child; it offers a vision of what most

Kant's Sadism

In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis Lacan says: “So as to produce the kind of shock or eye-opening effect that seems to me necessary if we are to make progress, I simply want to draw your attention to this: if The Critique of Practical Reason appeared in 1788, seven years after the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason there is another work which came out six years [!] afterThe Critique of Practical Reason a little after Thermidor in 1795, and which is calledPhilosophy in the Boudoir” (78). What is supposed to produce the shock effect is not the simple juxtaposition of dates, of course, but the implicitly Hegelian reading of history which makes those dates significant, and which comes out in full strength when Lacan says, in Kant avec Sade: “The Philosophy in the Boudoir comes eight years [!] after the Critique of Practical Reason. If, after seeing that the former agrees with the latter, we prove that it completes it, we will say that it gives the truth of the Critique” (Ecrits II 120; my translation). Lacan’s “proof,” however, is anything but rigorous or systematic; so his provocative statement will probably sound inspiring to Lacan enthusiasts and gratuitous to virtually anyone else. Which is a pity, because the statement is absolutely correct: it is indeed the case that Sade brought to their extreme consequences the characteristic premisses of Kant’s ethics, thus unfolding their truth in ways which the man Kant might even have vehemently resisted, but which were nonetheless necessary. Here I would like to provide more of a systematic and rigorous defense of this statement, though I make no claim as to how faithful my reconstruction might be to Lacan’s “intentions” (the irrelevance of this issue from the point of view espoused here will soon become apparent; hence it will also become apparent that it is an issue this point of view need not be concerned with).

What's Love Got to do With it?

Journal Article What's Love Got to do With it? Get access Alex Potts , Flesh and the Ideal. Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History , New Haven and London , Yale University Press , 1994 . 43 b&w ills. 352pp. , hardback ISBN 0-300-05813-6 , £25. Gill Perry and Michael Rossington , eds., Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture , Manchester and New York , Manchester University Press , 1994 . 46 b&w ills., 288pp. , hardback ISBN 0-7190-4227-5 , £45, paperback ISBN 0-7190-4228-3 , £15.99. WENDY LEEKS WENDY LEEKS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Oxford Art Journal, Volume 19, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 103–106, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/19.1.103 Published: 01 March 1996

Lacan and the Ethics of Modernity

THE STATUS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS is ethical.' This remark made during the course of the Eleventh Seminar formulates a central theme in Lacan's project from start to finish. An entire seminar is devoted to it. Even the school that Lacan founded (only later to dissolve) was patterned, not on a professional medical association, but on an ancient school of ethics, with its master, his teachings, and his initiatory language. But Lacan's reflections on ethics involve a rethinking of the very nature of ethics; the unconscious is in an unfamiliar sense. I read Lacan's remark about the status of the unconscious as saying that the of the he reconstituted out of Freud is an theory. It belongs not to a science of prediction and control but to an ethic of self-analysis and association with others. Ethics is at stake in Lacan's recasting of Freud's metapsychology in terms of the positions and structures of the talking cure. It is his way of extracting Freud's theory from its sources in a normalizing nineteenth-century psychiatric medicine and reformulating it as an ethic of language. Psychoanalysis is not a medical treatment any more than the unconscious is a medical disorder-a dysfunction or maladaptation. Rather the unconscious is a structural or constitutive fact about ourselves as speaking subjects, and analysis is the work through which one comes to terms with this fact. Analysis does not consist in diagnosis and prescription. It is made possible by a certain ethical position: a sort of suspension or epoche of the analyst in the face of the madness of another's desire, combined with a neutral listening. This stance makes possible the transference that structures the analytic process of articulating this madness in speech. Lacan says it was hysterics who taught Freud about the unconscious: Freud chose to analyze what they said rather than to fit them into medical categories. He removed the very concept of symptom from medical classification by making it a property of the idiosyncratic ways the hysteric masked and articulated her desire in language. He then in effect elaborated a theory about what the subject must be for this kind of symptom-formation to be possible. In thus linking

Psychosis and Mourning in Lacan's Hamlet

T HE TRAGEDY HAMLET, Lacan says, tragedy desire.' winding path Hamlet's desire will take Lacan through territory familiar to his readers, perhaps new to others: from object petit a, to to foreclosure and mourning, and finally to death. How these views add to our understanding how far they go beyond Lacan's own indictment the sort hogwash that psychoanalytic texts are full of (p. 20) remains to be seen. Lacan's own text, titled and Interpretation Desire in Hamlet, is a text edited from transcripts his seminar for academic year 1958-59 on and Its Interpretation. Its themes resonate with some related essays in Ecrits: A Selection:2 The signification phallus, delivered in May, 1958; The subversion subject and dialectic desire in Freudian unconscious, presented in September, 1960; and On a question preliminary to any possible treatment psychosis, his analysis Schreber's Memoirs, completed in January, 1958, and to which we will return.3 Norman Holland notes that psychoanalysts seem to take to Hamlet like kittens to a ball yarn.4 Lacan is no exception. Lacan's basic thesis can be summarized as follows: Hamlet's