Lacanian Account Research Articles

The value of owning the symbols that orientate us within Subjectivity

Judith Butler contests Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek's argument that the limits to symbolisation which shape political action are best accounted for through Jacques Lacan's account of the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real. Butler agrees that we each emerge as social subjects on the condition of foreclosures, but disagrees that such foreclosures are prior to the social or explicable through a universal account of kinship. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyĕwùmí has a somewhat similar critique of the Eurocentric foundations of feminist concepts. She argues that Western hierarchies, organised through ‘bio-logic’ or ‘body-reasoning’ with an emphasis on the sex/gender binary, are culturally particular. Oyĕwùmí distinguishes between relational, dynamic, fluid social hierarchies organised by seniority, and hierarchies organised by body-reasoning which are orientated towards fixity, and certainties. In this article I outline Bracha Ettinger's matrixial theory and argue that while it does not do what either Oyĕwùmí (transcend the terms of the nuclear family) or Butler (divest Lacan's paternal law of its power) advocate, it does provide us with the language to better account for how ‘body-reasoning’ structures our orientations and sets constraints on transformative processes. Through an account of multiple strata of subjectivity, within an expanded Symbolic, inscribed in social life through symbolic filters based on corporeality, matrixial theory enables us to account for the embeddedness of a strong orientation towards constant individuation, alongside a persistent disavowal and fear of processes of co-emergence at a non-cognitive level of subjectivity within Western thought. In their exchange, Laclau theorises social transformation through articulatory logics whereas Butler stresses the need for the work of cultural translation. Drawing on Ettinger’s and Oyĕwùmí's work, I propose that practices of translation must include a rigorous accounting for our orientations and investments within Subjectivity.

‘Hunger for certainty’: misrecognition, masculinity and agentic action in India’s and Russia’s desires for neocolonial subjecthood

This article takes as its point of departure the postcolonial understanding of the nation as a subject constructed through the colonial encounter. It argues that at the core of both colonial and postcolonial subject formations lies a desire for reconstructing a homogeneous nation that fulfils a ‘hunger for certainty’. The use of the term ‘hunger for certainty’ testifies to the emotional as well as corporeal desires involved in the quest for recognition. However, any such quest is always a process of misrecognition, involving fantasies of impossible wholeness and fulfilment. Proceeding from a Lacanian account of sublimation, lack and desire, we analyse the relationship between misrecognition, ontological insecurity, masculinity and agentic action in two neocolonial settings: Russia and India. By discursively deconstructing the official discourse of those speaking in the name of the state – in our case, Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi – we show how this ‘hunger for certainty’ is at the core of neocolonial agentic action and how desires for recognition are constantly underpinned by masculinity and unfulfilled desires for wholeness.

Upheavals in Black Thought

Upheavals in Black Thought

Foreclosures of Finitude: On Kiarina Kordela's Epistemontology

In conversation with Kiarina Kordela's Epistemontology, this essay considers how biopolitical capitalism relies upon the structural exclusion of experiences of dying and loss, while valorizing semblances of immortal transcendence. Following Kordela's argument that biopower attempts to "eternalize" the capitalist equation of being and value as coterminous with life through the production of experiences of false transcendence, this essay adds that the Hegelian critique of finitude clarifies the stakes of biopower's foreclosures of the death-event. With Lacan's account of foreclosure in mourning in Seminar VI, the essay concludes with how the potentiality of loss can reinscribe the subject's (non)rapport with eternity.

The King’s Two Anuses: Trans Feminism and Free Speech

“The King’s Two Anuses: Trans Feminism and Free Speech” critically examines the discourses of trans feminism and free speech absolutism as they have converged in a number of public controversies in the wake of the 2016 election of Donald Trump. It argues that the crisis of democratic institutions precipitated by that election revealed the surprising susceptibility of the dominant strains of critical and queer theory to cooptation by the far right and exposed the inadequacy of institutionalized rhetorics of trans affirmation, which generally comprise defenses of indeterminacy or gender ambivalence—the very conditions many trans people contest. Drawing on the late work of Michel Foucault and the private writings of Ernst Kantorowicz, “The King’s Two Anuses” articulates a critique of the Lacanian account of subjective sexuation (in the work of Judith Butler, Joan Copjec, and Slavoj Žižek), which it holds especially influential and especially inadequate to the task of accounting for the diversity and assertiveness of trans accounts of personhood.

Psychical contexts of subjectivity and performative practices of remuneration: teaching assistants’ narratives of work

A range of sociological work has theorized neoliberal regulative regimes, suggesting the contradictions contained in the enactment of policy and foregrounding the painful effects of these processes on subjectivities produced within performative school cultures. This paper contributes to this body of work by tracing the movement of desire in teaching assistants’ subjective relations to workplace practices of remuneration. We do this through an analysis of a series of group- and individual-free associative interviews with teaching assistants working in primary schools. Drawing on a Lacanian account of the way processes of identification channel affect, as desire, through signifying chains within a discursive field, we explore the associative chains of meaning that overdetermine the subjectivities produced within performative practices of remuneration. We suggest that the complex and contradictory chains of signification embodied in the school environment constitute a space where fragile teaching assistant subjectivities reiterate previous relations to an ambiguous Other.

The sexuality bind: same-sex marriage and structures of homophobic violence

ABSTRACTPierre Bourdieu increasingly engaged psychoanalytic concepts in his work throughout his life. However, he focussed his analysis on the social causes of psychic processes, and had a particularly ambivalent relationship with Lacanian psychoanalysis. This article therefore engages Lacanian theory to address what analysis from a psychoanalytic direction of causality can bring to Bourdieusian social theory. I contend that Lacanian theory can provide two key insights, demonstrated by reference to the same-sex marriage debate. First, I argue that fields are socio-historically constructed through the enactment of an imagined fantasy. Marriage has consequently institutionalized a cultural capital that reflects the imaginary of the dominant. I term this cultural capital ‘heterosexualness’. Second, I argue that the Lacanian account of the symbolic order allows the logic underlying political violence to be elucidated. This logic, illustrated through the concept of the sexuality bind, legitimizes violence against the Other when they violate the imagined rules of the field. Applying these insights, I conclude that the legalization of same-sex marriage fails to break down the symbolic boundaries between ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ that found the sexuality bind, instead reproducing the imaginary form of the sexuality bind institutionalized in marriage itself. This reproduces both an unequal right to national governance, and the imagined value of heterosexualness. By considering the psychoanalytic direction of causality, this article thus finds that the legalization of same-sex marriage will reinforce both the sexuality bind and the legitimacy of homophobic violence.

Protests, "acting-out", group psychology, surplus enjoyment and neoliberal capitalism

How should one make sense of the recent student protests across South Africa, which seem to be motivated by grievances relating to various forms of financial exclusion, from registrationandtuitionfeesto costs ofaccommodation, and later pre-election protests, triggered by competition among would-be party candidates? It appears that Freud and Lacan's countervailing psychoanalytical concepts of "acting-out" and "transference" cast explanatory light on this variegated phenomenon - the former insofar as it is an index of repressed, unarticulated motives manifesting themselves in irrational behaviour resistant to "analysis", instead of ethically accountable "acts", and the latter, on the contrary, designating a process according to which subjects are receptive to, and act (or speak) according to the requirements of "successful analysis", including the "subject supposed to know". Cognisance must also be taken of the fact that the protestors constitute(d) groups, and that it should therefore be approached as such in psychoanalytical terms. Recourse to the Freudian notion of "group psychology" is heuristically helpful in this regard. This is augmented by focusing on what has, it is argued, functioned to trigger the protest behaviour, namely neoliberal capital, by way of considering Lacan's account of capitalist discourse in Seminar 17 - together with its insightful interpretation by Juliet MacCannell - particularly the relation between surplus value and surplus enjoyment.

“All for Love, and Nothing for Reward,”: Psyche from Spenser to Lacan, and the Loss of Critical Values

As a generation of Lacanian critics convert what Spenser does into a science of the formations of subjectivity and psycholinguistic desire, they miss Spenser's project of providing a unique account of human psychology in his encyclopedic work. Both Lacan and Spenser have detailed accounts of the operations of the human soul or psyche and the stages the subject passes through in each. As the essay contrasts these divergent models, a number of illuminating distinctions emerge. While in Lacan the self remains positioned in a single arena where the irreconcilable demands of subjectivity and intersubjectivity oppose one another perpetually, in Spenser the conditions of subjectivity are always perilous for the self, cut off from the nutriments of community and nature. Despite grand claims Lacanians have made on his behalf, Lacan's account of human nature cannot enter the heroic struggles of Spenser's second stage and so never fully engages the dynamics of Spenser's quest narrative. The story Lacan tells of the psyche is always the one that ends in a tragic thwarting. Whether we like Spenser's picture or not, it is clearly not the one espoused by Lacan. In the end, a comparative critical reading of Spenser helps correct an interpretive overeagerness by Lacanian critics, a cast of mind that is perhaps psychologically significant in itself. Spenser's cautionary tales about the pitfalls of subjectivity and its proper correctives outside the self contrast finally with a style of reading that mirrors the critics' own narcissistic obsessions more than they are willing to admit.

Saved by Trauma: A Psychoanalytical Reading of the Atonement

AbstractThis work offers a Lacanian account of the work of Christ on the cross. It proffers a Holy Saturday theology in which God has to embrace suffering and death in its entirety in order to end the stranglehold of the world's system of sacrifice; the divine took on death as a constitutive factor. A reading of the atonement is constructed in which a diabolical system is shattered from within by the actions of a unique victim; it also relates the vicarious element of the atonement to the psychoanalytical concept of transference. Ultimately, this article hopes to contribute to the ongoing interaction between psychoanalysis and theology. Naturally it also hopes to influence the debate over which discursive “model” of the atonement is most helpful.

The ‘subject’ of corruption

This paper develops an analysis of corruption as the complement to processes of subjection. In this way the paper offers a way to make sense of how processes of inscription and audit which are designed to prevent corruption, nevertheless also continue to make corruption possible. The paper draws on both Foucault and Lacan's account of the formation of the subject to explore the ‘mad’ attractions of corruption. The analysis suggests that the attraction of corruption lies not only in the private material advantage it offers but also in the enjoyment and excitement that arises, both from the exercise of quasi-sovereign power within hierarchies, and from transgression of the very rules that hierarchy is formally constituted to enforce. The phantasies of omnipotence and absolute autonomy that animate corrupt subjectivity are further reinforced by subordinates who are too eager to win the recognition of the powerful, or at least too paranoid to overtly challenge their corrupt conduct. Far from the exception that advertises the norm, corruption can be seen as a norm of the conduct of the powerful, masked by the theatre of due process.

At the egg's edge: Lygia Clark's indiscretions

This essay examines the way the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920–1988) revisits and reconstructs the scene of birth in works that invoke, directly or indirectly, the figure of the egg. It compares Clark's reconstructions in relation to Jacques Lacan's account of birth, the development of the individuated subject and the normative, patriarchal social relations that subject upholds. It argues that while Lacan's account entails the bracketing of the indistinct and sensuous materiality he refers to as the Real, Clark's works reclaim the Real, creating a very different experience of bearing and being born, and of doing it together in and as a sharing of fluids, membranes, openings/passageways, in and as haptic contact. Constituted by this kind of interpenetration and entanglement, the Real becomes a field of discovery within which the contact of indiscrete flesh, of inorganic and organic matter, is the starting point for re-experiencing and remaking sociality and new modes of life.

Bachelard, Lacan and the Impurity of Scientific Formalization

This essay examines the conjunction of French historical epistemology and Lacanian theory in postwar France. In particular, Lacan's account of scientific formalization is scrutinized insofar as it develops aspects of the prior epistemological research of Gaston Bachelard, whose innovative approach to the problem of the nature and limits of scientific knowledge proved so influential on the subsequent field of French structuralism. Lacan's reflections on formalization will be shown, in contrast to Bachelard, to place an emphasis on the constitutive and limiting role of language in its interaction with logical and scientific projects. In asking how Lacan's structural psychoanalysis extends and subverts the rationalist emphasis of French philosophy of science, I hope to provide a new optic through which to assess the role of formalization in critical theory today.

The Other Heading of America: Derrida and Emerson on the Future of an Illusion

I. THE NEW AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM Over past half-century, American Studies has departed from romantically inclined reception of its canonical authors, and moved towards ideologically entrenched rejection of American idealism. According to Richard Rorty's stark assessment of this situation in Achieving Our Country (1998), New Left, or what he calls School of Resentment, has become a spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left, rather than Left which dreams of achieving our (35). He traces utopian aspirations in American letters from Walt Whitman to John Dewey, both of whom he describes as anti-absolutists who nevertheless managed to retain romantico-pragmatic faith in America. He claims they viewed the United States as opportunity to see ultimate in finite, human, historical project, rather than in something eternal and nonhuman (17). He explains, wanted that utopian America to replace God as unconditional object of desire. They wanted struggle for social justice to be country's animating principle, nation's soul (18). Critics of New Left, however, at least according to Rorty's polemical account, have not only dispensed with utopian dreams of past, they have lost all hope for future of their country. He observes, associate American patriotism with endorsement of atrocities: importation of African slaves, slaughter of Native Americans, rape of ancient forests, and Vietnam War. Many of them think of national pride as appropriate only for chauvinists (7). Donald Pease, founding figure and leading proponent of New American Studies, would seem to fit Rorty's bill. In his recent book, The New American Exceptionalism (2009), he even suggests, might be said to begin when country becomes patriotic fiction for its (166). (1) Such reduction of patriotism to bellicosity hardly does justice to twin phenomena in question, yet this does seem to be grand gesture of his magisterial case study of American fantasy life from Cold War to present. Offering Lacanian account of of real that was visited upon American people on September 11, 2001, Pease remarks, crises of magnitude of 9/11 are always accompanied by mythologies that attempt to reconfigure them within frames of reference that would generate imaginary resolutions to these crises.... [M]yths give closure to traumatizing historical events by endowing them with moral significance (156). The trauma of 9/11 figures as yet another instantiation of what he calls primal of American Exceptionalism: catastrophic site of interpretation so devastating for imagination that it not take place except through traumatizing displacement of all other representable spaces (17). This mythological moment produces surplus fantasy of an inaccessible place that could only be accessed retroactively, which symbolizes lost plenitude of that never existed. Pease explains that events like 9/11 trigger obsessive compulsion to retreat from scene of disaster and back into fantasized womb. The Bush administration simply borrowed tools of trade provided by Cold War romanticists--most notably myth of Virgin Soil, which effaced atrocities committed by early settlers, and thus secured for American people illusion of their radical innocence--in order to help institutionalize Homeland Security State. Pease provides brilliant genealogy of various permutations this national mythology has undergone over past four centuries, but he does so only to arrive at disheartening conclusion that by time of 9/11, America had already lost whatever moral higher ground it may have wished to recuperate from out of wreckage of its formerly glorious but always already fabricated virginity. The apparently Rortyian end result of his psychoanalysis of national state fantasy is that American dream is only ideological mystification of radical evil of human condition; American Exceptionalism is synonymous with history of genocide, slavery, and oppression; and American patriotism means little else besides love of war. …

Against economic (mis)conceptions of the individual: Constructing financial agency in the credit crisis

This paper draws upon the work of Lacan and Callon to interrogate and disrupt the foundational belief of neo-classical economics in the rationality and autonomy of the individual. Lacan's account of the ego's foundation in the ‘imaginary’ explains how the self may be grasped as if it were indeed autonomous and rational, but also what is ‘fictional’ about this image. Following Lacan, the credit crisis is explored in terms of the narcissism, paranoia and contempt for the law that in practice characterised the conduct of what economics celebrates as the rational individual. The paper then draws upon Callon's notion of performativity to explore the ways in which economics, and in particular its assumptions about incentives, came to make a reality of the fiction of the ‘rational’ individual. We suggest that widely adopted incentive pay practices, designed in line with agency assumptions, produced the very self-interested opportunism that they assumed ex ante.

Foreword: Why Lacan for Art Education?

ForewordWhy Lacan for Art Education? Michael Parsons and Sydney R. Walker The work of Lacan has had significant influence in psychoanalytic circles and perhaps even more so in other academic areas, especially in cultural studies and education. But it is not well known in art education. Lacan is still a relative newcomer to art education studies, and the purpose of this special issue of Visual Arts Research (VAR) is to help make the possible value of his work better known to art educators. We think it has much to offer the field, especially as extension and revision of current trends, and we want to explore some of what that might be. We don't see ourselves as committed to Lacanian thought or approaches in any consistent theoretical way. Lacan was a theoretician (as well as a practitioner), but he constantly changed his theory and refused to allow it to be pinned down with too much certainty. Consequently, unlike with Freud's work, those who have used his thought in the humanities—as opposed perhaps to psychoanalytic practice—have tended to use particular concepts or parts of his theory, rather than the theory as whole, to illuminate their topic. Some of these concepts are desire, the objet a, méconnaisance, the Real, the sinthome, the mirror stage, and the Gaze; with the unconscious being the most fundamental of all. The essays here use several of these Lacanian concepts, each in a different way. Lacanian thought seems useful because it allows us to raise questions or focus on issues that otherwise we tend to ignore because they do not fit our current approaches and theories. In very general terms, art education has tended to move in cycles: from an emphasis on the child and expression (Victor Lowenfeld, Herbert Read) to the emphasis on the disciplines of art (discipline-based art education [DBAE]) to a concern with diversity and, most recently, to an emphasis on [Begin Page v] visual culture, post-structural thought, and social justice. All of these phases have no doubt contained differences and controversies, and none were truly systematic or hegemonic, which is perhaps what allows the wheel to turn. Nevertheless, they have each, sequentially, led to the promotion of some interests and topics and the submergence of others. One currently submerged topic is what Lacan called subjectivity, close to what in our literature is usually called the subject. In the visual culture/post-structural paradigm, the subject has been understood as basically constructed as a set of positions taken within a variety of discourses; that is, identity is determined mostly by social influences. It seems fair to say that in general this paradigm has done much better with analyzing the social than the individual: It accounts much better for the effects of the social on persons than for the reverse. For example, it does not do well with the idiosyncrasies and persistence of desire, fantasy, refusal to understand, and thought that falls outside of consciousness. It is true that recently the socially constructed post-structural subject has begun to show signs of morphing into something else. The role of the viewer responding to mass media or artwork has increasingly been acknowledged as an active and creative one. There is recent interest, for example, in the carnivalesque and the "transgressive pleasures" of visual culture (Duncum, 2009). But we have no good way of acknowledging the implications of this. How can we account for the individuality of responses, the fact that individuals often have highly specific obsessions, interpretations, and resistances? And what is the origin of the variety of pleasures in visual culture? ("Pleasures" is surely an inadequate word for the complexities of desire involved.) In his essay, jagodzinski discusses this situation and says that we appear to be faced with a choice between the older belief in an innate identity struggling to get expressed and an ever-changing set of positionalities within multiple discourses. jagodzinski argues that Lacan's account of subjectivity, complex and difficult to follow as it is, offers a way out of this opposition. That account manages to acknowledge—to insist on—the post-structural insights about the influences of social structures, the importance of discourses...

How to Begin a Novel: Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and the Author-Reader Relation

This article offers a reconsideration, from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, of the opening to Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. The discussion reopens the debate on the founding status of the madeleine scene for the novel as a whole with reference to the narrator's own promotion thereof and critical accounts offered by Beckett, Genette, Landy and Doubrovsky. While these critics have tended to identify a single founding cause to the narrative that is discovered in this scene, this article finds in Proust's circuitous path to the start of his Recherche an inscription of the Lacanian account of subject-formation given in the eleventh seminar via the twin processes of alienation and separation. This account of the coming to desire, furthermore, is identified as consonant with Roland Barthes's presentation of the author–reader relation in Le Plaisir du texte as a ‘dialectique du désir’. What Proust thus discovers in the madeleine scene, it is argued here, is desiring subjectivity itself as condition of possibility of narrative, furnishing simultaneously a narrating subject of the unconscious susceptible to involuntary memory, the economic means for that narration to proceed (metonymy) and, at the metatextual level, the mode of appeal identified by Barthes as proper to the author–reader relation itself.

The Alienating Mirror: Toward a Hegelian Critique of Lacan on Ego-Formation

This article brings out certain philosophical difficulties in Lacan’s account of the mirror stage, the initial moment of the subject’s development. For Lacan, the “original organization of the forms of the ego” is “precipitated” in an infant’s self-recognition in a mirror image; this event is explicitly prior to any social interactions. A Hegelian objection to the Lacanian account argues that social interaction and recognition of others by infants are necessary prerequisites for infants’ capacity to recognize themselves in a mirror image. Thus mutual recognition with another, rather than self-recognition in a mirror, is what makes possible subsequent ego-formation and self-consciousness. This intersubjective critique suggests that many of the psychoanalytic consequences that Lacan derives from the mirror stage (e.g., alienation, narcissism, and aggressivity) may need to be rethought.

The ethics of interpretation: the signifying chain from field to analysis

This paper attempts to describe the relationship between the embodied practice of fieldwork and the written articulation of this experience. Starting from Valerie Hey's conceptualization of ‘rapport’ as form of ‘intersubjective synergy’, a moment of recognition of similarity within difference – similar in structure to Laclau and Moufffe's conceptualization of hegemony – the paper explores how we can understand these moments of recognition as positioned within a complex web of signifying chains that interlink social, psychic and linguistic means of representation. Laclau and Mouffe's logics of equivalence and difference and Lacan's account of the production of meaning through metaphor and metonymy provide a theoretical language through which to explore chains of meaning in two fragments of data drawn from a study comparing disciplines and institutions in higher education. My argument is that an awareness of these processes of production of meaning is necessary to the development of an ethical mode of interpretation.

The New Yorkers

There is a drawing by Saul Steinberg called A view of the world from Ninth Avenue. It is known to New Yorkers as “The world according to New Yorkers.” One of the New Yorker’ s most famous covers, it consists of a westward-looking aerial view in which the buildings and street space of Manhattan appears huge and beautiful at the bottom of the page, New Jersey is a strip of unpleasantness just above Manhattan; then comes a little blip called San Francisco, without much in between. At the top of the page is a vague shape called China. In a more recent New Yorker cover, by Kalman and Meyerowitz, called New Yorkistan, the Otherness which New Yorkers attribute to the world is brought home to roost. Projection works both ways; or rather, it has an opposite sense, introjection. For Freud if not for Lacan—they form two sides of the coin of identification. New York has drawn upon it all its native tribes, recalling those New York Times articles explaining Afghanistan and other hotspots which, thank heavens, are not New York. These two New Yorker magazine covers will be familiar to any New Yorker and this paper will bring Lacan's account of the visual field to bear on a critical reading of these two images. It will call into question the hegemony of perspective representation as the account of reality, and argue that space is a subjective effect in which identity and desire (of New Yorkers) are projections of the subject—which collude with optics—to structure space.