Lacan and the limits of language

213 Pages·2008·68.14 MB·English

by  Charles Shepherdson

LACAN AND THE L I MITS
OF L ANGUAGE
CHARLES SHEPHERDSON
AND
THE LIMITS OF
LANGUAGE
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
NrrcJJ Ytn·k
e
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CONTENTS
Abbr·evintious
VII
Preface
lX
The Intimate Alterity of the Real
I. I
The Atrocity of Desire: Of Love and Beauty in Lacan's
2.
A utig one so
Emotion, Affect, Drive 8r
3·
4· Telling Tales of Love: Philosophy, Literature, and
Psychoanalysis
IOI
The Place of Memory in Psychoanalysis
5· 122
6. Human Diversity and the Sexual Relation
1]2
Notes
20 1
v
ABBREVIATIONS
E Jacques Lacan. Ect·its (Paris: Seuil, 1966). A portion of this volume
has been translated as Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Norton, 1977). References will be to the English
edition.
Ju
FS Feminine Se.mnlity: Jacques Lncnn tmd tbc Ecole Fre11dienue. Ed.
liet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. New
York: Norton, 1985.
SI Jacques Lacan. Tbe Seminar ofJ acques Lacnn, Book 1: Freud's Papers
on Teclmique, 1953-54· Ed.Jacques-Aiain Miller. Trans. John For
rester. New York: Norton, 1988.
SII Jacques Lacan. Tbe Seminar of]ncques Lacon, Book II: Tbe Ego in
F1·eud's Tbeor;• and in tbe Teclmi111e of P.rycbonnaly.ris, '954-55· Ed.
Jacques-Ala in Miller. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: Nor
ton, 1988.
SVII Jacques Lacan. Tbe Seminrll' of]ncques Lncan, Book VII: Tbe Etbic.<
ofPsycboannlysLr 1959-60. Ed.Jacques-Aiain Miller. Trans. Dennis
Porter. New York: Norton, 1992.
SVIII Jacques Lacan. Le Scminnire, liure VIII: Le t:rrmsfm. Ed. Jacques
Aiain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1991.
SXI Jacques Lacan. Tbe Pout· Ftmdmnentnl Concepts of P.rycboaualysis.
Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1978.
SE Sigmund Freud. The Staudm·d Edition of tbe Complete P.rycbological
IVot·ks. Trans. and ed. James Strachey et. al. London: The Ho
garth Press, ' 953· 24 volumes.
T Jacques Lac.an. "Television," trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind
Krauss, and Annette J\llichelson. In Television: A Cbnl!engc to the
Psycbomut!ytic Ertnb!islmtellt, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Norton,
199°).
TL Julia KJ·isteva. Tales ofL ove. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Co
lumbia University Press, 1987.
vu
PREFACE
These chapters were written as occasional essays, each at the invitation of
a different host, who invited me to think about a topic of his or her own
choosing. The solicitation of thought that is thereby implied, the way in
which my own thought, grounded in philosophy and psychoanalysis, was
shaped and altered by these invitations, is of intrinsic interest to me, inso
far as it suggests how thought, and indeed life itself, unfolds beyond the
individual, and beyond one's own preoccupations. At the same time, my
own concerns invariably mark each essay. And above all I am struck, look
ing back at these essays, at how preoccupied I have been with t1ying to
support a conversation across boundaries that have become O\'erly territo
rialized, overly defended, and exclusive. These boundaries are multiple,
and I attempt here to cross them in several ways simultaneously. Several
chapters are concerned with the question of the body, which Lacan is often
wrongly said to neglect (Chapters I, 2, 3, and 6). Several are concerned
with the complex relationships among Lacan, Heidegger, and Derrida,
relationships that I approach, not through explicit references or texts or
themes (notoriously, the phallus as a supposed "master signifier," the text
of Poe's "Purloined Letter," etc.), but through some fundamental concep
tual problems they share in common, in particular, the excruciatingly
complex relationship between "structure" and "hist01y" (Chapters 4,
I,
and 5); the question of Lacan's relation to topics that he is generally con
sidered to have neglected, such as race (in Chapter 6), affect (in Chapters
and 3), and the body-a topic Lacan is thought to discuss endlessly, but
2
only in order to reduce it to the order of the signifier, or to the conserva
tive law of phallic division into two "sexes," both claims being, in my view,
greatly mistaken (Chapters 3, and 6).
I, 2,
In general, these crossings between Lacan and other thinkers (feminist
theory, Foucault, Derrida, and Heidegger, especially) are subterranean
here, in the sense that these relationships are not the "topic" of the essays.
But readers will see very clearly, I think, where I am inviting these rela
tionships, and indeed am compelled to initiate them, for what I hope are
JX
X
more authentic reasons- not, in other words, because I sought to produce
an academic essay on "Lacan's relation to Derrida" (useful as this could
be), but rather because a particular conceptual issue, set before me by
others, led me to realize that the issue itself- die Sncbe selbst- called me to
encounter the question of these relations. T hus, even while the relation
ships named above (to a thinker like Derrida, or a concept like affect)
remain subterranean, I think they will be the recognizable substructure of
this book, and that readers will see how the tbewselves should oblige
i>)"'tCS
us-and I do see this as an ethical issue, especially today, when so many
territorialized camps have been set up in the academy, such that Foucaul
dians do not read Lacan, philosophers do not touch psychoanalysis (and I
use "touch" with all its phobic resonance), with the forceful and important
exception of feminist theory, and Lacanians, unfortunately, do not read
anyone else, except to demonstrate that so-and-so "only repeats what
Lacan already said more profoundly," or "fails to recognize the most cru
cial point, which only Lacan was able to see for us"-to move across these
territorial boundaries, which are only the trivial boundaries of academic
turf, and not appropriate to the conceptual work that calls for our atten
tion. Derrida and Lacan, Foucault and Lacan, have much closer and more
intimate relations than their reception has allowed, and academic pieties
and allegiances, indeed, kinship wars (inheritances of the father), have
largely prevented us from engaging these relationships in a serious way.
This is not to say that there are no serious differences between these think
ers- on the contrary. But we will never grasp them with any clarity if we
begin, and teach our students to begin, with denunciations, excommunica
tions, and imaginary rivalry. Too often, especially in our academic culture,
and in the training of our doctoral students, these allegiances have taken
the place of thinking, and I hope these essays will encourage some more
generous and hospitable encounters.
Let me be somewhat more concrete. Chapter emerged from some
t
questions posed to me by a Mexican student of psychoanalysis, who was
trying to understand the concept of the " re.1l" and who asked me to clarify
its relation to the symbolic order. I therefore wrote this piece in a very
schematic way, somewhat like an encyclopedia article, hoping at least to
sketch out some of the major issues that the concept of the real might
engage, and also to suggest some general points of intersection between
the real in Lacan and other contemporary issues or thinkers- the "trace"
in Derrida, the "incest prohibition" in Levi-Strauss, the critique of La
can's covert essentialism that one finds in some ofJ udith Butler's work.
P,-iface
XI
Chapter was written at the invitation of Joan Copjec, for a splendid
2
conference on Autigone at the University at Buffalo, and since this commu
nity included some people in comparative literature whom I greatly ad
mire (Rodolphe Gasche, Carol Jacobs, Henry Sussman, and others), I tried
to emphasize not only the argument of Lacan's Etbics of P>)'Cbormnlysis but
also ( 1) the literary text itself, (2) Hegel's famous interpretation of Sopho
cles, and (3) some classical issues stemming from Aristotle's Poetic.r, partic
ularly insofar as they bear on "catharsis," and the problem ofj ouissrmce.
Chapter 3 was written on the ve1y sad occasion of the death of Teresa
Brennan, who died unexpectedly and much too young, and I was honored
to be invited by Kelly Oliver and Elizabeth Grosz to a conference in honor
of her work and her life, at the University at Stony Brook. In these circum
stances, I could not write about anything other than "Mourning and lvlel
ancholia," and the concept of affect, which had so occupied Teresa. Here
again, as in Chapter I had begun to think that affect, far from being
2,
neglected by Lacan, bore very directly on his concept ofj ouissrmce. The
problem is enormously complex, of course, because Lacan appears at some
points to say that anxiety is the only affect and that, indeed, anxiety is not
an "emotion," which would seem to have a clearer symbolic orientation.
The distinction between affect and emotion would tlms be one approach
to the border between the symbolic and the real, but this is only a first
approximation. Any reader of Heidegger will immediately realize that
questions of stirmmmg ("mood"), Befiudlicbkeit ("disposition" or "attune
ment"), and indeed anxiety itself would call for a far more extensive treat
ment. Nevertheless, the question of affect in Chapter and of the
2,
aesthetic effect of tragedy on our emotions (especially "pity" and "fear"),
is in some sense continued in Chapter 3, where I also turn briefly from
Autigonc to Hamlet for guidance.
Chapter 4 was written at the request of David Goecocheia of Brock
University, who organized a conference on Kristeva's Titles of Love and
invited me to comment specifically on Kristeva's chapter on Plotinus and
Ovid. I was thus brought to Tbe Metnm01pboses, yet another litera1y text,
which complicated greatly what I might otherwise have written, either
about Lacan or about Kristeva herself. This chapter is perhaps tl1e best
example of what I mean by stressing the gift of tl1ese "occasional" origins:
having been invited to write on this topic, I could not leave in place what
I thought I knew about narcissism, in Freud or Lacan or K.risteva; on the
contra1y, having been asked to comment on Plotinus, and thus on the
philosophical tradition, which is not at all psychoanalytic, and then (even
XJJ
worse) on Ovid, I was pulled irrevocably back to my own origins in literary
study, and I found that the text of Ovid, understood not as an "example"
or "instance" of psychoanalysis but as a dense literary object, inserted into
its own complex literary tradition, compelled me to read tbat text for what
it contained. J\lly argument thus became a kind of encounter between liter
ature (Ovid), philosophy (Plotinus), and psychoanalysis (Kristeva and
Freud), and the question of love is not unrelated to these crossings. In fact,
Lacan says that "love is the sign of a change in discourse," and this may
be part of the movement set forth in all the chapters that follow.
Chapter 5 emerged from an invitation to write about "memory," for a
special issue of Rc.rearcb iu Pbenrmteuology, a journal which I had greatly
admired as a graduate student, and in which I saw the most rigorous and
exciting phenomenological community I knew. I thus took what I under
stood of Lacan's ideas about memory-a topic so crucial to Freud-and
tried to show not simply what Lacan said about the subject, but how his
ideas might intersect with some issues in the phenomenological tradition.
Chapter 6, finally, was written at the request of Christopher Lane, who
was collecting a set of essays on the topic of psychoanalysis and race for
Columbia University Press. I understood, implicitly, (or thought I under
stood) that this was an invitation to write about psychoanalysis and mcism,
and thus about the various forms of imaginary and symbolic identification
that structure our expc·rience of race, what we call " racial identity" or "ra
cial practice." But the invitation itself spoke of •·ace and not mcism, and
because I have long been interested in biology, and the history of biologi
cal thought (indeed Canguilhem was important to me, and Foucault's Tbe
Bi11b of tbe Cliuic was a favorite book, no doubt because I had trained as a
Romanticist, and was steeped in the early nineteenth century, which saw
the rise of biological sciences and the very concept of "life" in its modern
form), I decided to try to address the relationship between psychoanalysis
and "race" as a concept that claims to have some biological or genetic
content. Cultural studies, of course, had long argued- persuasively, in my
view-that science always operates within a discursive horizon, and is deci
sively shaped by concepts and categories that do not have a purely empiri
cal basis, but belong to larger conceptual, discursive, and institutional
regimes. And yet, when I think about the attacks on Darwin that are
launched by religious fundamentalists in the United States, and I consider
the importance of current genetic research, and medical advances, I find
it impossible to say with tl1e haughty confidence of some cultural theorists
P,-iface
XU I
11
that race," or "the body," or usex," or indeed Hperception,n can be en
tirely detached from all consideration of biological knowledge, even if that
knowledge is, as I believe, a product of culture that will inevitably be
shaped in many ways by forces that are not strictly "scientific" (in the
sense that scientists would understand that term). In fact, it seemed to me
that cultural critics themselves had become all too comfortable with their
own appeal to "discursive constmction," as if tbnt regime of truth, tbat
pious certainty, could serve as a magic wand, capable of banishing all the
stupidities and blindnesses of otbcr thinkers, while leaving cultural tlleo
rists blind to tl1e mechanical operation of their own dogma, in which there
could be no reference to "sex," no reference to "the body," no reference
to "race" as a reality that might escape tl1e reach of language.
Of course, as Judith Butler has relentlessly reminded us, any utlk abo11t
race, or the body, will always involve some kind of discursive organization,
which itself requires vigilant attention. But one should not forget that tl1is
assertion, that "all knowledge is discursive," is itself prey to the same ob
servation, and we should therefore ask what may be occluded or banished
from thought by this insistent reminder, this universal truth of discursive
constmction, which covers all knowledge and all thinking, no matter what
the field of investigation may be. In response to this invitation to write on
"race," then, I decided not to speak about racism, which I suspected many
other contributors would address, and chose instead to think-almost in
the manner of a thought experiment-what psychoanalysis might have to
say about the idea of "race" as a biological fact. In other words, setting
aside for a moment the ob,ious and compelling critiques that had been
launched against the use of "race" as a biological category-critiques that
I thought had been well-circulated and successful-and knowing that one
could always rightly develop a critique of any scientific discourse, as Fou
cault himself did on several occasions, I decided to ask what psychoanalysis
might have to say about "race," assuming that something like race is in
deed a "reality" of a biological kind, namely, a form of human diversity
that has affected our evolutionaty history, just as it did the history of otl1er
animals. A critique of the anthropological me of race, or of the concepntal
categories that were generated as an to the reality of racial differ
OTL<WC"J"
ence, would always be possible and necessary, but assun1ing for a moment
that there is some truth to the the01y of evolution, and that human beings
are not exempt from evolution, what would psychoanalysis have to say
about this "realit)~' of the body? My answer was that human physiological