Lacan the Charlatan

Peter D. Mathews

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030452032
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030452049
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Psychology

This book sets out to determine the validity of an accusation made against Jacques Lacan by Noam Chomsky in an interview in 1989. He stated that Lacan was a "charlatan" – not that his ideas were flawed or wrong, but that his entire discourse was fraudulent, an accusation that has since been repeated by many other critics. Examining the arguments of key anti-Lacanian critics, Mathews weighs and contextualizes the legitimacy of Lacan's engagements with structural linguistics, mathematical formalization, science, ethics, Hegelian dialectics, and psychoanalysis. The guiding thread is Lacan's own recurrent interrogation of authority, which inhabits an ambiguous zone between mastery and charlatanry. This book offers a novel contribution to the field for students and scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy, sociology, critical and literary theory.

© The Author(s) 2020

P. D. MathewsLacan the CharlatanThe Palgrave Lacan Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45204-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Peter D. Mathews¹

(1)

Department of English Language and Literature, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

Peter D. Mathews

End Abstract

A Genealogy of the Charlatan Label

In the introduction to Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight (1987), Shoshana Felman recalls that she initially learned about Lacan while she was a graduate student at the University of Grenoble. ‘I first heard Lacan’s name mentioned by two highly respected teachers in the university,’ she writes. ‘One of them kept referring to Lacan with enthusiasm and admiration. The other would mention Lacan in a derogatory way, advising us, in sum, not to read him’ (Felman 1987, p. 3). Felman’s experience is not unusual. Lacan’s audiences tend to be bitterly divided between those who loathe and oppose him, and those who become his loyal disciples and followers. Not much critical space exists, it seems, for any position in between. Felman thus writes:

How can one comprehend a figure with such a record of controversiality? With a few exceptions, most attempts to understand Lacan have assumed the shape either of a didactic exposition of Lacan’s complicated thought or of a polemical defense of Lacan’s position in the context of the controversy among different psychoanalytic factions. (Felman 1987, p. 4)

The title of my own book reflects the controversial nature of its subject. It is designed to provoke with its evident boldness, but in a way that complicates and rethinks the simplistic options of being ‘for’ or ‘against’ Lacan. In truth, I am interested neither in attacking nor defending Lacan: my real concern in this book is with problems of mastery and authority, and the unique way that Lacan’s charlatanry, rather than being a purely negative phenomenon, might offer a potential solution to them.

Like Felman, my own introduction to the work of Lacan came through my university studies. In my second year as an undergraduate, I took a course titled ‘Postmodernism and the Novel’ with Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, a renowned Dostoevsky scholar, who introduced Lacan as one of the key thinkers of postmodernism and an intellectual hero. I remember taking several pages of long-lost notes in the first class, headed by the two overlapping circles of the ‘vel of alienation’ from Lacan’s Seminar XI. That diagram was followed by hermetic terms like ‘castration’ and ‘signification,’ all part of a complex theoretical language I had never before encountered. My eyes were opened to literature and critical theory in an entirely new way, and in subsequent semesters I took further courses like ‘Freudian Fable’ with acclaimed poet and Blanchot specialist Kevin Hart, which focused on the connections between psychoanalysis and narrative theory, ‘Introduction to Critical Theory’ with Elizabeth Grosz, author of Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (1990), and two courses, ‘Deleuze and Foucault’ and ‘Lacan and Subjectivity’ with Deleuze scholar Claire Colebrook. Lacan was a constant touchstone during this period of my education. When the time came to write my undergraduate honors thesis, I chose Lacan’s use of mathemes as my topic. In what would turn out to be a fatal move for my youthful interest in Lacan, however, my extra-curricular reading that year also included the two volumes of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Upon finishing the former, my impressionable mind had already been firmly swayed: psychoanalysis was a neurotic system of control mired in a hopelessly blind form of philosophical idealism. Reading Anti-Oedipus, in particular, persuaded me that Lacan was wrong, perhaps even a charlatan, a judgment that was just becoming prevalent in theoretical circles.

When I began this project, some twenty years later, the accusation of charlatanry had become commonplace in the critical literature about Lacan. I refer here not to the infighting and schisms that characterized Lacan’s school, the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP ), in which the divisions were primarily about questions of allegiance rather than the inherent value of Lacan’s teaching. Nor am I referring to the various thinkers who have performed sophisticated intellectual critiques of Lacan’s ideas, such as Deleuze and Guattari in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia books, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in The Title of the Letter (1973), Luce Irigaray in Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), or Jacques Derrida in The Post-Card (1980). Although these works take Lacan to task in various ways, they always assume that he is to be regarded seriously as a thinker. Instead, what has emerged more recently is a discourse that is openly hostile to the work of Lacan not at the level of ideas, but of authority. For the critics who hold this position, Lacan is not just wrong or mistaken about this or that concept—he is a fraud and a charlatan whose oeuvre should be stripped of its validity and dismissed entirely as an act of pure deception.

One of the precursors of this discourse was brought to my attention by Jean-Michel Rabaté’s essay ‘Lacan’s Turn to Freud’ in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan (2003), which recalls Lacan’s skirmish with the linguist Georges Mounin. Mounin’s attack, widely known at the time but now largely forgotten, took the form of an article titled ‘Some Features of Jacques Lacan’s Style,’ which he published in 1969. Since Mounin’s text is relatively obscure and has never been translated into English, Rabaté provides a helpful summary:

To describe what had already often been called Lacan’s ‘mannerism,’ a labyrinthine syntax that its author had preemptively defended as ‘Gongorism,’ a poetic manner that would force his readers to be attentive while immersing them in the fluid equivocations of unconscious discourse, Mounin listed a number of oddities in the psychoanalyst’s use of vocabulary and syntax. […] On the whole, Lacan, so Mounin continued, loved nothing more than obscure archaisms, poetic inversions, or unusual turns of phrase borrowed either from German or Latin. (Rabaté 2003, p. 4)

Rabaté notes the accuracy of Mounin’s analysis of Lacan’s unusual grammatical choices, recounting humorously how, even after Lacan’s death, it was still possible to identify his French disciples by the peculiarly tortured sentence structures they had copied from him. Mounin is one of the first to notice how Lacan’s style had changed over time, becoming ever more dense and difficult. ‘Mounin observed a dramatic increase in the frequency of these circumlocutions’; writes Rabaté, ‘for him, the 1966 preface to Écrits verged on self-parody’ (Rabaté 2003, p. 4). Rabaté makes the case that Mounin’s concerns were grounded primarily in the disparity he saw between ‘the excessive theatricality of a fustian style suggesting the image of a hamming buffoon’ and the professionalism he otherwise witnessed in Lacan’s work (Rabaté 2003, p. 5). ‘Mounin’s worry seemed justified, even inevitable,’ concludes Rabaté. ‘[W]as Lacan a frustrated poet, a post-Heideggerian thinker progressing by opaque epigrams, a psychoanalyst wishing to revolutionize a whole field of knowledge, or just a charlatan?’ (Rabaté 2003, p. 5). Rabaté contends that Mounin, as a linguist, had little real interest in psychoanalysis, and was mainly concerned with the way structuralist ideas were intruding on his academic turf. Still more concerning for Mounin was the possibility that Lacan was becoming a charlatan, a performer leading astray his ever-growing crowd of followers. Mounin’s attack achieved what it set out to do, putting enough pressure on the head of the École Normale Supérieure, where the weekly seminar had been held since Lacan’s departure from the Sainte-Anne Hospital in 1963, that Lacan was denied access to this venue and forced to relocate to his third and final seminar location at the Faculty of Law across from the Panthéon.

Although the history of the EFP was beset by rifts and schisms, during Lacan’s lifetime attacks on his authority were rare. Critics were willing to criticize him at the level of ideas, or for his authoritarian leadership style, but seldom did it occur to them that he was an outright fraud. A notable exception comes from the Italian critic Sebastiano Timpanaro, who writes in his book The Freudian Slip (1974):

I must confess that I am incurably committed to the view that in Lacan’s writings charlatanry and exhibitionism largely prevail over any ideas of a comprehensible, even if debatable nature: behind the smoke-screen, it seems to me, there is nothing of substance; and it is difficult to think of a pioneer in the encounter between psychoanalysis and linguistics who has more frequently demonstrated such an erroneous and confused knowledge of the latter, whether structural or not. (Timpanaro 2011, p. 58)

Although Timpanaro’s reproach bears all the hallmarks of the later charges of charlatanry, The Freudian Slip is a book that is concerned mainly with Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) rather than Lacan. As such, Timpanaro’s comment only appears as a passing footnote to that discussion, and Lacan is barely mentioned again in the rest of the text. Another example is François George’s 1979 book L’Effet ‘Yau de poêle: De Lacan et des lacaniens, in which he accuses Lacan of being a charlatan who bamboozled his disciples by deploying a hermetic discourse that consists mainly of nonsense and word play. Despite its initial flash of scandalous success, George’s book has since sunk into relative obscurity, out of print and untranslated.

Lacan’s death in 1981 resulted in bitter infighting among his followers over who had the authority to carry on his legacy. In this atmosphere, factions and ideologies hardened to the point where, as David Macey points out in Lacan in Contexts (1988), for ‘a long time, the reader of Lacan has been faced with a stark dilemma: total acceptance or total rejection’ (Macey 1988, p. ix). Rejection of Lacan comes in many varieties, however, and in this period it rarely equates to the kind of hostile denigration that characterizes later detractors. Monique David-Menard’s pointed 1982 essay ‘Lacanians Against Lacan,’ for instance, is aimed at the problematic effects produced by the EFP and, in the wake of its dissolution, the attempts to forge a Lacanian orthodoxy among his most ardent disciples:

Lacan thought he would avoid the pitfalls of university learning by correlating his teaching and his analyses, and because he marginalized or excluded the medical or university institutions that originally sheltered his seminar[.] […] In hindsight, it can be asked if this method of teaching, ingenious as it was, did not reinforce the pitfalls of all teachings, and perpetuate a passive, spellbound relation to the discourse of an idealized Master. (David-Menard 1982, p. 100)

In the same spirit, Marcele Marini, in Jacques Lacan: The French Context (1986), explores the political and institutional chaos created by Lacan’s passing, showing how it divided opinion about his work and legacy. ‘So, who was Lacan? Was he a visionary, a shaman, or a guru?’ ponders Marini. ‘Was he a sorcerer’s apprentice or an exemplary practitioner?’ (Marini 1992, p. 3). Once again, there is little sense for Marini that this situa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Lacan the Linguistic Charlatan
• 3. Lacan the Mathematical Charlatan
• 4. Lacan the Scientific Charlatan
• 5. Lacan the Ethical Charlatan
• 6. Lacan the Absolute Charlatan
• 7. Lacan the Master Charlatan
• Back Matter