Literature
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst known for his influential theories on the relationship between language, desire, and the unconscious. He emphasized the role of the "mirror stage" in the formation of the self and the importance of language in shaping our understanding of reality. Lacan's ideas have had a significant impact on literary theory, particularly in the analysis of narrative and the construction of subjectivity.
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12 Key excerpts on "Jacques Lacan"
eBook - ePubFiguring Lacan (RLE: Lacan)
Criticism and the Unconscious
- Juliet Flower MacCannell(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Taylor & Francis(Publisher)
A certain passion for Lacan has now taken over literary studies in a way that calls for some assessment. It is interesting that, in distinction to the adventures of Freud on both sides of the Atlantic and in relationship to Anglo-American culture, Lacan has managed, with relatively little delay, to have an impact simultaneously on French and Anglo-American culture, especially in its literary critical department. Use of his key concepts — the phallicised signifier in both semiotic and feminist criticism (Kristeva, Culler, Gallop, Mitchell), the gaze and suture in film studies (Mulvey, Berger), the figure and the body in deconstructive criticism (Derrida, de Man, Hartman, Spivak), transference in formalist criticism (Felman) — has touched nearly all the leading areas of literary criticism. Literature has responded to Lacan in a much more comprehensive manner than it did to the early uses of Freud for literature. For one thing, Lacan reverses the priorities, not reading literature in the light of Freud, but Freud as literature. While Lacan's influence has been greatest perhaps on those kinds of literary criticism already open to going beyond the narrow confines of literary purity, it is also the case that relatively formalist critics like Shoshana Felman, who was among the first to study and use Lacan (although her methods are closer to Freud), have found in Lacan a rich set of terms for formulating and formalising textual analyses. At the other extreme, studies oriented toward the ‘social’ rather than the ‘literary’ or ‘psychological’, even among Marxists like Jameson, find Lacanian terminology increasingly adaptable to and heuristic for their analyses, particularly in the study of ideology: the Other and the symbolic order appear with more and more frequency and now, almost, as a matter of course in such work. Even when critical distancing is expressed in his regard, nothing like either the wholesale adoption or rejection of Freud for criticism appears in the fate of Lacan and literature. Much more effective as a plague than Freud ever was, Lacan is everywhere and nowhere, like a contagion.
eBook - PDFLacan and the Destiny of Literature
Desire, Jouissance and the Sinthome in Shakespeare, Donne, Joyce and Ashbery
- Ehsan Azari(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
Chapter 4 Lacan, Literary Theory and Criticism We have arrived at a point of departure from the first part of the book, which was devoted to recounting a genealogical scheme of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory concerning desire and what was beyond and external to it. I wish to discuss three major topics in this transitional chapter to the next part of the book, which is aimed at practical Lacanian inquiry into a set of exemplary liter-ary texts. First, I will look at Lacan’s sustained interest and critical approach to literature, and his major influence on various schools of poststructuralist liter-ary studies. This section also intends to show how Lacan’s early exposure of the unconscious in terms of the signifier and linguistic structure, brought psycho-analysis to the centre stage of poststructuralist literary studies. Second, we will throw light on the Lacanian theory of writing that has been largely overlooked in Anglo-American literary studies. This will prepare a way for identifying litera-ture as writing and the sinthome that Lacan developed in the final phase of his teachings . The emphasis in this section will be put on responding to the following prob-lems: What exactly is Lacan’s theory of writing? And what can it add to our understanding of the anatomy and the interpretation of a literary text? This will lead us to our third goal: demonstrating how the fundamental tenets of the Lacanian theory of writing and literature bestow upon literary study an innova-tive interpretative power. From there, I will briefly consider Lacan’s immense influence on a number of important contemporary literary critics. In short, the overall objective in this chapter is to argue that literary Lacan exists and is more important than clinical Lacan when it comes to literature and literary theory.
eBook - PDF- Jennifer Rich(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Humanities E-Books(Publisher)
Psychoanalytic Theories Jacques Lacan Lacan’s work is characterized by the integration of traditional psychoanalysis within a Saussurian linguistic paradigm. One his most important insights—that ‘the uncon -scious is structured like a language’ succinctly demonstrates the unification of the two disciplines into a theory that rewrites the work of Sigmund Freud from the stand -point of linguistics and semiotics. Lacan’s understanding of language squarely rests on the primacy of the signifier in the relationship of the signifier (word, symbol) to the signified (referent). His quasi-mathematical equation S/s (Signifer/signified) is a convenient shorthand to convey the dominating nature of the signifier in the uncon -scious and human communication. For Lacan, the signifier can never be confidently chained to its signified; rather it is linked to other signifiers which are always defying attempts to fix their meanings or referents. It is the task of Lacanian psychoanalysis to anatomize the way in which language structures the unconscious. Lacan’s work is extensive and includes discussions of the practice of psychoanalysis. We will leave this area of his work aside and instead concentrate on elucidating his theories of the unconscious and its constituent parts. In the course of this discussion, we will be con -sidering several of Lacan’s works since no one article is a sufficient overview of his theories. Thus, subheadings will refer to key theories in Lacan’s thought, rather than particular articles. Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall… Understandably, Lacan begins at the beginning in anatomizing the way in which the unconscious is structured like a language. In true psychoanalytic fashion, he starts with the moment of the child’s first self-perception; specifically, the moment when the child recognizes itself in the mirror.
- Tomasz Sawczuk(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Peter Lang Group(Publisher)
3 Literary Studies and American Literature: Lacanian Perspectives 3.1 Literature with Lacan The usefulness and validity of the psychoanalytic thought for the sake of literary analysis has been perhaps the most discussed and divisive issue in the history of literary theory. Nevertheless, it would not be an exaggeration to call psycho- analysis the most influential theoretical underpinning literary criticism has had up to the present day. Recent examples would include the 2014 Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis and A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture published in the same year. Over a hun- dred years, if still perplexed over the matter of applicability of psychoanalytic theories to its field, literary criticism seems to have solved the problem at least partially. In the course of time, some ways of applying psychoanalysis to literary studies have been questioned, mainly due to their incompatibleness, implausi- bility and far-fetched conclusions drawn thereof. Such have been the cases of Marie Bonaparte and of Charles Mauron, whose model of psychobiography, that is psychoanalyzing the writer through his literary work, has been verified as simplistic and anachronistic. Having given up a questionable extrapolation of literary characters onto the person of the author, literary studies needed and wel- comed language-oriented bodies of psychoanalytic thought, theories of Jacques Lacan being undoubtedly among the most seminal and influential ones. As observed by Elizabeth Wright, [w]hereas the deliverances of classical psychoanalysis were used towards providing interpretations of actual texts, the effect of Lacan’s work has been to revitalize literary theory. With the help of such new theoretical understanding, approaches may indeed be made to actual texts, but it is as a result of the light they cast upon language and commu- nication that they are most valuable.
eBook - PDFMore Examples, Less Theory
Historical Studies of Writing Psychology
- Michael Billig(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
It appears that however large a following Lacan attracted in his lifetime, it was never sufficient to satisfy him. In the previous chapter, Paul Ricoeur’s book on Freud was mentioned. Roudinesco recounts that, when Ricoeur’s book appeared, it put the master in a fury because Lacan thought that Ricoeur had paid insufficient attention to his work. There is no doubting that Lacan’s ideas have become extraordinarily influential within sections of the international academic world. Apart from his influence on psycho-analysts and psychiatrists, Lacan’s greatest influence has been in the humanities. One of the most well-known and influential of contemporary social philosophers, Slavoj Žižek, is very much a Lacanian (e.g. Žižek, 2001). Lacan’s impact on literary studies has been apparent for many years. More than thirty years ago, Juliet MacCannell (1986) examined the influence of Lacan’s ideas in her book Figuring Lacan. She suggested that his concepts had ‘touched nearly Influential Return to Freud 117 all the leading areas of literary criticism’ and that ‘Lacan’s words, his terminology, have found a ready response in the literary criticism of our time’ (p. 2). Feminist critics like MacCannell might find some of Lacan’s notions problematic because of their phallocentrism, but nevertheless, she believed that the feminist critique of Lacan was extremely productive because Lacan had formulated many of the concepts necessary for such a critique. Probably the area of literary analysis that has been most deeply influ- enced by Lacanian theory has been film studies. Lacan’s idea of a mirror stage gives the visual image a prominence which it never had in classic Freudianism. Laura Mulvey’s (1975) article in Screen was one of the first to apply Lacanian ideas to the study of films. This paper, which argued that Hollywood films appeal to the psychic structures of male audiences, has been identified as the most important and widely cited article in film theory (MacKinnon, 2001).
eBook - ePub- Justin Wintle(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
LLACAN, Jacques1901–81French psychoanalyst
In the second half of the twentieth century, Jacques Lacan was the psychoanalyst who perhaps did most to confirm the importance and the utterly revolutionary character ofFreud’sdiscovery of the unconscious. If, despite all of the controversies surrounding its allegedly unscientific character, psychoanalysis is today still widely practised and if its theory continues abundantly to influence many academic disciplines, this is to a great extent due to Lacan’s multi-faceted ability to update both Freudian clinics and conceptual models by means of the most recent elaborations of structural linguistics (Saussure, Jakobson), structural anthropology (LéviStrauss) and post-Hegelian philosophy (Kojève,Heidegger).Lacan was born in Paris to a prosperous, middle-class Roman Catholic family, studied medicine and then specialized in psychiatry; his doctoral thesis on self-punishing paranoia, published as De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (1932), enjoyed a great success in avant-garde literary circles for its treatment of human knowledge as essentially paranoiac and resulted in Lacan’s becoming a contributor to the surrealist journal Le Minotaure. In the same years, he also began his psychoanalytic treatment with Rudolph Loewenstein and assiduously attended Alexander Kojève’s influential lectures on Hegel together with other French intellectuals such as Georges Bataille and Raymond Queneau. He made his first appearance on the psychoanalytic scene as early as 1936 when he presented a paper on the so-called ‘mirror stage’ of a child’s development at the 14th Congress of the International Psycho-analytic Association. Although his articles from the 1930s and 1940s were already highly original contributions to Freudian theory (see among others, ‘Le temps logique’ and ‘Propos sur la causalité psychique’, now in écrits, 1966), as well as ‘Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu’, now in Autres écrits
eBook - PDF- M. Brottman(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Chapter 5 Blueprints and Bodies: Lacan and the Pornographic Imagination In his most influential and perhaps most important work, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (transcribed and translated from a series of seminars at the Ecole Practique des Hauts Etudes in Paris in 1973), the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan professed to be a Freudian, and left it up to his students and followers, as he put it, to be Lacanians. Indeed, Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories are rooted in Freudian psychoanalysis, though they have evolved and developed over the years to meet the (often practical) requirements of a constant reformulation of psychoanalytic theory. According to Freud in his 1906 work Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, during the earliest phases of infanthood, the libidinal drives have no definite sexual object, but play around the various erotogenic zones of the body (oral, anal, and phallic). Before gender and identity are established, there is only the rule of the “pleasure principle.” The “reality principle” eventually supervenes in the form of the father who threatens the child’s Oedipal desire for the mother with the punishment of “castration.” The repression of desire makes it possible for the male child to identify with the place of the father, and with a “masculine” role (the Oedipal voyage of the female is apparently much less straightfor- ward). This phase introduces morality and religion, symbolized as “patriarchal law,” and induces the development of a “superego” in the child. However, this repressed desire does not go away and remains in the unconscious, thus producing a radically split subject. Indeed, according to Freud, this force of desire is the unconscious. The work of Jacques Lacan basically involves a reinterpretation and a critique of classical Freudianism in the light of structuralist and post- structuralist theories.
eBook - ePubJacques Lacan
Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Literature
- Jean-Michel Rabaté(Author)
- 2001(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
Slavoj Zizek and Joan Copjec are among the most original critics who have applied these models to film (especially film noir). If one turns to remarks made in Seminar XI in reply to the publication of Merleau-Ponty’s posthumous essay The Visible and the Invisible, one can follow how Lacan has rewritten and subverted a whole French school of phenomenology (one can think of Sartre’s theory of the gaze in Being and Nothingness) in the light of the radical decentring brought about by the Unconscious and the big Other. Lacan’s central insight – that each picture, each image, holds in various blots or stains a trace of the gaze of the Other as the place from which I cannot see myself but know that I am seen from outside – could be said to have triggered Barthes’ idea of the punctum : a ‘point’ from which my specifically personal enjoyment is solicited while also pointing to the space beyond my own death. However the massive impact of Lacanism on film theory, gender studies and cultural studies has often been at the cost of some important omission or the elision of some dimension, be it literary, clinical or conceptual. If I highlight the literary dimension of Lacan’s teaching, it is not to stress the metaphoric style of his often mannered prose or to uncover all the hidden allusions in his dense texts, but to show that most of his important insights entail a revision of literary categories. One can present Lacan as a philosophical or a literary theoretician of psychoanalysis, but my claim here is that he did not use literary or philosophical references as examples or illustrations promoting stylistic indirection or cultural reverberations, but in order to think through and eventually resolve difficult problems
eBook - PDFThe Dialogues in and of the Group
Lacanian Perspectives on the Psychoanalytic Group
- Macario Giraldo(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
PART I CHAPTER ONE Jacques Lacan 1901–1981 B oth Freud and Lacan came as psychoanalysts to visit the USA. Freud presented a view of man that was revolutionary. For America, the land open to new ideas and enterprises, his views were first welcomed. But Freud’s message militated against our tendency to idealise the human condition. In an important sense, his psychoanalytic project represented a critique of America’s assumed role as healer of the world’s wounds. Over the years, Freud’s message has been devalued or at least considered outmoded. In recent years, Jacques Lacan’s “return to Freud” has been gaining ground in the USA. Lacan sought to preserve the basic contributions of the founder of psychoanalysis. For Lacan, the talking cure and the unconscious are intimately connected to the laws of language. It is not surprising, perhaps, that in the USA it is through the fields of literature, philoso-phy, literary criticism, and gender and film studies that Lacan has gained recognition rather than through traditional psychoanalytic institutes. Yet, it is clear that Lacanian psychoanalysis is gaining ground in many clinical circles in this country. Perhaps time is ripe for a return to Freud. Lacanian psychoanalysis could certainly operate as a powerful 3 antidote to the trend in our society to deny the importance of the unconscious by assuming a technico-scientific model of the human. This quick look at Jacques Lacan’s life might serve as an introduc-tion for those clinicians who are just beginning to familiarise them-selves with his contribution to our field. It is my hope that by learning about Lacan, the man, the psycho-analyst, and the thinker, the reader might feel invited to take the jour-ney through these pages where I begin to apply Lacanian concepts in my work with the psychoanalytic group. Jacques-Marie Emile Lacan was born in Paris 1901. He was the first child of Alfred Lacan and Emilie Baudry.
eBook - PDF- Eugene Goodheart(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Columbia University Press(Publisher)
There is no reason for us to accept at face value that his prose speaks the unconscious. The enigmatic, the difficult, the abstract may express unconscious thought, but they are not inextricably and exclusively tied to it; they may be functions of conscious discourse as well. How do we know — by what signs can we tell— that Lacan's prose represents Lacan's unconscious? And what re-lation does Lacan's unconscious and its linguistic expression have (assuming that we can establish the prose as that of unconscious desire) to those of others (an essential question, since an act of communication is necessary if he is to persuade us that he possesses the truth of desire)? Surely, Lacan (as a Freudian) would not invoke the idea of a collective unconscious. Lacan does not estab-148 Freudian Narrative and the Case of Jacques Lacan lish the connection between his unconscious and that of his lis-teners or readers: indeed, he prides himself on his incommunica-bility. Lacan's communication exists paradoxically in the charisma that may arise from the hermetic—from the appeal to a portentous mystery. Most expositions of Lacan come to rest in the revelation of his literary achievement, in a kind of satisfaction that Lacan's true home is literature. Such satisfaction strikes me as problematic. It ignores the relationship of writing itself to repression. Can desire be identified with or reduced to language? Bowie suggests the difficulties, without fully realizing their implications, when he draws an analogy between an externally imposed political censor-ship and the unconscious censorship that marks all writing: era-sures, blanks and disguises. Bowie remarks with a mixture of admiration and misgiving. What Lacan has done by way of his compacted linguistic meta-phors is restore to the unconscious materials upon which psy-choanalysis operates an Edenic continuity and fullness quite be-lied by other elements of his argument in Fonction et C h a m p .
eBook - PDF- Paul H. Fry(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Yale University Press(Publisher)
166 chapter 13 Jacques Lacan in Theory Reading: Lacan, Jacques. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious.” In The Criti-cal Tradition , pp. 1129–1148. There is an obvious link between the work we reviewed of Peter Brooks and this particular essay of Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Uncon-scious,” that I’d like to begin by emphasizing. It concerns the part of Lacan’s argument that is probably most accessible to you after your tour through structuralism and offers perhaps the best means of understanding the rel-evance of Lacan for literary theory. Brooks treated the arabesque toward completion in fictional narrative as the sustaining of desire through a series of détours , inadequate or im-proper endpoints risked and avoided, resulting in a continuation of desire until a proper ending is reached—an ending that corresponds to what Freud posited as the desire of the organism to die in its own way and not according to the modification or pressure of something from without. This sequence of détours in the elaboration of a narrative plot Brooks called metonymy, which by this time we should recognize as what happens in the sequencing of signs along the axis of combination as described by Jakobson. But Brooks remarks also that at the same time there is a binding of this sequence of signs—of events in the case of a plot. There is an effect of unity, and this Jacques Lacan in Theory 167 effect he calls “metaphor.” Something like what Jakobson calls the “poetic function” has been superimposed on the metonymic axis of combination in such a way that the feeling of unity, the sense of the recurrence of iden-tity in the signs used, is an impression we carry away with us but can also confirm exegetically. Metaphor unifies the plot even through the zigs and zags of its delay. The delay of fulfillment is most obvious, of course, in a marriage plot and most immediately intelligible there—but there are many sorts of plot, all of which elaborate a form of desire.
eBook - PDFDowncast Eyes
The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought
- Martin Jay(Author)
- 1993(Publication Date)
- University of California Press(Publisher)
Lacan ab-sorbed many of the negative lessons of the failure of that project, which he combined with others he had derived from the interwar Surrealist in-terrogation of the visual. The result was a radical recasting of Freud's thought, which focused attention as never before on the issue of sight. Wilhelm Fliess in a letter a few days later. For an extensive discussion of its signifi-cance, see Marthe Robert, From Oedipus to Moses: Freud's Jewish Identity, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York, 1976), chap. 4. 5. The most extensive history of the French reception is Elisabeth Roudinesco, La Bataille de cent am: Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 1, 1885-1939 (Paris, 1982), vol. 2, 1925-1985 (Paris, 1986); for a critique of its teleological reading of that history as a prelude to Lacan, see Paul Bercherie, The Quadrifocal Oculary: The Epistemology of the Freudian Heritage, Economy and Society, 15, 1 (February, 1986), pp. 23-70. See also SherryTurkIe, Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud's French Revo-lution (New York, 1978); and Marion Michel Oliner, Cultivating Freud's Garden in France (Northvale, N.J., 1988). 330 THE SPECULAR SUBJECT OF IDEOLOGY Lacan's revision, as it were, of psychoanalysis profoundly influenced a wide variety of French intellectuals from Marxist political theorists like Louis Althusser to film critics like Christian Metz. And even when femi-nists like Luce Irigaray challenged the gender implications of his work, they retained-indeed, intensified-his critique of the visual constitu-tion of subjectivity. This chapter will explore Lacan's seminal contribu-tion to the antiocular discourse and examine one of its major offshoots, Althusser's analysis of ideology. Following a discussion in the next chapter of the work of Foucault and Debord on surveillance and the spectacle, Lacan's impact on film theory and feminism will be analyzed.
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