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[[Psychoanalytic ]] [[Theory ]] and Criticism: 3. The Post-Lacanians

In the late 1930s jacques [[lacan ]] began challenging a [[number ]] of conclusions long advanced by many psychoanalytic theorists and [[analysts]]. Lacan not only inveighed against the approach of American ego psychologists and its emphasis on the [[stability ]] of the ego as a [[betrayal ]] of [[Freudian ]] [[thought ]] but redefined the ego in relation to the "[[subject]]" of [[structural ]] [[linguistics ]] and [[semiotics]]. In his "[[return ]] to [[Freud]]," Lacan attempted to find rigorously psychoanalytic explanations for the ego’s relation to the most important of psychoanalytic concepts—the unconscious—the [[psychic ]] [[agency ]] Lacan reconceived in semiotic [[terms ]] and claimed was "[[structured ]] like a [[language]]." Consistent with the poststructuralist reconception of the "subject," this line of thought eventually led to far-reaching changes in psychoanalytic [[practice ]] in [[France ]] and beyond regarding how [[therapy ]] is conducted and how it effects cures.

This new [[thinking]], characteristic of post–World post–[[World]] War II anti-[[Hegelianism ]] among [[French ]] intellectuals, also engendered widespread reconsideration of psychoanalysis’s institutional function to the point that many in France took Lacan to be a prime instigator (because he was challenging established institutions) of the May [[1968 ]] uprisings by French students and [[workers]]. In the 1970s and 1980s a new wave of French theorists and critics trained or influenced by Lacan began to extend or revise [[psychoanalysis ]] even further to address institutional and [[ideological ]] issues more directly. They argued that Lacan did not go far enough in probing precisely the areas characterizing his [[discourse]]: the psychoanalytic dimensions of the "subject" ; psychoanalysis as both a [[clinical ]] practice and a [[cultural ]] institution; and psychoanalysis as ideologically committed and engaged.

These post-Lacanians included contributors in the late 1960s and 1970s to the French journal Tel Quel,feminists influenced by [[deconstruction]], and Continental critics of the [[political ]] [[Left]]. Some tended to combine Lacan’s insights with [[other ]] perspectives as an attempt to galvanize both sides but made no fundamental changes in Lacan’s precepts. hélène cixous’s criticism belongs in this [[category ]] in that she incorporated [[Lacanian ]] strategies in [[feminism ]] and deconstruction but did not challenge psychoanalytic discourse. This "additive" approach includes the ongoing [[work ]] of Shoshana Felman, julia kristeva, Stephen Heath, and Colin MacCabe, among [[others]]. More demanding of concessions from psychoanalysis is the [[theoretical ]] orientation of luce [[irigaray]]. In yet [[another ]] group are [[judith ]] [[butler ]] as well as gilles [[deleuze ]] and félix [[guattari]], who have moved beyond psychoanalysis to challenge and recast its theoretical concerns and its function as an institutional [[representation ]] of [[culture]].

Throughout the last thirty years, many of these theorists have debated the [[nature ]] of Lacan’s account of [[sexuation]]. However, a group of Lacanian critics that emerged in the 1990s express less interest in questioning the way [[sexual ]] [[difference ]] [[structures ]] subject [[formation ]] in Lacan’s work as Irigaray and Butler do. Instead, they explore Lacan’s [[ideas ]] [[about ]] the [[Real ]] to reinvigorate metaphysics—in [[particular ]] the [[philosophy ]] of immanuel [[kant]], g. w. f. [[hegel]], and karl [[marx ]] and friedrich engels. A group of intellectuals often referred to as the "Slovenian Lacanians" falls into this category. Among the better known of these intellectuals is slavoj žižek, who rereads Hegel’s philosophy through Lacan and resituates Lacan as a [[philosopher]]. In Tarrying with the [[Negative]]: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of [[Ideology ]] (1993), for example, Žižek builds a [[case ]] for considering Lacan as a [[transcendental ]] philosopher on the basis that Lacan’s [[psychoanalytic theory ]] offers a sort of critique of pure [[desire ]] as it probes the question how desire is possible (3). Žižek’s elaboration of Lacan’s thought has not been without some controversy, however. In [[Contingency]], [[Hegemony]], [[Universality ]] (2000) Butler, Ernesto [[Laclau]], and Žižek debate the viability of [[the Real]], as well as whether the Lacanian view of subject formation is compatible with antonio gramsci’s [[notion ]] of hegemony. More recently, [[Alenka Zupančič ]] has followed in Žižek’s path, combining psychoanalytic theory and [[social ]] philosophy by [[interpreting ]] Kant through Lacan, and vice versa, in [[Ethics ]] of the Real: Kant, Lacan (2000).

Finally, scholars such as Lawrence A. Rickels and [[Todd Dufresne ]] have made specific aspects of Lacan’s theory a less prominent feature of their work; they critique instead the [[development ]] of psychoanalytic theory as an institutional discourse. In Rickels’s [[three]]-volume [[Nazi ]] Psychoanalysis (2002), for example, he illuminates the ways that psychoanalysis gained legitimacy as it was coopted to advance the war causes of the [[German ]] and American military during [[World War II]]. Todd Dufresne takes a similarly historical approach in reevaluating the ideas of sigmund freud and Lacan by tracing the cultural influences on psychoanalytic thought. Although these more [[recent ]] thinkers take key [[concepts ]] such as the Real in new directions or reassess greater psychoanalysis as a [[whole]], one of the primary remaining touchstones for intellectuals interrogating psychoanalytic theory has been the issue of [[sexual difference]].

Kristeva, for [[instance]], has followed Lacan in her conception of the subject and in her problematical approach to the [[woman ]] question: "A woman cannot ‘be’; it is something which does not even belong in the [[order ]] of [[being]]" (Marks and de Courtivron 137). As for [[writing]], Kristeva sees [[women ]] as facing two alternatives: either valorizing "[[phallic ]] dominance, associated with the privileged [[father]]-daughter [[relationship]], which gives rise to the tendency toward [[mastery]]," or valorizing "a silent underwater [[body]]," which entails the [[choice ]] of marginalization (Marks and de Courtivron 166). The alternative she proposes is that women assume a negative function, one that would reject whole structures and explode social [[codes]].

Likewise, Michèle Montrelay, who sees her writing as a contribution to a better [[understanding ]] of the laws, [[structure]], and [[dynamic ]] of the [[unconscious]], is convinced that "in our [[civilization]], psychoanalysis, as theory and as [[treatment]], is one of the most precious, highest, most [[symbolic ]] forms of [[freedom]]" (Jardine and Menke 254) and emphasizes the political aspect of her work. In L’Ombre et le nom (1977)she attempts to probe psychoanalytic concepts, such as the assumption of woman as a "[[dark continent]]" and others concerning [[gender ]] relations that continue to function within Freudian discourse. Often close to representing [[femininity ]] in traditional terms—the [[feminine ]] as the shadow and the [[outside ]] that supports culture—Montrelay is also concerned with exposing the phallocentric bias in the Lacanian [[ethical ]] hierarchy that privileges [[the Symbolic ]] over the [[Imaginary]]. Rather than attempting to reverse the hierarchy, she proposes to shift the emphasis away from a hierarchy of values and to [[regard ]] [[the Imaginary]], not as "the poor relative," but as necessary to give consistency to the Symbolic (Montrelay 155–56).

Of course, many of these thinkers have been concerned with the problematical nature of the question of feminine [[subjectivity ]] in Lacan. By discussing the subject solely in [[masculine ]] terms, Lacan canceled out woman, and only too often he has reaffirmed that it is in the [[phallus ]] that we find "the [[signifier ]] intended to designate as a whole the effects of the [[signified]], in that the signifier [[conditions ]] [[them ]] by its [[presence ]] as signifier" ([[Écrits]]: A Selection 285). Many have agreed with Lacan’s notion that "there is no woman but excluded by the nature of things which is the nature of [[words]]" (Séminaire 68) but have objected to what follows: "and it has to be said that if there is one [[thing ]] about which women themselves are complaining at the [[moment]], it is well and truly that—it is just that they don’t [[know ]] what they are saying, which is all the difference between them and me" (68). Indeed, much effort has been spent turning this [[lack ]] to the advantage of women by devising strategies that, by revealing the ways in which femininity disrupts symbolic structures, also indicate the ways in which it circulates and inscribes itself. Woman’s language, according to many feminists, will be found by returning to the pre-[[Oedipal ]] union with the [[mother]].

However, feminists such as Butler question whether such a return is even possible and instead seek other strategies for destabilizing structures that reify phallic privilege in the Symbolic. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the [[Subversion ]] of [[Identity ]] (1990)Butler criticizes Lacan’s theoretical [[construction ]] of the Symbolic on the grounds that it is too deterministic and does not account for the variations, imperfections, and alterations that can take [[place ]] in the signifying structures defining gender and reinforcing phallic privilege: "The alternative perspective that emerges from psychoanalytic theory suggests that multiple and coexisting identifications produce conflicts, convergences, and innovative dissonances within gender configurations which contest the fixity of masculine and feminine placements with respect to paternal law" (67). Contending that there is no [[inside ]] or outside to culture, no a priori [[state ]] of being, prediscursive [[reality]], or pre-Oedipal state, Butler also reworks Lacan’s ideas about the [[mirror ]] [[stage ]] and the Symbolic in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993)to demonstrate how [[universal ]] applications of Lacan’s theories fail to describe a number of complications—that [[identification ]] and desire are not always [[separate]], mutually exclusive developments and that heterosexist assumptions underlie the Oedipal [[narrative ]] in psychoanalysis.

Similarly committed to a more radical strategy, other critics of psychoanalysis do accept primary semiotic and [[structuralist ]] advances of Lacan’s thought and have worked in light of these assumptions to displace the traditional [[idea ]] of a subject (as an ego) and to deconstruct the traditional Freudian idea of desire. This is the direction of the transformative psychoanalytic critiques of Nicholas [[Abraham]], Maria Torok, Deleuze, and Guattari—the last two, in particular, influencing those who wanted to go "beyond" primary Freudian concepts and Lacanian innovations such as the subject, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. They focus mainly on "[[Oedipus]]," Freud’s [[master ]] plot for familial and social organization, the narrative that evokes, first, [[fantasies ]] of [[unity ]] expressing [[infantile ]] idealizations of parental care; second, fantasies of [[alienation]], rupture, and "morcellation" associated with the assertion of paternal and cultural [[authority]]; and [[third]], the [[partial ]] reclamation of [[childhood ]] fantasies in conjunction with [[adult ]] [[responsibility ]] and maturity. Likewise, several French feminists of the 1960s, Cixous among them, sought to meld psychoanalytic procedures with [[feminist ]] projects for the reclamation of women’s culture.

Shoshana Felman’s work belongs in this area. Authoritative, wide-ranging, and always lucid, she has helped to shape Lacanian studies since the mid-1970s. And along with Anthony Wilden, Jane Gallop, and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, she has been committed to exploring [[literary ]] and cultural criticism in relation to what she frequently calls the force of Lacan’s teaching, his "revolutionary" pedagogy. Her work indicates, moreover, the movement of Lacanian studies in the 1980s toward an appreciation of Lacanian practice as actively engaged with [[postmodern ]] and avant-garde modes of thought.

For Felman, Lacan’s great contribution to contemporary culture is his teaching about rhetorical "performance" and "cognition," doing and [[knowing]]. She draws on [[speech]]-act philosopher J. L. Austin’s definition of the "[[performative]]" as rhetorical enactment, language use as separate as possible from what it conveys, a pure doing. The "constative," or cognitive, is what [[rhetoric ]] creates, [[meaning ]] as pure [[sense ]] conveyed apart from how it came to be. The "revolutionary" [[dimension ]] of Lacan’s pedagogy for Felman is the dialogism of the performative and constative, how in practice they undermine, deconstruct, and yet inform each other. The interactions of doing and [[undoing ]] [[form ]] the dynamic basis, Felman says, of psychoanalysis’s "ineradicable newness" (Literary 12), its evergreen vitality and unceasing "revolutionary" nature. Building on this insight, Lacan has shown [[experience]], largely unconscious, to be structured like a language, since [[human ]] [[behavior ]] manifests the [[dialectical ]] interaction of [[conscious ]] and unconscious experience, the [[double ]] writing of that which is enacted beyond what can ever be known at any one moment.

In [[Jacques Lacan ]] and the Adventure of Insight (1987)Felman wants to bring pedagogy into psychoanalysis, which Lacan conceived to be fundamentally and already a teaching anyway, and to show that a pedagogue should teach in relation to the student’s "unmeant [[knowledge]]" (77), the unconscious as it is inscribed but at the same [[time ]] hidden in teaching as a kind of [[text]]. The "unmeant" is of paramount importance because "teaching, like [[analysis ]] has to deal not so much with lack of knowledge as with [[resistances ]] to knowledge" (79), unmeant knowledge being significant because its lapses and breaks are [[unconsciously ]] motivated. In a [[reversal ]] of priorities, Felman virtually promotes "[[ignorance]]" and decenters "learning" as the primary preoccupation of teaching. Felman’s rendition of Lacan is an implicit plea for adoption of a [[complex ]] and subtle response to pedagogic discourse: respect for the "Other" conceived as the unconscious within language, respect given through the performative enactment of [[reading ]] the unconscious text by actively recognizing resistances and absences and "unmeant" knowledge. Felman argues in her discussions of [[literature]], criticism, and education that [[humans ]] must read and [[interpret ]] psychoanalytically so as to respond to the radical [[alterity ]] of the impossibilities posed by the Other. In actual practice, her reading of literature focuses on the rhetorical dimension of hiddenness in [[texts]], that which emerges when one reads the patterns of rhetorical strategy in a text as well as the achieved effects of rhetoric.

[[Gilles Deleuze ]] and Félix Guattari have moved in their own work from avant-garde experiments and probings of contemporary discourse to radical discursive practices. As an academic philosopher, for example, Deleuze began his career with typically "modern" topics such as those in Empirisme et subjectivité (1953, [[Empiricism ]] and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, 1991)and La [[Philosophie ]] critique de Kant (1963, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The [[Doctrine ]] of the Faculties, 1984). Guattari began his work as a [[psychoanalyst ]] trained in Lacan’s [[school ]] in [[Paris]], and beginning in 1953 he also practiced at La Borde [[Clinic]], a radical experiment in providing noninstitutionalized versions of therapy. In different ways, in other words, both theorists performed early "immanent" critiques of contemporary psychoanalytic and other [[discourses]]. When they began [[working ]] together, they moved toward radically "transformative" critique of the sort called for by Cixous and Irigaray.

Deleuze and Guattari, in short, seek to critique psychoanalysis in order to transform it altogether, ultimately to destroy it by unmasking its ideological foundation in the values of bourgeois culture. Accordingly, their move in this area is aimed at psychoanalytic "theory" but just as intently at psychoanalysis as an institutional representation of culture in its bourgeois and patriarchal dimensions. Their L’Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (1972, [[Anti-Oedipus]]: [[Capitalism ]] and [[Schizophrenia]], 1983)and Mille Plateaux (1980, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1987)try to dissect psychoanalysis so as to institute truly new understandings and discourses for contemporary culture on the ashes of the old along three lines. First, they try to expose the nature of [[repression ]] and [[castration ]] as fundamental to psychoanalytic machinery. Second, they critique the psychoanalytic characterization of the unconscious as an [[ideal ]] of static being rather than [[active ]] production. And third, they try to expose the situating of discourse within the hegemonic constraints of the Oedipal narrative.

Deleuze and Guattari reject this notion of repression and castration as "molar" —blanket conceptions, a cluster of suppressed assumptions united in an ideologically motivated pattern that is taken mistakenly to be "[[scientific]]" and "[[naturally]]" the way humans function. The buried supposition behind the term "castration," as Deleuze and Guattari show, is "that there is finally only one sex, the masculine, in relation to which the woman, the feminine, is [also] defined as a lack, an [[absence]]" (Anti-Oedipus 294). Deleuze and Guattari challenge this hegemonic version of cultural regulation as promulgated to advance a "molar" (and essentialist) conception of males. By contrast, the "molecular," nonessentialist conception of the unconscious, like the repression that engenders it, "[[knows ]] [[nothing ]] of castration," precisely because castration as such is an ideologically motivated [[construct ]] not attributable to the operation of repression (295). Deleuze and Guattari seek to explode the [[concept ]] of castration as a form-giving and [[unifying ]] concept and [[speak ]] instead of the unconscious producing positive "multiplicities" and "flows" (295), potentially not just "two [[sexes]], but n sexes," perhaps "a hundred thousand" (296).

What allows the [[constitution ]] of such "molar" conceptions of castration to begin with is Freud’s conception of the unconscious as a static representation. The fact of the unconscious as such is not objectionable, and to a certain point Freud conceived of the unconscious as the site of the "production of desire." Deleuze and Guattari, without irony, call this conception the "great discovery of psychoanalysis" (Anti-Oedipus 24). The problem comes, rather, in Freud’s attempt to bury the unconscious "beneath a new brand of [[idealism]]" and to associate it with the representation(rather than production) of "a classical theater" of "[[myth]], [[tragedy]], [and] [[dreams]]" (24). In short, Freud, and Lacan after him, connects the unconscious, in a detour through Greek myth, inextricably with the [[family ]] and the ideological investments inherent to the West.

The final target of Deleuze and Guattari’s attack on psychoanalysis and patriarchal culture in general is Oedipus. The three areas of their attack are interrelated, and certainly the attack on Oedipus recapitulates that on the "familial" version of the unconscious. But Oedipus is an even broader concept and must be seen not merely as an ideological [[interpretation ]] of [[psychological ]] functions but in a broader, political sense, as Mark Seem asserts, "the [very] figurehead of [[imperialism ]] [and] ‘colonization’" (Anti-Oedipus xx). Oedipus is a construct "more powerful . . . than psychoanalysis, than the family, than ideology, even joined together" (122) and encompasses the whole of the hegemonic [[regime ]] that is "Western culture" ; it is "Oedipus" at this encompassing level that Deleuze and Guattari oppose in their fervor to be "anti-Oedipal."

Deleuze and Guattari [[project ]] the "post-Oedipal" as a world without the [[genital ]] and Oedipal organization characteristic of Western culture. The [[loss ]] of this traditional genital [[economy ]] will yet produce, among many other things, a radically liberated human body, a "body without organs" (Thousand 285), a body of [[energy ]] "flows" and "excesses" that is capable of "becoming an [[animal]]" (259) in the specific sense that psychoanalysis, with its Western [[belief ]] in castration and Oedipal commitments, "doesn’t [[understand ]] becoming an animal" (259). However one may understand "becoming an animal" or the a-linear [[logic ]] and [[irrationality ]] of the "rhizome" (or a-paternal) economy of culture as discussed in A Thousand Plateaus, it is clear that Deleuze and Guattari [[want ]] to violate and suspend Western ideology as they find it figured in the [[schemata ]] of psychoanalysis. They advocate the pursuit of ratios and economies of experience other than those Freud could conceive in his own recapitulation of the values and commitments already evident in Western culture from the ancient [[Greeks ]] forward. As literary critics, they tend to be deconstructive readers who challenge and dismantle the unities of realism and its [[metonymic ]] effects of familiarity in a text. Ultimately, they [[wish ]] to deconstruct the textual authority of the paternal [[metaphor ]] that is at the heart of Oedipus.

[[Bibliography]]

See also judith butler, hélène cixous, gilles deleuze and félix guattari, [[french theory ]] and criticism: 5. 1945 to 1968 and 6. 1968 and after, luce irigaray, julia kristeva, [[jacques lacan]], and slavoj žižek.

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