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http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol8/dit-mension.html
This article seeks to explore the
overlapping of theories of language and subjectivity in the writings
of French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s particular brand of
psychoanalysis takes its inspiration from Sigmund Freud, but Lacan
has radicalized the discipline by opening it up to areas like
linguistics, anthropology and philosophy. The subject as theorized
by Lacan is consequently an individual whose identity is constructed
through language itself, which both ensures the individual’s
socialization but simultaneously splits the subject by cutting him/her
off from the real order of experience.
Considering this background to the
development of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, this article
questions anew the relationship between psychoanalysis and literary
criticism. It is my contention that the link between the two centers
around the crucial position of language within Lacan’s thought.
Showing how the purpose and mechanisms of the literary critic
parallel those of the analyst within the situation of analysis, I
will argue that the objective of both discourses is the uncovering
of truth or meaning. However, both the analyst and the critic are
also condemned to pursue their interpretations through language, as
no metadiscourse is available. Since language in Lacanian
psychoanalysis serves to disguise the unconscious, the truth cannot
be found within language itself, but beyond it: in the interstices
of signification, inter-dit. In this way, it becomes evident
that the analysis of any piece of literature or art necessarily
involves a response that is dictated primarily not by the words on
the page or the paint on the canvas, but a message received by the
subject which addresses the unconscious Other.
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‘Et ignotas animum
dimittit in artes’
He sent his mind in search of knowledge
that was hidden’
1
(Ovid
43 BC to
18 AD)
So I renounced and sadly see:
Where
word breaks off no thing may be
2
(Stefan Georg,
1919)
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La
Lettre Volée
What makes psychoanalytic theory useful for the analysis of culture?
How does the task of the cultural critic equate with that of the
psychoanalyst? Many solutions have already been proposed to these
questions. Early use of psychoanalysis with literature produced what
has come to be known as psycho-biography, with the critic analyzing
the author, and the text functioning as the dream or the flow of
free association through which the latent neuroses of the author
could be uncovered. The theories of Lacan steered psychoanalytic
criticism irreversibly onto the path of post-structuralism, yet
while critics no longer analysed authors, recognizing that this
method ignored the literary aspects of the text, they did analyse
literary characters. Recent criticism has begun to question more
thoroughly the exact nature of the relationship between the two
discourses. Shoshana Felman argues that there is no longer a clear-cut
definition between literature and psychoanalysis, and instead of
positing the critic as analyst, which has traditionally been the
case, she sees the author as analyst, recognizing that even the
analyst’s interpretation is not free from the actions of the
unconscious, a point which Lacan is at pains to emphasise. Peter
Brooks finds an analogy between literature and psychoanalysis in the
concept of transference, equating the reader/text with the analyst/analysand:
‘[i]n the transferential situation of reading as in the
psychoanalytic transference, the reader must grasp not only what is
said but always what the discourse intends, its implications, how it
would work on him. He must, in Lacanian terms, ‘refuse the
text’s demands in order to listen
to its desire’ (qtd. in Kaplan 1990, 6). Brooks moves closer to what
I believe to be the fundamental link between the two discourses in
his description of the concealed desire of the literary text as
parallel to the analysand’s unspoken desire in the situation of
analysis. It is precisely this site of silence that is the focus of
Barbara Johnson’s essay ‘The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan,
Derrida’, which critiques Derrida’s reading of Lacan’s analysis of
The Purloined Letter.
In
‘Le Facteur de la Vérité’, Derrida criticizes Lacan for his
blindness to the functioning of the signifier in the narration, and
for making the signifier itself into the narrative’s truth, thereby
contradicting his own position on the endless play of the signifier
by imposing a fixed meaning on the text. Derrida’s title is a play
on the double meaning of the French word facteur, which
signifies both postman and factor. The title of the essay reveals
its theme, which is the factor of truth, or the delivery of truth in
psychoanalysis. Derrida correctly recognizes the importance of this
seminar in Lacan’s overall body of work. In the French one-volume
version of Ecrits published in 1966, it was placed according
to Lacan’s wishes at the beginning of the book, the only piece which
is displaced from the chronological sequence. Derrida rightly
assumes that this strategic placement of the seminar reveals that it
contains themes which consolidate many of Lacan’s theoretical
concerns. The Purloined Letter loses some of its meaning in
translation: la lettre volée means both to steal and to fly.
This refers to both the letter being stolen, as it is several times
in Poe’s story, and also to the meaning of the letter which flies
off and cannot be pinned down. All of the characters in Poe’s story
are linked through their silence when the letter is in their
possession: the Queen, the minister and the detective Dupin. If the
letter is, as Lacan suggests, ‘synonymous with the original, radical
subject’ (Lacan 1988, 196) then it is the subject’s truth which is
hidden, trapped in an endless play of signifiers, as ‘[o]nly in the
dimension of truth can something be hidden’ (Lacan 1988, 201-2).
Both the analyst and the critic seek to uncover the truth or truths
of the analyst’s speech and the cultural text respectively, and both
attempt to do so through the only medium available to them:
language.
Lacan’s now famous summary of Poe’s
story, ‘a letter always reaches its destination’ (Lacan 1988, 205)
is open to many interpretations, but one of the most important for
the purposes of this article is the primacy of the symbolic order in
the construction of subjectivity. Each of the characters in Poe’s
story is changed in some way through his/her contact with the letter,
and in a similar way, the symbolic order in Lacanian psychoanalysis
shapes and manipulates subjectivity. If there is a truth that can be
accessed therefore, it is a truth beyond the signifier. The last
forty years of structuralist and post-structuralist theory have
effectively dismantled the idea that any text contains a definable,
indisputable truth that is possible to uncover: at least, any truth
of authorial intention. The truth that I refer to is not to be found
within language. Rather, it is a truth that is situated in an
unsignifiable space outside of language. It is not to be found
either in the speech of the analysand or on the written page, but is
concealed in the interstices of language, in the blank spaces
between the words: ‘inter-dit’ (Lacan 1998, 119).
Derrida’s criticisms of the seminar on
The Purloined Letter fall into two strands. He argues firstly that
Lacan ignores the constructed nature of the narrative, seeing the
narrator as a neutral communicant of information, and regarding
the story not as a piece of literature, but as an illustrative
example with a pre-ordained message that Lacan uses didactically.
Further, he argues that Lacan’s analysis conceals the purpose of
his argument, which is not just a comment on signification, but is
also belies the fundamental structuring function of his theories
of sexuality:
What does Dupin know? He knows that
finally the letter is found, and knows where it must be
found in order to return circularly, adequately to its proper
place. This proper place … is the place of castration: woman as
the unveiled site of the lack of a penis, as the truth of the
phallus, that is of castration. (Derrida
1987, 439).
According to Derrida, the signifier takes the place of the phallus
in Lacan’s analysis of the story. Like the letter which is
indivisible and indestructible, so too is the phallus in Lacanian
psychoanalysis. Derrida states that ‘[f]emininity is the truth of
Truth (of) castration, is the best figure of castration, because
in the logic of the signifier it has always already been signified’
(Derrida 1987, 442). Like the letter which always reaches its
destination, so too the phallus is positioned in Lacanian theory
as an originary signifier, master signifier or as Derrida would
have it, a transcendental signifier. The dividing line between
psychoanalysis and deconstruction falls between the insistence of
psychoanalysis on certain fixed points of meaning, and the equal
insistence of deconstruction that signification has no fixity.
However, Johnson points out that deconstruction also has a
transcendental signifier, which is its insistence on the openness
and instability of meaning. Derrida thus copies ‘the gesture of
blank-filling for which he is criticizing Lacan’ (qtd. in Kaplan
1990, 7). Moreover, Derrida ignores the context of Lacan’s reading.
He is not posturing as a literary critic, but admittedly uses the
text for his own purpose, which is the illustration of his
theories. The truth that Derrida refers to, contained according to
Lacan in the letter, is ‘a truth which is not to be divulged’
(Lacan 1988, 198). The seminar on The Purloined Letter
begins this article for the same reason that it begins Lacan’s
Ecrits: it contains in a succinct form many central issues of
Lacanian psychoanalytic theory: language and subjectivity and the
relationship between the two; how the mechanisms of language
structure the subject in a literal manner and the interpolations
of the two in Lacan’s formulations on language which uncover the
dynamics of subjectivity and sexuality. This article will outline
Lacan’s theory of language as the cornerstone of subjectivity, in
order to propose that the mechanisms of signification in the
speech of the analysand and the literary text link the functions
of both analyst and critic in an unending and ultimately
unfulfilling search for truth and/or meaning.
Language: The Real Thing?
For Lacan, subjectivity is firmly rooted in language.3
Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, and Lacan’s rereading of the
unconscious as a system based on the relation of the subject to
signification, has engendered such a radical displacement of
twentieth century thought that he compares it to the Copernican
revolution (Lacan 1989, 182). The Lacanian subject must be
conceptualized outside of the boundaries of traditional Freudian
psychoanalytic theory, although Lacan does use Freud as a starting
point, stating that his writings on dreams and jokes are ‘a
deciphering of pure signifying di-mention [dit-mension]’
(Lacan 1990, 9). In fact, Lacan’s theorizations of the subject are
without precedent in psychoanalysis as they are considerably
influenced by philosophy. Elisabeth Roudinesco points out that in
Freud’s work, the concept of the subject is not crystallized,
although he uses the term. Lacan however is,
[T]rying to introduce the concept [of
the subject] as it has been used in classical philosophy rather
than in psychology …. Man is the subject of knowledge and law.
Lacan is trying to link not Freud’s second topography of the id,
the ego, and the super-ego with a theory of the I, but to connect
together a philosophical theory of the subject and a theory of the
subject of desire derived from Freud and from Hegel via Kojéve’ (Roudinesco
2003, 27).
Lacan’s divergence from Freud at the most basic level is through
his theorizations of the subject as subject of language in the
most literal sense of the word. He/she is structured through the
structures of language. Lacan constantly emphasises the alienation
between language and reality and this is echoed in the alienation
between the subject and the imago in the mirror phase. Ragland-Sullivan
describes this alienation by saying, ‘[l]anguage names things and
thus murders them as full presences, creating an alienation
between the word and the thing, an alienation that infers gaps or
a ternarity into language itself’ (Ragland-Sullivan and Brasher
1991, 4). Language can only stand in for the real thing. It
creates reality: ‘[t]he concept… engenders the thing’ (Lacan 1989,
72). In ‘Encore’ Lacan denies that there is any knowledge beyond
the signifier, saying ‘[t]here is no such thing as a prediscursive
reality. Every reality is founded and defined by a discourse’
(Lacan 1998, 32). He draws on Saussurian linguistics which
similarly highlights the gap between language and reality by
seeking to prove that the relationship between the signifier and
the signified is arbitrary. According to Saussure, it is the
combination of the two components of the sign that produces
meaning: ‘[a]lthough both the signified and the signifier are
purely differential and negative when considered separately, their
combination is a positive fact’ (Rice and Waugh 2001, 40).
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