This is the second and final written part of my MA exam. In this part, I was asked to evaluate the relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis to the study of the humanities. Issues that came up during the oral defense include the materiality of language in Lacan (as cited in an article where Lacan interprets that…
Tag Archives: Jacques Lacan
[A demagogue; Image from Teaching American History] What is a regime of signs? A semiotic machine, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari state in A Thousand Plateaus. In “On Several Regimes of Signs,” they call Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist linguistic of the sign—the linguistic system that privileges the signifier and its signifying function—semiology—but one regime of…
[The psychoanalytic couch; An Associated Press photo by Bob Wands] [Continues "Another Bar"] As a preliminary formulation, Fink sums up the process by which the subject is “alienat[ed] by and in the Other [as language]” and then “separate[d] from the [m]Other [as desire]” through the prohibition of the fOther (as law (i.e. prohibitive/symbolizing/socializing language)) as…
[Continues "Beyond the Bar"] Central to the psychoanalytic schema is that which thwarts/frustrates/disillusions the alignment/overlapping/matching/filling of the two lacks/desires (by two subjects, e.g. the mOther and the child), what Lacan calls the paternal function—the father in Freud’s Oedipus—which is associated with the primordial signifier, i.e. that which signals the subject’s entrance into language, the Symbolic…
[Mother and Child by Esther Leli] [Continues "The Barred S"] The coming-to-be of the Lacanian subject does not end with alienation. The process of becoming a subject, that is, goes beyond the location—the pointing out/to—of the place where it is not (the place where it can potentially be). Differentiating Lacanian psychoanalysis from structuralism strictly speaking,…
Bruce Fink presents in The Lacanian Subject his interpretation of Jacques Lacan’s theory of subjectivity. In contrast to the ego (in its many guises: the individual, the conscious subject, the mirror image, the subject of the statement), Fink states that Lacan’s subject—the subject of the “return to Freud,” the true subject of psychoanalysis—is none other…
It has been a common thing in academic circles to talk about the travails of scholars-in-training (i.e. graduate students) in the field of the humanities, most notably in the “superfluous” concentrations of philosophy, literature, history, anthropology . . . (where scholars-in-training spend at least seven years of their “most productive lives” (their twenties) reading books…
In delineating the unconscious as the (no longer merely psychic, as in Freud, but Symbolic (social?)) repository, as it were, of repressed elements, Jacques Lacan stresses that the rules (the Law) these elements are subject to (that determine the shape, as it were, of the unconscious, what it looks like, what’s in there, what happens…
[A schema of (Real) being and the (Symbolic) Other from lacan.com] In a previous post I suggested that in contrast to Alexandre Leupin‘s ontological presentation of Jacques Lacan’s three orders, Bruce Fink in The Lacanian Subject offers a durational model, i.e. a model that portrays the relationship between the orders as historical configurations, i.e. as…
[Image from the movie version of Everything is Illuminated] [A review of the psychoanalytic ontology of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, the Real would be helpful in reading this post.] There’s this passage in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated that, in the midst of the romanticism that permeates the book, stands out perhaps as so…
