Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics

348 Pages·1996·28.84 MB·English

by  Willy Apollon

LACAN,
POLITICS,
AESTHETICS
WILLY ApOLLON AND
RICHARD FELDSTEIN,
EDITORS
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
SUNY Series, Psychoanalysis and Culture
Henry Sussman, Editor
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 1996 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lacan, politics, aesthetics / Willy Apollon and Richard Feldstein,
editors
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914-2371-9 (alk. paper). - ISBN 0-7914-2372-7 (pbk.
alk. paper)
1. Psychoanalysis and culture. 2. Psycholinguistics-Social
aspects. 3. Political psychology. 4. Aesthetics-Psychological
aspects. 5. Lacan, Jacques, 1901- . 1. Apollon, Willy.
II. Feldstein, Richard.
BF175.4.C84L33 1995
150. 19'5'092-dc20 94-10967
CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
For Joan Dagle and Rich Weiner
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction I
Richard Feldstein
Xl
Introduction II
Willy Apollon xix
the politics of desire
The Fetish of the Party
Slavoi Zizek 3
A Lasting Heresy, the Failure of Political Desire
Willy Apollon 31
Subject of the Gaze for Another Gaze
Richard Feldstein 45
jouissance, desire, and the law
Facing Fascism: A Feminine Politics of Jouissance
Juliet Flower MacCannell 65
A Verdict on the Paternal Function:
Law, the Paternal Metaphor, and Paternity Law
Judith Roof 101
vii
viii Contents
the politics of mastery
The Discourse of the Master
Ellie Ragland 127
literary representation
Othello's Lost Handkerchief:
Where Psychoanalysis Finds Itself
r.
Elizabeth Bellamy 151
Reading Hamlet with Lacan
Bruce Fink 181
Kundera and Lacan: Drive, Desire, and Oneiric Narration
Maire Jaanus 199
Fatal Conjunctions: Gendering Representations of Death
Elisabeth Bronfen 237
graphic representation
Dali and Lacan: Painting the Imaginary Landscapes
Hanjo Berressem 263
musical representation
Orpheus and Eurydice: Muses of Music
Peter Widmer 297
filmic representation
Aliens and the Psychotic Experience
Danielle Bergeron 305
Aliens or Staging the Trauma
Lucie Cantin 315
cross-genre representation
Lost Objects: Duras's Minimalist Cinema of Remembrance
Catherine Portuges 327
Index 337
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We wish to thank Ericka McGowan for her work in preparing
the index for this volume. We would also like to thank Maria Cimini
and Chris DeGuilio for their aid in helping us to prepare the final
manuscript of Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics. We would especially like
to thank Rich Weiner, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Rhode Island
College, and Joan Dagle, Chair of the Department of English when
we compiled this anthology, for all their support. Without them, this
volume would have been delayed for several years.
ix
Richard Feldstein
INTRODUCTION I
By the end of the 1980s the first phase in the reception of
Lacan's work by the English-speaking audience drew to a close.
This stage presented numerous introductions to Lacan's writing
that both defined basic concepts like the big Other, petit objet a,
desire, and jouissance, and contextualized them in relation to each
other. Because most of Lacan's seminars have not yet been trans
lated for the Anglo-American audience and since his concepts do
not easily lend themselves to intellectual comprehension, other
texts will no doubt surface to redefine basic terminology and
founding principles. Nonetheless, in the 1990s, we have entered
into a second phase in the transmission of Lacan's work. In this
stage, some writers continue to develop basic concepts that have
proved confusing, while others concern themselves with the cul
tural connotations of Lacanian analysis. The recent exploration of
multiculturalism has induced a second look at Lacan's work.
Spearheaded by philosophical and literary activists like Slavoj
Ziiek and Juliet Flower MacCannell, this second wave of transmis
sion applies Lacan's theories to cultural studies-to issues of race,
gender, and class that help to delineate the boundaries of the new
xi
xii Introduction I
psychopolitical movements that are a part of the cultural ethos of
our time.
Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics is part of the second phase in the
dissemination of Lacan's thought through the cultural field. In this
volume psychoanalysts, cultural theorists, and literary critics
demonstrate the relevance of the unconscious economy to the
wider field of cultural studies. These writers have adopted a variety
of rhetorical positions when engaging cultural issues that deal with
representation, ideology, class, and gender. This volume was con
ceived to apply psychoanalytic cultural criticism to a broad range
of political and aesthetic issues related to the legal and ideological
superstructure of contemporary society. Our hope was to offer a di
versified anthology to understand relevant Lacanian concepts as
well as to provide a conceptual network to challenge initiated
readers.
The initial part of the volume is divided into three sections,
the first of which, "the politics of desire," contains essays by Slavoj
Zizek, Willy Apollon, and Richard Feldstein. In these essays the
writers examine the cultural dynamics of a range of political dis
courses legitimized by post-enlightenment bourgeois societies.
Zizek, in particular, is interested in the logic of the Communist
party as a carrier of the sublime body that becomes a fetish repudi
ating castration. According to Zizek, the political fetish presents a
lack in the Other where nothing is missing. This lack guarantees a
neutral knowledge or metalanguage of objective laws that enabled
Stalin and his cohorts to claim factual objectivity for themselves,
although their only claim to objective meaning was the performa
tive nature of language. Apollon also questions the foundation of
politicized laws that legitimize authority while repressing any in
vestigation of lithe foundation of the Law as legitimate to authorize
political discourse." From this perspective, State authorities-in
cluding the police and military establishment-perpetuate a mo
nopoly of violence in the practice of their political will as an end in
itself. By repressing an inspection of the political foundation and
jouissance related to it, the State regulates violence against those
who seek to uncover the cultural fissure that comprises the lack in
the Other and the monopoly of violence used to hide this lack. My
own article also examines the impulse to construct a symbolic orga
nization that evades the lack in the Other, the fissure in its cultural
matrix, and the attempt to overwrite it within the framework of
fantasy. I claim that the phallic implementation of political power