LACAN the Human Science
Edited with a foreword, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, March 1991, 191 p.
Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Article
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Colloquium: Lacan and the Human Sciences
Nov. 20-22,1986
Sponsored by the Dept. of French & Italian and The Center for French & Francophone Studies, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Lacan and the Human Sciences, a colloquium held at Louisiana State University Nov. 20-22, 1986, was one of the latest in a series of the type "Lacan and...": academic gatherings devoted to the work of Jacques Lacan. The Center for French & Francophone Studies and the Department of French & Italian of Louisiana State University invested heavily in the presentation, bringing speakers from territory as diverse as Berkeley and Paris.
For those who have been following the various Lacan conferences in recent years (Ottawa, Milwaukee, Amherst, New York City) the level of address was refreshing and diversified if not entirely devoted to the work of Jacques Lacan proper, in each case.
The structure of the colloquium was perhaps the most evident aspect of a Lacanian discourse. It was framed by two women- Jane Gallop at the beginning and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan at the end. We know that the question of the place of a woman in phallic discourse is central to the Freudian project according to Lacan. Thus, it is always crucial to attend to what a particular woman has to say with regard to her relation to Lacanian theory. In two completely different ways both Gallop and Ragland-Sullivan posed the question of their relation to the discourse of psychoanalysis. If it can be said that Freud introduced the question of the science of the unconscious, Lacan introduced the terms of the science in question: the relation of any subject to the signifier.
Even the form of the discourse of the women bore the mark of their encounter with phallic ambiguity, and in no uncertain terms pushed forward the implicit doubts. Jane Gallop, opening the colloquium, articulated the doubt as such. She spoke from "notes" rather than a formal "text" which seemed to invite one to think about her subject, which she specifically identified as "strange bedfellows". The "strange" of the phrase poses the query into the "bedfellows" of psychoanalysis (especially Lacanian) and feminism. One is tempted to say that this bed-fellowship is a "bad"-fellowship in that one of the "fellows" is female.
Gallop's concern was to show how the discourse of Lacan in the "human sciences" (a term unknown to American academic structure) has depended largely on feminism and literary studies (studies of reading and writing) to disseminate its message to the English-speaking intellectual communities. She related this to the fact that the students of literature have to do with the "human" in the way that psychoanalysis has to do with the "human". In this, she does not follow Lacan, of course, for whom the "human" has nothing to do with the subject, which is only implicated in a discourse of desire, not a discourse of the human: for Lacan, there is no future in which the human sciences will wed psychoanalysis.
Where Jane Gallop brilliantly hesitates at the door of psychoanalytic discourse, Ellie Ragland-Sullivan takes one into the consultation room to experience the mind of the Lacanian analyst musing about the next intervention with the couched subject. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan's paper a prepared "text"- was nonetheless fragmented, or rather "split" by the intrusion of time so that the audience was deprived of some of the material pertaining to the subject of her discourse: stealing material. Her primary subject was the materiality of language which is material, in part, because it can be stolen. Theft, rather than measurement, defines what is material. The difference between theft and measurement defines very well the distance between psychoanalysis and the empirical sciences.
This distance is furthermore "measured," as Ellie Ragland-Sullivan develops it, by the materiality of language itself. She states it thus: "the materiality of language is determined on the level of effect". These two female voices operated as elliptical foci of balance for the colloquium. It is not that Denis Hollier's "intervention on the counter-transference" was wrong, though in no way clinically informed. It is not that Dennis Porter said nothing of importance about translation, but just not much about translating (or translations of) Lacan. The elegance of his presentation, however, suggests that his own translations will be more than adequate to a formidable task.
Francois Regnault came very close to the clinical issues of Lacan's theory in his treatment of the nature of "experience" and "experiment." Yet he did not discuss aspects of the unconscious itself which determined his frame of reference. There is a conflict between a scientific treatment of the laws of the unconscious and the particularity of a given clinical case.
While Jean-Claude Milner did not inspire universal applause, he, like the women, spoke to the question of the relation of the subject through history -to the desire of l'Autre. The "coupure' of modern science in the seventeenth century radically separated the ancients from the direction of history. It introduced a death into the discourse of Western Civilization. The only exception to this was mathematics which endured, indeed, provoked, the cut. His presentation was a precise and heady rendition of the function of the letter which he said is not a signifier, though inscribed on the Borromean knot.
Joel Fineman's presentation was a close textual reading of the essentially masculine desire of Shakespeare's "Rape of Lucrece" -what might be termed the chiastic poesis of rape.
Jean-Joseph Goux's presentation was essentially an assault on Lacan's Symbolic order. For Goux, the Symbolic order is itself an assault on the Imaginary and it fails on the question of the feminine. His was the contrapuntal presentation, the effort to de-Lacanize Lacan using Lacan, and in this sense not far from the deconstructive project of Derrida. For Goux, psychoanalysis is a "technology of iconoclasm." In the end, his is a very familiar charge, namely, that psychoanalysis is phallocentric since its theory resides on a formalization of the phallocracy of contemporary social exchange.
One might express the hope that where there are colloquia whose name is partially determined by the name of Lacan, there is a future for the discourse of psychoanalysis as Lacan taught it. Yet, in Baton Rouge- the red "rod" (cyprus?)- the struggle of the discourse of l'Autre in America is still on the level of the discourse of the "Other" that is, something lost in translation. The discourse was preserved- it insisted- in virtue of the elliptical foci around which the arc of the colloquium was inscribed. This may be an apt if not entirely adequate image for the shape of the "effect" of the desire of l'Autre during its embryonic beginnings in the "new world".
James Glogowski
State University of New York at Buffalo, Department of Psychiatry
Vol 46. No 4
Rec'd December 29. 1992
Lacan, like Freud, was concerned to retain the mantle of science for psycho-analysis and saw structural linguistics as the key to bridging the gap between the exact sciences and what he called the "conjectural" ones. He defined exact science by its "transmissibility", that is, the possibility of its findings being transmitted in precise mathematical form from person to person without subjective distortion. The conjectural or human sciences could not but take account of the subjective, and for psychoanalysis in particular the key aspect of the subjective is the unconscious. The present volume is a collection of articles based on a conference that addressed the question of Lacan's approach to the human sciences. The common theme is precisely that of the degree to which language, the symbolic order, the letter, can be taken to be definitive of the human. The central claim of science, that its language grasps the material, is taken up by Ellie Ragland-Sullivan. She finds the material in Lacan's psychoanalysis appearing, not at the level of atom and molecule, as Freud would no doubt like to have traced it, nor, as a vulgar Marxist would, at a base as distinct from a superstructure, but in the appearance of the Real in the jouissance effects, effects of pleasure/displeasure that mark the subject's emergence in language. These occur as a result of the interaction of the unconscious and the symbolic order, the unconscious being the indirect and hidden product of the institution of that order within the subject. Within this persuasive view of Lacan, the human is not reducible to the letter, because there remains a real kernel that resists its impression. This makes it clear that, while language produces the subject, it does not completely define it. Jean-Joseph Goux misses this point in merely insisting that there would be neither subject nor object if it were not for language, seeing Lacan as an "iconoclast" both in rejecting Freud's emphasis upon the image and in replacing it with the letter as the key to the genesis of the.subject. Jean-Claude Milner, however, while admitting that in science one has to adhere to the letter as far as possible (p. 41), acknowledges a danger in the disappearance of the image into the letter, and maintains that literature is a means by which language itself can be used to spell out what exceeds the letter. Jane Gallop similarly warns against dividing the biological from the cultural, and Dennis Porter, in an interesting piece on Lacan and translation, writes ironically of all language-users as decoders of their own language, but "misusing it wonderfully" (p. 162), for the misuse can turn out to be of greater benefit than the conventional meaning. This is an interesting collection that casts light on that recalcitrant oxymoron, the "human sciences".
Elizabeth Right
Girton College, Cambridge
Article in Review of Metaphysics
December 1992
Rec'd 2/24/93
The articles assembled here demonstrate the impact of Lacan's thought on epistemology, anthro- pology, feminist studies, and literature. The focus of Leupin's intro- duction and of the first chapters by Jean-Claude Milner and Francois Regnault is Lacan's linking of the social sciences and science. Leupin writes that while Freud drew upon "medicine and biology to ensure ...scientific consistency" (Milner lists physics and thermodynamics [p. 33]), in Lacan these are replaced by mathematics and topology (p. 2). Lacan argued that the social or human sciences should be renamed the "conjectural sciences"-that they are susceptible of an exact cal- culation in terms of probability.
Ragland-Sullivan's otherwise impressive article on the materiality of language includes passages linking Freud to a "simplistic biology" (p. 66) or a "biological determinism" (p. 69). She writes, "Freud's literalist definition of judgment as the quest for an identity of perception between internal representation of the satisfactory object and perception of a similar external object leaves us, finally, in the field of biological phenomenology" (p. 67). In addition to the fact that the meaning of "literalist" is unclear, the identity of perception and the identity of thought are conflated in this comment. The identity of perception in Freud is wish-fulfillment in the form of a fragmentary hallucination of a prior experience of satisfaction. The quest of judgment is for an identity of thought. While Freud's emphasis is on the means of refinding the object, and Lacan's on the permanent mark of lack the subject carries into that refinding, neither the identity of perception nor the identity of thought leaves us "in the field of biological phenomenology". No one more than Lacan has emphasized the difference between biological need and psychic wish. Read retrospectively, the identity of perception - original wish fulfillment - is, first of all, a negation, a denial of need, a denial of absence of the object, a denial of want of being, and the first coming into play of the quest for the objet à - hardly biological phenomena.
Jean-Joseph Goux, in asking, "Why the letter? Why does Lacan constantly privilege the letter at the expense of the image?" (p. 109), pursues the question largely motivating this reviewer's Arguing with Lacan (1991). In accord with his title, "Lacan Iconoclast," Goux sees Lacan identified with Moses in banishing idolatry, the imaginary. The law of the father demands sacrifice of "the imaginary, and with it, the desire for the mother" (p. 113). Might not this be called, Goux asks, "the foreclosure of the mother and perhaps the feminine?" (p. 118).
Jane Gallop, in "Juliet Mitchell and the Human Sciences", portrays the threats that Mitchell resists. Mitchell, allying herself with Marx (Althusser's Marx), Freud (selected quotations from Freud), and Lacan (a particular interpretation of Lacan), valorizes history and humanization against the biological. "At stake here", Gallop writes, "is the way women have been relegated to the outskirts of culture, kept close to nature, in biology, trapped in unwitting reproduction" (p. 136). But Gallop resists Mitchell's resistance to biology. In her view it is the ideological use of biologism that oppresses women, rather than biology itself or nature itself.
Dennis Porter, responsible for the translation of Lacan's seminars, here introduces Lacan and psychoanalysis as a third term in Paul de Man's difference with Walter Benjamin's "Task of the Translator". The article, in Derridean terms, is on "the necessary and impossible task of translation, its necessity as impossibility" (p.163). Denis Hollier, in the concluding chapter, approaches the topic of feminine jouissance in its realtionship to the unknown, to the Others, by the way of Emile Zola's 1984 novel Lourdes .
Notwithstanding flaws such as Leupin's effort to approximate superego, ego, and id with Lacan's symbolic, imaginary, and real (p.11), and Ragland-Sullivan account of the identity of perception (p.67), each contribution in this volume is both highly readable and informative. To borrow from Benjamin, de Man, Porter, and Derrida, however, the task of the reviewer is impossible even in reviewing a single author, let alone in an attempt to enter a dialogue with eight.
Joseph Ho Smith, Bethesda, Md.
Vol. 33 No.4 (Winter 1993) Rec'd February 4, 1994
This collection began as a colloquium exploring a Lacanian program of research, held at Louisiana State University, November, 1986. The articles based on those lectures are not at all dated. In fact, this study exemplifies the process of theoretical invention in a way that makes it useful as a textbook in courses concerned with the impact of French theory on the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences.
The exemplarity of the volume begins with the introduction by the editor, who, in providing a basic background that is assumed by the specialized contributors, gives us the most concise account I know of concerning the scientific status of Lacan's mathemes, his diagrammatic schemas, and topological knot models. Lacan's contribution to epistemology is located in his correlation of the "incompleteness" of the individual human subject (modeled as the two holes in a torus, and assigned the name "desire"), with the incompleteness theorem of Godel, who demonstrated the impossibility of any scientific field to account fully for itself in its own terms.
On one hand, Lacan rejected any special status for the "human" sciences: A field is either "science" in the modern sense developed in the natural sciences, or it is not science at all. On the other hand, Lacan problematized the concept of "science" by questioning the boundary constructed by the natural sciences separating what is outside and what is inside the human being. The profound question that psychoanalysis poses to science involves the subjectivity of the scientist. ""What is this passion of knowledge in modern man?" and "Where does science lead?" These are questions that science as such has not yet asked about itself and perhaps has not in itself the means to ask" (19).
The Lacanian response to this situation - concerning the desire to know, which itself has to be explained - is not against science. On the contrary, the strategy is to argue that desire as such may be accounted for in material terms, subject to scientific study. Each of the contributors to the collection takes up this challenge, locating a diverse body of disciplines - Philosophy (epistemology), Anthropology, Feminist Studies, and Literature - in relation to the materiality of language. These discussions, authored by some of the most original thinkers in the academy today (Milner, Ragland-Sullivan, Goux, Hollier, among others) are useful in several ways beyond the immediate interests of Lacanian specialists. Lacan is placed in a general context of contemporary French theory, committed to the idea of an absolute cut separating modern knowledge from earlier historical periods. At the same time, Lacan is distinguished from his "post-structuralist" peers by his insistence on a referential "Real".
Students of literature will find this book useful as an orientation to the special place of "letters" in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Together the articles trace a path of dissemination from the invention of the theory of the letter (the materiality of the signifier in "experience" or "experiment" of the speaking and spoken subject) through to its application in the context of science, the clinic, ethics, politics, and art. Lacan himself used literary works, such as Antigone or Poe's "Purloined Letter", as "thought experiments." Literature demonstrated how a "singularity" could be generalized, and has as much to offer to science as do the case studies of individuals.
Another service of the collection is the way some of the articles pose broad questions that open lines of research for others to pursue. A good example is this observation by Ellie Ragland-Sullivan: "If one were to take seriously Lacan's idea of three logical unconscious moments - the instant for seeing, the time for understanding, the moment for concluding - then concepts such as "insight", revelation, relational transference, and narrative linearity would have to be rethought" (82). Whoever takes the trouble to construct the pattern that this "insight" forms in relation to the other pieces in the book will be on the path of a new practice of creativity.
Gregory L. Ulmer
University of Florida
Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Article
Received April 20, 1992
Alexandre Leupin has edited a useful anthology of essays, but don't be misled by its title; this compilation does not attempt a comprehensive overview of Lacan's influence across the human sciences. Rather, the several contributors combine specialized perspectives on Lacan with Lacanian perspectives on their specialties: Jean-Claude Milner, François Regnault, and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan on epistemology; Jean-Joseph Goux on anthropology; Jane Gallup on feminist studies; Dennis Porter and Denis Hollier on literature. These essays were first presented as lectures at a conference, "Lacan and the Human Sciences" (Louisiana State University, November 1986), and they indeed are mutually illuminating, more so than is often the case in such collections. People with a particular interest in Lacan will want to read this book in its entirety; others may well find only individual selections pertinent, so brief recapitulations are in order - all the more so in that the volume lacks an index. The editor's introduction provides a notably lucid account of Lacan's position in representing the conjectural (or human) and exact (or hard) sciences as similar structures. Leupin also presents the most comprehensible explication I've seen of Lacan's topology and its centrality to his psychoanalytic project. Leupin suggests that above all this project asks the question occluded by the ideology of modern science: "What is this passion of knowledge in modern man?" (19). Milner demonstrates that in defining science Lacan relied on Alexandre Kojeve and Alexandre Koyre, whose work Milner nicely outlines; through a well staged argument, he tracks the implications of Lacan's insistence on being as literal as possible. Beginning with the distinction between "crucial experiments" and "mind experiments", Regnault addresses the question of why Lacan seems uninterested in particular case studies: case studies are the psychoanalytic equivalent of crucial experiments, and "a case is an exception to the law it belongs to" (47); thus Lacan prefers the mind experiments of literature. Ragland-Sullivan argues that whereas for other post-structuralists, material language has become "a machine that can act randomly" (60), for Lacan (as a realist) the materiality of language depends on several factors, which she outlines. She then concentrates on one premise-language is material in that it can be stolen - and its relevance to theories of influence, especially the work of Paul Ricoeur .To my mind, this selection of essays on Lacan and epistemology is particularly valuable in marking distinctions between Lacan and other post-structuralists with whom he is often grouped. The next two essays are important for feminists. Goux takes up the question of why Lacan gives precedent to the letter over the image (or hieroglyph) and to the symbolic over the imaginary; according to Goux's reading of Lacan reading Moses and Monotheism, these preferences are ultimately ethical or religious. Thus Lacan's principle that the signifier governs the imaginary is less a description than a patriarchal prescription. Clearly, Lacan was no feminist. As Gallup observes, however, feminists have indeed found his reprocessing of Freud useful. Her essay begins with a serious joke: Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminism make strange bedfellows. She pursues this strangeness through a subtle reading of Juliet Mitchell's Women: The Longest Revolution. She concludes that much as (in American universities) history lies at the boundary between the humanities and social sciences and biology at the boundary between the human and natural sciences, so feminism traverses the border between the humanities and social sciences even as it insists on including biology. That is, feminism reorders knowledge. Two essays follow that address literature. Porter asks what psychoanalysis has to offer for theories of translation. He sets up Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator" and Paul de Man's "Walter Benjamin: The Task of the Translator" as implying opposed theories of language and literature and then puts them to the test of Lacanian psychoanalysis. These juxtapositions provoke a recognition of a "kind of mistranslation" that is "not the misreading of the original language but the production of a strangeness in the target language" (153). Like analysands, "cultures cannot know what they don't know until they see what they fail to say" (160). Rollier harks back to the early days of psychoanalysis with his discussion of hysterical paralysis in Zola's novel Lourdes, published in 1894, one year after Freud's article distinguishing between organic motor paralysis and hysterical paralysis appeared in Archives de Neurologie. Lourdes is haunted by a repeated imbrication of walking, women, and knowledge, as indeed were Zola and Freud. In Hollier's reading, Zola's novel becomes the story of a man's desire to protect a woman from the knowledge that he deeply fears already possesses her.
As Leupin notes, this collection indicates "the immense impact of Lacan's thought, be it negative or positive" (19). I would add that, taken together, the essays point directions for a psychoanalytic reading of the ideology of science, a reading that might suggest why certain of the human sciences are conspicuously absent from this collection.
Susan Baker
University of Nevada, Reno