Lacan and the Limits of Language

PREFACE

These chapters were written as occasional essays, each at the invitation of a different host, who invited me to think about a topic of his or her own choosing. The solicitation of thought that is thereby implied, the way in which my own thought, grounded in philosophy and psychoanalysis, was shaped and altered by these invitations, is of intrinsic interest to me, insofar as it suggests how thought, and indeed life itself, unfolds beyond the individual, and beyond one’s own preoccupations. At the same time, my own concerns invariably mark each essay. And above all I am struck, looking back at these essays, at how preoccupied I have been with trying to support a conversation across boundaries that have become overly territorialized, overly defended, and exclusive. These boundaries are multiple, and I attempt here to cross them in several ways simultaneously. Several chapters are concerned with the question of the body, which Lacan is often wrongly said to neglect (Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 6). Several are concerned with the complex relationships among Lacan, Heidegger, and Derrida, relationships that I approach, not through explicit references or texts or themes (notoriously, the phallus as a supposed master signifier, the text of Poe’s Purloined Letter, etc.), but through some fundamental conceptual problems they share in common, in particular, the excruciatingly complex relationship between structure and history (Chapters 1, 4, and 5); the question of Lacan’s relation to topics that he is generally considered to have neglected, such as race (in Chapter 6), affect (in Chapters 2 and 3), and the body—a topic Lacan is thought to discuss endlessly, but only in order to reduce it to the order of the signifier, or to the conservative law of phallic division into two sexes, both claims being, in my view, greatly mistaken (Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 6).

In general, these crossings between Lacan and other thinkers (feminist theory, Foucault, Derrida, and Heidegger, especially) are subterranean here, in the sense that these relationships are not the topic of the essays. But readers will see very clearly, I think, where I am inviting these relationships, and indeed am compelled to initiate them, for what I hope are more authentic reasons—not, in other words, because I sought to produce an academic essay on Lacan’s relation to Derrida (useful as this could be), but rather because a particular conceptual issue, set before me by others, led me to realize that the issue itself—die Sache selbst—called me to encounter the question of these relations. Thus, even while the relationships named above (to a thinker like Derrida, or a concept like affect) remain subterranean, I think they will be the recognizable substructure of this book, and that readers will see how the issues themselves should oblige us—and I do see this as an ethical issue, especially today, when so many territorialized camps have been set up in the academy, such that Foucauldians do not read Lacan, philosophers do not touch psychoanalysis (and I use touch with all its phobic resonance), with the forceful and important exception of feminist theory, and Lacanians, unfortunately, do not read anyone else, except to demonstrate that so-and-so only repeats what Lacan already said more profoundly, or fails to recognize the most crucial point, which only Lacan was able to see for us—to move across these territorial boundaries, which are only the trivial boundaries of academic turf, and not appropriate to the conceptual work that calls for our attention. Derrida and Lacan, Foucault and Lacan, have much closer and more intimate relations than their reception has allowed, and academic pieties and allegiances, indeed, kinship wars (inheritances of the father), have largely prevented us from engaging these relationships in a serious way. This is not to say that there are no serious differences between these think-ers—on the contrary. But we will never grasp them with any clarity if we begin, and teach our students to begin, with denunciations, excommunications, and imaginary rivalry. Too often, especially in our academic culture, and in the training of our doctoral students, these allegiances have taken the place of thinking, and I hope these essays will encourage some more generous and hospitable encounters.

Let me be somewhat more concrete. Chapter 1 emerged from some questions posed to me by a Mexican student of psychoanalysis, who was trying to understand the concept of the real and who asked me to clarify its relation to the symbolic order. I therefore wrote this piece in a very schematic way, somewhat like an encyclopedia article, hoping at least to sketch out some of the major issues that the concept of the real might engage, and also to suggest some general points of intersection between the real in Lacan and other contemporary issues or thinkers—the trace in Derrida, the incest prohibition in Lévi-Strauss, the critique of Lacan’s covert essentialism that one finds in some of Judith Butler’s work.

Chapter 2 was written at the invitation of Joan Copjec, for a splendid conference on Antigone at the University at Buffalo, and since this community included some people in comparative literature whom I greatly admire (Rodolphe Gasché, Carol Jacobs, Henry Sussman, and others), I tried to emphasize not only the argument of Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis but also (1) the literary text itself, (2) Hegel’s famous interpretation of Sophocles, and (3) some classical issues stemming from Aristotle’s Poetics, particularly insofar as they bear on catharsis, and the problem of jouissance.

Chapter 3 was written on the very sad occasion of the death of Teresa Brennan, who died unexpectedly and much too young, and I was honored to be invited by Kelly Oliver and Elizabeth Grosz to a conference in honor of her work and her life, at the University at Stony Brook. In these circumstances, I could not write about anything other than Mourning and Melancholia, and the concept of affect, which had so occupied Teresa. Here again, as in Chapter 2, I had begun to think that affect, far from being neglected by Lacan, bore very directly on his concept of jouissance. The problem is enormously complex, of course, because Lacan appears at some points to say that anxiety is the only affect and that, indeed, anxiety is not an emotion, which would seem to have a clearer symbolic orientation. The distinction between affect and emotion would thus be one approach to the border between the symbolic and the real, but this is only a first approximation. Any reader of Heidegger will immediately realize that questions of stimmung (mood), Befindlichkeit (disposition or attunement), and indeed anxiety itself would call for a far more extensive treatment. Nevertheless, the question of affect in Chapter 2, and of the aesthetic effect of tragedy on our emotions (especially pity and fear), is in some sense continued in Chapter 3, where I also turn briefly from Antigone to Hamlet for guidance.

Chapter 4 was written at the request of David Goecocheia of Brock University, who organized a conference on Kristeva’s Tales of Love and invited me to comment specifically on Kristeva’s chapter on Plotinus and Ovid. I was thus brought to The Metamorphoses, yet another literary text, which complicated greatly what I might otherwise have written, either about Lacan or about Kristeva herself. This chapter is perhaps the best example of what I mean by stressing the gift of these occasional origins: having been invited to write on this topic, I could not leave in place what I thought I knew about narcissism, in Freud or Lacan or Kristeva; on the contrary, having been asked to comment on Plotinus, and thus on the philosophical tradition, which is not at all psychoanalytic, and then (even worse) on Ovid, I was pulled irrevocably back to my own origins in literary study, and I found that the text of Ovid, understood not as an example or instance of psychoanalysis but as a dense literary object, inserted into its own complex literary tradition, compelled me to read that text for what it contained. My argument thus became a kind of encounter between literature (Ovid), philosophy (Plotinus), and psychoanalysis (Kristeva and Freud), and the question of love is not unrelated to these crossings. In fact, Lacan says that love is the sign of a change in discourse, and this may be part of the movement set forth in all the chapters that follow.

Chapter 5 emerged from an invitation to write about memory, for a special issue of Research in Phenomenology, a journal which I had greatly admired as a graduate student, and in which I saw the most rigorous and exciting phenomenological community I knew. I thus took what I understood of Lacan’s ideas about memory—a topic so crucial to Freud—and tried to show not simply what Lacan said about the subject, but how his ideas might intersect with some issues in the phenomenological tradition.

Chapter 6, finally, was written at the request of Christopher Lane, who was collecting a set of essays on the topic of psychoanalysis and race for Columbia University Press. I understood, implicitly, (or thought I understood) that this was an invitation to write about psychoanalysis and racism, and thus about the various forms of imaginary and symbolic identification that structure our experience of race, what we call racial identity or racial practice. But the invitation itself spoke of race and not racism, and because I have long been interested in biology, and the history of biological thought (indeed Canguilhem was important to me, and Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic was a favorite book, no doubt because I had trained as a Romanticist, and was steeped in the early nineteenth century, which saw the rise of biological sciences and the very concept of life in its modern form), I decided to try to address the relationship between psychoanalysis and race as a concept that claims to have some biological or genetic content. Cultural studies, of course, had long argued—persuasively, in my view—that science always operates within a discursive horizon, and is decisively shaped by concepts and categories that do not have a purely empirical basis, but belong to larger conceptual, discursive, and institutional regimes. And yet, when I think about the attacks on Darwin that are launched by religious fundamentalists in the United States, and I consider the importance of current genetic research, and medical advances, I find it impossible to say with the haughty confidence of some cultural theorists that race, or the body, or sex, or indeed perception, can be entirely detached from all consideration of biological knowledge, even if that knowledge is, as I believe, a product of culture that will inevitably be shaped in many ways by forces that are not strictly scientific (in the sense that scientists would understand that term). In fact, it seemed to me that cultural critics themselves had become all too comfortable with their own appeal to discursive construction, as if that regime of truth, that pious certainty, could serve as a magic wand, capable of banishing all the stupidities and blindnesses of other thinkers, while leaving cultural theorists blind to the mechanical operation of their own dogma, in which there could be no reference to sex, no reference to the body, no reference to race as a reality that might escape the reach of language.

Of course, as Judith Butler has relentlessly reminded us, any talk about race, or the body, will always involve some kind of discursive organization, which itself requires vigilant attention. But one should not forget that this assertion, that all knowledge is discursive, is itself prey to the same observation, and we should therefore ask what may be occluded or banished from thought by this insistent reminder, this universal truth of discursive construction, which covers all knowledge and all thinking, no matter what the field of investigation may be. In response to this invitation to write on race, then, I decided not to speak about racism, which I suspected many other contributors would address, and chose instead to think—almost in the manner of a thought experiment—what psychoanalysis might have to say about the idea of race as a biological fact. In other words, setting aside for a moment the obvious and compelling critiques that had been launched against the use of race as a biological category—critiques that I thought had been well-circulated and successful—and knowing that one could always rightly develop a critique of any scientific discourse, as Foucault himself did on several occasions, I decided to ask what psychoanalysis might have to say about race, assuming that something like race is indeed a reality of a biological kind, namely, a form of human diversity that has affected our evolutionary history, just as it did the history of other animals. A critique of the anthropological use of race, or of the conceptual categories that were generated as an answer to the reality of racial difference, would always be possible and necessary, but assuming for a moment that there is some truth to the theory of evolution, and that human beings are not exempt from evolution, what would psychoanalysis have to say about this reality of the body? My answer was that human physiological diversity could not be understood in quite the same way that animal diversity is imagined, because humans organize themselves, group together, migrate and exchange, intermarry and reproduce, according to mechanisms and structures that are partly cultural. This is quite obvious, but it seemed to me that evolutionary theory, insofar as I understood it, had not really addressed this fact. Thus, from the standpoint of cultural studies, theory seemed to have avoided the reality of race, while from the standpoint of biological knowledge, science had neglected to consider the impact of culture on the body. Psychoanalysis, strangely enough, seemed to me to be the obvious arena for a philosophical reflection on the history of the human body, in which the shortcomings of both biological and cultural theories would become more evident.

A similar argument could be made about sexual difference, and I had in fact attempted such an argument in a previous book, Vital Signs, whose title was explicitly intended to mark this conjunction of the vital order and the signifier—two realms that were too often separated from one another. Race, however, as readers will see, does not have the same status as sexual difference, and the evolutionary perspective that I tried to maintain in this chapter, this thought experiment, remains fairly strong and radically distinguishes race from what Lacanians mean by sexual difference. But the larger point, from the perspective of this book as a whole, is that this chapter tries to dislodge some of the pieties of contemporary academic discourse and seeks to bring into contact areas of thought that are too often separated from one another—literature and philosophy, structuralism and history, Derrida and Lacan, and so on. These prohibited relations, these unthinkable neighbors, are brought into proximity here, not to dissolve all differences but, on the contrary, to initiate a clearer understanding of the distinct contribution of each tradition, each method or discourse or form of knowledge.

Each chapter can, in some sense, be read as an investigation of the limits of language, in that I wanted to show how the dominant reading of Lacan, as a thinker of the symbolic order, mistakenly reduces his work to a thought of nothing but the symbolic order, which is obviously a very different thing. As a thinker of the symbolic order, Lacan brought to light many aspects of human existence that are irreducible to language. In Chapter 5, this appears as the limit to remembering, which is one of the first formations in Lacan of the concept of the real. In Chapter 1, it appears as the limit of the real itself, understood not as a prelinguistic reality but as an effect of the signifier itself. In Chapter 2, the limit of language appears in the figure of Antigone, in a least two respects: first, because she is presented by Lacan in terms of her appearance, her manifestation, the so-called beauty of Antigone (l’eclat d’Antigone), a sort of shining that not only recalls Heidegger but introduces a profound meditation on the analytic of the beautiful in Kant’s Third Critique and gives rise to one of the first incarnations of the concept of the gaze, which reorganizes the familiar account of the imaginary in Lacan; and second, because Antigone’s ethical position, according to Lacan, can only be understood in connection with a refinement of our familiar understanding of the law in Lacan, since, as Lacan himself says, she confronts us with something that is, in effect, of the order of law, but which does not get inscribed in any signifying chain. This is where Lacan breaks with the Hegelian interpretation. And here too, we are dealing with the limit of language, and its consequences for ethics. In Chapter 3, this limit takes off from the remarks on jouissance offered in the discussion of Antigone and develops the question of affect more directly, together with a distinction between affect and emotion, which Lacan’s work might help us to pursue in a more precise and useful way. Chapter 4 approaches the limit of language in narcissism itself, insofar as the time of narcissism, and the very structure of the temporality of the subject, necessarily refers us to something that is not inscribed in history, an absolute past that organizes narrative but cannot be reduced to the narratives that seek to describe it. The tension between genesis and structure that runs throughout the book is at is highest point here, but despite the philosophical character of this question, it was expressed more precisely though Ovid than through Derrida, who taught me to be aware of the issue. And finally, in Chapter 6, the limit of language is encountered, in a very different way, through the problem of the body.

From my earliest days as a student, I have been impressed and fascinated by the excruciating complexity of literary texts. And when I eventually began to read philosophy in a serious way—partly because poetry was simply too difficult, impossible to speak about, really—I found myself struck by the strange relation between philosophy and poetry. On the one hand, philosophers are notoriously clumsy and incompetent when they read poems, so much so that one should advise philosophers to keep altogether silent on such matters. Recent accounts of Antigone, grounded in the interpretations of Hegel and Lacan, have been stunningly ignorant about the literary dimension of Sophocles’ text, so much so that can one hardly imagine one is dealing with a tragedy. As with early deconstructive readings of literary texts, one can only be shocked at how quickly the literary work disappears—a matter to which Derrida himself was profoundly sensitive. Readings that make literary work into evidence of the Foucauldian construction of early modern subjectivity, while often extremely illuminating as intellectual history, can only make a literary scholar cringe. Yet I would not have learned to read literary texts without philosophy. I would not have learned to pause and unfold the philosophical consequences of literary works without the guidance of Heidegger, Derrida, and other philosophers. The same is true of Lacan: he is not a philosopher, and I have written many times about the erasure of psychoanalysis that takes place whenever Lacan’s work is translated into the linguistic theory of Saussure or the philosophical account of intersubjectivity that one finds in Koje`ve. Psychoanalysis is not philosophy, and yet its significance, as Lacan always insisted, cannot be grasped from within psychoanalysis alone but requires philosophical elaboration, so that, eventually, the critique of philosophy that one finds in psychoanalysis can eventually emerge with greater force. These neighbors stand in need of one another, precisely in order that their differences can emerge. I have tried to initiate this process in the chapters that follow.

I would like to thank The Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, which provided fellowship support during the time when Chapters 2 and 6 were drafted. I am grateful to Elizabeth Weed for her support, for cultivating an exceptional intellectual space at the Pembroke Center, and for encouraging me to speak in my own voice. I would also like to thank the Institute for Advanced Study for support during the time when Chapters 3 and 5 were completed. Joan Scott not only gave me exceptional guidance and support during my time in Princeton, but provided an unmatched example of the strength and spiritedness that are necessary for intellectual survival, and she has generously continued to support my work. I am also grateful to Bobby Paul of Emory University, who in the face of many demands has generously supported my work and helped me to give my interest in psychoanalysis a broader footing. I am deeply indebted to Charles Scott of Vanderbilt University for his exceptional teaching, for introducing me to Continental philosophy and making its questions real, and for taking me to the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Perugia, Italy, where my educational path was irrevocably altered. One could not hope for a better and more generous teacher. Earlier versions of some of this work appeared in the following places. I wish to thank the following publishers for granting permission to reprint.

Humanities Press International and Research in Phenomenology for Vital Signs: The Place of Memory in Psychoanalysis, Research in Phenomenology 23 (1993): 22–72.

Oxford University Press, for permission to reprint The Intimate Alterity of the Real, Postmodern Culture, vol. 6, no. 3(May 1996).

Joan Copjec and the State University of New York at Buffalo, "Of Love and Beauty in Lacan’s Antigone," Umbr(a), no. 1 (Fall 1999): 63–80.

The State University of New York Press, for Affect, Emotion, and the Work of Mourning, from Affect in the Work of Teresa Brennan, ed. Kelly Oliver and Shannon Lundeen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 57–77.

The Johns Hopkins University Press, for Telling Tales of Love: Philosophy, Literature, Psychoanalysis, Diacritics (Spring 2000): 89–105.

Columbia University Press, for Human Diversity and the Sexual Relation, The Psychoanalysis of Race, ed. Christopher Lane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 41–64.

LACAN AND THE LIMITS

OF LANGUAGE

CHAPTER 1

The Intimate Alterity of the Real

Many readers of Lacan have asked the question: Is everything really a ‘discursive construction,’ a product of the symbolic order, and if not, how can we speak of an ‘outside’ without returning to a naive realism? This question is especially important for the concept of the real, and more broadly speaking, it is one of the most important issues in contemporary intellectual life. It might even be said that one’s response to this single issue is enough to define one’s theoretical orientation today.

A map of postmodernism could in fact be drawn on the basis of the answers that are given to this question. It would have three major areas: in the first, we find an emphasis on the symbolic order and certain theories of social construction; in the second, we find a reaction against postmodernism and a return to positive and empirical investigation, together with a return to biological, genetic, and endocrinological accounts of consciousness, behavior, and sexuality; in the third, we find an effort to think through the linguistic turn—not to react against the formative power of representation, but rather to think its limit. This is where I believe the most interesting contemporary work is being done, and this is a problem held in common by Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, though they do not elaborate the issue in the same way. There are many ways to approach the question, as it concerns Lacan, and I will therefore try to touch very briefly on a whole range of directions in which the question might take us. I will loosely organize the discussion under three headings: Inside/Outside, The Limits of Formalization, and Two Versions of the Real (Judith Butler and Slavoj i ek).

Inside/Outside

First, concerning the idea that the real is outside the symbolic. Jacques-Alain Miller developed the term extimité from Lacan, suggesting that the real is not exactly outside, but is a kind of excluded interior, or an intimate exterior.¹ In Seminar VII, for example, in the chapter On the Moral Law, Lacan says of the thing: "das Ding is at the center only in the sense that it is excluded (SVII, 71). And again, in the chapter The Object and the Thing, he speaks of what is excluded in the interior (SVII, 101), noting that this exclusion presents us with a gap in the symbolic order—something that escapes the law—a gap once again at the level of das Ding, which indicates that we can no longer rely on the Father’s guarantee (SVII, 100). However much one may stress the notorious law of the father" in Lacan, it is clear that the symbolic order is not the whole story, and that the relation between the symbolic and the real (or between language and das Ding) involves a certain failure of the law. We must therefore take account of this element that escapes the symbolic order, or renders it incomplete. The problem remains as to how exactly this excluded object should be conceived. We can already see, however, that it is not simply outside the structure, but is missing from the structure, excluded from within. So the question is: Just how we are to understand this belonging and not belonging to structure, this intimate alterity of the real?

TOPOLOGY

Lacan often drew on topology in his attempts to describe this peculiar extimate relation between the symbolic and the real. One could thus approach the question in geometrical terms, for the usual relation between inside and outside that exists in Euclidean space (a circle, for example, has a clearly defined interior and exterior) is disrupted by topological figures such as the Klein bottle or the torus (the figure shaped like a doughnut, structured around a central hole). Even with the Mobius strip, which has only one side, the usual intuitive relation between inside and outside is disrupted. Lacan’s use of these structures was more technical and precise. Juan-David Nasio argues that each of these topological figures is meant to address a specific problem within psychoanalytic theory.² Thus: (1) the torus describes the relation between demand and desire; (2) the Mobius strip describes the relation between the subject and speech; (3) the Klein bottle describes the relation between the master-signifier and the Other; and (4) the cross-cap describes the structure of fantasy, where we find the subject’s relation to the object.³

BEING-TOWARD-DEATH

Without developing these points in detail, it is easy to see this material at work in Lacan’s text. Even in the familiar Rome Discourse, Lacan says that the human being’s relation to death is unlike the natural relation to biological death, and that death is not a simple event, a moment in chronological time, but rather the very opening of time, its condition of possibility. Instead of being placed at the end of a temporal sequence, as a final moment in biological time, the relation-to-death is placed at the origin, and understood as the giving of human time, the opening of possibility, of time as a finite relation to the future and the past, structured by anticipation and memory. Death thus involves a peculiar link between the symbolic and the real, presenting us with a sort of hole or void in the structure of meaning—a void that is not a deficiency, but virtually the opposite, an absolute condition of meaning. The human relation-to-death (discussed in such detail by Heidegger) is thus in some sense at the origin of the symbolic order—not represented in language, or entirely captured by the symbolic rituals that seek to contain it, but rather primordial to language: So when we wish to attain in the subject … what is primordial to the birth of symbols, we find it in death (E, 105). The topological reference to a missing center (added to the text in 1966) follows: To say that this mortal meaning reveals in speech a center exterior to language is more than a metaphor; it manifests a structure … it corresponds rather to the relational group that symbolic logic designates topologically as an annulus. He adds, If I wished to give an intuitive representation of it … I should call on the three-dimensional form of the torus (E, 105). In short, one can easily see that the relation between the symbolic and the real cannot be approached if one begins with a dichotomy between inside and outside. It is rather a matter of a void within the structure. This is of course what the theory of lack in Lacan tries to address. And this is why those for whom lack is foreclosed—those who lack lack—are in some sense deprived of access to language.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE BODY

Lacan’s topological formulations may seem esoteric, and many commentators have ridiculed them, denouncing his pseudo-mathematical interests as chicanery or mysticism or intellectual posing. But if one thinks for a moment about the body—about the peculiar structure of the body, and all the discussions in Freud about the limit of the body, the difficulty of containing the body within its skin, or of determining what is inside and outside the body (the relation to the object, the mechanisms of projection and introjection, etc.), it becomes obvious that the space of the body is not really elucidated by Euclidean geometry. The body is not easily closed within itself, as a circle is closed with respect to the outside. The body does not occupy space as a natural object does. When it comes to the body, the relations of interior and exterior are more complex and enigmatic than one would suspect if one began by regarding the