Lacan and the limits of language

Lacan and the Limits of Language

Volumn , Issue , 2008, Pages 1-222

  Shepherdson, Charles ^a  

^a NONE

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References (130)

1. Miller, Jacques-Alain. ''Extimité,'' in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society, ed. Mark Bracher, Marshall Alcorn, Jr., Ronald J. Cortell, and Françoise Massardier-Kenney (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 74-87.
2. Juan-David Nasio, Les Yeux de Laure (Paris: Aubier, 1987).
3. For a fine short book on these issues, see Jeanne Granon-Lafont, La topologie ordinaire de Jacques Lacan (Paris: Point Hors Ligne, 1985).
4. See Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996).
5. I have tried to make this argument in more detail (partly in reference to anorexia), in my ''Adaequatio Sexualis: Is There a Measure of Sexual Difference?'' in From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire, ed. Babette Babich (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1995), 447-73.
6. Jacques Derrida, ''Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,'' in Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 279.
7. See Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's very useful discussion of this text in Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 199-212, where he also corrects some deficiencies in the English translation.
8. Derek Attridge, ''Language as History / History as Language: Saussure and the Romance of Etymology,'' in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 183-211.
9. Martin Heidegger, ''The Thing,'' in Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. P. Hertz and J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 165-86.
10. SlavojŽ ižek, For They Know Not What They Do (New York: Verso, 1991), 99.
11. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970), 237.
12. Marie-Hélène, Brousse, ''La formule du fantasme?'' in Lacan, ed. Gé- rard Miller (Paris: Bordas, 1987).
13. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ''Sex'' (New York: Routledge, 1993).
14. Miller ''Extimité,'' 85.
15. Charles Shepherdson, ''Vital Signs: The Place of Memory in Psychoanalysis,'' Research in Phenomenology, special issue, ''Spaces of Memory,'' 23 (1993): 22-72, reprinted as Chapter 5 in this volume.
16. Miller ''Extimité,'' 85.
17. Derrida, ''Structure, Sign, and Play,'' 283.
18. SlavojŽ ižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 83.
19. Moustafa Safouan, Pleasure and Being: Hedonism from a Psychoanalytic Point of View, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Saint Martin's Press, 1983).
20. These categories are discussed in detail in Robert Samuels, Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Lacan's Reconstruction of Freud (New York: Routledge, 1993).
21. Tim Dean, ''Transsexual Identification, Gender Performance Theory, and the Politics of the Real,'' literature and psychology 39, no. 4 (1993): 1-27.
22. SlavojŽ ižek has usefully explored the relationship between these two versions of the real and Kant's distinction between the Ding-an-sich and the transcendental object. See Tarrying with the Negative, 14-18, 150-51.
23. Samuels, Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, 7.
24. Richard Boothby, Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan's Return to Freud (New York: Routledge, 1991).
25. SamuelWeber, Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan's Dislocation of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 106.
26. Jonathan Scott Lee, Jacques Lacan (New York: G. K. Hall, 1990), 136.
27. Borch-Jacobsen, The Absolute Master, 107.
28. Weber, Return to Freud, 106.
29. Michèle Montrelay, ''The Story of Louise,'' in Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan, ed. Stuart Schneiderman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 77.
30. Ž ižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 221-22.
31. See Charles Shepherdson, ''History and the Real, in Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2000), 153-85.
32. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 198.
33. Charles Shepherdson, ''The Epoch of the Body: Need, Demand and the Drive in Kojève and Lacan,'' in Perspectives on Embodiment: Essays from the NEH Institute at Santa Cruz, ed. Honi Haber and Gail Weiss (New York: Routledge, 1996).
34. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 188.
35. Derrida, ''Structure, Sign, and Play,'' 294.
36. Samuels, Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, 18.
37. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 189.
38. Samuels, Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, 83, my emphasis.
39. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonos, Antigone, trans. F. Storr, the Loeb Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). Citations will be by line number, and the translation has often been modified to reflect Lacan's account
40. This is the phrase of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ''The Caesura,'' Heidegger, Art and Politics, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 41. See also Lacoue-Labarthe's ''De l'éthique: à propos d'Antigone,'' in Lacan avec les philosophes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), 21-36.
41. See A Greek-English Lexicon, compiled by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, revised and augmented by Sir Henry Stuart Jones with the assistance of Roderick McKenzie, with a supplement in 1968 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).
42. Carol Jacobs, ''Dusting Antigone,'' Modern Language Notes 111 (1996): 889-917.
43. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 151-52.
44. See Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, ''De l'ethique:A` propos d'Antigone,'' in Lacan avec les philosophes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), 21-36. Again Heidegger comes to mind, insofar as ''hesitation'' is a crucial category for the account of the mode of being wherein Dasein flees from its own destiny, through ''indecision,'' ''procrastination,'' and ''hesitation''-temporal relations that could be correlated with Lacan's account of these terms in his note on ''temporal tension'' and ''intersubjective time.''
45. David Grene, Sophocles I: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, 2nd ed., trans. with an introduction by David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1-8.
46. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 151-52.
47. See SamuelWeber, Antigone's Nomos,'' in Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 121-40.
48. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 152.
49. To give only the smallest sample, see, for example, RichardWollheim, On the Emotions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999);
50. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
51. Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the Death of the Subject (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001);
52. Charles Altieri, Particulars of Rapture: An Esthetics of the Affects (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); and countless neurobiological or ''evolutionary psychology'' texts that offer to explain the relation between emotion and culture.
53. See Charles Shepherdson, foreword to Roberto Harari, Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety: An Introduction, trans. Jane C. Lamb-Ruiz (New York: Other Press, 2001), ix-lxxix.
54. These issues are developed by Lacan in his seminar on anxiety, Le séminaire, livre X: L'angoisse, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2004). See also my foreword to Harari, Lacan's Seminar on ''Anxiety,'' ix-lxii.
55. For some English excerpts from Lacan's seminar on Hamlet, ''Desire and Its Interpretation,'' see Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
56. Darian Leader, ''Some Thoughts on Mourning and Melancholia,'' Journal for Lacanian Studies 1, no. 1 (2003): 4-37.
57. See Bessel van der Kolk, ''The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,'' in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 158-182.
58. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 87.
59. Teresa Brennan, History after Lacan (London: Routledge, 1993), 16.
60. I elaborate here some remarks already made in ''The Elements of the Drive,'' Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious, no. 1 (1997): 131-45.
61. For further discussion of this passage see André Green, The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1999).
62. Teresa Brennan, The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity (London: Routledge, 1992), 83.
63. I take this phrase, ''the disaster of Narcissism,'' and some inspiration for my argument from Claire Nouvet, whose lectures at Emory University pushed me in directions I would not otherwise have taken. See Claire Nouvet, ''An Impossible Response: The Disaster of Narcissus,'' Yale French Studies, no. 79 (1991): 103-34.
64. Maurice Blanchot. The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 1.
65. Blanchot. The Writing of Disaster, 125.
66. See Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 17.
67. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 95-96.
68. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 94.
69. These remarks in the ''Rome Discourse'' are developed in Lacan, ''Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism,'' trans. Bruce Fink, in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (New York: Norton, 2006), 161-75. The text, as well as some later remarks on time from Seminar XI, are discussed by John Forrester, The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 168-218.
70. I am indebted to David Krell's discussion of Aristotle in Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
71. William Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads (1850 edition), in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 1:138.
72. William Wordsworth, The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 1805 edition, book 1, 416-27.
73. A splendid example of this interpretation can be found in Peter Dews, The Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1987).
74. See Jacques Derrida, ''The Violence of the Letter,'' in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 101-40, and ''Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,'' in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278-93.
75. On bees in Heidegger and Agamben, who address the questions of animal language, see Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animals, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 40 and 52.
76. See Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 23.
77. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 60-61. Translation slightly altered.
78. See Krell, Of Memory, 16.
79. William Wordsworth, note to ''The Thorn,'' in Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 701.
80. For specific analyses of obsessional and hysteric structures, as governed by these questions, see Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan, ed. and trans. Stuart Schneiderman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). See also Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and Literature: A French-American Inquiry, ed. Alan Roland (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978).
81. Derrida, ''Freud and the Scene of Writing,'' Writing and Difference, 196.
82. Russell Grigg, ''Signifier, Object, and the Transference,'' in Lacan and the Subject of Language, ed. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher (New York: Routledge, 1991), 100-15. Grigg also notes that in The Interpretation of Dreams, this term is translated as ''transcript.''
83. For ''non-positive affirmation'' (Freud's Bejahung), see ''What is an Author?'' in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. and trans. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113-38.
84. See, among many texts, Jacques Derrida, ''Nombre de oui,'' Psyche: Inventions de l'autre (Paris: Gallilée, 1987), 639-50: ''That a yes is presupposed each time, not only by every statement of yes by the subject, but by every negation and every opposition, dialectical or not, between the yes and the no- this is perhaps what gives affirmation from the outset its irreducible and essential infinity'' (640). My translation.
85. See Jacques Derrida, ''Freud and the Scene of Writing,'' Writing and Difference, 196-231.
86. Jean Piaget, Structuralism, trans. Chaninah Maschler (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 55-56.
87. See Joan Copjec, ''Cutting Up,'' in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Teresa Brennan (New York: Routledge, 1989), 227-246, esp. 228-29.
88. Rainer Nägele has shown clearly the abyss between Freud and advocates of the Enlightenment in Reading After Freud: Essays on Goethe, Hölderlin, Habermas, Nietzsche, Brecht, Celan, and Freud (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
89. I have addressed this point further in ''On Fate: Psychoanalysis and the Desire to Know,'' in Dialectic and Narrative, ed. Dalia Judowitz and Thomas Flynn (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 271-302.
90. Jean Laplance and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 245.
91. Marie-Hélène Brousse, ''La formule du fantasme?'' in Lacan, ed. Gé- rard Miller (Paris: Bordas, 1987), pp. 107-22, cited from 112, translation mine.
92. See SlavojŽ ižek, ''The Truth Arises from Misrecognition,'' in Lacan and the Subject of Language, ed. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher (New York: Norton, 1991), 206.
93. Sander J.Gilman, The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 2.
94. See: Guenter B. Risse, ''Epidemics and History: Ecological Perspectives and Social Responses,'' in AIDS: The Burdens of History, ed. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 33-66;
95. Mary Catherine Bateson and Richard Goldsby, Thinking AIDS: The Social Response to the Biological Threat (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1988).
96. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
97. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 149-50.
98. Lucius Outlaw, ''Towards a Critical Theory of 'Race,' '' in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 58, my emphasis.
99. Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 264.
100. Marvin Harris, Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Came From, Where We Are Going (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 296-300.
101. Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 257.
102. Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 305.
103. Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 261.
104. Michel Foucault, ''Power and Sex,'' in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Lawrence Kritzman, trans. David J. Parent (New York: Routledge, 1988), 120-21.
105. Jacques Derrida, ''Cogito and the History of Madness,'' in Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 42-43, 54, 57.
106. See: Jo Ann C. Gutin, ''End of the Rainbow,'' Discover: The World of Science, special issue ''The Science of Race'' (November 1994), 73; Michael Banton and Jonathan Harwood, The Race Concept (New York: Praeger, 1975), 47-49.
107. See: Peter J. Bowler, Theories of Human Evolution: A Century of Debate, 1844-1944 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 106, 128; Outlaw, ''Towards a Critical Theory of 'Race,' '' 62-64.
108. Michel Foucault, ''Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,'' in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 76-100.
109. See: Richard A. Goldsby, Race and Races (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 31-49;
110. William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function, and Transformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 92-117.
111. Stephen Jay Gould, ''The Geometer of Race,'' Discover (1994): 65-69.
112. Michael Albert, Leslie Cagen, Noam Chomsky, et al., Liberating Theory (Boston: South End Press, 1986), 26.
113. Jared Diamond, ''Race Without Color,'' Discover (1994): 83-89.
114. Goldsby, Race and Races, 56.
115. Gutin, ''End of the Rainbow,'' 73.
116. Diamond, ''Race Without Color,'' 88.
117. Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 26-40.
118. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 97-98.
119. Ridley, The Red Queen, 9.
120. See: Harris, Our Kind, 296-300;
121. Frans B. M. deWaal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 29-34, 182-86.
122. Ridley, The Red Queen, 8.
123. Theodosius Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 346-47, my emphasis.
124. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), 351.
125. Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving, 347.
126. Gutin, ''End of the Rainbow,'' 73, my emphasis.
127. Outlaw, ''Towards a Critical Theory of 'Race,' '' 66.
128. Ridley, The Red Queen, 13.
129. Paul Hoffman, ''The Science of Race,'' Discover (1994): 4.
130. Gutin, ''End of the Rainbow,'' 72.