Read My Desire<\/a> (recently reprinted by Verso) sets Lacan against the historicists, specifically against Foucault. But also, along the way, Lacan against the structuralists. It\u2019s dense going, as one might expect.<\/p>\nEarly on, Copjec isolates the trouble with Foucault. He \u201crealizes the necessity of conceiving the mode of a regime of power\u2019s institution,\u201d carrying out his genealogical program,\u201d but \u201che cannot avail himself of the means of doing so and thus, by default, ends up limiting that regime to the relations that obtain within it.\u201d He ends up, she says, \u201ca bit of a historicist\u201d and \u201ca bit of a nominalist,\u201d and one might add \u201ca bit of a structuralist\u201d (7).<\/p>\n
Why does Foucault fail? Copjec says it arises from \u201chis diallowance of any reference to a principle or a subject that \u2018transcends\u2019 the regime of power he analyzes.\u201d He firming rejects any notion of a meta<\/em>principle, a \u201cprinciple of construction or staging\u201d that occupies \u201ca different, a superior, position to the regime it stages.\u201d He cannot assume, in Derrida\u2019s terms, a transcendent signified, an extra-structural something that eludes structuration. In the end he \u201cabandons, without actually acknowledging that he is doing so, his attempt to define the very principle he supposedly seeks\u201d (7).\u00a0<\/p>\nOne cannot simply do away with transcendence in this way: \u201csome notion of transcendence is plainly needed if one is to avoid the reduction of social space to the relations that fill it.\u201d Foucault rejects a language-based analysis (structuralism) because he thinks it leads to idealism; instead, he offers a battle-based model. Copjec thinks this is a fatal decision: Only a linguistic model is able to escape idealism. She observes that in a materialistic science \u201cno object can be legitimately posited unless one can also specify the technical means of locating,\u201d and similarly \u201cthe existence of a thing materially depends on its being articulated in language, for only in this case can it be said to have an objective \u2013 that is to say, a verifiable \u2013 existence, one that can be debated by others\u201d (8). The linguistic model doesn\u2019t imply a metalanguage, but to deny the existence of a metalanguage is to affirm that \u201csociety never stops realizing<\/em> itself, that it continues <\/em>to be formed over time\u201d (9).<\/p>\nIt is along these sorts of lines that Lacan stands against historicism and structuralism, without reverting to theology. Copjec\u2019s explanations of Lacan are difficult, but the point is well made by a couple of illustrations she offers from Freud. In Totem and Taboo<\/em>, Freud traces the relations among brothers\/sons to the origin, to \u201cthe existence of some preposterous being, a primal father who once possessed all the power the brothers now equally share and whose murder is supposed to have issued in the present regime.\u201d The theory is dismissed as typical Freudian crackpottery, but Copjec slyly notes that this is more or less Freud\u2019s point: the father \u201cis unbelievable within the regime in which his existence must <\/em>be unthinkable if relations of equality are to take hold\u201d (12). The preposterousness of the theory is evidence of its truth. And Freud is showing that \u201cthe real structure, of a society of equals . . \u00a0. is irreducible to the labile relations of equality.\u201d Rather \u201cthe petty jealousies and feelings of powerlessness that threaten these relations, that block their permanent realization, betray their guilty origins, the cause that they must efface\u201d (12).\u00a0<\/p>\nCopjec finds similar dynamics in Beyond the Pleasure Principle<\/i>, where Freud acknowledges the centrality of the pleasure principle in psychic life but \u201che then seeks, by means of the death drive, to account for this centrality, to state the principle by which the principle of pleasure is installed\u201d (13). The death drive is not a second principle, but plays the role of the father in the primal horde. It is necessary to explain the reign of the pleasure principle.<\/p>\n
In each of these texts, Freud explains that \u201cthe transcendental principle, or the principle of the principle of rule, is in conflict with the principle of rule itself.\u201d Neither of these principles can win, \u201csince the very existence of the empirical field always presupposes the existence of its cause, and since the cause can never exist abstractly, in the absence of that which it effects\u201d (13).<\/p>\n
This <\/em>is the way of transcendence: No meta<\/em>principle, and yet the whole internal structure depends on some \u201ctranscendent\u201d episode that must be suppressed. The society of equals exists only because of the now occluded origin; yet the society of equals can never be realized because of the guilt from those same occluded origins. Thus far Freud the tragedian of social order.<\/p>\nThis is the way of transcendence, if <\/em>one insists on rejecting theology.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joan Copjec\u2019s 1994\u00a0Read My Desire (recently reprinted by Verso) sets Lacan against the historicists, specifically against Foucault. But also, along the way, Lacan against the structuralists. It\u2019s dense going, as one might expect. Early on, Copjec isolates the trouble with Foucault. He \u201crealizes the necessity of conceiving the mode of a regime of power\u2019s institution,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1322,125,1323,950],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foucault","category-freud","category-historicism","category-jacques-lacan"],"yoast_head":"\n
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