Dear Professor Grossman, 

Thank you so much for bringing the full text of one of Lacan's many
pertinent reflections on desire and temporality to the attention of list
members not familiar with it.   

I think the major issue in previous posts was not whether desire is
proleptic, but whether prolepsis is erotic. Prolepsis is one of the many
forms of the erotic in Renaissance linguistic theory and poetry. I
mentioned quite a few others in previous posts.  

As for Lacan's theorization of desire in relation to temporality, it does,
of course, include analepsis. I think your apt summary of the passage from
"The Subversion of the Subject" accords with Dr. Whitworth's succinct
formulation of yesterday: "desire's orientation toward a future is always
already determined by analepsis, "the need" of a past that constantly
weighs on the present, and in the process of being articulated, becomes
desire." So I think we all agree.   

This was probably a parapraxis in your last post, but Lacan sees desire as
the remainder left over when *need*, not demand, is gratified. The
constitutive emptiness of desire is one reason why formulations such as
"the satisfaction of desire" which have come up on this list are, in
Lacan's terms, oxymorons. This is also why, as Lacan says on many
occasions, desire is the "want-to-be" (e.g. *Seminar 11*, p. 29, "The
Subversion fo the Subject," p. 323; *Seminar 20,* p. 31). Desire's status
as the "want-to-be" is also another reason why its tense cannot be present,
subtended by the copula "is," the ontological copula, the metaphorical
copula. Attempting to produce ontology in language through that copula,
Lacan says in *Seminar 20*, p. 31, "is a highly risky enterprise," one
which evades desire and the unconscious, and leaves us entrapped in the
imaginary, the only place where we can produce misrecognitions of presence
(or, if you will, "identifications"), the only place we can delude
ourselves we "are." The issues of the conceptual relations between the
ontological copula aand denial, and the similaic copula, desire, and
jouissance, in two chapters of my *The Risks of Simile in Renaissance
Rhetoric*.   

I don't think for Lacan desire 'passes' through the symbolic. Along with
the unconscious, desire is a prime constituent of the symbolic, register of
signifiers and subjects. Desire and the unconscious do not partake of the
imaginary and the real. Because the unconscious is structured like a
language, as is desire, rhetoric, especially in its exquisitely nuanced
form in Renaissance linguistic theory and poetics, is essential to our
understanding of the psyche. This is part of Lacan's legacy. Witness the
long list of rhetorical forms he (imprecisley) lists when he theorizes
dream in "The Function and Field of Speech and Language" (p. 58) and even
more specifically, his reference to "the ancient art of rhetoric" in "The
Subversion of the Subject" (p. 298) as the site from which psychoanalysis
must learn about its concerns. Lacan was not a scholar of rhetoric. This is
a challenge, admittedly difficult, but inspiring, intriguing, fascinating,
he left to those of us who are.        

Yet we must strive to be precise. In terms of Renaissance rhetoric,
prolepsis, analepsis, and chiasmus are not tropes but figures. Puttenham is
the one English Renaissance rhetorician who does not resort to this
distinction, for interesting reasons, but for all others, "figure" and
"trope" are conceptually and psychologically distinct. Figure is theorized
in relation to a structure of desire Lacan would theorize as preversion and
characterize as the closest approximation to jouissance within the
symbolic. See the as yet untranlsated *Seminar 3* on object relations and
the conclusion to "The Subversion of the Subject." Trope is theorized in
relation to a possessiveness which denies the desire of the other, a
psychic structure related to what Lacan would theorize as the discourse of
the master, and which, in *Seminar 20*, he aptly relates to the verb "to
be" (maitre/m'etre) (p. 31). I have a chapter in my book on each one of
these categories, and quite a few related articles.        

Yet if the unconscious is rhetorically structured, there cannot be a single
linguistic form (which would have to be a figure, not a trope) which would
fully trace the subject. On the contrary, the manifold psychic structures
of desire and the unconscious correspond to many different rhetorical forms. 

I like your attempt to provide a rhetorical characterization of the
interrelation of prolepsis and analepsis in Lacan's theorization of desire.
I'd like to make two points here: first, unlike prolespis and analepsis,
chiasmus is not a temporal form. It cannot come instead of the temporal
formsof prolepsis and analepsis which do figure inLacan's theorization. You
use chiasmus, it seems to me, on a meta-level, to characterize the
strcutural relation between prolepsis and analepsis inLacan's theorization
of desire. But the ratio between prolepsis and analepsis in this
theorization, unlike the ratio between the terms crossed in chaismus, is
not direct. They do not have the same weight. I would have to think more
about what the rhetorical form for the relation between them might be, but
in the meantime thank you heartily for the challenge of leading me to think
about this.  

Perhaps part of the answer is indeed suggested by Benveniste in *Problems
in General Linguistics*. When Barthes takes up Benveniste's discussion of
the subject of the enunciation in *The Rustle of Language*, he speaks of
the "correlation of subjectivity" rhetorically embodied in the category of
the middle voice. Aristotle, and Barnfield, called this category "the
mean." See Barnfield's "I cannot keepe the Menane: for why (alas /Griefes
have no meane, though I for meane doe passe" (*The Shepheards Content,
lines 13-14). Professor Stephen Whitworth has analyzed all of this,
inrelation to Spenser and Barnfield, brilliantly and throughly, in "Passing
for Mean" (*Rhetoric Society Quarterly* 29.3 [1999]).        

proleptically, 

Dr. Shirley Sharon-Zisser
Tel Aviv University 




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