Dear Professor Willett,
I think that many of the "reservations" about Lacanian theory and its treatment of the category of desire that you articulated in your last message to the group might be instructive. You essentially accuse Lacan of failing to raise psychoanalysis to the level of an objective (positivist?) science. I would suggest that this is a wrong-headed accusation, since it was *never* Lacan's goal to depend upon the sort of "objectifying knowledge" that psychoanalysis came into being to critique. Psychoanalysis is the study of an *open* system, the system that is the unconscious and its imbrication within language, and it would be therefore inappropriate for psychoanalysts to attempt to "rigidify' their method within any sort of code or absolute representation----such simplifying, reductive codes or objective representations are only ever fantasies insofar as they attempt to contain, delimit or "discipline" the unconscious; they are only ever the defense mechanisms of the object-ego that analysis tries to look/hear beyond. Instead of being an "objective" science, analysis should be, Lacan suggests, a *poetics* of the psyche, an *art* that understand the psyche, Lacan says in "the function and field of speech and language," as a collection of rhetorical figures, "ellipsis and pleonasm, hyperbaton or syllepsis, regression, repetition, apposition...metaphor, catachresis, autonomasis, allegory, metonymy, and synecdoche.." Understanding those figures of the psyche is not a matter of "standing back" safely and anaseptically "describing." It's a matter of reflective listening, passionate engagement, and close-reading. In other words, psychoanalytic thought and understanding are a *rejection* of the illusions of everyday "truth" and positivist inquiry; "it is on the basis of a kind of refusal of understanding," lacan says, " that we push open the door to analytic understanding."
The second major criticism that you launched against Lacanian theory is that it depends upon linguistic models---those of Saussure, Jakobson, and other structuralists---that, you say, are "outdated." The conventions of Elizabethan theater are "outdated"----no one writes Elizabethan tragedies in the year 2000 (as anything other than pastiche). Does it therefore follow that we should no longer read Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, et al.? I hope not. My sense is that the human sciences, like the arts, do not folllow the line of some providential, historical plan ever marching towards more and more precise descriptions of Truth. They move in fits and starts, having moments of insight often followed by long periods of unfortunate retrenching.
Best,
Stephen
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