true enough -- the person who is imprecise in this particular instance, I
believe, is Professor Belsey. In *The Subject of Tragedy*, she dismisses
psychoanalysis as a way of thinking which, because it makes the "the social
and political" into "secondary concerns," permits the "institutions" of
power to "stay much as they are" (p. 54). Yet the title and her argument
itself, in important moment, rely on the psychoanalytical category of the
subject. 

The title of the book in which Belsey voices her critique of
psychoanalysis, The Subject of Tragedy, relies on psychoanalysis' term for
the point of articulation of the unconscious (Lacan Écrits 128), a category
with which she admits her discomfort (The Subject of Tragedy 53).  The
subject is not the only psychoanalytical category curiously emerging in the
writing of those who declare a quarrel with psychoanalysis. When, in the
conclusion to her book on the "subject" of tragedy, Belsey speaks of the
identity-forming effects of the "language which defines, delimits, and
locates power" (191), she has recourse to another category of Lacanian
psychoanalysis. She calls this language or "discourse" wherein "subjects …
find their position" the "symbolic order" (221).

In her programmatic Critical Practice, Belsey more extensively explains
Lacan's symbolic as "the set of signifying systems of culture of which the
supreme example is language" (60). And isn't the idea of the "symbolic," so
understood as a "social formation" (ibid.) fashioning the self or "subject"
through politicized discourse what is assumed in Louis Montrose's reference
to "representations" working by means of a "multivalent ideological
process" to "generate … cultural meanings and values"? Does it not inform
the appeal of the editors of Rewriting the Renaissance, a collection which
helped promote cultural materialism in early modern studies, to the
"complex and heterogeneous sign systems that encode - and enforce" social
"identity"? Does not the understanding of the symbolic as a set of
authoritative and empowered descriptions echo in Elizabeth Harvey's
reference at the conclusion to her study of ventriloquized female voices in
Renaissance texts to the "language and … cultural lexicon" working to keep
female identity "marginal"?

Yet to speak of the symbolic as the register of authoritative "citations"
concerning gender and class "identity" is to understand it as a register of
representations and significations, or what Lacan would call captations.
These are the constituents not of Lacan's symbolic but of his register of
the signified, the imaginary. Lacan's symbolic, we had better remember, is
the register of the signifier, not the signified, of the structures of
language and/as the structures of desire and the unconscious. To make the
symbolic, as do catherine Belsey, Judith Butler and Diana Fuss, the arena
where identity politics are instantiated and contested is to collapse
Lacan's symbolic into his imaginary, the register of the ego and its
specular images, its imagoes. Understanding the symbolic as the arena of
identity politics, Diana Fuss admits, involves a "serious difficulty" with
respect to the unconscious, psychic site of this register for Lacan. The
unconscious does not and cannot exert the "steady or lasting control" over
"identity" ascribed to the symbolic when it is understood by Belsey,
Butler, and others who mis-appropriate psychoanalysis into cultural
studies, as the locus of the "law." How revealing, then, of Fuss to link
identity politics with the psychic function of identification, the function
Lacan theorizes as one of the two poles of the imaginary. Fuss's and other
current discussions of "identity politics" occasionally invoking Lacan's
symbolic but collapsing it with Foucault's discursive formations,
discussions at the theoretical backdrop of new historicist and cultural
materialist studies of early modern texts, confuse Lacan's symbolic with
his imaginary. In doing so they lose hold and lose track of the symbolic as
the register of the structures of desire and the signifier, of the
rhetorical and/as the erotic.

But in early modern literary and metalinguistic texts, much as in Lacanian
psychoanalysis, the rhetorical and the erotic are inextricably mapped onto
one another. If we are to read these texts in a historically responsible
way, as new historicists insist we do, we cannot afford to forget this
mapping. If we are to pursue the thinking of the erotic and/as the
rhetorical this mapping reveals in a conceptually responsible way, we
cannot ignore its striking anticipation of Lacanian psychoanalysis. In
Lacanian psychoanalysis, the erotic and the rhetorical, desire and the
signifier can be understood only in their relation to the primary
constituent of the symbolic register, the subject of the unconscious.

In other words, I believe Belsey's formulation regarding "the symbolic
order of culture and language" reiteratd from *Critical Practice* to this
very day, by her and others who echo her, does not adequately represent
Lacan's thinking of the symbolic as locus of desire. When we attempt to
understand Lacan's category of desire through Belsey's, or Butler's, or
other, to my mind imprecise reformulations, rather than first hand sources,
such mistakes are inevitable. 

And here I happily find myself concurring with Professor Willet about the
philosophical risks run by criticism that does not study its primary
tehoretical texts in depth. 

Dr. Shirley Sharon-Zisser         
 


At 14:31 22/10/00 -0600, you wrote:
 If memory serves, when
>she makes the statement, she's explaining Lacan.... now there might be
>someone who's wrong.  
>Frances Batycki
>
>



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