Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Rise of Historioplastic Metafiction (original) (raw)

Lacan: The Mind of the Modernist (2015)

ABSTRACT (“Lacan: The Mind of the Modernist”): This paper offers an intellectual portrait of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, by considering his incorporation of perspectives associated with “modernism,” the artistic and intellectual avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century. These perspectives are largely absent in other alternatives in psychology and psychoanalysis. Emphasis is placed on Lacan’s affinities with phenomenology, a tradition he criticized and to which he is often seen as opposed. Two general issues are discussed. The first is Lacan’s unparalleled appreciation of the paradoxical nature of human experience, together with his treatment of paradox as (paradoxically enough) almost a criterion of truth. These points are illustrated by considering Lacan’s conceptions of the self and of erotic desire. The second issue is Lacan’s focus on the “ontological dimension,” on overall styles or modalities of what might be termed “transcendental subjectivity”: namely, what he calls the registers of the “Imaginary,” the “Symbolic,” and the “Real.” By emphasizing the incommensurable yet (paradoxically) interdependent nature of these modalities, Lacan offers a synthesis of dynamic/conflictual and formal/ontological dimensions of the human condition This paper offers an encompassing portrait of Lacan’s major ideas that is at odds with the widespread assumption that Lacan is somehow a deeply anti-humanist thinker who derides the subjective dimension. Lacans’ most distinctive contributions are fundamentally concerned with the nature of human experience. They show strong affinities with (and the influence of) “hermeneutic” forms of phenomenology inspired by Heidegger, a philosopher who focused on ontological modes of Being and considered paradox as a mark of truth.

Lacan and Beckett: Acts of Writing between Psychoanalysis and Literature

SBT/A 29.1 pp. 79-91

Building on the dialectical tension between neuro-cognitivism and Lacanian psychoanalysis , this article approaches the Beckettian text to localize acts of writing that take place between psychoanalysis and literature. In opposition to the cognitivist model of neuronal relationality, it uses the Lacanian logic of Real non-relation as an inroad into Beckett to explore the material frontier of Beckettian writing where relational meaning reaches its limit. At this limit, we are left with a complex writing between speech and inscription that makes the body of the signifier write against its sense.

" Desire Pronounced and/Punctuated": Lacan and the Fate of the Poetic Subject

American Imago, 1995

Throughout the 1980s, as future histories of the academy will no doubt recall, the concept of the self was in big trouble. Theoretically, that is. Outside the academy it was a different story; indeed, in popular culture, forms of self-exploration and expression proliferated alongside fragmented and fragmenting media technologies. Next to this complex narrative, theself in the academy enacts a fairly consistent retreat. Attacked by intellectuals in every corner of the human sciences, the self was nowhere less secure than in the very discipline often accused of giving it ultimate priority: psychoanalysis, symbolized especially by the figure of Jacques Lacan. In the eyes of some historians at least, Lacan singlehandedly loosed analysis from its traditional moorings; as Anthony Elliot (1994) recently phrased it, Lacanian theory "has completely transformed cultural debates about the development of the individual subject in social and historical terms" (91-92). Yet at the height of this transformation, the Lacanian theoretical vocabulary of desire was being picked up and employed by several young American poets toward very different ends. As poststructuralist theory grew more important to the academy, Lacanian terms became important to poets who struggled over the fate of traditional poetic notions of agency, selfhood, individuality, and authorship. What resulted from this heady mixture of lyric and Lacan by no means reaffirmed the centrality of the subject in either poetry or cultural theory; it did, however, implicate the collapse of traditional discourses of the self in the reproduction of contemporary poetic value.