Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. page 106
.. a standard feminist epistemological position is that systems of representations form the known object. This position implies that a representational model of language is inadequate because those systems of signs are neither neutral nor transparent. However, feminist epistemologies often do not explicitly address or develop the implications of this position.
This chapter uses Lacan’s model of psychoanalytic discourse as a template to develop a theory of feminist knowledge as a transformative discursive practice.
Analytic Discourse
Analytic discourse In Lacan’s model, the exclusion of ‘an element of impossibility’ founds and structures all discourse (S17: 50).
Lacan represents that excluded term by an algebraic a. In analytic practice, the analysand recognizes the relation of his or her discourse to its excluded term a, such that the analysand recognizes the foundation of his or her discourse upon the exclusion of this term. That recognition is an act of symbolization, in which the analysand articulates the signifier of its otherwise excluded term (Fink 1999: 49).
In psychoanalytic practice, the analysand represents the excluded signifier, so that it is not repressed but is inscribed in his or her signifying chain.
The analysand’s inscription of the signifier of the a changes the relation of symbolic elements in that signifying chain, so producing a new signifying chain. In this way, the analysand produces new meaning or signification.
For feminist epistemology, the importance of the Lacanian theory of analytic discourse is that it provides a template that it can use to analyse other transformative discourses. 106
It could be argued that feminist epistemology cannot appropriate a Lacanian model of psychoanalytic knowledge because it derives from clinical practice. In this argument, any such appropriation either reduces feminist practice to psychoanalytic practice or relies on an unsustainable analogy between them. However, my use of Lacan’s model as a template to theorize feminist discourse … does not claim that feminist knowledge is analytic knowledge in another mode, nor that feminist knowledge is able to be (or needs to be) produced in the clinical operations of resistance, transference, and so on. 107
It is evident that the transferential relation of analyst and analysand does not produce feminist knowing. However, my use of the Lacanian model of knowledge does not rely on such an analogy between feminist and psychoanalytic practices because it reconfigures that model in the feminist field. As I argued in Chapter 2, rereading the Lacanian theory of analytic discourse through feminism positions that model within social and political relations. With this rereading, it becomes possible to use Lacanian theory to understand how feminist knowledge changes how we know ourselves and our others. 107
The Lacanian approach identifies three elements in an analysis of discourse:
- the structure of signifiers of a given discourse, or, the common features of feminist knowledges;
- the relation of the structure of the discourse to its repudiated and yet foundational term a, or, the nature of that discursive practice;
- the operation of that discourse in the production of meaning, or, an account of its operation.
In the next section, I use this Lacanian model to understand how feminist knowledge operates as a discourse.