McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.
According to Dolar, “The whole point of Lacan’s construction of university discourse is that this is another lure, that the seemingly autonomous and self-propelling knowledge has a secret clause, and that its truth is detained by the master under the bar.”
In university discourse, the master signifier occupies the position of truth, which means that expert authority works ultimately in the service of mastery. For her part, Zupancic adds, “What Lacan recognizes in the university discourse is a new and reformed discourse of the master.”
University discourse emerges in response to the failure of the discourse of the master, but it is not a radical social structure. It represents a retooling of the authority involved in mastery in order to allow that authority to cope with the exigencies of capitalist relations of production. As the truth of university discourse (and expert authority), mastery is hidden and all the more effective because of this obscurity within which it dwells. 182