Adrian Johnston’s Review of Lacan in America 2002
Joan Copjec, a familiar name in English-language Lacanian scholarship, addresses the link (or, perhaps, non-rapport) between psychoanalysis and “embodiment theory” as a general anti-Cartesian trend permeating the American academy.
Proponents of the “embodied subject” endlessly rant and rail against the Cogito’s haunting of Western thought, continually issuing emphatic reminders to themselves and others that “bodies matter.”
Lacanian psychoanalysis is seen as yet another Cartesian marginalization of the body; Lacan gives pride of place to “the signifier” and its structure, thereby ignoring corporeality, affectivity, and so on.
But, Copjec asks in “The Body as Viewing Instrument, or the Strut of Vision,” what kinds of “bodies” are embodiment theorists talking about? Simply affirming that “the body” is important, that human beings have bodies, is a trivial point not worth paying attention to when taken at face value. What sort of insights could the brute declaration “I have a body” possibly hope to produce?
One of Copjec’s central theses is that Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis promises a far more philosophically satisfying investigation into embodiment than what comes out of the mouths of the agitated advocates of a “return to the body.”
These advocates usually offer a choice between two flawed options: either an experiential “lived body” entwined with an amorphous perceptual self of sorts (i.e., the phenomenological option), or, alternatively, an empty, socially constructed husk, a tabula rasa for the transcription of “power” (i.e., a vaguely Foucauldian option).
Copjec maintains that the psychoanalytic concept of Trieb poses a direct challenge to these ways of envisioning embodiment that has yet to be genuinely thought through by those who so frequently babble about bodies—“of all Freud’s notions, that of the drive has had the least success in attracting supporters; it obliges a kind of rethinking that only the boldest of thinkers would dare to undertake. The question one must ask is: How does drive determine human embodiment as both a freedom from nature and a part of it?” (pg. 279).
Or, similarly, how should one set about explaining the manner in which “human nature” is, by being simultaneously and always-already entangled in “soma” as well as “psyche” (the latter including the concrete impacts of the socio-symbolic order on the individual), neither a pure corporeal substantiality nor a constructed, virtual epiphenomenon?
Copjec uses discussions of gaze and body, particularly the issues raised by Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century and subsequently taken up by film theory, in a struggle to work through the implications that metapsychology harbors as regards embodiment (in this task, she relies on Lacan’s analyses of the gaze, the visual field, perspective, and subjectivity from seminars eleven and thirteen).
As one might have already sensed prior to the present juncture, a contemporary figure playing in the background of many of these ongoing debates is Judith Butler.
Certain arguments mentioned above are echoed in Butler’s exchanges with Slavoj Žižek in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, particularly the problem of negotiating between structural and historical axes of analysis in Lacanian theory.
Part of her project, as spelled out in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, is to wed Foucault and psychoanalysis so that they mutually supplement each other. Why should one combine these positions?
Foucault’s delineations of the workings of “power” lack any carefully-explained model of psychical subjectivity as the object of these forces; however, psychoanalysis fails acknowledge and incorporate Foucauldian insights into the fundamentally historical, contingently-mediated nature of the subject.
In short, Butler is searching for a metapsychology of the socially constructed psyche (on a related note, Frances L. Restuccia’s piece “The Subject of Homosexuality: Butler’s Elision” succinctly blows holes in Butler’s claim, also from The Psychic Life of Power, that heterosexual identity is erected upon the foundations of a fundamentally disavowed “passionate attachment” to the same gender, that “foreclosed” homosexuality underlies society’s artificial sexual norms).
Going back to the texts of Foucault, according to Christopher Lane in “The Experience of the Outside: Foucault and Psychoanalysis,” reveals the ultimate futility of this Butlerian endeavor. Any marriage between Foucault’s constructivist position and Lacanian psychoanalysis can only result in the suppression of the latter’s explanatory potentials.
Lane’s argument is clear, straightforward, and easy enough to grasp. He contends that an absolutely fundamental assertion/assumption in psychoanalysis is that the subject is constitutively “out of joint” with “reality.” What else could Freud mean when he speaks of the impossibility of “educating” the unconscious, or when he later depicts the id as utterly ignorant of the external world?
Of course, this isn’t to deny that the psyche is profoundly affected and modified by the sensations, experiences, and influences constantly streaming into it from “the Outside.”
Nonetheless, what Lane does deny is the notion that subjectivity is a passive, receptive surface, a malleable receiver or container of normative, socio-cultural patterns and processes.
Copjec cites Lacan’s remarks from the eleventh seminar about “failures of causality” and “gaps” between causes and effects as fundamentally important conceptualizations to keep in mind when approaching the unconscious.
Similarly, Lane stresses that the interactions between psychoanalytically conceived “human nature” and its trans-individual environment cannot be mapped out along the lines of predictable pathways, such as, for example, ideological stimulus “x” always leading to subjectivity effect “y.”
Although “power” may indeed perpetually and continually press upon subjects, a carbon-copy imprint of these socio-ideological mechanisms, a flawless reproduction of the macro-level at the micro-level, doesn’t smoothly and invariably take root.
Lane effectively shows how any constructivist position repeats, on nothing more than a quantitatively enlarged scale, the narcissistic enclosure of solipsism by presenting a picture of humans unproblematically manufacturing their own reality as a collectivity.
If everything is socially constructed, then what motivates this constructing activity in the first place? What sets it in motion, and why is society constructed in the specific ways that it is, rather than being constructed in other possible ways?
Lane explains Foucault’s well-known ambivalence towards psychoanalysis as a result of his failure to resolve these sorts of criticisms and questions to his own satisfaction. Although Lane concedes that Foucault himself sensed these problems and made sophisticated attempts to deal with them, he argues that Foucault’s followers tend to pass over them in silence.