logocentric – Page 89

campbell discourse of hysteric

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 77 – 78.

For feminist epistemology, the question is how to create a political discourse that does not reproduce the Discourse of the Master. Its utopian claims posit the possibility of other discourses, citing feminist knowledges as evidence of that possibility. … For Lacan, the question too is how to stop the discourse of mastery (S17 207). The possibility of a psychoanalytic discourse also subsists in the disruption of the Discourse of the Master. In the later Lacanian epistemology, that disruption occurs in the Discourses of the Hysteric and the Analyst.

Lacan argues that the discourses of the Hysteric and the Analyst create new positions of epistemological enunciation and a new relation of subject to object. Can his account of these discourses explain the new position of epistemological enunciation and relation which feminist epistemology seeks? If so, does the feminist knower occupy the position of the Hysteric or the Analyst? Or neither? 77

For Lacan, the hysterical analysand opens the Master’s Discourse to the Analyst’s Discourse. The desire to know the Master animates the Discourse of the Hysteric. (S17 36). She asks ‘what is it to be a woman?’ (S3 175) In Lacan’s discussion of the case history of Dora he places the emergence of hysteria … in the little girl’s reproach to the mother that she does not have the phallus. The hysterical demand emerges from that reproach, in which the hysteric signifies the frustration of her unanswerable demand to have and to enjoy the phallus (S17 112). … She subjects the Master’s Discourse to her unanswerable demand, and he can only reply with the assertion that she is castrated — that there are beings that do not have the phallus and that she is in that class of beings. 77

One strand of feminist thinking, such as that of Elaine Showalter (1987), has also understood the hysteric as a position of feminine protest, and her symptoms as a bodily rewriting of her experience of a social order that causes her psychic pain. It perceives Dora, the exemplary hysteric of psychoanalysis, as its first feminist heroine who represents the limits of psychoanalytic knowledge and patriarchal discourse. It interprets Dora’s rejection of Freud’s cure both as a refusal to be reinserted into the exchange of women, and as a protest against that exchange.

In this interpretation, Dora is a metaphor for the inability of psychoanalytic knowledge, and patriarchal knowledge generally, to describe feminine sexuality in general, and female homosexuality in particular. She comes to represent a rupture of an apparently seamless masculine representation and knowledge of women. In both these accounts, the hysteric represents a contestation and disruption of the Master’s Discourse. She represents its moment of failure because she reveals its cost.

However, Lacan argues that the position of the Hysteric resolves itself in a demand to the Master (S17: 150). She constructs her protests within his terms. The Hysteric desires knowledge, but the knowledge that she desires is that which the Master possesses.

In this way, her position is one of symptomatic repetition that fails to contest or change the Master’s discourse.

The Hysteric’s response to her pain is a symptomatic protest rather than resistance to the social order that produces her symptoms. She does not represent a contestation of the knowledge of the Master but is trapped within it.

Other feminist readings of the hysteric perceive her in similar terms, arguing that she does not represent a political figure. For example, Maria Ramas (1985) argues that the hysteric silently protests the oppression of women by taking up a position of inarticulate and passive resistance, thereby participating in traditional feminine protest of mute victimhood. These feminists argue that while such a position may have been the only position open to Dora, it does not provide an adequate basis for an active and interventionist politics that seeks to change the social order rather than to silently suffer its injustices.

In both Lacanian and feminist theory, the position of the Hysteric represents an important moment in the contestation of the Discourse of the Master. However, while the hysteric reveals the failure of the Discourse of the Master, she fails to disrupt its operation. The hysterical analysand exposes the castration of the Master, but she does not dislodge him from his position of mastery. The Discourse of the Master ultimately recuperates the position of the hysterical analysand. She knows that the Master is castrated, but she refuses to address him as other than Master. In epistemological terms, the limit of the Discourse of the Hysteric is evident in relation to her knowledge.

What is the knowledge of the hysteric? She knows the truth of the Master’s discourse, namely that he suffers castration. Lacan acknowledges that the price she pays for that knowledge is herself. But what does this castration reveal? The hysteric’s demand that she have the phallus is unanswerable. She cannot be a Master nor have mastery, and in this the hysteric must always fail.

Her knowledge cannot be spoken because she cannot articulate the castration of the Master within her discourse, and hence cannot bring it into representation. Without that possibility, the hysterical analysand cannot represent the Master other than as Master. She cannot articulate a position other than that of unattainable Mastery or of suffering hysteria. For that reason, hysteria operates as a symptom, rather than as a political discourse that can change the social order that causes the Hysteric’s psychic conflict and distress.

For this reason, the Discourse of the Hysteric does not produce an adequate subject position for the feminist knower. Dora the hysterical analysand may be interpreted as a nascent feminist heroine. However, her knowledge of the Master’s discourse is bodily rather than political.

Feminist politics implies symbolization, a representation of how we might understand gender and gender relations differently. However, the hysteric wants to evade the very possibility of representation, because it is the refusal to articulate desire that produces the hysterical symptom. The Discourse of the Hysteric is not the Discourse of the Feminist. Is, then, feminist discourse a Discourse of the Analyst? 79

campbell discourse of the master

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004.

For Lacan, the Discourse of the Master describes the production of the speaking subject in the symbolic field. The subject comes into being when it enters the signifying chain through identification with a signifier, S1. The S1 is a fundamental symbolic element which ‘knots’ signifier and signifed and thereby arrests their constant sliding. It represents the signifier that gives the subject its symbolic coherence and situates it within language. For this reason, the marks the point of the ‘origin’ of the subject’s speech, because the identification with the I of speech, the S1 that symbolizes the I of the master, constitutes the subject (Seminar 17: 70). In this way, identification with the I of the Master forms the subject in the symbolic field. The Discourse of the Master thereby inaugurates a speaking subject which is identical to its proper signifer and which ‘names’ it. For Lacan, this discourse binds the subject to the master signifier and all its illusions. 65

In the Discourse of the Master, the subject refuses knowledge of its formation in signifying networks. In his schema, Lacan represents this refusal to know by an arrow S1—>S2 labelled impossibility. Given this structure, it is impossible for the subject to know its relation to the signifier. For this reason, Lacan represents that impossibility by his figure of the barred subject, $. He represents the subject as barred because it refuses to acknowledge the truth of its unconscious division. That lack is a consequence of its constitution as a speaking being, because castration is the price of entering the Symbolic order. The discourse of the Master hides the truth of the lack-in-being of the subject (S17 90). The Master does not want to know, and cannot know, the truth of its unconscious. The subject perceives itself as an I, that is, as a unified subject, and hence refuses to acknowledge that it is in fact a Master that suffers castration.

The Discourse produces a subject who wishes to master its self, its others, its desire, and its unconscious. For Lacan, the Master wishes to dominate that which it excludes form its discourse (S17 110).

Fink describes how this subject must show no weakness, in this sense carefully hides the fact that he or she, like everyone else, is a being of language and has succumbed to symbolic castration’ (Fink in Nobus Key Concepts 1998). The castrated Master refuses to believe that it is castrated. 66

It veils over its lack with the illusion that it is whole and complete; the méconnaissance of a self that imagines that it is identical to itself and to its master signifier (S17 70). It imagines that it has mastery of a ‘univocal’ discourse that masks its unconscious division. 66

The Knowing Master is a position in which the imaginary order captures the knower such that it perceives its self and its objects in the mirror of the ego. The Master subject claims to be a unified subject which creates itself in an act of mastery. It imagines itself to be whole and identical to itself, and perceives its self and its others as identical to its egoistic projections. The knower constructs its relationship to its others as an objectifying identification in which the other is an object that it seeks to master. Its knowledge is an aggressive, objectifying and distorting domination of its known object. The knowing subject attempts to gain omnipotent control of itself and its world, so as to imagine itself as the ‘Absolute Master’ (Lacan 1955: 47, Éc: 33). It posits itself as omniscient, the possessor of absolute knowledge. 66

Lacan’s description of the knowing subject of the Discourse of the Master presents it as the universal, disembodied knower. However, given that the Lacanian account of subjectivity posits sexuation as its condition, then the knower is necessarily sexed.

Following a feminist deconstructive strategy leads us to ask, how is sexuation inscribed into the Lacanian theory of the knowing subject? (66)

To answer that question requires the reinscription of sexual difference into Lacan’s account of the production of the Master subject. 67

🙂 Here we go

For Lacan, the Master subject is produced through identification with a symbolic term, the trait unaire, translated as the unitary, unary or ‘single-stroke’ trait. Lacan’s theory draws on Freud’s account in Group Psychology (1921) of the process of the assimilation of an aspect or characteristic of another, in which the subject identifies with a trait of another subject. Lacan argues that an identification with the unitary trait ‘marks’ each one of us as a singular and unified identity. (S17 180)

He links this concept of the unifying mark to the signfier of ‘L’Un’ (The One). ‘The One’ is the signifier that institutes the symbolic structure of the subject (S17 12, S20 143-144).

In the Discourse of the Master the unitary trait appears as S1, the master signifier. The master signifier functions as the signifier that represents the subject as subject.67

However Lacan also links S1 to the phallic signifier. In his discussion of sexuation, Lacan describes the phallus as ‘that which is also incarnated in S1, which, of all the signifiers, is the signfier for which there is no signified (S20 80). The phallus incarnates or ‘makes flesh’ the S1 of the master signifier.

For this reason, identification with the phallic signifier operates as identification with the master signifier. What links these terms is the process of symbolic identification in which the phallic signifier is a master signifier that produces the subject.

Lacan argues that in the formation of the subject, the signification of the phallus [is evoked by the paternal metaphor]. The paternal metaphor is the attribution of procreation to the Name-of-the-Father and the signification of the paternal relation.

A moment of the Oedipus complex, the paternal metaphor represents the intervention of the Symbolic order (signified by The-Name-of-the-Father) in the subject’s imaginary relation to the mother (and her desire).

In the operation of the paternal metaphor, the desire for the mother is repressed and the phallic signifier stands in for that desire in the subject’s unconscious (Muller and Richardson 1994 213). This process forms the subject in a relation to the phallic signifier and hence as a sexed identity which has or does not have the phallus (S5 186). In this account, the masculine subject has the phallus, a position of possessing the signifier of the phallic object, while the feminine subject does not have the phallus, a position of lack and hence castration. 67

Lacan argues that the dissolution of the Oedipus complex involves symbolic interjection, in which ‘what was outside becomes the inside, what was the father becomes the super-ego’ (S1 169). In symbolic identification the subject introjects the signifier of the father, forming the super-ego. The subject assimilates the phallic signifier as the mark of the Father, and thereby incorporates the Symbolic father as an I. (S11 256-257)

Presenting the reformulation of the paternal metaphor (and of the Oedipus complex) in the theory of the Discourse of the Master.

In the Discourse of the Master, identification with the phallic signifier — S1 — of the Father produces a ‘unified’ subject. It is an identification with the paternal signifier because the phallic signifier is the mark of the Father, and hence of his Law. This symbolic identification ‘marks’ and names the subject with and by the Name-of-the-Father. Identification with S1 involves an assimilation of the Symbolic father. For this reason, Lacan describes ‘the law’, that is, the Law of the Father, as dominating the Discourse of the Master (S17 48). 68

The process of symbolic identification with the Father produces the illusion of a conscious self. It establishes a subjective relation of I and ego in which the I of the speaking subject appears to be co-extensive with the ego because of the operation of repression. For the Master subject, consciousness founds illusion of the transcendental I (S17 70). Identification with the Symbolic Father who has the phallus and is not castrated structures this position of mastery, forming the master subject in terms of a psychic structure of defence against the unconscious. The identification with the Symbolic father produces a subject structured by a méconnaissance of its origniary and ontological lack.

However, in the Lacanian account identification with the Symbolic father operates differently in formation of masculine and feminine subjects. In the logic of castration, the model of a typical ‘successful’ resolution fo the Oedipus complex is that of the paternal identification of the little boy because of the tie of the symbolic phallus and the real penis. (S4 209). In the third stage of the Oedipus complex, the little boy identifies with the father who possesses the penis while the little girl recognizes that he has it (S5 196) For Lacan, if masculinity and femininity both ‘fail’, they fail differently. The difference concerns the more or less ‘problematic’ assumption of Oedipal subjectivity, because the master signifier that represents the subject is masculine (S17 107).

In Lacan’s account, the masculine subject has the phallus (S20 80). That is, the masculine subject possesses the phallus and, in this sense, is not castrated. The male subject defines its masculine position through the exception of castration such that his ‘all’ is defined through an other position of ‘not-being-all’. This other position is that of castration, which is the feminine position of a being that does not have the phallus. The phallus is the master signifier by which the masculine subject refuses the (lacking) body. …The phallus ‘that props him up as signifier and is also incarnated in S1 which of all the signifier, is the signifier for which there is no signified (S20 80). His ontological loss cannot be acknowledged without being symbolized as castration, for otherwise hts fantasy of omnipotence, unity and universality would unravel.

The displacement of ontological loss through the representation of castration in a symbolic function allows the masculine subject the illusion of mastery (S17 144).

In that illusion of mastery, the masculine subject misrecognizes itself as a being whole and complete of itself. It is a position of (masculine) mastery. 69

It is a position of presence, of the universal masculine subject which is ‘whole’ and which does not suffer loss or lack. The Discourse of the Master describes the production of the knowing master, a masculiine subject that secures its identity through identification with the Symbolic father in a repudiation of castration. 69

Reconceiving the knowing master as a masculine subject explains the formation of the masculine knower and its imaginary méconnaissance. It explains the relation between the knowing subject of consciousness and the masculine knower … showing the link between the formation of masculine subjects and knowers. In this way, it provides an account of the constitution of the knower as a masculine subject by providing the feminist deconstructive project with a means of understanding the formation fo the subject of ‘masculine’ knowledges.

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 75.

My account of the discourses of mastery provides a means of retaining these insights of deconstructive theories, while also not reducing masculine knowledge to an effect of individual experience or familial objects. In the later Lacanian epistemology, different discursive social links produce particular forms of knowledges and knowing subjects. Those symbolic relations between subjects represent different forms of the social bond. In a Western culture, a phallocentric Symbolic order structures those social relations between subjects. In particular, it founds the Discourse of the Master as a dominant discourse of Western culture. The Discourse of the Master produces dominant forms of knowledge and the masculine knowing subject.

These masculine subjects need not be men. Both men and women can, and do, become knowing Masters. However, men are more likely to assume this position than women for two reasons.

First, the Master is a paradigmatic knower because of the material and cultural privileging of particular forms of masculine identity.
Second, the normative production of identity attaches masculinity to biologically male subjects.

My account of the discourses of mastery provides an explanation for this ‘demonstrable alignment’ between masculine knowers and knowledges. For example, following Scheman’s description of the Cartesian knower, it explains how identification with the Symbolic father forms this egoistic, defensive Knowing Master. Similarly, following Bordo’s description of the masculine Cartesian subject, it explains why the knowledges of the masculine knower repudiate its feminine others (indeed, all others), the better to control their difference (1986: 452).

Rather than seeing masculine knowledges as a reflection of the privilege of men in social relations (as in standpoint theory), my account explains how those social relations produce masculine discourses of mastery. Those social relations produce discourses of knowledge that form the knower and its objects. These forms of knowing are discursive practices that do not describe the nature of ‘knowledge’, but rather the production of particular knowers and forms of knowing. (76)

campbell sexuation

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 64.

The power and difficulty of Lacan’s concept of sexed subjectivity for feminism lie in its linking of social, psychic and corporeal sexual difference. The very ground of feminist critiques of Lacan’s account is also that which makes it a powerful account of the formation of masculinity and femininity. This theory offers us, first, an explanation of the formation of sexed subjectivity, and second, an understanding of sexed subjectivity in which:

To become a subject is to become sexed.
To be sexed is to be caught within representations of sexual difference.
That signification is contingent and not fixed by the body.

In this account, sexual difference is both necessary and necessarily contingent. While Lacanian epistemology presents the knower as if it were outside the field of sexual difference, the Lacanian theory of sexuation situates all subjects within that field. Zizek points out that ‘[o]ne of the crucial differences between psychoanalysis and philosophy concerns the status of sexual difference: for philosophy, the subject is not inherently sexualised . . . whereas psychoanalysis promulgates sexualisation into a kind of formal, a priori, condition of the very emergence of the subject’ (1998a: 81). As a speaking subject, the knowing subject of Lacanian epistemology is therefore also sexed. While Lacan does not develop his work in this way, in the next section of the chapter I read Lacan’s accounts of knowledge and sexuation together to develop a theory of the formation of the sexed knower and its knowledges. I interweave Lacanian epistemology and the Lacanian account of sexuation to offer a possible answer to the question: ‘How, then, is sexual difference, this fundamental Real of human existence, inscribed into the matrix of the four discourses? How, if at all, are the four discourses sexualised?’ (Zizek 1998a: 82). (64)

campbell sexuation phallus

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 60.

The later Lacanian epistemology also presents a subject that is sexually neutral, because the master, academic, hysteric and analyst are positions without gender. Since both men and women have to enter the intersubjective relations of discourse in order to become subjects, the subject as such does not have a sex. … The Master is sexless because all must enter the Discourse of the Master in order to become subjects. That discourse produces all speaking subjects, such that ‘[i]n the final analysis, the “person” always has to do with the master’s discourse’ (S20: 69). Lacan makes his claim that the Discourse of the Master forms all subjects in Encore, (S20) the same seminar in which he also proposes that feminine sexuality and subjectivity are in excess of, rather than determined by, the phallic function. In his later work, Lacan repeatedly returns to the question of women’s knowledge (60).

The figure of the knowing woman is both difficult and fascinating for the later Lacan. This difficulty reflects the paradox of the classical account of sexuation: the phallus is a sexually neutral signifier which produces all subjects, but men and women become sexed subjects because of their different relation to the phallus.

In Lacan’s work, a different relationship to the phallic signifier defines the sexual difference of masculinity and femininity. In the description of the formation of the subject presented in Écrits, the child becomes an I and takes up a subject position in language after the intervention of the Law of the Father in the Oedipus complex. After the resolution of the Oedipus complex, subjectivity is assumed in the Symbolic order and the subject sexually differentiated by its relation to the phallus (É: 320– 321).

Similarly, Lacan’s later account argues that the subject’s relation to the phallic signifier produces it as sexed. As Lacan describes it in Encore, each speaking being must line up on one side or the other of the Graph of Sexuation (S20: 79).

In this way, Lacan’s account of the production of the subject turns on his concept of the phallus. This pivotal role of the phallus in the formation of sexed subjectivity gives rise to the most strenuous feminist critiques of Lacan’s work. Generally, the accusation of phallocentrism contains two objections:

– first, that Lacan ties his concept of the phallus to the biological organ of the penis,

– second, by doing so Lacan privileges masculinity and the male body as his model of sexual difference and its formation. For example, Elizabeth Grosz contends that in the phallocentric model, ‘[s]exual difference becomes codified into the presence or absence of a single feature – the male sexual organ’ (1990: 188).

In reply, Lacanians commonly accuse feminists of misreading this concept of the phallus. Typically, Bruce Fink argues that feminist authors such as Jane Gallop ‘have thus provided the reading public with patently or partially false interpretations’ (1995: 98). …

Following the ‘Function and Field of Speech’ (1953), Lacan’s concept of the phallus becomes increasingly complex and central to his theory of sexed subjectivity. For Lacan, the phallus operates in the three registers of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. In the Symbolic order, the phallus ‘is the signifier for which there is no signified’ (S20: 80); in the imaginary order it operates as a narcissistic object of the phallic image which fulfils that lack (É: 354); and in the real as the real phallus, the organ of the penis (É: 320). …

By implication, the ‘lack’ to which Lacan refers is the anatomical difference of woman, which he renders as the absence of a penis. Kaja Silverman argues that we should expect this confusion of phallus and penis because:

in any [theoretical] passage centrally concerned with elaborating a lack specific to woman…that lack can only be elaborated through reference to the penis. The Lacanian phallus depends for its libidinal centrality upon the anatomical distinction between the sexes, and it cannot, consequently, be rigorously distinguished from the penis. (1992a: 96)

In this way, Lacan’s account of ontological loss is predicated on the assumption of a body that suffers anatomical ‘loss’. For this reason, reference to a social signification of the body secures the Lacanian account of sexed subjectivity.

Lacan emphasizes the contingency of the relation between biological and psychic sexual difference in his argument that the subject can have either masculine or feminine structures, regardless of biological sex (S20: 71). However, while sexuation may be contingent, the socio-symbolic field which assigns masculinity and femininity to male and female bodies also produces them as sexually different.

Sexual subjectivity is not so contingent that it becomes possible to sever its production from the signification of the biological body. A concept of biological sexual difference thus secures which bodies come to be ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ (63).

While biological sex does not determine sexed subjectivity, sexuation signifies what it is to have a ‘male’ or ‘female’ body. Because ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ refer to a relation of the subject to the phallus, sexuation operates as the signification of biological sex in relation to the phallic signifier. For example, Lacan understands the Hysteric as a position of both men and women. Both sexes can be hysterics and, as analysands, become hysterical subjects. However, he repeatedly identifies this position of the subject with the feminine. The Hysteric has a ‘feminine’ structure because it symbolizes the primary dissatisfaction of castration (S17: 84). Lacan acknowledges that ‘there are many more women hysterics than men – this is a fact of clinical experience – because the woman’s path to symbolic realization is more complicated’ (S3: 178). Conversely, the male hysteric has access to ‘both phallic and the Other jouissance’ (Fink 1995: 108). He is therefore still structured by reference to a masculine structure, that is a masculine relation to the phallic signifier, because otherwise he would not have access to the phallic jouissance which is linked to the male organ (S20: 7). The terms ‘masculinity’ or ‘femininity’ do not have content without reference to the description of bodily sexual difference.

In Lacan’s account, subjects have a masculine or feminine structure, which provides a signification of anatomical sexual difference. The relation to the phallic signifier that produces the subject also gives meaning to biological body. In this theory, the socio-symbolic order assigns masculinity and femininity to particular bodies and in particular ways. That assignation may be contingent; such that pace Fink men can have feminine psychic structures and women can have a masculine relation the phallus. Nevertheless, Lacan does not describe those women as men, but as phallic women. Lacan’s theory assumes that ‘order and norms must be instituted which tell the subject what a man or woman must do’ (1964b: 276), and that most commonly the normative position for men is masculinity and for women is femininity (64).

campbell 4 discourses pt 4.

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 56.

In the later Lacanian epistemology, ‘knowledge’ is not only a relation of subject to object, but also of subject to subject. Lacan argues that the four discourses represent different forms of the social bond. The discourses that produce different forms of intersubjectivity also produce different forms of knowledge. In this way, the later Lacanian account of knowledge moves between subjective and intersubjective structures.

Because Lacan’s model describes not only the relation of subject to object, but also the relation of subjects, discourses of knowledge reveal the relation of the knower to its others. The Lacanian model thereby unfolds the epistemological relation of knowing subject, signifier and known object to include the relation of the knowing subject to other subjects.

The later Lacanian epistemology is a model of knowledge that posits it as a social practice in the sense that it is the product of the discursive social link. This model describes knowing as contingent upon social bonds which enable the subject to give meaning to, and make sense of, its world. It articulates discourses that structure how the knowing subject knows the world. To conceive knowledge in this way posits it as contingent upon our social bonds.

For this reason, Lacan conceives knowledge or savoir as that which is inscribed in the social link (S20: 73). Lacanian epistemology thus provides an account of the intersubjective production of knowledge, and of knowing as a socially mediated act. Lacan’s theory of the four discourses is far from being an elaborated epistemology. For example, Lacan does not indicate whether the discourses are necessarily interlinked or whether they can operate as explanatory devices without reference to each other. Moreover, Lacan does not reveal why it is four (and only four) discourses that comprise the fundamental social bonds. Lacan argues that these four discourses represent fundamental social bonds within the psychoanalytic field and possible forms of psychoanalytic knowledge. However, he does not explain why these discourses of the master, the hysteric, the university and the psychoanalyst function as foundational social links, nor why he has chosen these four discourses out of all possible social discourses.

Despite these omissions, the later epistemological work provides a new and important means of understanding the production of knowledge. Lacanian epistemology analyses knowledge as a discursive practice that is the product of the operation of particular signifying structures. Knowledge is also a social practice, in that the discursive social link produces it. In Lacan’s account, knowledge is understood as a discursive social practice. It does not reduce knowledge to the status of a proposition (as in many philosophical theories) nor to a social object (as in many sociological accounts). Rather, Lacanian epistemology offers feminist epistemology a theoretical apparatus to analyse the relation between knowledge, subjectivity and sociality.

campbell 4 discourses pt 3.

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 53.

I read the formulae of the four discourses as a dynamic representation of the discursive social link; as devices that formalize and elucidate fundamental forms of intersubjectivity. These models of the four discourses are a conceptual apparatus that can be used as skeleton keys to open the complexities of discourse.

In the theory of the four discourses, Lacan describes the different relations of the knower to other subjects and to its objects, and the different forms of those epistemological relations. Each discourse formalizes a position of a knowing subject, its relation to that which its discourse excludes, to its master signifier, and to its knowledge. The formulae represent the structural relation of these key elements, so that each represents a stable structure of discourse. Each schema describes a particular and specific form of knowledge. For example, the Discourse of the University attempts to know all, including that which it excludes. A desire for mastery and control of its objects dominates this discourse, which at the same time operates to reproduce the exclusions of its knowledge (S17: 70– 71). The foundational discourses thus articulate possible combinations of discursive elements, representing four possible positions of the knowing subject and four possible epistemological relations (53-54).

However, the position of the knower and the form of its knowledge cannot be understood by simply examining the place of the barred subject ($) or of knowledge (S2) in the formulae of the discourses. The knower does not take up the position of the $, just as S2 does not represent its knowledge (54).

Rather, Lacan suggests that a knowing subject takes up a particular speaking position (for example, that of the master, the hysteric or the analyst) and so produces a particular type of knowledge (mastering, hysterical, analytic). The discourses describe four possible forms of knowledge. (54)

The four discourses present a theory of specific forms of knowledge. However, they also constitute an epistemological metatheory. Underlying these four models is a radical imbrication of knowledge and discourse because ‘[d]iscourse is a fundamental apparatus which is prior to and which determines the whole relation of subjects to subjects and subjects to objects’ (Adams 1996: 72). For Lacan, discourse produces knowledge. It gives meaning to the world, and so how that world is known is contingent upon its symbolic network. Lacan’s formulae do not represent a formal description of the conditions of true belief abstracted from reality. Rather, as speaking beings we are always already within the world of discourse. Reality is a function of discourse, for discourse produces both the world that is known, and the only world that can be known (S17: 13). In this model, discourse has a necessary and stable structure which shapes the interplay of its elements and which produces signification. Lacan analyses discourses in terms of their constitutive elements, and the operation of those elements. The different combinations of a knowing subject, the barred subject, the signifying chain, the excluded from discourse (the a), and the master signifier, produce different forms of knowledge. Lacan reduces each discourse to its constituent components. In this way, Lacanian epistemology describes the structural logic or symbolic economy of knowledge. In this model, knowledge is contingent upon the discursive position of the knower. However, that subjective structure is necessarily an effect of discursive structure. By taking up a speaking position, the knower thereby is enmeshed in the fundamental relations of discourse. In the Lacanian account, it is inscribed in every act of enunciation of a subject (S17: 11).

In each of Lacan’s schemas, the knower exists in a particular relation to S2 – knowledge or le savoir (S20: 16). The knowledge of the Master differs from that of the Hysteric, and these subject positions articulate a different relation to that knowing. For example, Lacan contrasts the ignorance of the Master who does not want to know with the desire of the Hysteric to know. The discourse of the knowing subject produces its relation to the known object. This relation is inscribed in an order of signifiers such that ‘knowledge’ is a representation or signification of what is known. Accordingly, the different operations of discourse produce different forms of knowledge. Lacanian epistemology therefore posits knowledge as a signification of a known object. The object is signified, rather than known in and of itself. Discourse produces the known object, since the object can only be represented through signifying structures. This model of knowledge conceives it as a signifying act. The act of knowing is an act of representation that the stable structures of signifying chains produce. Therefore, knowledge itself has a discursive structure and thereby is rethought as the product of signification.

The later Lacanian epistemology does not describe the propositional content of knowledge, but instead describes how discursive networks produce a known object, and the relation between the knowing subject and its known object. In the later Lacanian epistemology, what is known is inseparable from how it is known. Knowledge describes a relation to the real, and the structuring of that relation in discourse. Lacan argues that the world is known through the meaning given to it, and that meaning is always bound up in discourse (S17: 13), because every ‘reality’ is presented in discursive networks (S20: 32). Discourse describes the symbolic structure through which the knowing subject represents the world to itself and to other subjects.

Knowledge is therefore a symbolic practice because it is an act of meaning of the knowing subject. This act of signification is the insertion of the known object into the signifying chain, placing it within a symbolic field that enwraps the object and gives it meaning. Lacanian epistemology posits knowledge as a signification given to the object.

What is known is therefore radically contingent upon the discourse of the knowing subject, and accordingly radically limited by it. If discourse produces knowledge, then discourse is a necessary condition of knowing. Forms of knowledge are therefore contingent upon discursive forms. In this way, Lacan’s theory suggests that there exists a causal, if not determinative, relation between knowledge and discourse (S17: 13). Lacan does not argue that these concepts are identical or reducible to each other. However, his account does suggest that what can be known is conditional upon discursive networks.

In this sense, discursive structures delimit what is thinkable and signifiable as knowledge, such that to change those structures is to change how we know the world (S20: 16). (55)

In Lacan’s theory, discourse produces signification. It structures signifiers by ordering their relation and so producing meaning. Discourse enables the otherwise arbitrary signifier to mean something not only to the knowing subject but also to other subjects. Discourse knots the signifier and signified together by functioning as the link that enables the circulation of the signifier between those who speak (S20: 30). The signifier is an arbitrary symbolic element that does not produce meaning until it is brought into relation with other signifiers.

Because subjects exist in a symbolic relation to one another, they are able to exchange meaning. In this model, different knowing subjects may use the same symbolic element to name a known object but each may attribute it with a different signified. For Lacan, what enables other knowing subjects to ‘read’ the signifier is the social link between knowing subjects.

The social tie is language because its discursive chains form the link and the relationship between speaking subjects. For Lacan, discourse is not a transparent relation between subjects. It does not imply that its addressee receives the message sent by the sender, as Lacan starts out from the position that communication is necessarily a failure (Verhaeghe 1997: 100). Rather, discourse is a particular arrangement of signifiers that enables symbolic exchange between subjects (56).

For Lacan, the practice of language ‘dominates’ the social because the social order is founded in the structures of language, the Symbolic order. The Symbolic order produces a number of stable discourses, which represent fundamental intersubjective relations. The four discourses therefore articulate four different and foundational social bonds (which in turn raises the possibility of the existence of other discourses) (56).

campbell 4 discourses part 2

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004.

As in L’envers, in Encore Lacan represents each of the discourses by a schema which sets out the relation of four terms: b, S2 , a and $. These terms designate respectively: the master signifier (le signifiant maître), knowledge (le savoir), surplus jouissance (le plus-de-jouir) and the subject (le sujet) (S20: 17).

S1 represents the master signifier, the symbolic element that represents the subject for another signifier. The master signifier marks the subject’s position within the signifying chain and hence within the discursive social tie.

S2 designates the symbolic field, the chain or network of signifiers that form the subject. For this reason, S1, S2 represents the knowledge of the subject. It describes both the form of the subject’s knowledge, for example, academic, psychoanalytic and so on, and the form of knowledge of the subject, such as the differing conceptions of the subject within the university and psychoanalysis.

The term a represents the ‘left-over’ or remainder of discourse. That remainder is the jouissance produced by, and surrendered to, language in the taking up of a speaking position by the subject. The a is an unassimilable excess to the discourse. There is no signifier of the a, as it is not possible to represent it in the signifying economy of the discourse. The subject attempts to structure its relationship to this unassimilable remainder by rendering it as an imaginary object – the objet petit a. The a thus both functions in the imaginary register, in which it appears as an imaginary object filled with phantasmic content, and in the symbolic register, in which it marks the excluded term of discourse, the gap in or void of its symbolic structure. For this reason, the a ‘stands simultaneously for the imaginary fantasmic lure/screen and for that which this lure is obfuscating, for the void behind the lure’ (Zizek 1998a: 80).

The fourth term, $, represents the subject. The subject does not represent the S of the conscious subject but the ‘true’ psychoanalytic subject of the unconscious. $ designates the barred subject, in which the S of the conscious subject is struck through because of its division by the unconscious. The schemas of the discourses describe the relation of each of these terms, S1 , S2 , a and $ (50).

campbell 4 discourses pt 1

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004.

Discourse thus produces the social link between subjects, because discursive chains of signifiers structure stable intersubjective relations. In the theory of the four discourses, the intersubjective relation is a discursive relation. This concept of discourse does not therefore imply a Hegelian intersubjectivity, which Lacan always associates with the imaginary order, but rather a symbolic relation between subjects (48).

The social bond of subjects is discursive because language anchors that relation (S20: 54). For Lacan, language produces a ‘speaking being’ – l’être parlant – and the relation between such subjects (S20: 54). In this way, the term ‘discourse’ implies a relation between speaking subjects. It represents the transindividual aspect of language that structures social bonds. The Lacanian concept of discourse links the structure of signification and the intersubjective relation because it describes signifying chains that form relations between subjects.

In his theory of the four discourses, Lacan identifies four different and foundational types of social bonds of speaking subjects. Lacan describes the subject of discourse as the ‘subject of a signifier’. In a typically cryptic formulation, Lacan explains ‘this minimal formula’ further with a restatement of his earlier definition of the subject in Écrits whereby ‘a signifier represents a subject to another signifier’ (S20: 142). A signifier represents a subject for another signifier because a discursive relation between signifiers produces the subject. As in the Lacanian epistemology of Écrits, the subject describes a position in language. However, in the later Lacanian theory, specific discourses produce different subjects (49).

stavrakakis on ethics of psychoanalysis

Stavrakakis, Yannis. “Ambiguous Democracy and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis” Philosophy and Social Criticism 23:2 (1997), 79-96.

Stavrakakis tackles the age-old divide in democratic theory between: individuality and commonality. But try as they might, those who try to impose harmony, an ethics of harmony no doubt, run up against the wall of contingency, the disharmony of democratic arrangements. Instead of trying to resolve this discordance with ‘better ethics’ or a more precise and workable democratic theory that seeks to contain the contingent through various attempts to enforce more ‘inclusive protocols’ for example, Stav argues that all this is for not.

The argument of Stavrakakis is:

This gap that exists between the plural, the multiple, the particular and their opposite, the general, the Good, the common value etc, reveal a gap, a non-closure that can never be resolved permanently. Stav celebrates this ambiguity as the strength of democracy which ensures that this opening is constantly renewed and changeable via elections etc. Those who are unnerved by the essential contingency that is this gap, try to close it and thus make un-democratic the very democracy they are trying to build. However this leads to the following point, “instead of harmony we are meant to legitimize disharmony and recognize division.” (84) Or what Connelly calls in his book an “ethics of disharmony.” But then what is this new ethics about? Here then is where Stav turns to Lacan. The history of Western philosophy has been a “doomed quest for harmony based on successive conceptions of the good” (85).

The clear aim of all these attempts is to reinstate the big Other, the symbolic system, the field of the social as a harmonious unified whole by referring it to a single positive principle. The same applies to the subject … [who] can be harmonized by being subjected to the ethical law. It is evident that an ethical view based on the fantasy of harmony applied both to the subject and to the social is not compatible with democracy, rather it can only reinforce ‘totalitarianism’ or ‘fragmentation.’ (85)

🙂 Žižek rejects this either/or. Either democracy that recognizes itself as radically incomplete project or else totalitarianism, is for Žižek a sign of an inability to note that the very terrain that Stavrakakis occupies is misrepresenting the way in which political change comes about not by incremental changes to the coordinates of the symbolic which is the project of Stavrakakis as understood by Žižek, but instead through a radical political act. Žižek also claims that the Real is not this “ambiguity in democratic politics” but the Real of capital [whatever that means.]

Further excepts from the article by Stavrakakis:

Society does not exist. Gone are the markers of certainty that ensured the position of the prince was a ‘god-given’ right guaranteed in religious edict. It is the recognition of “division and antagonism and the dissolution of ‘pre-democratic’ unconditional points of reference that institute a deep ambiguity in the heart of democracy; but this is not an accident, it is the differentia specifica of democracy: Democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution fo the markers of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy …” (81)

… the ambiguity of democracy is not an ambiguity caused by democracy. The ambiguity, the division, the dislocation of organic social unity precede the democratic invention. Democracy does not produce by itself the ambiguity and the lack characterizing the human condition; it does not produce the irreducible division and disharmony characterizing every social form. It only attempts to come to terms with them by recognizing them in their irreducibility, thus producing a new form of social unity (82).

… traditional ethics aims at mastering this structural impossibility of the Real. It’s failure opens the road to a different strategy, that of recognizing the centrality and irreducibiity of the Real. (86)

Although the Real in itself cannot be touched there are two strategies in confronting its structural causality. The first one is to bypass it — as traditional ethical discourse does — while the second is to encircle it. This latter strategy entails a recognition of the irreducibility of the Real and an attempt to institutionalize social lack. This attitude is what Žižek has called ‘ethics of the Real.’ … The ultimate failure of the successive conceptions of the good cannot be resolved by identifying with a new conception of the good. Our focus must be on the dislocation of these conceptions itself. This is the moment when the Real makes its presence felt and we have to recognize the ethical status of this presence (87).

“Sublimation creates a public space. Although it can only be individual it nevertheless creates a public space, a unifying field” (88). Sublimation “involves another sort of “bond” among us, a bond that mediates between the individual and the common, the particular and the universal.” (88)

The work of art is, on the one hand, strictly individual; tied to the libido of a particular body, the artist. But the artist’s work is also addressed to the public, creating a public space without ever abolishing its singularity: ‘the public of sublimation is not, in this sense, a public of common denominator, of communality. Sublimation is rather the public space in which our singular perverse bodies may make contact with one another through the creation of beautiful objects that stand for them. (88)

pluth on sexuality sexual difference

Pluth, Ed. “On Sexual Difference and Sexuality “As Such”: Lacan the and the case of lilttle hans.” Angelaki 12:2 (2007): 69-79.

Sexual difference is traumatic. No doubt, but what is so traumatic about it? Lacanians have had to dance around this forever because of a strong feminist current of critique whose vigilance with regards to spotting forms of essentialism and male bias in Lacanian theory, particularly any time a Lacanian talks about ‘sexual difference.’

Ed Pluth, a Lacanian, is doing more to shed some sort of repectable coherence and understanding to this freakin can of worms:

… what makes sexual difference “real” is the function it plays in the symbolic as a place-holder for something else. … The impasse or “trauma” that sexual difference marks in Lacanian theory is not really a trauma about sexual difference at all. … It is a trauma that, more originally, is about sexuality as such … In other words, if sexual difference is a symbolic impasse, and thus real, it is because it is the repetition of another impasse, one that Lacan describes as sexuality “as such.” 70

Here Pluth is saying that before sexual difference, there is the trauma of sexuality. Sexual difference is a way of taming sexuality as such

It [sexual difference] is less a way of making sense of sexuality than a way of doing something with sexuality, just by putting the enigma of sexual difference in the place of the enigma of sexuality itself (72).

Sexual difference is not a way of representing sexuality as such. A better way to put it is to say that the impossibility introduced by sexuality as such — an impossibility in the sense that its emergence defies symbolization — is replaced by another impossibility in signifiers: what Lacan ends up calling the impossibility of the sexual relationship. (76)

Sexual difference … is a translation or repetition of the impasse of sexuality as such in the symbolic. … a displacing or transferring of an impasse between the real as such and the symbolic as such into purely symbolic terms. (77)

sharpe subjectivity hegelian

The Jacobin Reign of Terror … for Hegel, is that within it for the first time subjects could at any moment ‘lose everything’ with no hope of any equivalent return. To quote The Phenomenology of Spirit

… all these determinations [that the subject receives in its ‘acculturation’ hence] have vanished in the loss suffered by the self in absolute freedom: its negation is the death that is without meaning, the sheer terror of the negative that contains nothing positive … [Hegel, 1997:362]

… it is only when the individual has experienced this ‘terror of the negative’, and had the courage to see in what appeared to him qua particular Self as a groundless alien force something which is ‘immediately one with self-consciousness’, that full ‘self-consciousness’ emerges. [Žižek 1999a: 94] (139).

‘Subject’ [thus] emerges at this very point of utterly meaningless voidance brought about by a negativity which explodes the frame of balanced exchange. That is to say, what is ‘subject’ [in Hegel] if not the infinite power of absolute negativity/mediation … [for] whom every ‘pathological’ particular positive content [henceforth] appears as ‘posited’, as something externally assumed? [Žižek, 1993, 27; Hegel 1997: 355-63] (139)

Žižek thus comments that what ‘… Bataille fails to … note … is that the modern (Cartesian) subject no longer needs to sacrifice goats intestines, his children, and so on, since his very existence already entails the most radical … sacrifice, the sacrifice of the very kernel of his being’. [Žižek, 1996a 125 … ] (139).

In Hegel, who for Žižek most consistently thought through this subject’s philosophical subversion, the ‘Cartesian’ subject corresponds to: ‘.. the purely negative gesture of limiting phenomena without providing any positive content that would fill out the space beyond the limit.’ [Žižek, 1993, 21]

From Hegel’s Realphilosophie of 1805-6:

The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity — an unending wealth of presentations, images, none of which occurs to him or is present … here shoots out a bloody head, there a white shape … [Žižek, 1991a, 87; 1997b:8; 1992: 50; 1999b: 136] (139)

sharpe the Other is itself divided the Other does not exist

Sharpe, Matthew. Slavoj Žižek: a little piece of the real. Burlington Vt: Ashgate, 2004.

Žižek’s position is that ideology primarily captures subjects at the level of their unconscious beliefs, and that it does this by structuring their access to jouissance (99).

Žižek proposes … that the answer to how one can still speak from ‘outside’ of the big Other of a hegemonic ideological system comes from a more detailed ontology of this Other itself. … the Other is itself divided and/or inconsistent, and so contains the resources of its own critique (100).

Modernity, Žižek repeats, is that ‘enlightened’ epoch wherein: “… the symbolic substance (the “big Other” qua texture of symbolic tradition) can no longer contain the subject, can no longer hold him to his symbolic mandate. [Žižek, 1992: 134 (Sharpe’s italics)]

Žižek’s argument is that sexuality only emerges in the first place at the points of the failure of what can be sanctioned by social discourse (113).