{"id":12374,"date":"2013-12-11T12:29:12","date_gmt":"2013-12-11T17:29:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=12374"},"modified":"2013-12-11T12:29:12","modified_gmt":"2013-12-11T17:29:12","slug":"johnston-on-copjec","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2013\/12\/11\/johnston-on-copjec\/","title":{"rendered":"johnston on copjec"},"content":{"rendered":"

Adrian Johnston’s Review of Lacan in America 2002<\/a><\/p>\n

Joan Copjec, a familiar name in English-language Lacanian scholarship, addresses the link (or, perhaps, non-rapport) between psychoanalysis and \u201cembodiment theory\u201d as a general anti-Cartesian trend permeating the American academy.<\/p>\n

Proponents of the \u201cembodied subject\u201d endlessly rant and rail against the Cogito\u2019s haunting of Western thought, continually issuing emphatic reminders to themselves and others that \u201cbodies matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lacanian psychoanalysis is seen as yet another Cartesian marginalization of the body; Lacan gives pride of place to \u201cthe signifier\u201d and its structure, thereby ignoring corporeality, affectivity, and so on.<\/p>\n

But, Copjec asks in \u201cThe Body as Viewing Instrument, or the Strut of Vision,\u201d what kinds of \u201cbodies\u201d are embodiment theorists talking about? Simply affirming that \u201cthe body\u201d 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 \u201cI have a body\u201d possibly hope to produce?<\/p>\n

One of Copjec\u2019s 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 \u201creturn to the body.\u201d<\/p>\n

These advocates usually offer a choice between two flawed options: either an experiential \u201clived body\u201d 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 \u201cpower\u201d (i.e., a vaguely Foucauldian option).<\/p>\n

Copjec maintains that the psychoanalytic concept of Trieb<\/span><\/strong> 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\u2014\u201cof all Freud\u2019s 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?\u201d (pg. 279).<\/p>\n

Or, similarly, how should one set about explaining the manner in which \u201chuman nature\u201d is, by being simultaneously and always-already entangled in \u201csoma\u201d as well as \u201cpsyche\u201d (the latter including the concrete impacts of the socio-symbolic order on the individual), neither a pure corporeal substantiality nor a constructed, virtual epiphenomenon?<\/p>\n

Copjec uses discussions of gaze and body, particularly the issues raised by Jonathan Crary\u2019s 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\u2019s analyses of the gaze, the visual field, perspective, and subjectivity from seminars eleven and thirteen).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Certain arguments mentioned above are echoed in Butler\u2019s exchanges with Slavoj \u017di\u017eek in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left<\/em>, particularly the problem of negotiating between structural and historical axes of analysis in Lacanian theory.<\/p>\n

Part of her project, as spelled out in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection<\/em>, is to wed Foucault and psychoanalysis so that they mutually supplement each other. Why should one combine these positions?<\/p>\n

Foucault\u2019s delineations of the workings of \u201cpower\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

In short, Butler is searching for a metapsychology of the socially constructed psyche (on a related note, Frances L. Restuccia\u2019s piece \u201cThe Subject of Homosexuality: Butler\u2019s Elision\u201d succinctly blows holes in Butler\u2019s claim, also from The Psychic Life of Power<\/em>, that heterosexual identity is erected upon the foundations of a fundamentally disavowed \u201cpassionate attachment\u201d to the same gender, that \u201cforeclosed\u201d homosexuality underlies society\u2019s artificial sexual norms).<\/p>\n

Going back to the texts of Foucault, according to Christopher Lane in \u201cThe Experience of the Outside: Foucault and Psychoanalysis,\u201d reveals the ultimate futility of this Butlerian endeavor.<\/strong> Any marriage between Foucault\u2019s constructivist position and Lacanian psychoanalysis can only result in the suppression of the latter\u2019s explanatory potentials.<\/p>\n

Lane\u2019s 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 \u201cout of joint\u201d with \u201creality.”<\/strong> What else could Freud mean when he speaks of the impossibility of \u201ceducating\u201d the unconscious, or when he later depicts the id as utterly ignorant of the external world?<\/p>\n

Of course, this isn\u2019t to deny that the psyche is profoundly affected and modified by the sensations, experiences, and influences constantly streaming into it from \u201cthe Outside.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Copjec cites Lacan\u2019s remarks from the eleventh seminar about \u201cfailures of causality\u201d and \u201cgaps\u201d between causes and effects as fundamentally important conceptualizations to keep in mind when approaching the unconscious.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Lane stresses that the interactions between psychoanalytically conceived \u201chuman nature\u201d and its trans-individual environment cannot be mapped out along the lines of predictable pathways, such as, for example, ideological stimulus \u201cx\u201d always leading to subjectivity effect \u201cy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although \u201cpower\u201d 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\u2019t smoothly and invariably take root.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

Lane explains Foucault\u2019s 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\u2019s followers tend to pass over them in silence.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cembodiment theory\u201d as a general anti-Cartesian trend permeating the American academy. Proponents of the \u201cembodied subject\u201d endlessly rant and rail against the Cogito\u2019s haunting of Western thought, continually issuing … Continue reading “johnston on copjec”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lacan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12374"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12376,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12374\/revisions\/12376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}