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Reviewed by:
  • Beyond Lacan
  • Paul Allen Miller
James M. Mellard. Beyond Lacan. Albany: State U of New York P, 2006. 288 pp.

Mellard's Beyond Lacan is a book that has large intellectual ambitions. It seeks to define a new understanding of Lacan based on a synthesis of an early Lacan of desire and the Symbolic with a late Lacan of drive and the Real. This synthesis he calls "middle Lacan." It also seeks to provide a series of readings of modern and postmodern British and American texts to illustrate and validate this new synthesis. Finally, it offers a reading of Slavoj Žižek's work, claiming that as Lacan represented the "beyond of Freud" so Žižek is the "beyond of Lacan." The book is divided into three sections corresponding to these goals. Unfortunately, the requisite rigor necessary to achieve such lofty ambitions is lacking in this often-disappointing set of disconnected essays.

While this position may seem uncharitable, the book makes a number of elementary errors. In chapter 1, "From Freud to Jacques Lacan and the Textual Unconscious," Mellard makes the argument that because Lacan argues that the unconscious is structured like a language and Jameson asserts that "everything can be a text," therefore when Lacan uses series graphs and "mathemes" to illustrate his concept of the unconscious, this means that the Lacanian unconscious is "textual" rather than "archeological," as in the dominant Freudian metaphor. Mellard duly takes the caution of citing Hayden White on the power of metaphor as constitutive of a field of study. Still, it is one thing to say that the metaphor of textuality is constitutive of the Lacanian field; it is another to say that Lacan's use of graphs and textual metaphors mean that the [End Page 394] Lacanian unconscious is textual. The first is an argument about the way in which fields of inquiry are constituted within a set of discursive practices. The second is a hypostasis of the categories of analysis as the object of analysis per se. This is Kant 101, and, as Lacan shows in his introduction to the "Seminar on the Purloined Letter," he is aware of the danger and takes pains to avoid the charge: "for, with my as, ßs, .s, and ds, I do not claim to extract from the real more than I have presupposed in its given—in other words, nothing here—but simply to demonstrate that they already bring with them a syntax by simply turning this real into chance" (Fink's translation). In short, Lacan understands the distinction between his mathemes and the Real.

As for the claim that there exists a "middle Lacan," Mellard does nothing more than defend a standard eclecticism. In itself, this it is not problematic. The gesture is common among interpreters of many intellectual's with long and complex oeuvres, whether they are readers of Plato, Marx, Freud, Foucault, Derrida, or Lacan himself. Yet if the practice is common, why should this particular pragmatic eclecticism be privileged over any other?

Still, even if the theoretical arguments lack rigor, the readings of the literary texts might produce moments of genuine insight. They do not. The Invisible Man is subjected to a translation into the language of a Lacanian hermeneutics but not to true symptomatic reading. A chapter is devoted to proving that Flannery O'Connor was a sexually repressed Catholic. Another on Glaspell produces such insights as, "if law and crime are matters of construal, of human judgment or construction, then guilt and responsibility are likewise just such matters." The one truly engaging chapter is "Hart's Damage, Lacanian Tragedy, and the Ethics of Jouissance." It had already appeared in PMLA, and the polish as well as the insightful close reading it displays is a testament to that journal's high editorial standards.

Part 3 is all one chapter, the longest of the book, "Beyond Lacan: Slavoj Žižek, Things to Die for, and a Philosophy of Paradox." It presents a reading of what purports to be two phases in Žižek's career, an early philosophy of paradox and a late Christian inflected political philosophy. As noted above, such periodizations of the work of thinkers whose...

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