The other Side of Desire: Lacan's Theory of the Registers

Notes

Introduction 1. See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique , 1953–1954, trans. John Forrester, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988) 73. Hereafter, Seminar I will be cited in the text as Sem I. 2. For a thorough analysis of Freud’s archaeological metaphor, see Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction, chapter 1, “Freud’s Dreams of Knowledge,” especially 18–26. Lis Moller, The Freudian Reading (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991) explores the same theme. See chapter 2, “Gradiva: Psychoanalysis as Archaeology.” 3. The metaphor of the musical register effectively emphasizes both the qualitative nature of the distinctions Lacan makes between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real and the fact that each register incorporates a range of phenomena . For instance, imaginary processes tend toward unity while symbolic processes involve differentiation. Within the imaginary register alone, however, Lacan might talk about identification, or about the relation with the imaginary mother, or about the imago, and so on. 4. My thanks to vocalist Kathleen Lane, Department of Music, Idaho State University for her helpful insights on the registers of the singing voice and the texture of music. 5. The idea of linguistic registers applies in Lacan more loosely, as when linguists talk about the “register of law” or the “register of medicine” or the “register of linguistics” to designate each professional vocabulary and the context in which that vocabulary signifies. This use of the term “register” overlaps what Lacan (and much of contemporary theory) refers to as a “discourse” spoken by a specific discourse community. The former term emphasizes semantics, while the latter term emphasizes speech as a practice. 6. Secondary works about theory generally fall into one of three approaches: the explication or “guide to” whose purpose is to clarify a theorist’s 161 Notes work, the argument whose purpose is to critique or challenge the theory it discusses , and the application whose purpose is to demonstrate a theory’s encounter with another text. Combining these approaches makes a heavier demand on the reader. At issue for me (as a theorist who teaches theory to both undergraduates and graduate students) is when secondary works have value— not whether. My position here is that Lacanian analysis is best learned by reading Lacan’s own texts first, with a companion explication as a reference if necessary . Only then can a critique or an application be meaningful. Read before primary texts (or in lieu of them!), critiques and applications tend either to confuse their readers or, worse, to give readers a false sense of mastery. Even an important introductory work like Elizabeth Grosz’s Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990) accommodates two distinct paradigms, requiring the reader to keep the feminist paradigm in play while acquiring the Lacan. Interdisciplinary critiques do position Lacan in the larger intellectual community, and one very helpful example of this approach is David S. Caudill’s Lacan and the Subject of Law (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997). However, I return to Lacan’s main texts and issues in this work because I feel that Lacan best clarifies Lacan. 7. First published as “Freud et Lacan,” La nouvelle critique 161/162 (1964/65): 88–108 and reprinted in Positions, 1964–1975 (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1976) 9–34. The article first appeared in English in The New Left Review in 1969 but has been most widely disseminated in Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971) 189–219. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, details the theoretical problems involved in Althusserian Marxism itself (London: Verso, 1983). Anderson argues for a “local defeat” of Marxist theoretical ideas by the French structuralists whose ideas amounted to an ‘epistemic’ shift, which Marxisms like that of Althusser sought to counter through appropriation. Interestingly, Sherry Turkle makes the parallel suggestion that “psychoanalysis, a theory with two faces, was the Trojan Horse for French structuralism.” See Turkle, “The New Philosophy and the Agony of Structuralism: Enter the Trojan Horse,” Chicago Review 32.3 (1981): 24. Also, see Jameson, The Political Unconscious, Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (New York: Cornell UP, 1981). For a thorough discussion of Jameson’s use of Lacan, see Michael Clark, “Imagining the Real: Jameson’s Use of Lacan,” New Orleans Review 11.1 (1984): 67–72. 8. See The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983): 130. 9. Compare Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New...