Page 176 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes only appears fleetingly, on those rare occasions when a signifier crosses the bar, leaving an empty
space above it.
"Wo Es war, soll Ich werden"

With the fleetingness of the subject established, Lacan closes the essay by developing a maxim of
Sigmund Freud's: "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" (usually translated as: "where the id was, the ego
shall be"). Rather than strengthening the ego as the great intellectual and ideological rival of
Lacanian psychoanalysis, ego psychology, encouraged the patient to do, Lacan claims that the
analysand 'must come to the place where that was...modifying the moorings that anchor his
being'.
Criticism
'Whereas Saussure placed the signifier over the signified, dividing the two by a bar of "meaning",
Lacan inverted this arrangement, placing the signified under the signifier, to which he ascribes the
primary role'. In the same way, 'unlike Jakobson Lacan associated the Freudian idea of condensation
with metaphor and displacement with metonymy'. Critics would contend that we see here a
typical example of the way 'Lacan was...an intellectual magpie', illegitimately borrowing the
intellectual kudos of linguistics to give a respectable veneer to his psychoanalytic theories, without
submitting to the actual rigors of the discipline itself.
Nevertheless, Élisabeth Roudinesco concludes that 'this extraordinary intellectual operation, by
means of which Lacan endowed psychoanalytic doctrine with a Cartesian theory of the subject
and a "post-Saussurian" conception of the unconscious...alone would earn him a place among the
great theoreticians of the twentieth century'.
Analysis
Literary critics learn how to read the letter of the text, how to interpret the style, the form, rather
than just reading for content, for ideas. The psychoanalyst learns to listen not so much to her
patient's main point as to odd marginal moments, slips of the tongue, unintended disclosures.
Freud formulated this psychoanalytic method, but Lacan has generalized it into a way of receiving
all discourse, not just the analysand's. There is no better way to read Lacan.
The propagation of psychoanalysis . . . has shown us, ever since Freud, that interpretation necessarily
represents appropriation, and thus an act of desire and murder.
These two quotations explicitly address psychoanalysis as a way of reading or interpreting,
appropriate for a seminar which is to examine psychoanalysis within the frame of literary theory.
Gallop offers, or perhaps insists on, a way of reading Lacan, that is to say reading Lacan in a
Lacanian, psychoanalytic way. I begin with her statement out of an admitted preference for the
slightly peculiar situation it produces for reader/practitioner of literary theory: not to attempt an
explanation or application of psychoanalysis to literature, but rather to view psychoanalysis in the
light that it has itself shed or cast over literature. To repeat, as it were, the psychoanalytic act (in
so far as it acts upon literature as a text) upon the text of psychoanalysis. To elucidate this
diacritically, I mean that I will not attempt so much to show what Lacan does to literature - that is,
to enumerate the methods he employs while reading, to extract general psychoanalytic principles
of literary theory from his texts. Rather I hope to, to borrow Lacan's phrasing, hold up a mirror to
the psychoanalytic act of reading. By focusing on the way Lacanian psychoanalysis might read
itself I hope to demonstrate and explore key elements of the way Lacanian analysis reads literature.
At the same time, it is my intention to place emphasis on this mirror as structure, to better register
the reflexive implications of Lacan's texts.
The significance of the second quotation from Kristeva marks the second register of this presentation
- placing at the center of the discussion the question of desire and violence, or as she more
explicitly puts it, "desire and murder." At this point I am reduced to merely asserting this question
or specter of violence in psychoanalytic interpretation as an anticipation, a threat whose presence
and influence I will attempt to acknowledge and monitor.

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