Althusser and Lacan on Ideology
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Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2012 A Structuralist Controversy: Althusser and Lacan on Ideology Won Choi Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Social Psychology Commons Recommended Citation Choi, Won, "A Structuralist Controversy: Althusser and Lacan on Ideology" (2012). Dissertations. 297. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/297 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2011 Won Choi LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO A STRUCTURALIST CONTROVERSY: ALTHUSSER AND LACAN ON IDEOLOGY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN PHILOSOPHY BY WON CHOI CHICAGO, IL MAY 2012 Copyright by Won Choi, 2012 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Acknowledgements are due to Éditions du Seuil for permission to reproduce figures from the following two books: Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre V: les formations de l’inconscient , éd. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998) and Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XXIII: le synthome , éd. Jaccques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005). Acknowledgements are due to Norton for permission to reproduce figures from the following two books: Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The Complete Edition , trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006) and Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI) , ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998). I would like to thank my wonderful professors in the Philosophy Department at Loyola University Chicago. My committee chair, Professor Andrew Cutrofello, pushed me to think more clearly by raising numerous questions during the whole process of writing this dissertation. His vast knowledge of various philosophical traditions was one of the primary sources of my research. Professors David Schweickart and David Ingram gave me chances to develop my ideas about Marx in their classes and became great readers of my dissertation. My special thanks go to Professor Warren Montag from the iii Department of English and Comparative Literary Study at Occidental College. He was not only an exceptional outside reader whose expertise on Althusser was a tremendous help, but also became one of my dearest intellectual friends to whom I can always talk about my ideas with comforts. Loyola University Chicago provided me with the funds that I needed during the study. A Crown Fellowship from 2005 to 2008 and a Fourth Year Fellowship during the 2008-2009 school year allowed me to focus on my research and writing. iv For Yoon Sun and Juna PREFACE My dissertation investigates the essential mechanism of ideology through the prism of the debate between Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan. Althusser and Lacan were two of the most prominent French theorists of the late 20 th century. Their theoretical convergence and divergence literally defined an important phase of the history of Freudo- Marxism. When they made a theoretical alliance in the early 1960s, they seemed to be making a decisive progress in establishing a new link between Marxism and Freudianism via their shared interests in the questions of structure and subject. This alliance did not last long, however: Lacan soon made a public criticism of Althusser in one of his seminars, while Althusser, though much later, wrote an essay which explicitly showed his dissatisfaction with Lacan’s theory. In her biography, Jacques Lacan , Elisabeth Roudinesco offers us a sharp contrast between the positions occupied by Althusser and Lacan as follows: “Lacan . had traveled in the opposite direction from Althusser. Hence his constantly renewed attachment to Lévi-Strauss’s idea of symbolic function. While Althusser believed that only by escaping from all filial symbolism could one achieve a founding act, Lacan showed that, on the contrary, while such an escape might indeed produce logical discourse, such discourse would be invaded by psychosis.”1 Many readers today may be 1 Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan , trans. B. Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 301-02. vi dumbfounded by this passage, since the picture presented here about the two theorists is diametrically opposed to the picture they tend to hold true. In the latter picture, Althusser is depicted as an unyielding structuralist who disallowed the subject any chance to escape from the dominant ideology, while Lacan is portrayed as a genuine critic of such a position, who, by stressing the irreducible dimension of the real, showed how the subject might be able to find a way to subvert the entire symbolic structure. Of course, this latter picture cannot simply be whisked away as a theoretically unfounded popular belief. Althusser indeed began to be criticized as a structuralist (or a functionalist) not long after his famous essay on “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” was published. This criticism seemed to receive its long waited foundation as well as its theoretical weight when Slavoj Žižek wrote The Sublime Object of Ideology to confirm its validity precisely by comparing Althusser’s theory with Lacan’s. Twenty years after its publication, we still see this text heavily determines the way in which both Althusser and Lacan are perceived by various academic communities. So much so that even a critic like Ian Parker, so unsympathetic toward Žižek, embraces the idea that the latter’s criticism of Althusser is valid and reliably represents Lacan’s own position.2 Should one think, then, that Roudinesco was simply mistaken? Much more recently, however, Yoshiyuki Sato made a similar argument in his Pouvoir et résistance by insisting that it is Lacan who took the most intransigent structuralist position in the whole debate that unfolded around the question of the subject in France during the 1960s and 70s, and that the theoretical works of (the later) Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Althusser 2 Ian Parker, Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2004), p. 86. vii all may be viewed as various attempts to distance themselves from such a position of Lacan’s. According to Sato, Lacan’s entire theory can be characterized by its emphasis upon the “absolute passivity” of the subject in relation to the symbolic structure. 3 Should one think, then, that the current dominant picture which says otherwise is simply mistaken? I position myself among those who claim that Lacan was a much more orthodox structuralist than Althusser was; however, I simultaneously argue that it is crucial to see their agreements as well as their disagreements. In other words, we should begin our discussion by recognizing that structuralism itself was not a unified school of thought, and, therefore, the respective relationships that Althusser and Lacan developed with it cannot be thought of in a manner of all or nothing. Insofar as they both tried to move the category of the subject from a constituting position to a constituted one, Althusser and Lacan were both great structuralists. 4 They did not simply nullify the category of the subject (including its activity and autonomy) but tried to explain it by investigating through what process and mechanism the subject is constituted as one who recognizes itself as autonomous while still depending upon the structure in a certain way. Only after clearly delineating their common interest in this way can one possibly begin to inquire into the different choices they made in their own theoretical works. 3 Yoshiyuki Sato, Pouvoir et résistance: Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Althusser (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), p. 57. 4 Étienne Balibar, “Structuralism: A Destitution of the Subject?”, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies , 14.1 (2003), pp. 1-21. viii In order to carry out such an inquiry, I propose to revisit Žižek’s discussion of the Althusser-Lacan debate in The Sublime Object of Ideology . Žižek interprets the debate principally by referring to the difference between the two levels installed in the Lacanian graph of desire. He identifies the lower level with the symbolic and the upper one with the symbolic shot through by the real. His claim is that, while Althusser limits himself to the lower level in which the “alienation” of the subject in the symbolic transpires, Lacan adds yet another level in which the dimension of the real ( jouissance ) is introduced, and thus the “separation” of the subject from the symbolic itself becomes conceivable. I contest this view by arguing that it is much more appropriate to identify the lower level with the imaginary and the upper one with the symbolic. Žižek’s misapprehension results from neglecting the crucial distinction Lacan makes between the symbolic that arrives in advance in the imaginary phase itself and the symbolic proper (the pure symbolic dissociated at the upper level from the imaginary). Due to such a misreading, Žižek constantly misses the fact that Lacan considered his notion of separation only a separation from the mother, which the subject can achieve under the condition that it is absolutely dependent upon the metaphor of the father. Žižek’s portrayal of the debate, furthermore, fails to notice that, when the two theorists collided with each other on the question of structuralism in the late 1960s, something completely different was at stake. The point of the debate did not really concern whether or not the subject can separate itself from the structure, but how the ideological formation of the subject as a social practice is to be situated in relation to other social practices such as the economical or the political.