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Joan Copjec-Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists

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Joan Copjec-Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists Read My Desire Lacan against the Historicists Joan Copjec An OCTOBER Book The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 1994 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Bembo by DEKR Corporation and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Copjec, Joan. Read my desire: Lacan against the historicists I Joan Copjec. p. cm. "Many of the chapters in this book appeared in earlier versions as essays in various journals and books"-T.p. verso. "An October book." Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-03219-8 1. Psychoanalysis and culture. 2. Desire. 3. Historicism. 4. Lacan, Jacques, 1901- 5. Foucault, Michel. I. Title. BFI75. 4. C84C66 1994 150. 19'5-dc20 94-383 CIP Many of the chapters in this book appeared in earlier versions as essays in various journals and books. Chapters 2, 4, and 5 were published in October 49 (Summer 1989); October 50 (Fall 1989); and October 56, a special issue on "Rendering the Real," edited by Parveen Adams (Spring 1991), respectively. Chapter 3 was published in Between Feminism and Psy­ choanalysis, edited by Teresa Brennan (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Chapter 6 appeared in a special issue of New Formations (Summer 1991), "On Democracy," edited by Erica Carter and Renata Salecl. Chapter 7 was an essay in Shades of Noir: A Reader (London and New York: Verso, 1993), which I edited. To my mother, Ann, and the memory of my fa ther, John Copjec Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix 1. Introduction: Structures Don't March in the Streets 2. The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lac an 15 The Screen as Mirror Orthopsychism The Mirror as Screen 3. Cutting Up 39 The Death Drive: Freud and Bergson Cause: Lacan and Aristotle Achilles and the Tortoise Cause and the Law 4. The Sartorial Superego 65 Colonies and Colonnades Guilty versus Useful Pleasures Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle Fantasy and Fetish 5. Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety 117 The Drying Up of the Breast Breast-Feeding and Freedom 6. The U,ender Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America 141 The Teflon Totem The Modern Forms of Power 7. Locked RoomlLonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir 163 The Actuarial Origins of Detective Fiction The Locked-Room Paradox and the Group Contents vii Detour through the Drive The Voice and the Voice Over Locked Room/Lonely Room Lethal Jouissance and the Femme Fatale 8. Sex and the Euthanasia o£Reason 201 The Phallic Function The Female Side: Mathematical Failure The Male Side: Dynamical Failure Sexual Difference and the Superego NOTES 237 INDEX 261 Aclmowledgments One reason writing is so difficult is that one feels, while doing it, com pletely alone. Yet if this were true, writing and thinking would be im possible. The big Other aside (I don't, after all, know his or her name). it is to a number of others that I have addressed myself in writing this book and who have made it, literally, possible. My debts were incurred in waves, two of them. The rust was the period, beginning in the mid to Iate 1970s. when Screen and mlf were publishing their ground-breaking texts. when Screen readers' meetings. the Filmmaker's Co-op in London, the Milwaukee conferences were sites of intense debates that marked me for good. I often regret that I have not seen their like since, that the rigor and excitement, the aura of urgency, commitment, and community that surrounded them, seem largely to be absent fr om more contemporary exchanges. lowe a great deal to the people who staged and participated in these earlier debates. and especially to a few friends whom I associate still, fo r various reasons, with the values they represented and the important theoretical projects they began: Par veen Adams, Homi Bhabha, Elizabeth Cowie. Mary Ann Doane, and Sandy Flitterman Lewis. The second wave coincided with the period when I began to define my own work not according to the object of my study, nor even as broadly theoretical, but, specifically, as Lacanian. At this moment I began to incur debts to Slavoj Zizek, who has helped me to see that the distance between abstract theory and concrete analysis can be creatively bridged, and without loss to theory; to Juliet MacCannell and Renata Salecl, who have become allies in the project of bringing Lacan and feminists to the negotiating table; to Jacques Alain Miller, who in his Acknowledgments x seminars and in conversation opened up fo r me a political reading of Lacan that many other interpreters had almost entirely obscured. To each of these lists I must add a single name, that of Joel Fineman, whose death diminished both theoretical worlds by a significant sum. My efforts at writing were also sustained by two different profes­ sional contexts. The first was, of course, the journal October, where my coeditors, Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson, supplied me with ample space and encouragement to develop the argu ments of the earlier chapters of this book. The second is the English and Comparative Literature departments at the University of Buffalo and my many colleagues there. I hesitate in this case to single names out fo r special mention fo r fear the list would grow too long. I do have to thank separately, however, the students in my seminars, who have, through their eagerness, intelligence, and interest, inspired me. I would also like to thank Bill Fischer fo r arranging fo r me to have leave time to put the final touches on the book. My colleagues at the Center fo r the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture also deserve separate mention for giving psy choanalysis such a solid home, not only during the good times, when psychoanalysis was the "hot" discourse, but during the bad times as well. Thanks, too, to Joan Cipperman for her years of sustaining service to the Center. I want to thank Roger Conover at the MIT Press fo r all his help, especially at one crucial moment when his editorial intervention proved decisive. Jenya Weinreb was a speedy, thorough, and very pleasant copyeditor of the final text; I thank her fo r her care. Finally, I thank my husband, Michael Sorkin, fo r so much, in cluding the fa ct that he would prefer that I not delay my book any longer while I try to figure out how to acknowledge him properly. Wise; because he knows that this, at least, is not possible. Read My Desire Introduction: Structures Don't March in the Streets In May 1968, an angry French student scrawled across the blackboard of one of the classrooms at the Sorbonne a sentence that immediately became a slogan fo r student discontent: "Structures don't march in the streets." A modern equivalent of the Wordsworthian "Up, up, my friends and quit your books," the French phrase was accompanied by none of the ambivalence that surrounded its predecessor and targeted a specific, in­ digenous fo rm of intellectualism-structuralism-which seemed to these students to be wholly dead and thus completely incapable ofrising to the theoretical challenge posed by the urgent and chaotic events in whose midst they now fo und themselves. Structuralism was denounced for its universalizing program and for its adherence to empty, moribund fo rms, conceived at all times to be always already in place, sedimented. The dynamics of this student revolt were such that it unreflectively led to the celebration of precisely that which structuralism seemed designed to ex clude: not simply the particular, but the particular in its most spontaneous and concrete fo rm. In the post 1968 years, celebration solidified into a number of concepts, one of which, that of the "pleb," has had a substantial influence on a certain strain of political discourse, up to and including the present, where, under the banner of "multiculturalism" or "political correctness," it sometimes returns. Proposed first by Andre Glucksmann, this concept named some pure instance of particularity that had the potential to un dermine all the universalizing structures of power. The "pleb," as she or he was embodied in workers, students, immigrants, all those made poor, sorry, worthless, or marginal by the society in place, was conceived as endowed with "the immediacy of a knowledge (connaissance) which springs from the realities of suffering and resistance. "1 Following this Chapter 1 2 definition, any discourse that "originated" with the pleb was thought to have a political value and correctness that was automatically fo reclosed to discourses "originating" with those in positions of power. Glucksmann developed his concept of the pleb with liberal bor rowings from Michel Foucault, and Foucault, in turn, incorporated Glucksmann's concept into his own thinking. But not without reserva tions. Interviewed by the Revoltes Logiques collective, Foucault uttered this warning regarding the pleb, which he described as "the constant and constantly silent target for the apparatuses of power": Without doubt the "pleb" must not be conceived of as the per manent foundation of history ...the never totally extinct hearth of every revolt. The "pleb" undoubtedly has no sociological reality. But there is indeed always something which in some way escapes the relations of power; something in the social body, in the classes, in the groups, in the individuals themselves which is not at all the more or less docile or reactive raw material, but which is the centrifugal movement, the inverse energy, that which escapes.
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