5 Stuck Theory

If there’s one thing that will make any student of theory feel stuck, it’s plodding through Jacques Lacan. The brilliant and enigmatic founder of the École Freudienne de Paris was, by all accounts, a god-awful writer. Lacan’s talent was instead as an oral teacher. His seminars, promising a “return to Freud” but delivering an often radically new attention to language in psychoanalysis, took place annually in Paris for nearly thirty years, to larger and larger audiences. Only near the end of his seventh decade, according to Elisabeth Roudinesco’s clarifying biography of Lacan, did the theorist begin to want things written down. Through his career, of course, Lacan had written, but most of the books that now bear his name are transcriptions, edited and translated, from his oral deliveries. These were his real works.

The main exception is a book of writings called Écrits. (In French, écrits means “writings.” It’s not an untranslatable word, but if you leave it in French, you get to sound pretentious.) My college days were those of the old Alan Sheridan translation (the more recent “complete” translation by Bruce Fink was not published until 2006), and the copy I purchased was one that I only very partially read, though I made a lot of jokes about its difficulty (e.g., “You can’t read Lacan without Hegel”). After my first semester of graduate school, however, I got it in my head that I needed to understand Lacan better. I sat in coffee shops for a week of my winter break, puzzling through this famously challenging book of essays, making my own index of terms, writing down charts, noting parallels between different concepts, marking the original contexts for some of the famous “out-of-context” phrases I had heard repeated (for example, “desire is the desire to desire”).

Reading Lacan that week was uniquely soothing. I remember the feelings of those days vividly, with the comfort and excitement that other people attribute to childhood Christmases. I took pleasure in the ritual of my reading, which was elevated by the feeling of accomplishment when that week and my perusal of the book were both over. I recall the satisfaction with which I folded my page of notes, stuck it into the book, and then (with perhaps more determination than satisfaction) schlepped that book from one apartment to another four times before I had to teach from it years later during my first job after grad school. Only then did I pull out my trusty page of notes and begin rereading the essay I had assigned to my students. It made zero sense. Like, none. I had read it before, knew what it was about, and literally had notes in front of me. Still I was coming up short.

However unintentionally, there is something a little perfect about this story, because to enter into Lacan’s terms is always to play with absurdity. He marshaled an arsenal of seemingly paradoxical or self-contradictory concepts, to the glee of his enthusiasts and often to the frustration of his lay readers. To give you just one example, Lacan writes in a number of places about what he calls méconaissance, that is, misrecognition or misconstrual (it’s another term his translators usually leave in French). The idea here is that, as a human child is developing its sense of self, what it learns about the world does not always align with the actual reality it sees or senses. Lacan loved to speak of the instance of seeing oneself in the mirror. The child sees the mirror as something out there in the world, but as it grows up, it will learn, like the rest of us, that the reflection in the mirror is itself. For the child to see its mirror image as an external object, instead of reflecting itself back to itself, is a misrecognition, a méconaissance, but—and here’s the Lacanian flair for paradox—the misrecognition is also correct. That image is not the child; it is outside the self and in the world. Our sense of ourselves relies on making sense of the world in ways that are not identical to our own sensory experiences of it. Or, as Lacan puts it, the self is extrinsic to itself. From this example, I hope it becomes clear that this guy must have been real fun at parties.

Put in my best Lacanian-sounding terms, the question posed by my experience of reading him becomes something like, Was I stuck when I didn’t understand what Lacan was saying, or had I been truly stuck in grad school, when I thought I did? With the question posed this way, the Lacanian answer would almost certainly be yes. But the value of that answer—its insight, its provocation—would be based not only on admitting I was stuck either way but on sorting out whether I was better off in one kind of stuckness or another. There’s no winning in a Lacanian universe, but there are ways to lose less badly.

***

“Stuck” is not a properly psychoanalytic term. I’m not sure it’s even a common theoretical term, though it lodged in my vocabulary decisively when I read Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism. Berlant’s book uses the word—as both noun and verb, as well as paronyms like “unstuck”—on a number of occasions and to powerful effect. At the same time, she doesn’t gloss it with the sheen of jargon or present it as a central concept. For her, and certainly for the way I have appropriated her term, “stuck” is just a useful means of describing the feeling or the experience of being fixed in place. To be stuck is to be located in happenstance—neither a zone of crisis or trauma nor one of aspiration or desire. By my reckoning, stuckness doesn’t generate too much narrative. Ask a stuck person why they live here, and you might be told, “I just do.”

Even without being a storied theoretical term, “stuck” is a concept that theory needs. It’s not a good thing or a bad thing exactly; it’s just a thing, a way of talking about the vicissitudes of ordinary experience. Or to use the least sexy word I have at my disposal for describing theoretical concepts, “stuck,” as a term, is mature. It’s a word for which one reaches from the middle of something—midargument, midmeal, or (I sometimes fear) maybe just midlife. As such, “stuck” counterposes the more out-of-the-ordinary and phenomenologically singular experiences toward which the vocabulary of theory clusters: terms like “event,” “trauma,” “aporia,” “différend,” “exception.” Once you begin to take inventory of the way this vocabulary skews away from “stuck,” it’s tempting to conclude that “stuck” is exactly what theory doesn’t want you to feel.

To be sure, the promise of being unstuck was undoubtedly one of the motivations by which theory came into my life, for it corroborated the impulses of youth. For example, one of the many fashions of my college years was veganism. Young people commonly experiment with diet as a way of trying to remake themselves, literally and figuratively. Vegetarianism and veganism were to the Nineties what macrobiotics had been to the Seventies or gluten-free or paleo is to now: all ways to land in both an identity and a practice of self-transformation through food. But veganism wasn’t just something we did. As a practice, it begot and, equally, was begotten by theory.

My vegan friends and I argued and agreed about ideology, nonviolence, and the ethics and scales of consumption. In our more far-reaching and self-reflective moments, we thought about the relationship among individual choices, preference, desire, and the big structural mechanisms of things like global capitalism and national agriculture. The theory and practice of veganism were inextricable. We theorized what a just or minimally exploitative consumption might look like and then tried to live it out. As far as we were concerned, every dash of Bragg’s Liquid Aminos enlivened debate as much as (honestly, probably much more than) it enlivened a plate of brown rice. We used the vocabulary and the conceptual tools of theory as a way of grafting the entirely ordinary activity of eating onto something much larger and more meaningful. There’s a joke that says, if you’re trying to figure out if someone is a vegan, don’t worry, they’ll tell you. Like a lot of jokes, it harbors a note of truth; but only a little defensively would I insist that the act of telling was, in my experience, less about sanctimoniousness than it was the by-product of trying to convince myself, as much as anyone else, of Something Really Important.

Certainly the aspirations of theory, as I have described them here and in the preceding chapters, are transformative. Veganism is just one example of the far-reaching potential of these transformations. The larger point remains that the transformative aliveness of theory is part of why I gave so much of my youth to studying it. From memes and jokes and reading groups to friendship and sex and love to meals and shopping and debate, theory provided an occasion for transformative things to happen. Our actions had meaning. Sure, many of those actions might have happened anyway; but they happened in this way, and that quality of the experience makes a difference. By contrast, my life would be impoverished if I had never, say, read Moby-Dick, or listened to Nina Simone or come into contact with something else that has become a part of me; but I’m equally sure my life would have gone on. Without theory, however, without the years spent thinking and talking and being and becoming in the ways that theory inspired and captioned, well, I have no idea who I’d be.

This identity-saturating nature of theory has to do with the fact that, while eating and studying and loving and joking are ordinary experiences, having them in proximity to theory meant that my language for talking about ordinary things didn’t have to feel merely ordinary. In this way, theory did for me what religion or ideology often does for other people: it enriched the world with words and deeds that added up toward something that seemed like more than something. Theory provoked us to have ideas that reached inexorably toward praxis, the consummation of which we sometimes clearly could and, even more excitingly, sometimes clearly could not see. Theoretical ideas about the lives we were living stretched out on the horizon, and they invited us to follow them in the direction of their vanishing point. Theory animated the possibility that we could be unstuck.

***

At nineteen or twenty, my friends and I were not really stuck, not in the ways that life can make you stuck as it goes on (see earlier, re: midlife). Nonetheless, we were acquainted with stuckness, and there was an ambient sense in those Reagan-Bush-Clinton decades that American culture itself had become a little stuck, that we were in a period of retrenchment and backlash against an optimism toward ideas of social perfectibility fondly remembered from just the other side of the time we’d been born. Theory functioned in our imaginations as a way of making the Sixties last into the Nineties, a way of circling back to some purer potential of thought for action.

At the least, it seems like more than a coincidence that my college friends and I, as well as so many of the fellow travelers I have met over the years, were attracted to theory with much the same intensity that we were attracted to Left politics or punk music or communal living or vegetarianism or sexual experimentation. It was perhaps the same attraction to a new world that drew Foucault to sadomasochism; at least, it made a canny kind of sense that Walter Benjamin would write lovingly about hashish or that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would go to see Patti Smith play during their one joint trip to Berkeley. Like theory, these expressions and embodiments were designated as a means of feeling out an original relation to ourselves and each other. Likewise, it felt familiar and even objectively correct to me when in 2010 students at Middlesex University occupied campus buildings in response to their administration’s threat to cut the entire philosophy program, that they did so with protest signs that read, “Yes We Lacan.” These students displayed an impulse shared by me and my friends in our student days. They were playing with theory in order to give the idea for a different world a linguistic shape that, in turn, articulated the actions that might produce that different world. If there was a raison d’être for theory in the Nineties, it was that we were going to live out our values. We were going to make the world anew.

To be unstuck meant that theory and practice went together. It’s small wonder that one of the language games we played in college was (as I learned years later) called a “snowclone.” That term refers to a phrasal template, in which you can substitute a couple of words depending on the context but still generate a recognizable cliché: for example, “x is the new black,” where x is anything at all you happen to be talking about. Well, in college, I often found myself saying “x is theory, but y is the practice.” Should we study at the coffee shop? Homework is theory, but coffee is the practice. Reading Gender Trouble? Antiessentialism is the theory, but performance is the practice. (Yeah, these jokes didn’t often land. Repetition and delivery helped, though, as did patient friends.)

This particular snowclone had been in my repertoire for a while before I learned that there was an original phrase at its root. All this time I had been riffing off Lesbianism and Feminism, a 1971 pamphlet by Anne Koedt, published by the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, that began with an epigraph attributed to Ti-Grace Atkinson: “Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.” Now, it’s been a while since I have had any informed claims on the habits of college lesbians, but that sounds pretty unstuck to me.

***

The stuckness of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton decades did come to an end, though not one that seemed possible from the vantage of the Nineties. I graduated college in June 2000 and was barely two months into graduate school when the Supreme Court handed victory in the presidential election to George W. Bush (who, we said with a sincere contempt, toward which I feel unendingly rueful, was no worse than his opponent, Al Gore). Ten months later, two airplanes flew into the World Trade Center towers in New York, 185 miles from where I was sitting, at that same moment cramming a chapter from Jürgen Habermas’s The Inclusion of the Other for the first meeting of a theory seminar I was taking in the Political Science Department. It was not Habermas, however, who came to mind when my boyfriend called from work and told me to turn on the television. I watched the second tower fall and thought about Gilles Deleuze. “So this,” I said, “is a becoming.” I don’t remember whether I spoke aloud.

Deleuze had spent the Sixties writing deliberately provocative interpretations of canonical figures in European philosophy: David Hume, Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche. His slim 1963 book on Kant treats all three of the monumental Critiques in a spare one hundred pages—a formal polemic if ever there was one. Around 1970, Deleuze began cowriting with the activist-psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, who had spent the preceding decade as an auditor in Lacan’s seminars and as a patient on his couch; working together, Deleuze and Guattari’s joint ideas became impressively unhinged. Their lengthy and lapidary 1980 book A Thousand Plateaus, while not new during my first semester of graduate school, had become all the rage. The previous winter, possibly the same happy week I spent reading Lacan in coffee shops, I paid a visit to a beloved independent scholarly bookstore in downtown Santa Cruz, and I noticed that the proprietor had stocked nearly all Deleuze’s books—a change from even six months before. “Are people reading these all of a sudden?” I asked. “All of a sudden,” he repeated.

Transformations happen all the time, but the question is how. Deleuze and Guattari explain the process of “becoming” as a particular kind of transformation, which they eagerly distinguish from imitation or analogy. On their account, becoming is, rather, generative of truly new ways of being that are a function of influences rather than resemblances. Key, here, is that the world as it already exists can be reassembled into something that’s genuinely otherwise. 9/11 was arguably a “becoming,” in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, because it was an occasion when something that was possible but hadn’t really happened before (not in this place, not in this way) did happen, and the world reassembled itself in the wake of that event. A becoming makes things unstuck, and the events of 9/11 made aspects of the world literally molten.

In the significantly more minor register of my own life, the events of that morning fomented a different becoming, as I mumbled about Deleuze, maybe out loud, to an empty room. I had spent my college years using the language of theory to make the stuckness of life feel more mobile, but now I reached for a theoretical term to stabilize something. I called it a “becoming” because I needed the event to feel discrete, comprehensible. That need would only amplify in the weeks and years that followed, when the ordinary became otherwise than it had been and so many of my habits of comprehension atrophied, while other latent senses very slowly, lamely began to find expression in words.

Here was the event, unstuck from the vicissitudes of the ordinary. My theoretical vocabulary wasn’t good enough to make sense of it. My language failed.

***

Nothing about Lacan’s writings could solve this problem, but it’s also no wonder I was drawn to them. The theorists who ranked among the pillars of psychoanalysis—Lacan but also Sigmund Freud, Jean Laplanche, and Melanie Klein—wrote things that I read with only tepid curiosity in college. But suddenly in graduate school, psychoanalytic theory became interesting in wholly different ways than it ever had been before. I needed its language, which, among other things, offered up the possibility that language was sometimes all we had and also, at many of the same times, was not enough.

It makes all kinds of intuitive sense that I would be drawn to psychoanalytic theory in such times, but I am also hard-pressed to explain where I got the idea to be. Even among theory heads, psychoanalysis was not entirely fashionable coming out of the Nineties, at least not in the United States. Around the literary humanities, the critical language of that moment was infused with the concept of “culture,” drawn from anthropology, from the Birmingham School of cultural studies, and from the diffusion of Marxism, via the Frankfurt School and via Foucault, into studies of the “context” for literature—what we learned to call “literary production.” Psychoanalysis was not off the table, but by comparison to these other, more prominent strains of theoretical inquiry, it looked like a bourgeois retreat from the historical realities of the post-1989 collapse of actually existing socialism. Yes, those were really the words we used.

While canonical psychoanalytic theory was largely out, one strain in particular, trauma theory, dominated in the Nineties. Properly psychoanalytically speaking, a “trauma” is a psychic disturbance, something that doesn’t kill you but that comes close enough that it’s not easy to recover from. The word in ancient Greek means “wound,” though it is the same in English as it was in Freud’s German. He used the word early and often, and some of his readers have argued that its meaning inflected differently over the course of his career. But “trauma theory” changed the word’s meaning again. Its rubric named a conversation that tried to emphasize, and to some extent isolate, trauma as a dimension of psychoanalytic theory—that is, to treat trauma not in relation to other pieces of the Freudian ecology of mind (like the death drive or the Oedipus complex) but as a broad analytic in its own right.

The impulse to talk more about trauma in these years did not belong to theory alone. Indeed, few technical theoretical terms have ever leaked into the American cultural imagination as thoroughly as “trauma.” In the Nineties, the word was everywhere, and it meant nearly anything. Being in a car crash was a trauma, but so was the AIDS crisis, so was child neglect, so was the Holocaust, and so, according to several Kantian-inflected inquires, was the sublime. Never mind that the actions that catalyzed these experiences—let alone the experiences themselves—were so incommensurably different. Trauma in those days was often measured without a scale, leaving the weight of one kind of experience to balance with any other, whether it was highly personal or broadly sociological.

All these meanings for trauma amounted to a minor trauma in their way, and some scholars tried to salve this terminological mess. Shortly before I took a graduate seminar with the historian Ruth Leys, she published Trauma: A Genealogy, whose careful and clarifying history of the term’s many meanings dissolved, in the final chapter, into an extreme reaction to Cathy Caruth’s then-very-recent book Unclaimed Experience. Leys is not exactly wrong to find that Caruth has what nearly any version of psychology would consider an overly literal account of trauma (that trauma, according to Caruth’s deconstructive argument, stands outside representation), but neither is she exactly nice about it. “Trauma” was a term that had lost its critical and diagnostic precision well before 1996, and despite my professor’s intervention, that fact would only become more and more true as the Nineties ended and a cloud of toxic dust erupted and slowly settled over lower Manhattan.

***

People insist now that the justification for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq made sense at the time; but I was there, and I remember perfectly that it didn’t. People just trusted, or wanted to be able to trust, the chimera of order that the US government symbolized. Nobody really wanted to abandon the possibility that things made sense, and, accordingly, it made so much sense that an action would have a reaction that people willingly looked past the fact that invasion was pretty obviously the wrong reaction. The siege began on the twentieth of March 2003, just about seventeen months after 9/11. We were all still traumatized. That isn’t a precise explanation, but neither is it an incorrect one.

***

Amid this mishegas, when the impulse to read psychoanalytic theory came over me, I turned to the small shelf of books by contemporary practitioners, often coming out of the European academy, whose versions of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically inflected social theories were interesting to American academics: the likes of Jacqueline Rose, Adam Phillips, Joan Copjec, and Slavoj Žižek. What was refreshing about these scholars is that they had read widely in philosophy and theory, but they kept psychoanalysis front and center while avoiding both the devoutness of Freudianism and the messiness of trauma theory.

Reading in this vein of psychoanalytic theory was rewarding, but it didn’t make me unstuck, because it did not offer what I really needed—something that, in 2001, was not yet on offer. Only about five years later would that needful thing come into its own as what has come to be called “affect theory.” It’s difficult to explain affect theory in any summary way, because it’s less a theory proper and more like an ongoing interdisciplinary conversation. One of its most useful insights—the one my plaintively outstretched hand could not close around in the fall of 2001—is that emotions are not solely the province of people, but, rather, they belong to larger structural and historical patterns. Sure, people have emotions, but from the vantage of much of affect theory, it’s equally the case that emotions have people. Feelings are individual and private, but individuality and privacy are historically contingent social constructions; and so it follows that the things you happen to be feeling are yours but not yours alone. Or, as the academic-activist group Feel Tank Chicago put the matter much more succinctly in that Prozac-saturated first term of the second Bush administration, “Depressed? It might be political.”

One of the major conversation openers for affect theory was Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s 1997 essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You.” In the sophisticated but still playful way that the title indicates, Sedgwick’s essay explored the fact that, around 1997, insight in the humanities often amounted, à la Adorno, to exposing some hidden machination, some secret working of ideology, and bringing it to light. Against this mode, which she termed “paranoid reading,” Sedgwick proposed the alternative of “reparative reading,” the possibility that scholars might take pleasure in the objects of our study, that we might be drawn to study because it’s a way of giving attention to something that nourishes us, and it is in turn something whose flourishing we may want to encourage. Here as in much of her published writing, Sedgwick wanted to use criticism to promote thoughtful attachments to a wider-than-was-common array of objects of study.

The uptake of these insights was significant both in its reach and, unfortunately, in its delay. Only after the 2003 republication of this essay in Sedgwick’s monograph Touching Feeling did “reparative reading” become a term of art that critics (at least within my hearing) readily discussed. Sedgwick’s intervention was already necessary in 1997, but, like so many things one needs, having it didn’t mean that anyone knew what to do with it.

The ballooning interest in affect theory in the past decade suggests that I was not alone in needing it during the decade prior. But absent its conceptual models, I spent the debilitating dark age that people shorthand as “post-9/11” depressed without having any language to explain convincingly that it might be political. Psychoanalytic theory was my best shot, but all it really gave me was some validation for not having the right words.

Of course, validation matters, even if it too is not unsticking. Browsing for the right words I lacked, one day in the school library, I found an edited collection called Languages of the Unsayable. I brought it home and kept it for years without ever reading any of the essays. The book meant a lot to me, but the knowledge it imparted was confined wholly to the totem of its title. How comforting it was to imagine that there might be a whole language for the things that one could not find the words to say.

***

Not having the right words to describe a new world made me feel stuck, but so, in turn, did other people’s insistence that we could continue to use the same old words. For about five years after 9/11, I would read prefaces to newly published academic books that informed me that recent unanticipated geopolitical events made the subject of the book at hand “more urgent than ever.” It didn’t matter what the subject of the book actually was. I understood such topical indifference to mean that this claim was not literal so much as it was a reflex, a rhetorical tic. At its heart was a desire to carry on with the analysis unaltered or the language unchanged.

The theoretical language we had left over from the pre-9/11 world was not sufficient to a number of aspects of the post-9/11 world, as the variously mute and gaping or else clichéd and empty—in short, the entirely human—responses to the event of 9/11 had themselves proven. But recourse to that leftover language provided a feeling of continuity, and it was continuity that we actually wanted, even if our still-cherished theoretical vocabularies prioritized other kinds of expression. “More urgent than ever” parroted the rhetorical idiom of an event-and-exception-filled theoretical language, but as a tic, it more modestly, more desperately expressed a set of feelings that hovered somewhere between being stuck and not wanting to be.

The scenario in which one does not have the right language is well anticipated by many theories besides psychoanalysis, one of which I had confronted in college. It numbered among my favorite nuggets of theoretical insight gleaned in those undergraduate years, and it came from the opening to Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. Marx is explaining the political coup of 1851–1852, in which Louis Napoleon seized legitimate republican power in order to establish the French Second Empire, much as his namesake and uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, had done previously in 1804. This text originates Marx’s oft-quoted line about how history happens first as tragedy, then as farce. But the passage that caught my attention was a more enigmatic one: “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content—here the content goes beyond the phrase.” The content goes beyond the phrase. It’s not exactly clear what Marx means here—interpreters have debated it—but I was compelled by the idea that an event in the present might exceed the language of the past. Revolutionary things would happen first, and we’d decide how to talk about them second.

The events of 9/11 or the misbegotten invasion of Iraq were, of course, not revolutions. Nonetheless, they were events for which my theoretical language proved inadequate. Marx’s “poetry of the future” had anticipated this possibility—as had Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming,” as had Lacan’s méconnaisance—but in all these cases, the content going beyond the phrase turned out to be much, much easier to imagine as a thought than it was to endure as a feeling. For me, at least, reading all those “more urgent than evers” engendered feelings that were blistering, ugly, and awash in bile. I grew truly to hate the ways others seemed to retreat from the hard work of making new language adequate to the overwhelmedness of the event. Now, I’m not certain at whom I was really angry, insofar as my frustration was with everyone else’s inability to do something that, at the same time, I also could not do.

Looking back to Marx as a way of trying to look to the future, maybe I was just engaged in a different grandiose futility. All I can tell you for sure is that as I dialed into my 56k modem to access the online library catalog or whatever other website where I might gather my resources for making all those new phrases whose contents I was sure we needed to get beyond, I did so via an AOL dial-up service for which my screen name was “poetryofthefuture.” In fact, all my screen names and internet handles in those days were some derivative of this phrase, whose contents I had clearly, manifestly, and, though I couldn’t see it at the time, rather literally not gone beyond. It was my own tic. I was holding fast to a vain hope for the ongoing relevance of my theories, just as were the people I was criticizing. In retrospect, I really doubt it mattered that mine happened to be slightly different theories.

***

Whatever else my interest in Lacan turned out to be, it was not especially world building. Over the years, I’ve discovered that when one reads or teaches Lacan, it’s remarkably challenging to get people on board if they aren’t already among the converted. His prose is so difficult that reading groups often turn out to be more work than fun. In addition to the challenges of Lacan’s writing is the strangely exclusive idiolect of the ideas—all the terms that translators leave in French (or worse: German). By contrast, you can read Marx, find it valuable, and maybe even land some zingers about exploitation—and still not be a Marxist. (A college friend swore she was just a little Marxish.) But somehow if you take the trouble necessary to really read Lacan, you end up being a ride-or-die Lacanian. All the more foolhardy it would seem that I was reading Lacan for what was more or less the opposite reason, in the hopes of getting unstuck.

To some extent, Lacan seems to have cultivated the exclusive atmosphere that surrounded him. In 1953, he broke with the Parisian psychoanalytic establishment where he had spent nearly his whole career, over what came to be called the “variable-length session” or “short session.” Whereas Freud had established the length of an analytic session as the famous fifty-minute hour, Lacan proposed that analytic insight could be concentrated if the length of a session were shortened at the discretion of the analyst—sometimes to mere minutes. Such unorthodox timing scandalized the Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse, and Lacan and many of his colleagues left to found a different organization.

It’s worth appreciating that an abrogation in the contract between the analyst and analysand laid the foundation for Lacan’s new analytic organization. In a way, this break was Lacan’s becoming—it was, at least, the event that transformed him into the leader of what was suddenly legible as a movement. Lacan’s seminars had begun in 1951, but only surrounding the events of this break, in 1953, did they begin to be recorded and, subsequently, transcribed and published (under the sole authority Lacan vested in his protégé, Jacques-Alain Miller, who, in 1966, the same year as the publication of Écrits, married Lacan’s daughter, now the philosopher Judith Miller). Lacan, meanwhile, both assumed and, from the position of his assumption, resisted this role as leader. He described his seminars as a “return to Freud,” and almost three decades later, at a conference in Caracas, he announced that his auditors might be Lacanians if they wished, but he was a Freudian.

It would seem that Lacan’s life’s work was to fold the already deckled edges of rupture and continuity onto each other until they held together well enough that one had to face the texture of their relation. Even among theorists, he had the power to make awkward terms and absurd ideas stick. This power did not, however, insulate him from the mechanisms of paradox that he so skillfully wielded, and so, even as Lacan masterfully related things to one another, other things broke apart. Thoughts and feelings can be encouraged to work together, but they are not finally coextensive. Love, Lacan was fond of repeating throughout his 1957–1958 seminar, is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it. I can think that this definition is astonishingly correct and still feel, or want to feel, otherwise. For what it’s worth, I have often considered what it might be like to anticipate fifty minutes of someone’s time and attention and then, without warning, get only seven. It might be the kind of twist or provocation that yields great insight, but I don’t suppose that the abruptness of the technique feels particularly good for the patient. The knowledge that comes with disappointment is great, but it is also partial.

The example of Lacan illustrates—as would the example of Marx or Deleuze and Guattari or many theorists besides—that theoretical language gives us ways to comprehend the world in even its most extreme and unexpected manifestations. But as we use this language to inch our way toward the better world where theory and practice coordinate in an original way, we run into innumerable instances when this language is not enough. In these instances, we often find ourselves stuck with something that doesn’t work in the ways that we might need it to, or, perhaps, we find ourselves stuck in a moment when our need might be greater than the means we have at our disposal to satisfy it. For all its rhetorical designs on the likes of “events” and “exceptions,” for all its gravitational pull toward the new and the ideal, theory ultimately offers no positions that are immune from these possibilities. Any position is a place where you can get stuck.

Does reading Lacan leave us stuck, or were we stuck already? The Lacanian answer would be yes.