Karen Coats
As Daniel T. O’Hara notes in Chapter 30 (“Freudian Psychoanalytic Criticism”), psychoanalytic criticism stemming from Freud’s work has become something of an outlier in literary studies, suffering most from a reductive caricature of Freud’s vital insights into the ways the erogenous body and primal family relationships impinge on, and determine, a person’s reality and a culture’s social norms. The elliptical “return to Freud” of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, however, continues to inspire new interpretive possibilities not only in literary studies, but also in philosophy, human sciences, semiotics, women’s studies, film studies, multicultural studies, queer theory, cognitive studies, trauma studies, animal studies, and affect theory, to name but a few of the fields of inquiry that continue to discover, or in some cases seek to repress, the influence of Lacan’s ideas about the role of language and the unconscious in the creation and maintenance of subjectivity. In fact, we might argue that Lacan did for psychoanalytic theory in the humanities what his contemporary and countryman, performance artist Yves Klein, did for the color blue—that is, to stamp it so indelibly with his own methods and techniques that, just like International Klein Blue, Lacan’s work has inspired countless commentaries, academic dissertations, artistic productions, and cultural references. To approach any of these other theoretical paradigms with a background understanding of Lacanian theory is to be able to more fully nuance the mechanisms whereby desire enters into economies of value, how academic discourse reveals and conceals unconscious truth through the obsessive generation of knowledge, and how our preferred fantasies provide a hedge against subjective destitution.
While the uptake of Lacanian insights in these various discourses produces interpretations that deepen our understanding of texts and our responses to them, reading Lacan himself can be a daunting enterprise. Nearly every commentator acknowledges that his richly allusive and deliberately enigmatic style can be an obstacle to understanding and putting his insights to work in analyzing texts. However, I would add that another reason for resisting his style has something to do with what it uncovers in ourselves as comprehension of what he has to say begins to dawn on us. Lacan’s obfuscatory style is not only an affront to our sense of ourselves as scholars capable of confidently understanding a theoretical paradigm, but his view of the subject, starting in fact with the use of the term subject, with all that implies, rather than self, is also an affront to our illusion of self‐mastery and inner coherence. And indeed, this is his intent. In the aftermath of Freud, Lacan argues, psychoanalysis had moved toward a model more in line with traditional philosophical notions of a unified self, with the ego in charge of managing any conflicts that might arise between a person’s renegade desires and the social reality that impinges upon them. Maladaptation between a person and her outer and inner environs became the problem that psychoanalysis sought to cure, mainly through having the analysand identify with and model a well‐adapted analyst. By contrast, Lacan’s “return to Freud” manifests first and foremost as an insistence on a hard break between being and meaning, and between knowledge and unconscious truth, that unmasks the tidy fiction of the unified self to reveal an irrevocably split subject.
In light of these two difficulties, and in the spirit of a Companion, I have framed this chapter as both a methodological and substantive introduction that aims to inspire a degree of confidence in approaching this theory, motivation to study it further, and a sort of gracious humility in admitting that it isn’t a system that can be mastered once and for all. Part of the necessity for this latter admission is that Lacan’s body of work is extensive and growing. His writings continue to be published and translated, so a proper hermeneutics, that is, one that reads individual pieces in dialogue with the entire oeuvre, is not yet possible; there is as yet no Standard Edition of Lacan’s entire corpus, although to keep things simple in this chapter, I draw most of my quotations and page numbers from Bruce Fink’s (2006) translation of Écrits: The First Complete Translation in English. Another problem with viewing Lacanian theory as a methodology that can be mastered once and for all is that to even dream of doing so is to misunderstand the theory altogether. Therefore, I first suggest a method for reading Lacan, and second, I introduce some of the concepts that make Lacanian psychoanalytic theory so generative in the interpretation of literary texts, focusing on how his theories of language and discourse under‐ and overwrite interpretations of textuality in general.
The very first thing I tell my students is that they have to approach the reading of Lacan in a radically different way than they have been trained to read other texts. Throughout our formal schooling, and especially in these grim days of standardized testing, we are explicitly taught to read for something called the main idea. At the end of our reading, we should be able to write a coherent summary that demonstrates our mastery of the key concepts in a text. Approaching a Lacanian text this way will only lead to frustration and possible property damage, as readers may be tempted to hurl the book across the room. What such cold reading can do, however, is lead to an ultimately felicitous breakdown, which is the first step to learning something new; one has to begin by admitting, against the formidable defenses of the ego, that one does not know everything. But the project then becomes how we can move forward.
It helps to start with cultural context, in fact because Lacan’s own theory of subjectivity encourages us to do so. He coins the terms “extimacy” to indicate that, at the most intimate heart of my subjectivity, that is, my unconscious, I find nothing other than the discourse of the Other. In other words, what I consider most authentic in myself, my originality so to speak, has, in reality, been internalized from the culture around me, referring to this Other as that “to whom I am more attached than to myself [moi], since, at the most assented heart of my identity to myself, he pulls the strings” (Lacan 2006: 436). Lacan was born in 1901 to a strongly Catholic family. By the age of 16, after attending a Jesuit school, he embraced atheism, while his brother went on to become a Benedictine at the abbey of Hautecombe. Our job here is certainly not to analyze Lacan, but for those readers who hear in his writings the echoes of a specifically Christian discourse evoked and/or rejected, this early history may serve to bring certain of his most difficult concepts, such as the heterogeneity of the Real, into focus.
But the more exigent context for his style can be found in the intellectual and aesthetic climate of France during his adult years. Lacan was friends with Surrealists André Breton, Salvador Dali, and Raymond Queneau as well as writer Georges Bataille; he attended the intellectually transformative lectures on Hegel by Alexandre Kojève; and beginning in 1953, he began delivering his own weekly teaching seminars, which were attended or closely followed by anthropologist Claude Lévi‐Strauss, philosophers Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Jean Hyppolite, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Derrida, literary critics Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, and linguist Roman Jakobson, to name but a few. Like Kojève’s, then, Lacan’s work was disseminated orally before a live audience of public intellectuals engaged in, and knowledgeable about, various fields of inquiry. He lectured in a circuitous style that ranged over several academic disciplines and engaged in current debates and explicit references to people who were in attendance that evening or who had responded, either in print or in conversation, to something he said in a previous seminar. Meanwhile, he was involved in an ongoing and contentious battle to reform methods of training psychoanalysts. Even as he reworked his seminars for publication, this spontaneous and sometimes combative oral delivery style was evident, making tracking down time‐and‐context‐bound references difficult, and requiring an intense familiarity with continental philosophy, the emergent linguistic backgrounds for semiotic theory, and the debates raging within the psychoanalytic community. Adding to this difficulty, his style exuded the deliberately opaque character championed by the Surrealists as a method for letting the unconscious express itself, which was surely one of Lacan’s objectives, as he maintains, “For the function of language in speech is not to inform but to evoke” (Lacan 2006: 247).
How, then, can we even begin to read Lacan without participating in the heady contexts that made his lectures so immediately transformative? Fortunately, while they may respect Lacan’s motives for producing texts that demand both conscious effort and a willingness to allow engagement with unconscious materials, not all of his commentators since the 1990s have considered opacity a virtue in their explication of his texts. One of the processes that will assist readers in approaching Lacan’s texts is to find a guide whose style and knowledge base are both trustworthy and accessible. These are what I might call starter texts, in that they explain Lacanian terminology and concepts with examples drawn from both real life and aesthetic artifacts, and in so doing, provide useful maps for the actual territory. Bruce Fink (1995: 2004) is one of the ablest writers in this vein; his introductions offer masterful overviews of concepts from Lacan’s corpus that explain clearly without reducing the complexity of Lacan’s theories of language, otherness, subjectivity, desire, and sexuation, among other topics. Likewise, Mark Bracher (2006; Bracher et al. 1994) has written accessibly on Lacan’s theory of the four discourses. For a particular focus on Lacanian literary criticism, Ellie Ragland‐Sullivan (1984), James M. Mellard (1991), Claudia Tate (1998), Elizabeth Wright (1999), and I (Coats 2004) have all offered what I call reciprocal readings—that is, Lacanian concepts are explained and demonstrated through close readings of literary texts, while stylistic concerns, character constellations and plot arcs are illuminated through Lacanian concepts.
This reciprocal method is the one favored by Slavoj Žižek (1992a, 1992b, 1992c), whose early work explores specific Lacanian theories through individual films. These works are more difficult for beginners because they presume some familiarity with both continental philosophy and Lacanian terms, but they are great fun once you’ve laid hold of some of the fundamentals. And indeed, once you have some experience with the basic concepts and terms, it’s time to up your game. You can do this in one of two ways: one is to plunge right in to Lacan’s texts, pairing an essay with the simultaneous reading of a richly evocative novel, such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, or a film like Fight Club or Inception, or, following Žižek, Hitchcock’s Vertigo or North by Northwest. After reading a segment of an essay by Lacan (you could read the entire essay, or you could read until a passage stops you), read a chapter or so in the fictional text or watch the film, preferably before doing some other sort of activity, such as going for a run, taking a nap or a drive. I know that this type of advice is unusual in an essay of this sort, but this method is not accidental to understanding and working with Lacanian literary criticism; it is intended to give your unconscious its best chance to work on, and work out, the ideas Lacan is presenting. Remember that your goal in this type of reading is not mastery, but something more like resonance or productive discomfort that impels you to keep puzzling out how what he is saying speaks to texts, and how a dialectic between text and reader emerges in the process of a reading. Lacan’s style was meant to evoke the work of the unconscious; this method of reading his words, switching to a dreamscape, and then allowing your brain to shift into an activity that involves automaticity offers the opportunity for the unconscious to express itself. And then, once you have found a point of entry, a puzzle to solve, by all means write, freely and associatively; you will learn what you know by seeing what you say.
A second method that is more traditionally scholarly would be to read Bruce Fink’s Lacan to the Letter (2006) or Philippe van Haute’s Against Adaptation: Lacan’s “Subversion” of the Subject (2002) alongside the Lacanian essays on which they perform extended close readings. Van Haute’s text is particularly useful in that it not only explicates a key Lacanian essay line by line, but also draws together thematic threads when they are dispersed throughout the text. In his close reading, Van Haute provides the necessary background information on Hegel and Freud where necessary for understanding Lacan’s allusions, and walks readers carefully through the iterations of Lacan’s graph of desire. The Lacanian text is well chosen for van Haute (2002: xiii) to be able to elucidate “various fundamental Lacanian concepts (the object a, the phantasy, the phallus, and so on) in relation to each other,” as well as how these concepts shift in meaning and importance over time in Lacan’s work (yet another source of difficulty in producing any definitive statements of the theory as a whole). This contextualization enables readers to attain a more confident understanding of these concepts when they encounter them in other texts. Fink’s slimmer volume offers close commentary on several essays, some with more clinical significance, and others with broader theoretical concerns; he seeks to take Lacan at his word, treating his texts in much the same way as one would treat a poem, weighing words carefully not only for their immediate meanings, but for the ways they evoke a plurality of interpretations that nevertheless does not reduce their precision. Fink is also concerned with clearing up errors and other infelicities in previous translations, which he believes have unfairly contributed to Lacan’s reputation as abstruse.
It is only once you have given yourself the chance to acquire a foundational understanding through these and other dedicated Lacanian theorists that I would suggest moving on to the many Marxist, feminist, and philosophical extensions, appropriations, and challenges that have sometimes provided provocative and useful new interpretations of both the theory and the cultural artifacts under discussion, and sometimes distorted Lacan’s claims beyond recognition. After more than a half century of people working with Lacan’s ideas in both the psychoanalytic clinic and academic criticism, Jean‐Michel Rabaté (2003) may rightly note,
The time of simple exegesis has passed; we do not need yet another account of Saussure’s binaries or a summary of ternaries like Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real. Although these notions obviously need to be understood, what matters today is how productive they are. It is less a matter of defining deliberately elusive concepts like “the Other” than of understanding their dynamic usage in several contexts.
(Rabaté 2003: xiv)
However, as such concepts are regularly put to productive use without adequate exegesis, each new reader of any theoretical paradigm that has emerged from the intellectual crucible of the second half of the twentieth century does benefit from a simple yet non‐reductive explanation of these and other fundamental concepts. Lacanian theory remains productive and dynamic because it is deliberately non‐totalizable; he offers an open structural paradigm that is responsive to diverse cultural contexts and language change. Indeed, his way of construing subjectivity as deeply implicated in, but not fully reducible to, the cultural Other helps us understand those contexts and changes.
Lacan’s chief innovation on Freud’s system is what makes his work so well‐suited for literary theory, and that is his insistence on the role of language and image in the construction of subjectivity. While other methodologies seek to apply psychoanalytic theory to literary texts to discern the psychopathologies and symptoms of characters and authors, or even to locate within the texts examples of psychoanalytic motifs such as Oedipal conflicts and phallic symbols, a Lacanian poetics stresses that “literature operates a magnetic pull on the reader because it is an allegory of the psyche’s fundamental structure” (Ragland‐Sullivan 1984: 381). In fact, Lacan himself drew on literary texts to illustrate how literature allegorizes the subject’s relation to the Other, which we must understand as a multivalent concept: the Other as culture, law, environmental and social structures, the Other as other people, and the Other as language. For Lacan, it is our relationship with the Other that initially and continually structures the subject.
This structuring begins even prior to birth. Perception at this early stage is inchoate, with no cognitive centering principle to organize it, and yet we still take in the images, sounds, and smells of the Other along with various affects associated with these percepts. We begin life in a logical time that Lacan would characterize as the Real—an existence prior to symbolization that persists even after the infant has entered the mirror stage. The mirror stage is probably the best known of Lacan’s concepts, crucial for understanding why language and image matter to the developing subject. When an infant recognizes itself in the mirror, it forms an identification with this specular image that differs from, and is more attractive to, the infant than the fragmented body he experiences. This recognition, then, is a fundamental misrecognition: the infant is not coincident with his reflected image in the Real, nor does it have any of the control or independent power he imputes to it. “But the important point,” Lacan (2006) stresses,
is that this form situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming, no matter how successful the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve, as I, his discordance with his own reality.
(Lacan 2006: 76)
In other words, what has been introduced in this moment is a separation between what the baby is and what he sees and assumes he is, and this forms the “rootstock of secondary identifications” (2006: 76), those ideal images and symbolic signifiers that will constitute an identity that never again completely coincides with the Real, which is that which not only precedes but also exceeds symbolization. Instead, the child will form an identity lived in the Imaginary, the register of images and dyadic identifications between the self and others as well as the self as other, and the Symbolic, the register of the big Other of culture and language where the subject first asserts himself as “I” among other subjects. But what also emerges in this entry into Imaginary and Symbolic registers is a sense of loss; Lacan says the child is “jubilant” in his misrecognition of himself as a coherent, bounded being, but he also comes to realize his essential separateness from others and the environment. Prior to this vision of his own limited form, he could imagine the world as an extension of himself. He now knows that he is “not all,” and in that moment the Other is born for him as a force with which to reckon.
For many critics, this “not all” is the major sticking point with psychoanalytic literary theory, because they immediately jump to the commonplace that sexual difference is the absolute signifier of the separation that structures the subject, and from there conclude that psychoanalytic criticism can only forever reinscribe a patriarchal discourse where women are seen as the site of the “not all.” Freud is largely responsible for this, since of all the bodily demands that impinge upon mental life, he singled out sexuality, placing an inordinate amount of weight on sexual difference as the salient condition under which individuals take up subject positions, and inflecting those positions with the attitudes of his time. But Lacan (1998: 94) issues a gambit that few have taken up when he says: “the apparent necessity of the phallic function turns out to be mere contingency.” Even as he argues that the Symbolic is the realm of the paternal Law that contravenes the child’s desire to return to a dyadic union with the mother, Lacan notes that these figures in the Oedipal triangle are always already signifiers for more abstract concepts that are not necessarily gendered. What the child actually loses is a sense of oneness with the world, a sense of having all needs met by an omnipotent Other whom he experiences as an extension of himself; he loses the sense that he is all. His desire, then, is coextensive with the recognition of lack, and it is yet another misrecognition that his desire is to eradicate that lack. Instead, he continually seeks what he feels is his “most profound lost object” (Lacan 1981: 198). Although this object is figured in multiple ways in literature, it is most often linked in some way to the mother, which is what reinforces the idea that lack is connected with the female body, but also serves to highlight the fact that it is a signifier made salient through repetition rather than through necessity. In addition, it sheds light on the nature of desire itself in that the impossibility of reuniting with the (m)other allegorizes the idea that desire must never be fulfilled, but must instead continue circulating to keep the plot, and the subject, alive.
This, then, is the genesis of the split subject, divided between being and signification, taking up a position as “not all” and seeking to keep on seeking. Part of her operates consciously, as ego, negotiating roles and positions with respect to others in the world, as well as with respect to idealized images of herself. Other people act as images with which to identify, but so do cultural products such as literary characters and media figures. And the images she introjects are not just specular or animate; stories and poems offer sounds, plot arcs, and coherent worlds that by turns precipitate longing and momentarily cover over lack. What’s more, her split also enables her motility with respect to these images; that is, the experiential memory of the fragmented body apart from the totalizing mirror image allows her to identify with parts rather than solely with whole images. Language helps in triangulating and multiplying her identificatory possibilities by necessitating the production of her own specular images and affective memories to link to words. While part of this is under her conscious control, another part evokes the participation of her unconscious, which comes into being when representation forces the repression of an object under a sign that stands for it—that is, at the moment when the subject recognizes herself in and as an other, and comes to accept images and words as stand‐ins for things. A literary text thus functions in a structurally similar way as a mirror image: it offers a site for identification and misrecognition; we impute to it a totality and authority that is at odds with our everyday experience; and we pursue it as an anticipatory structure that might get us closer to some ideal sense of a coherent ego. However, we are not thereby held in utter thrall to it; our unconscious pushes back against a totalizing representation because the unconscious, according to Lacan, is structured like a language.
When Lacan says that the unconscious is structured like a language, what he means in part is that the material of the unconscious—the words and images that populate it—are untethered from their referents in two ways to form their own network of associations that structure the subject’s reality. His understanding of language here jumps off from Saussure’s conception that a linguistic sign consists of a signifier, or sound image, and a signified, a mental concept, that, though arbitrarily related, are wedded together through convention. Lacan points out, however, that on the one hand, different signifiers can refer to the same signified, and, on the other hand, a single signifier can refer to multiple signifieds. In both instances, the lack in the Other as language is revealed by way of the sliding disconnect of both signifier and signified from the Real; we can never come to a place where the meaning of a word is entirely coincident with the reality it purports to name. Our apprenticeship with literary representation, interestingly enough, works in a way similarly disconnected from material reality that nonetheless turns back to structure that reality using the same tools. The cat in Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat (1957) looks nothing like an ordinary feline, and yet we accept the nominative designation associated with the caricatured image. Young readers further make the connection between the human characters, Thing One and Thing Two, and an unconscious, anarchic desire within themselves, completing a circuit of representation through word and image that is utterly cut off from reality, revealing that the lack the child experiences in herself is also present in the cultural Other. The representation is also utterly conventional, revealing that the desire to cover over that lack is the desire of the Other, which uses collective fantasy as a mechanism for doing so—the Cat cleans up the mess he and the Things have made, restoring order and disappearing before the return of the children’s mother. The reader internalizes such culturally scripted images so that when her unconscious is activated through a reading experience, she finds the Other always already there, but the significance of this text is that it ends with a question, inviting the child reader to renegotiate her relationship to the Other: should she tell her mother that there is a lack in the big Other, or should she protect both herself and her mother from that knowledge? As a subject, she is not without a degree of agency with respect to how she manages her desire in relationship to the Other.
This section has canvassed just a few of the ways Lacanian theory speaks to the intersections of literature and subjectivity. Ultimately, what we see in Lacan is something of a rapprochement between two conflicting views of the subject. He openly rejects the self‐determining, unified subject of traditional philosophy, and yet he does not accede to the view that the subject is completely constructed by cultural images and norms. Instead, he argues that the subject is an effect of language, and then proceeds to complicate our view of what language is and how it operates. Even though the Other as language and culture shapes our earliest perceptions and structures our subjectivity as split between the Real and the Imaginary and Symbolic registers, it is the slippage in language, its lack of self‐referentially, that allows wiggle room for the subject to take up a position with respect to the Other. What I would like to explore now is an aspect of his theory that helps us understand how we as critics situate ourselves with respect to the unconscious truths that slippage entails.
My claim that an understanding of Lacanian theory can further nuance any theoretical methodology rests on the fact that he places language as the hub of a wheel connecting textuality, subjectivity, and culture. However, I take Fink seriously when he insists that “it is not a Weltanschauung, a totalized or totalizing worldview, though many would like to make it such. It is a discourse and, as such, has effects in the world. It is but one discourse among many, not the final, ultimate discourse” (Fink 1995: 129). In fact, Lacan offers a theory of discourse—four discourses, to be precise—that enables us to consider how and why we approach texts the way we do, and what unconscious truths emerge along the way. Lacan rejects notions of truth understood in the traditional way, as correspondence to reality, and truth understood as a social construct. Instead, he argues that truth is always only the truth of each individual’s desire as it is bound up in the desire of the Other. We could understand this in multiple ways: my desire is to be the object of the Other’s desire, that is, I desire recognition from the Other; I desire as the Other desires in an imitative fashion; I desire that the Other achieves her desire; I desire desire itself, its endless deferral being necessary to keep me from being consumed by the Other. This entanglement between my desire and the desire of the Other renders the search for truth psychically dangerous, there being at least three ways it could result in my annihilation. And yet, we must still engage with others and ourselves; we must do our work and address our messages to the world.
In his theory, Lacan sets in motion four players who occupy four positions. Player one is the master signifier. A master signifier is one which holds out an ideal of wholeness or perfection that is impossible to obtain and yet sets the standard to which a subject aspires. Master signifiers invoke a chain of secondary signifiers that give them their power, but they themselves are not part of the chain, which is why they can continue to stand as perfect ideals that we will inevitably fail to achieve. The impersonal system of knowledge, understood as academic discourse as well as know‐how, is player two. We’ve already met player three, the split subject. Finally, we have player four, the surplus enjoyment that incites our desire without satisfying it. The positions that these players occupy include an agent who addresses an other. This address is always in some ways a failure, but it does result in a product. Inevitably, the product that was intended is accompanied by an unconscious truth we try to repress.
By rotating each player through a different position, Lacan demonstrates four ways that discourse can operate. In the discourse of the master, the master signifier puts knowledge to work for her in order to produce a product for her enjoyment. In this mode of approaching literary criticism, we seek an authority figure who represents a totalizing system that explains it all. We can produce a body of work that identifies us with, or even as, that authority, so that it seems as though our address to the other has been a success. Now, I know what you’re thinking—isn’t Lacanian theory, at least the way I’ve presented it here, exactly that sort of discourse? For some critics, it probably is. But I think that Lacan’s own style makes it resistant to that charge, insofar that he went out of his way to disrupt attempts to define his terms once and for all. In other words, he wanted to evoke, rather than repress, the status of the subject as split, which is what is revealed as the unconscious truth in the discourse of the master. Because the master signifier represents an unattainable ideal of perfection that cannot fully represent the subject, all attempts at totalization fail. There is always an exception, a surplus that cannot be fully explained, or an aspect of our subjectivity that marks our failure to fully embody the master signifiers we aspire to. In seeking to identify with the master signifier, what we attempt to repress is our status as a split subject.
In the discourse of the university, knowledge is placed in the position of agent. There, it masquerades as impersonal and objective, a servant to the truth. What it represses in the process is a desire to occupy the position as master signifier. The other to whom it addresses itself is the surplus enjoyment of expertise: Heck, I would do this kind of work even if I didn’t get paid; I just love learning and teaching others to know what I know! It may seem benevolent, and it can be well‐intentioned, but what it ultimately produces is a power dynamic that results in the production of split subjects, those who know the important stuff and those who don’t. The literary critic who operates within this discourse often writes in such a way as to make her readers earn their way to understanding. Alternately, such critics may produce virtuoso readings of literary texts that ultimately have no relevance outside the knowledge system that they themselves value—that is, they preach to their own choir as a way to shore up the sense that they are masters of a particular discursive system that is ultimately self‐enclosed, in this way denying the lack in the Other.
The discourse of the hysteric locates the subject’s own split as the agent, and therefore requires that the master signifiers that he relies on be exposed as lacking in the position of the Other. A form of knowledge is produced in the process, but it represses the unconscious truth that what the split subject is really after is a validation of his own alienation or suffering, in other words, the enjoyment he gets from identifying as a victim. This is the stance often assumed in criticism addressed to works written by writers who identify as under‐represented or intersectionally marginalized, especially when the critic is not a member of the group about which he writes. The final discourse, the discourse of the analyst, is a productive iteration of the discourse of the hysteric. It begins with an agent who has owned his own desire and can acknowledge the consequences and effects of that desire on himself and others, especially the way these desires produce master signifiers. Much queer theory seems to operate in this vein of recognition, noting that the position taken up is not one of victimhood, but of the choice to adopt shifting signifiers of identity that challenge normativity on multiple fronts. The unconscious truth that gets repressed is the desire to reduce individual identity to these social signifiers.
Iterations of any theoretical discourse, including Lacan’s, can operate according to any of these discourses, producing effects that are both intended and unintended, and revealing the unconscious truths that push back against idealized knowledge. In the end, it is perhaps this revelation of unconscious truth that makes Lacanian psychoanalytic criticism so difficult, and, in turn, so worthwhile.