Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 1989"

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

Abstract: Greil Marcus, author of "Mystery Train", widely acclaimed as the best book ever written about America as seen through its music, began work on this new book out of a fascination with the Sex Pistols: that scandalous antimusical group, invented in London in 1975 and dead within two years, which sparked the emergence of the culture called punk. 'I am an antichrist!' shouted singer Johnny Rotten - where in the world of pop music did that come from? Looking for an answer, with a high sense of the drama of the journey, Marcus takes us down the dark paths of counterhistory, a route of blasphemy, adventure, and surprise. This is no mere search for cultural antecedents. Instead, what Marcus so brilliantly shows is that various kinds of angry, absolute demands - demands on society, art, and all the governing structures of everyday life - seem to be coded in phrases, images, and actions passed on invisibly, but inevitably, by people quite unaware of each other. Marcus lets us hear strange yet familiar voices: of such heretics as the Brethren of the Free Spirit in medieval Europe and the Ranters in seventeenth-century England; the dadaists in Zurich in 1916 and Berlin in 1918, wearing death masks, chanting glossolalia; one Michel Mourre, who in 1950 took over Easter Mass at Notre-Dame to proclaim the death of God; the Lettrist International and the Situationist International, small groups of Paris-based artists and writers surrounding Guy Debord, who produced blank-screen films, prophetic graffiti, and perhaps the most provocative social criticism of the 1950s and '60s; the rioting students and workers of May '68, scrawling cryptic slogans on city walls and bringing France to a halt; and, the Sex Pistols in London, recording the savage "Anarchy in the U.K.", and "God Save the Queen". Although the Sex Pistols shape the beginning and the end of the story, "Lipstick Traces" is not a book about music; it is about a common voice, discovered and transmitted in many forms. Working from scores of previously unexamined and untranslated essays, manifestos, and filmscripts, from old photographs, dada sound poetry, punk songs, collages, and classic texts from Marx to Henri Lefebvre, Marcus takes us deep behind the acknowledged events of our era, into a hidden tradition of moments that would seem imaginary except for the fact that they are real: a tradition of shared utopias, solitary refusals, impossible demands, and unexplained disappearances. Written with grace and force, humor and an insistent sense of tragedy and danger, "Lipstick Traces" tells a story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself.

Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page

Abstract: "Imaginary Audition" responds to a major current conflict in Shakespeare studies between proponents of close reading of the academic armchair variety and proponents of what is called theater-centered (or performance-centered) interpretation. This conflict has come into focus at the intersection of several lines of reaction to the New-Critical and poetic-drama approaches practiced during the middle decades of the century: the revival of the "theater-centered" criticism that has flourished since the 60s; the rise of metatheatrical and metapoetic criticism in the same period; new developments in psychoanalysis and gender-theoretical criticism; new approaches to textual scholarship and editing; and the reorientation of social, political, cultural, and historical analysis associated with the new historicism.Harry Berger, Jr., confronts the first two of these developments. Beginning with a sustained critique of the theoretical premises and the practice of Richard Levine and Gary Taylor, he proposes a new approach that cuts between the extremes of theater-centered reading and armchair reading, and demonstrates this approach in a radically new interpretation of "Richard II". The close articulation of critique, theory, and interpretation lays the ground for a new approach to the reading of Shakespeare, one that will be more fully demonstrated in Berger's extended study of the Henriad, now in progress, and to which "Imaginary Audition" serves as a kind of prologue.

Flannery O'Connor's Others: Freud, Lacan, and the Unconscious

Abstract: ions of human law, authority, Otherness. By her resistance to the old man's narcissistic identification with her, Mary Fortune forces the old man to look at the difference not only between him and her but also between an individual tree-perhaps the tree-and the backdrop of sacred, sacramental woods. The woods are special because of their identification, by O'Connor, with the figure of Christ. The first paragraph of the story speaks of the "black line of woods which appeared," Christ-like, "to walk across the water" (CS, p. 335; LA, p. 525). The sacramental significance becomes much clearer in the episode, near the story's end, when the old man fails to see it. "Several times during the afternoon," O'Connor writes, "he got up from his bed and looked out the window across the 'lawn' to the line of woods she said they wouldn't be able to see any more. Every time he saw the same thing: woods . . . , just woods" (CS, p. 348; LA, p. 538). Though the intended significance of the woods as Other is lost on the old man, it is clear in the text that the Otherness they represent is God or God's other and double, Christ. The third time he got up to look at the woods, it was almost six o'clock and the gaunt trunks appeared to be raised in a pool of red light that gushed from the almost hidden sun setting behind them. The old man stared for some time, as if for a prolonged instant he were caught up out of the rattle of everything that led to the future and were held there in the midst of an uncomfortable mystery that he had not apprehended before. He saw it, in his hallucination, as f someone were wounded behind the woods and the trees were bathed in blood. (CS, p. 348; LA, p. 538; emphasis added) In O'Connor's theological terms, it is evident that the old man's rejection of the significance of his vision is a rejection as well of Christian salvation. In Lacanian terms, the rejection simply means that he has clung to the enervating engagements of his childish narcissism. That narcissism will not only lead him to his death, but it will also lead to the death of the one who has been his narcissistic other, his better "self," and potentially his guide-should he follow her-to grace. By rejecting the Other signified by the woods in O'Connor's text, old man Fortune rejects knowledge of the limits imposed This content downloaded from 207.46.13.129 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 07:29:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 640 American Literature by what Freudians call castration, what we might call limitation or finitude, and Lacan calls the Law of the Name-of-the-Father. All the imagery of blood found in the old man's vision of the woods joins Christian and psychoanalytic themes, for it may be associated not with the Crucifixion alone but also with castration, the father's imposition of his ultimate authority over the son. The rejection of the knowledge of castration connotes a determination to remain within the untrammeled domain of narcissism. Since the old man's narcissistic image of self-the child-has now manifested a contrary determination to ally herself with the father-Pitts-and thus with the Name of the Father (theologically, God; psychoanalytically, the Other), she no longer satisfies old man Fortune's identificatory narcissistic needs, which have now been transferred to that serpentine storeowner, Tilman. She is immediately transformed, by the old man's psyche, into an image of the "bad" other, one who must be dealt with as aggressively as the child's mother. In her he now sees "the Pitts look, pure and simple, and he felt personally stained by it, as if it had been found on his own face" (CS, p. 351; LA, p. 54I). So, he thinks, "his trouble with her had always been that he had not shown enough firmness. He had been too generous" (CS, p. 352; LA, p. 542). Thus he must exercise an authority over her such as that exercised by Pitts. In what can only be regarded, psychoanalytically, as a usurpation, old man Fortune attempts to perform the same disciplinary tactic as Pitts. He takes the child to "the exact spot where he had seen Pitts take his belt to her" (CS, p. 353; L,A, p. 544). But Mary Fortune, who now has accepted knowledge of the law in the name of the father, recognizes that her proper name is not Fortune but Pitts. Yet it is not the name so much as the law of the name that is important. Though she repeatedly denies to the old man that Pitts has beaten her, she does so for a simple reason: it was the law punishing her, not anyone, least of all not her mere fleshly father. Thus she is not about to accept the old man's usurpation of her father's lawful authority without a fight. When Fortune tries to beat her, "She was on him so quickly that he could not have recalled which blow he felt first." Making him feel "as if he were being attacked not by one child but by a pack of small demons all with stout brown school shoes and This content downloaded from 207.46.13.129 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 07:29:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms O'Connor's Others 641 small rocklike fists" (CS, p. 354; LA, p. 545), the child forces the old man at least momentarily to acknowledge what he really is: "Stop!" he wheezed. "I'm your grandfather!" She paused, her face exactly on top of his. Pale identical eye looked into pale identical eye. "Have you had enough?" she asked. The old man looked up into his own image. It was triumphant and hostile. "You been whipped," it said, "by me," and then it added, bearing down on each word, "and I'm PURE Pitts." (CS, p. 355; LA, p. 545; emphasis added) In those words O'Connor suggests that the old man has glimpsed his Other; it is not Mary Fortune who speaks (despite what most critics infer); instead, it is the "it," the Id, the Other indicated in the saying of Freud that Lacan fastens upon: Wo es war, soll Ich werden (Ecrits, pp. 128-29, 171, 299-300, 31314), meaning, "Where It/Id is, there also shall I/Ego be." The "I" is determined, Freud and Lacan say, by the Other of the unconscious. The child is now, at least in the old man's eye/ "I," an extension not of himself but of his Oedipal arch-enemy Pitts. Were the old man to remain in Symbolic subjugation to her he would in effect be in the "proper" place on the Lacanian quadrangle of the subject. The quadrangle's four points-based in Lacan's description on the game "Puss-in-the-Corner," says Catherine Clement 2`are the subject, the other, the moi, and the Other. Narcissistic interactions, Lacan teaches, are located on the axis lying between the other and the moi, the unconscious self that is founded on the subject's experience of language and images absorbed in infancy. When it is neurotically attached to the narcissistic engagements, the subject (called je, the "I," by Lacan) effectively denies the authoritative Other that underlies all "normal" psychic effects. This Other is located, in the quadrangle of Fortune's psyche, where "PURE Pitts" stands; Fortune's narcissistic "other" (note the little o) is located where "pure FORTUNE" stands, and represents the overweening demands of infantile narcissism. Again, were the old man to remain beneath Mary Fortune PITTS, he would signify his "proper," or "normal," relation to that Other for which she now 12 The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, I983), p. i66. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.129 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 07:29:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 642 American Literature substitutes. But he does not accept that subjugation. Worse yet, he destroys quite finally any opportunity he will ever have to achieve a proper relation. With a sudden surge of strength, he managed to roll over and reverse their positions so that he was looking down into the face that was his own but had dared to call itself Pitts. With his hands still tight around her neck, he lifted her head and brought it down once hard against the rock that happened to be under it. Then he brought it down twice more. Then looking into the face in which the eyes, slowly rolling back, appeared to pay him not the slightest attention, he said, "There's not an ounce of Pitts in me." (CS, p. 355; LA, p. 545) He can now look down on his "conquered image," but that image is no longer merely the narcissistic image that has to be overcome; having become the very image of his Other, the child takes with her his opportunity for what O'Connor would regard as Christian grace and what Lacan would regard as his opportunity to gain or regain psychic normality. Killing the child who is pure PITTS now, the old man kills not his mirroring, narcissistic, Imaginary other, but his Other in the register of the Symbolic-a far graver crime, indeed, one that in psychoanalytic terms equals the murder of God in the Christian subject's denial of God's grace.

Evening the Score

Abstract: For purposes of tracing some implications of the transition from symbiosis to the symbolic order, it may be useful to draw a distinction between the symbiotic mother and the symbolic mother. The symbiotic mother is the mother of the undifferentiated stage, the mother of the preverbal era who is not yet other. But, at the risk of over-schematization, let us stretch the ordinary meaning of symbiosis so that the symbiotic mother refers to all stages of differentiation prior to the oedipal era. The symbiotic mother would then be the mother first imaged as the object of wish-fulfillment; the mother as self-object in Kohution terms; the imaginary mother, in the language of Lacan, who mirrors an image of unity to the infant; and, even, the mother of the dual relationship from the time the advent of speech announces her as other until her fundamental relinquishment in the symbolic castration achieved during the oedipal crisis. The symbolic mother is not only the mother that comes to be known as other by virtue of language and the oedipal crisis; she is also, as Lacan phrased it, the mother in the place of the Other, "the Other" referring to language and its law-like effects. This is to say that the symbolic mother is the mother who has all along introduced language and mediated the place of the Other to the father. It is she whose non-narcissistic mode of being in the world points the child toward the father and a future apart from herself. It is this dimension of both the mother and the father with which the child identifies in what Freud called "identification with the father ... [of] personal prehistory" (S.E. 19, p. 31. See his footnote: "Perhaps it would be safer to say 'with both parents.' ")

L'Illusion sociale

Abstract: How within the political space created by the "revolution of individualism" and against it, the illusion of a social subject mastering its history, is built up, and how this illusion organises the space of revolutionary parties. The point of this dissertation is to follow and elucidate the road which-when considering the history of ideas- goes from the inven- tion of politics as an autonomous realm, with the individual as a free subject as its sole founding ground, to the construction of new discourses which, through the mediation of history, restore to society the imaginary coalescence which the revolution of individua- lism had dissolved. Our hypotheses are the very ones which can be found in freud's works, a reference which prompted us to think the relationship of man with himself and the world from the point of view of the drive for death; a reference which also prompted us to measure the effects resulting from the divorce between law and the sacred since man is now taken as the origin of the significations the opacity of which he is caught.

Leadership and Gender: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

Abstract: Leadership is discussed from a psychoanalytic point of view, which finds that to have leaders presupposes the presence of followers or the group. The problem of leadership and gender is seen through Lacan's field of the Imaginary.

The Soil and Man's Intelligence: Three Contemporary Landscape Poets

Abstract: The American imagination, which has been identified with the landscape from the beginning, is most successful when it retains some form of attachment to the soil. Henry James admitted in The Art of Travel, "fact gives more to the imagination than the imagination gives to fact" (15). When precept strays too far from percept, poetic invention from observation, metaphor from attention to the world, our language often grows stale. Description provides the constant renewal of abstraction, its natural resource. The romantic symbol asserted a relation of mind and matter based on their participation in a common essence. Thus the principle of "organic form" assumed a continuity between the poet's artifice and his natural, corporeal reality. Yet that attachment to soil can no longer be an organic or native one, if it ever truly was so. Emerson's theory of language makes nature the original of human language. It is through nature that the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and one who accurately describes what he sees expresses his contact with God. Modern thought has re-emphasized the discontinuity that romanticism resisted. The theory of correspondence-in which the symbol partakes of the reality it represents has been replaced by the arbitrariness of the sign. It is based on a principle of return, from a condition of estrangement. The new attachment is necessarily rhetorical or figurative rather than natural, and it must be inventive, not nostalgic. This awareness is present throughout American modernism and its preoccupation with the particular -in William Carlos Williams, in his insistence that the poem bears an appositional, not organic, imitative or oppositional relationship to the real; in Marianne Moore, who celebrates nature's neatness of finish while inventing her own imaginary

What is Called Subject?: A Note on Lacan's "Linguistery"

Abstract: T HE REQUEST THAT MOTIVATES this note on Lacan and lan­ guage, while apparently modest, is really quite outrageous.1 For the question of language in Lacan is no small one: it is the ques­ tion, the central and obsessive question of his famous “ return to Freud,” which, as is well known, was almost entirely concerned with reformulat­ ing Freudian theory in terms of speech and language. Hence, any analy­ sis of this question would involve examining Lacan’s proverbially pro­ lific and complex text in all its aspects and implications. I will not venture that here. I propose rather, more modestly, to sketch a demonstration of the internal logic that I see governing the development of Lacan’s thought on language from his first meditations about speech to the imposition of the “ logic of the signifier” in his late period. More pre­ cisely, I would like to question why the Lacanian theory of language is conjoined to the point of being identical, with a theory of the subject. Why, indeed, is the subject defined exclusively as the subject of speech, of language, or of the signifier? And conversely, why is the signifier—in Lacan’s canonical (and enigmatic) formula—“ that which represents the subject for another signifier” ? In attempting a response to these questions, I will start with what is most familiar (if not best understood): Lacan’s extensive reference to Saussure and structural linguistics. When Lacan writes that “ the uncon­ scious is structured like a language [langage],” or again, that “ language is the condition of the unconscious” (1970, 58),2 he is really thinking of “langue” in Saussure’s sense.3 Similarly, when he proposes to assimilate the Freudian mechanisms of condensation and displacement to metaphor and metonymy, he is thinking much less of classical rhetorical tropes than of the particular linguistic interpretation proposed by Jakobson in his famous article on aphasia.4 No matter how much Lacan may later have distanced himself from linguistics (to which he opposed his own “ linguistery” [1975b, 20]), it is clear that the major, if negative, model of reference for his theory of language is that of linguistic science in its Saussurian version: langue as a closed system of regulated oppositions that organizes, independently of the reality it designates, a homogeneous

Between Hashemites and Zionists: The Struggle for Palestine, 1908-1988

Abstract: This book is an attempt to cut through the polemical fog that has beset key aspects of the Arab-Israeli issue by recalling the essential background of the problem in its real rather than imaginary political context. Only by understanding the real issues behind the conflict can there be hope of ever finding a means of resolving it.

Postcolonial Discourse in Latin American Theatre

Abstract: American history. Since independence from Spanish rule, divergent prospects for the future of the newly created nations kindled bitter battles in an ongoing war. In this process, irreconcilable views converged towards two distinct poles. One foresaw a Latin American progress born of the internalization of foreign models: Europe and the United States. The other, more willing to define progress within the specificity of their own processes, defended the dignity of its cultures, of its own uncharted destiny. As a consequence of this bipolarity, exile and death have been tightly woven into the fabric of Latin American history. New nations were born free of Spanish rule in the early nineteenth century only for many to find that once again, exile from the newly acquired homeland was the only alternative to execution. The birth of national literatures, in many cases, found their more eloquent artists writing abroad, already unable to live in the land they were struggling to form. Under these circumstances, nation and literature were born together, and it is not surprising that literature ascribed to the social project of inventing a collective imaginary. It is at this moment of "prospective being" that the conceptual image of the future underwent a radical split. Two contradictory visions took form regarding a Latin American destiny. These contradictory visions have become deeply ingrained in a collective imaginary that still marks the development of the continent. I am referring to the divergent social projects which are at the core of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's and Jos6 Marti's writings. Sarmiento ascribed to the notion of "progress" through the implementation of European and United States models. He defended this view both in works such as Civilizaci6n y Barbarie (1845) and in the office of his presidency in Argentina (1868-

The Invention of America Imaginary Signs of the Discovery and Construction of Utopia

Abstract: &dquo;The ships that invented regions were directed toward the West&dquo;, announced Juan de Castellanos in 1587 in his Elegias dedicated to Christopher Columbus, and at the beginning of the 16th century Hernán Pdrez de Oliva wrote a Historia de la invencion de las Indias.l The use of the word invention when speaking of the discovery of America may seem to be a semantic confusion or poetic license, viewed from the contemporary perspective of a discipline with well-defined limits, such as geography, since we usually understand invention as the transformation of things by man’s intervention, while discovery is finding something that already existed so as to make it known to others.

The Existential Question and the Imaginary Situation as Therapy

Abstract: How does the world look to a man or woman who is sad, furious, happy, aggressive, sexual, guilty, conscience-stricken, loved, fat, ugly, etc.? And how does the world look to a man or woman in his house, at work, on vacation, in sexual situations, alone, with members of the same sex, in school, in crisis, in war, with nature, with people close to him, etc.?

The Reluctant Subject: Kaspar and the Frame of Representation

Abstract: Michael Hays, who interprets this incident, suggests that: "Handke's Kaspar is 'born' onto the stage . . ." Most critics, including June Schlueter, Linda Hill and Rainer Nagele, adopt Hays' reading and view the remainder of the play as a nonrealistic narrative following an imaginary Kaspar through his tortuous process of language acquisition, ending in his schizophrenic demise, and, in some accounts, his death. This attempt to devise a narrative for Handke's play is done despite the author's claim that he is "Making people aware of the world of the theatre~not of the outside world . . ." and his insistence, in the description of the setting for Kaspar, that "The stage represents the stage." (60) If Handke's call for a non-illusionistic theatre is taken literally, then the audience is not a witness to Kaspar's birth but his entrance onto the stage and, therefore, into the frame of representation. Soon after Kaspar enters onto the stage, the frame of representation, he utters his first words: "I want to be a person like somebody else was once." (65) According to the stage directions he understands neither the meaning of