Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 1995"

Bodies that matter : on the discursive limits of sex

Abstract: Preface Acknowledgements Part 1: 1. Bodies that Matter 2. The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary 3. Phantasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex 4. Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion Part 2: 5. 'Dangerous Crossing': Willa Cather's Masculine Names 6. Queering, Passing: Nella Larsen Rewrites Psychoanalysis 7. Arguing with the Real 8. Critically Queer. Notes. Index

Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality

Abstract: Moira Gatens investigates the ways in which differently sexed bodies can occupy the same social or political space. Representations of sexual difference have unacknowledged philosophical roots which cannot be dismissed as a superficial bias on the part of the philosopher, nor removed without destroying the coherence of the philosophical system concerned. The deep structural bias against women extends beyond metaphysics and its effects are felt in epistemology, moral, social and political theory. The idea of sexual difference is contextualised in Imaginary Bodies and traced through the history of philosophy. Using her work on Spinoza, Gatens develops alternative conceptions of power, new ways of conceiving women's embodiment and their legal, political and ethical status.

The Invention of African Rhythm

Abstract: "African ryhthm" was invented in the 1950s when, thanks to pioneering research by the Reverend A. M. Jones, Alan Merriam, Gilbert Rouget, Erich von Hornbostel, and John Blacking, among others, "African music" was construed as an essentially rhythmic phenomenon. Three decades and a sizable body of empirical research later, it is easy to see that an overriding ideology of difference (between "Africa" and the "West") motivated these early efforts. This essay reinvents "African rhythm" not by denying its own ideological construction but by engaging in an imaginary dialogue with earlier researchers in an effort to concretize that which was missing from their representations. In it, I develop a view of African rhythm in which its mechanical aspects (grouping, accents, periodicity) are shown to reside in broader patterns of temporal signification (movement, language and gesture). Although this is a less elegant proposition (in the mathematical sense), it is phenomenologically truer to the African experience. The latter, in turn, is not a mystified precolonial essence but the more "contaminated" and inherently contradictory condition of postcoloniality itself. "African music" in this construction is not synonymous with "African rhythm," although the latter9s apparent complexity, explicitly thematized in earlier writings, reemerges against a richer conceptual background.

Beyond the Psychoanalytic Dyad: Developmental Semiotics in Freud, Peirce and Lacan

Abstract: In this original work of psychoanalytic theory, John Muller explores the formative power of signs and their impact on the mind, the body and subjectivity, giving special attention to work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Muller explores how Lacan's way of understanding experience through three dimensions--the real, the imaginary and the symbolic--can be useful both for thinking about cultural phenomena and for understanding the complexities involved in treating psychotic patients, and develops Lacan's perspective gradually, presenting it as distinctive approaches to data from a variety of sources.

Outlaw language: Creating alternative public spheres in Basque free radio

Abstract: Recent rethinking of Habermas' Stntctural Transformatiort of the Public Sphere by Negt and Kluge (1993), and feminist and social historians Nancy Fraser (1993), Joan landes (1988), and Geoff Eley (1992), among others, has argued persuasively that the bourgeois public sphere has, from its inception, been built upon powerful mechanisms of exclusion. The idealized image of a democratic theatre of free and equal participation in debate, they claim, has always been a fiction predicated on the mandatory silencing of entire social groups, vital social issues, and indeed, "ot any difference that cannot be assimilated, rationalized, and subsumed" (Hansen 1993b: 198). This is especially clear in the case of those cit izens who do not or wil l not speak the language of civil society. The linguistic terrorism performed with a vengeance during the French Revolution and reenacted in Official English initiatives in the United States more recently, reveal to us how deeply monolingualism has been ingrained in l iberal conceptions of Libert6, Egalit6, anci Fraternit6. But perhaps silencing may not be the best way to describe the fate of linguistic minorit ies or other marginalized groups. For, as Miriam Hansen (1993b) notes, what he more recent work on public spheres uggests i that "the" public sphere has never been as uniform or as totalizing as it represents itself to be. Proliferating in the interstices of the bourgeois public -in salons, cofteehouses, book clubs, working class and subaltern forms of popular culture -are numerous counterpublics that give lie to the presumed homogeneity of the imaginary public. Spurred in part by ethnic nationalist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, speakers and writers of "barbarous" tongues and "i l legitimate patois" can be seen as one among the counterpublics who avail themselves of any number of "media" from novels to oral poetry, from song and regional presses to, more recently, various forms of electronic media to give expression to other kinds of social experience and perspectives on who the public is. what its interests might be, and what its voice sounds like. This article examines the contemporary fbrmation of one such counterpublic

Muito além do espaço: por uma história cultural do urbano.

Abstract: The widely discussed crisis of the explicative paradigms of reality that takes place in this fin-de-siecle has put into evidence the so-called "new cultural history", which has a wide field of approach in the studies concerning the social representations of the city. By understanding the urban phenomenon as an accumulation of cultural goods, the article aims at developing the theoretical-methodological strategies that allow the "reading of the city", thus reaching the "real" through the historically built system of ideas and images of collective representation that we call imaginary.

Imaginary maps : three stories

Abstract: Imaginary Maps presents three stories from noted Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi in conjunction with readings of these tales by famed cultural and literary critic, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Weaving history, myth and current political realities, these stories explore troubling motifs in contemporary Indian life through the figures and narratives of indigenous tribes in India. At once delicate and violent, Devi's stories map the experiences of the "tribals" and tribal life under decolonization. In "The Hunt," "Douloti the Bountiful" and the deftly wrought allegory of tribal agony "Pterodactyl, Pirtha, and Puran Sahay," Ms. Devi links the specific fate of tribals in India to that of marginalized peoples everywhere. Gayatri Spivak's readings of these stories connect the necessary "power lines" within them, not only between local and international structures of power (patriarchy, nationalisms, late capitalism), but also to the university.

First Things: Reading the Maternal Imaginary

Abstract: In First Things Mary Jacobus combines close readings with theoretical concerns in an examination of the many forms taken by the mythic or phantasmic mother in literary, psychoanalytic and artistic representations. She carefully explores the ways in which the maternal imaginary informs both unconscious processes and signifying practices at all levels. Her fierce analysis of specific texts and paintings raises questions about the the symbolic and biological maternal body and how they relate to each other in literary and psychoanalytic terms. The invocation of writings by Kleist, Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Malthus and de Sade, along with analysis of French revolutionary iconography and Realist and Impressionist paintings by Eakins and Morisot, make this wide-ranging text a truly interdisciplinary study. First Things sees literary theory and psychoanalysis as mutually illuminating practices. The work of Freud, Klein, Kristeva and Bion shape an inquiry into such topics as population discourse, surrogate motherhood, AIDS, mastectomy and psychoanalysis itself. In addition, Jacobus elaborates on Freud's oedipal preconceptions, Klein's missing theory of signs, memory, melancholia, narcissism and maternal reverie.

Imaginary gardens with real toads

Abstract: A R I A N N E MOORE SAID: “Poetry is about imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” That applies just as well to many aspects M of human cultures and especially to science. Scholars and scientists of all kinds are gardeners of ideas, trying to cultivate lovely flowers and fruits of understanding. Such intellectual gardeners usually pay little attention to toads or other uninvited creatures residing among the flowers-unless those creatures begin to munch or trample the plants. Visitors who seem greatly concerned about the toads but unappreciative of the fruits and flowers naturally dismay the gardeners, especially if such visitors even mistake the gardeners for toads. This horticultural whimsy explains my title and offers rustic metaphors for some of the phenomena addressed in this volume. In my view, the blossoming of “science studies” by historians, sociologists, and philosophers is to be welcomed. It is seeding fallow fields that have long separated scientific and humanistic gardens. In the process, some dust and mud is being stirred up, coating alike flowers and toads. That is inevitable. Science has always drawn lively critics, often motivated by ideology or mysticism. However, I am startled to find a philosopher suggesting that Newton’s Principiu could be regarded as a “rape manual,” or radical postmodernist scholars asserting that scientific discoveries are “socially constructed fictions.” Such claims, and the disregard for rational analysis that often indulges them, deprecate not only science but all objective scholarship and public discourse. As in horticulture, blights readily spread to neighboring gardens. In this paper, my chief aim is to welcome any visitors or critics, friendly or not, to tour three patches of my personal scientific garden. The first deals with what for me was a rehearsal for this conference. It was a public television program, titled “The Nobel Legacy” and aired last May, in which I had to counter doleful complaints about science delivered by Anne Carson, a poet and professor of classics at McGill University. The second part comments on aspects of scientific work that are often misunderstood. These pertain to science education as well as to the pursuit of new knowledge. The third part sketches a saga of scientific discovery, submitted to exemplify favorite themes

Lacan for beginners

Abstract: This volume discusses the ideas of psychoanalytical theorist Jacques Lavan. The book guides the reader through Lacan's early study of paranoia to his subsequent analyitical innovations - his addition of structural linguistics to Freudianism and his ideas on the infant "mirror phase", the maturation of identity and the dynamics of the psyche. It shows how Lacan's influence has been crucial in many interdisciplinary areas which have become labelled "postmodern" in the critical theories of literature, art, philosophy, feminism as well as psychoanalysis itself.

Caribbean Insularisation of Identities in Maryse Conde's Work: From En attendant le bonheur to Les derniers rois mages

Abstract: "Ecrire n'a rien a voir avec signifier, mais avec arpenter, cartographier, meme des contrees a venir" [Writing has nothing to do with meaning, it has to do with surveys and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come] (Mille plateaux 11) And (to adopt or parody Deleuze and Guattari's aphoristic style), writing about writing has nothing to do with interpretation but with a reassessment of how writers make sense of the relationship between constructed bodies and constructed spaces, identities and "habitus" (Bourdieu) When the construction in question involves the Caribbean area, the previous proposition needs to be rephrased in a less universalistic tone: when I read the work of a francophone woman author such as Maryse Conde, I find myself powerfully drawn to systems of explanation that metaphorize the connection between geography and identity A look at the titles of critical studies written about her work in the last decade makes me wonder why geographical and geometrical categories seem so relevant From Puis's "L'Afrique en pointille" ["Africa, On and Off"], Smith's "A Triangular Structure of Alienation," Mouralis's "Thriller Immobile," to the most recent attempts at "Mapping the Mangrove' (Munley), Conde's work seems to elicit a critical discourse saturated with spatial metaphors or reflections on the theme of space and travel Like other critics, I find it difficult to separate Conde's biographical narrative as a traveler from her literary representations of displacement, from her imaginary redefinitions of home, homeland, exile, belonging, ancestors, etc As Veve Clark puts it:

Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art: Sites of Imaginary Space

Abstract: List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction 1. Imagination and imaginary space 2. Verbal hallucination: Rimbaud's poetics of rhythm 3. Reflections in black and white: Mallarme and the act of writing 4. Putting the spectator in the picture: Kandinsky's pictorial world 5. Between the lines: form and transformation in Mondrian 6. Universal exceptions: sites of imaginary space Conclusion Notes Select Bibliography Index.

African Cinematic Reality: The Documentary Tradition as an Emerging Trend

Abstract: The development of cinema in Africa is directly connected to both historical circumstances and movements in film practices. There is a relationship between history/politics in society and history/politics in the text, which may culminate in the decolonization of the screen and the repositioning of the cinema as the site for what critics are calling political contestation. A concerted effort to crystallize national struggles and identities may be an indication of a society that is moving to regain its belief in itself. This belief had been shattered by the "[un]humanitarian uses of the cinema"' entrenched in the standard narrative and visual structure of the dominant tradition, which the "alternative" reinventing representations of Africa now seek to reverse. This paper examines new African documentary practices and the strategies utilized in the construction of cinematic "reality" of Africa. It does so in the context of two films, Allah Tantou ("God's Will," Guinea, 1991) by David Achkar and Afrique, je te plumerai ("Africa, I Will Fleece You," Cameroon, 1992) by Jean-Marie Teno. The films are considered in relation to their theoretical contexts so as to redefine the relationship between the dominant (Western) and oppositional (pan-Africanist) cinematic representations of Africa. A critical issue at stake is whether the new African documentaries can be wholly comprehended without fathoming the radically divergent ways in which the pan-Africanist imagery positions the subject, the viewer, and the filmmaker to promote spectator participation. In addition to stressing the documentaries' manifestations as social art, I will also consider their inventive approaches to issues of formal structurations, experimental modalities, and modes of address. Bill Nichols's observation regarding the dichotomous relationship between fiction and documentary film is germane to our discourse. He notes that "[i]f narratives invite our engagement with the construction of a story, set in an imaginary world, documentary invites our engagement with the construction of an argument, directed toward the historical world" (118). The hegemony of the colonizer relative to the colonized peoples has, in conjunction with the history of oppression, institutionalized social differentiation and inequality. This imbalance also promoted the assumption that colonial histories offer a privileged perspective from which to analyze both worlds. Countering this assumption implies the demystification of colonial histories, exposing their method of reification, objectification, and representation of the "Other." Hence, the quest for African cinematic reality (the image) in film has produced a genre of social documentary meant to combat

Imaginary Islands: Staging the East

Abstract: Its push outward first oward Africa and then into the Indian Ocean originated in the Reconquest, the successful attempt to drive the Islamic occupiers from the Iberian Peninsula. Its overextended empire crashed, too, ironically enough, not in India but in North Africa. In 1578 the young King Sebastian led an ill-fated crusade against the Moors in North Africa. His death and the disastrous defeat of his forces at El-Ksar el-Kebir ended not only what the historian C. R. Boxer has called \"one of the worst mismanaged campaigns in recorded history\" (Hart 748) but the Portuguese pretensions to empire as well. In two years' time Portugal had become a semi-autonomous part of the Spanish Empire, not to regain full independence until 1640. Portugal's decline as a colonial power was, of course, eagerly awaited by its European competitors. From Plymouth, on 13 December 1577, Sir Francis Drake began his circumnavigation of the globe, hoping to be the first Englishman to repeat the Portuguese Magellan's historic feat. Having plundered Spanish settlements and shipping on his voyage through the Strait of Magellan and up the coast of Chile to Upper California, he finally arrived at Ternate in the East Indies on 3 November 1 579. There, according to Francisco de Dueñas, a Spaniard sent to spy on Portuguese possessions

Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995

Abstract: A theater of voices of men and women, the dead and the living, over time and across continents, the poems of Dark Fields of the Republic take conversations, imaginary and real, actions taken for better or worse, out of histories and songs to extend the poet's reach of witness and power of connection--and then invites the reader to participate.

Politics ancient and modern

Abstract: Translator's Note. Acknowledgement. Introduction: Athenian Democracy in 1788. 1. Plato, History and the Historians. 2. Atlantis and the Nations. 3. The Enlightenment in the Greek City-state. 4. The Formation of Bourgeois Athens. 5. The Place of Greece in the Imaginary Representations of the Men of the Revolution. 6. From Paris to Athens and Back. 7. Renan and the Greek Miracle. Index.

Ruskin, venice, and the construction of femininity

Abstract: RUSKIN'S The Stones of Venice is not one work, but many. Justifiable claims have been made for it as a peculiar version of moral drama, a typological historical epic, a sacred legend, and even a kind of psychological travel book.' It has also been described as a very early kind of cultural history, and the anxiety which was felt in the 1970s about whether it was 'legitimate' history has given way to a more open acceptance of its unorthodoxy and the recognition that within a fairly ordered structure, there exists a pattern of several discourses which are essentially antiphonic. One of the most telling ways of locating the salient features of the style and structure of The Stones of Venice has been to place it within the context of traditions already established in nineteenth-century writing, and to draw attention to the ways in which Ruskin operated within those traditional forms to create something of his own. Elizabeth Helsinger, for example, develops an idea originally suggested by Richard Stein that one of the central preoccupations of the book is with travel and journeying. Stein accounts for the famous imaginary trip from Padua to Venice of 'The Sea Stories' in terms of epic journeys taken by Dante and by Bunyan, and points out how the 'physical movement across the seas and toward the center of the city parallels the narrative of the first five hundred years of Venetian history'.2 Helsinger enlarges upon this idea to show just how imaginatively powerful the literature of travel was for Victorian readers, and she points out how so many of Ruskin's favourite authors-Byron, Wordsworth, Rogers, and others-adopted the leitmotiv of the journey for explorations into the historical past.3 Yet there is another

The Textual Architecture of Eliza Haywood's 'Adventures of Eovaai.'

Abstract: The Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo (1736) is a hybrid novel by the "Great Arbitress of Passion."(1) Political satire, woman's romance, imaginary voyage, oriental fantasy and semi-pornography, Eovaai incorporates a wild blend of genres to accentuate the fragmentation of traditional hierarchic government and to exploit the analogy between sexual and party politics. A difficult plot to summarize because of its digressive quality, the Adventures of Eovaai is, in fact, a simple story. On his deathbed, Princess Eovaai's father gives her a jewel which will protect her person and her reign from evil. She loses it, is overthrown, and Ijaveo is embroiled in civil war. Eovaai is whisked away to the land of Hypotofa by the evil magician Ochihatou, who plans to seduce and marry Eovaai in order to gain the throne of Ijaveo and extend his power. A magic telescope reveals to Eovaai that Ochihatou is really "crooked, deformed, distorted in every Limb and Feature, but also encompassed with a thousand hideous Forms, which sat upon his Shoulders, clung round his Hands, his Legs, and seem'd to dictate all his Words and Gestures" (78). Eovaai escapes Ochihatou's palace and meets Hypotofan patriots who educate her about Republicanism. Ochihatou recaptures the princess and tries to rape her. Her screams bring a stranger who rescues her, and the prime minister dashes his own brains out against a tree. The stranger is discovered to be Prince Adelhu, heir apparent of Hypotofa, who has restored peace to Ijaveo in Eovaai's absence and has fortuitously found the princess's lost jewel and restores it to its casement. Adelhu and Eovaai fall in love and marry, uniting their hearts and their kingdoms, to live happily ever after. Eovaai manifests a genuine concern for exposing social and sexual injustices from many perspectives and emphasizing them through the use of many genres and editorial intrusions. Haywood's creation of a text that demands to be challenged due to its argumentative machinery and use of overt, provocative genres invites a questioning and a critique of governmental and social authority (with a play on the idea of Authority). The Author, Translator, Commentator, Historian, and Cabal who editorialize on Eovaai are continually at odds, and readers are left to formulate their own conclusions on the fictional action and, by extension, their real society. The focus of this paper is the central core of Haywood's novel: The History of Yximilla, the ancient man's Republican speech, and the History of Atamadoul. I shall manifest how these three generically different episodes are put together to form mutually interdependent structures. Despite its fascinating format which includes a literal subtext in the form of footnotes, the deceptively simple tale of Eovaai has been oversimplified by scholars. Criticism has focused, not on its unique narratological form, but on specific themes within the novel. Mary Anne Schofield neatly assigns Eovaai to the group of Haywood's works "examining the female tensions between submission and aggression" and "the question of womanhood as a moral and social issue" (Quiet Rebellion 42, 43), but she overlooks the narratological tension of the story's structure. Jerry Beasley identifies the work as "an outrageous orientalized fantasy that savagely attacks Robert Walpole as a private man and public figure" (225), while he ignores the obvious commentary on intersexual conversation. Janet Todd is closest to appreciating the significance of Eovaai's structure when she suggests that women writers were searching out how to communicate Truth through narrative. Todd observes that women authors in the early eighteenth century insisted in complex or simplistic ways, on fiction's access to psychological and moral truths. With this continuing concern, their conventional insistence on artistic unskillfulness precisely drew attention to their rejection of the largely male belief that fiction's reality lay in art itself and not in its intervention in life. …

Gender, Genre and Geography in Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal

Abstract: out the disruptive quality of the poem by couching it in comfortably traditional categories of genre. And second, since the epic hero is always male and the trajectory of his journey has traditionally been gendered as masculine,2 these generic labels also serve to thwart discussion of the poem's figuration of gender by suppressing the role the feminine plays and reading the poem's figuration of masculinity as "natural." This ends up lending false coherence to the lyrical subject, suggesting an easily identifiable, active narrator moving through time and space, a notion Cahier d'un retour defies. When one examines the way that the poem's complex imagery is gendered, one arrives at a point of reversal of terms, where what was once masculine (the sun) becomes feminine (the moon) and vice versa. This reversal is eventually overturned, yet a fundamental ambiguity remains and is never fully resolved. The poem's ending is both an attempt to rewrite the binary oppositions of masculine and feminine, vertical and horizontal, sun and moon, and a call to transcend a debilitating collective history. By unsettling this symbolic structure-what amounts to a "colonial Imaginary," in Althusserian terms-the poem unsettles the ideology which strove to justify the wrenching history of the African diaspora. Once the poem undermines its own binary imagery and starts to sketch in a third term, one can see that what has been viewed as a sort of phallic negritude, where "negritude as phallus. . . revalorizes the black man" (Scharfman 61), is nothing of the sort. The imposition of such Lacanian terms on the text leads to a reading of colonization and decolonization where the former is figured as emasculating and the latter as "rephallicizing." What I would like to do is to provide a reading which both illuminates the construction of gender in the poem, and shows how attempts to fit the poem into traditional generic concepts (hero and epic) and Lacanian structures (by way of Althusser and Fanon) unintentionally serve to preclude any possibility for female decolonization and to oversimplify the poem's obscurities. By drawing out the

Uses and Abuses of the Nation: Toward a Theory of the Transnational Cultural Exchange Industry

Abstract: At a recent academic conference entitled Globalization and Culture,' I came upon a curious flyer advertising an international essay competition. The essay question read: "How can nations or individuals internationalize without sacrificing their cultural identity?" Sponsored by Intersect Japan, an international business magazine, AT&T, and Matsushita Electric Corporation of America, the first-place winner could expect to win a $5,000 cash prize. Next to several academic journals and the conference reader, the innocent flyer seemed oddly out of place. But, then again, corporations and universities have always had a lot in common, not least of which being the questions they ask. One reason for this is that questions are produced not simply by individuals but by history. And our own historical moment of late capitalism-in which political and economic decisionmaking power has been quickly transferring from nation-states to transnational corporations-has prepared us to ask the question of how culture functions within an emerging network of globalization. If the nation-state is declining then is there a new global imaginary being produced? What is the network of production and consumption that shapes this new transnational space, this new transnational imaginary? What will happen to older national identities and those which still have much invested in the nation as a site of resistance? Who will profit and who will lose from globalization? These were the questions contested by many of the conference's participants. As the conference developed, what seemed clear was that although the transnational corporation is the driving force of economic production, on the level of consumption the nation-state is far from dead. In fact, cultural/national identity is one of the most valuable products transnational corporations sell. But why does the nation as an imaginary construct need to be resold like so many newly improved products that are now bigger, more durable, and extra-strength? And how is this repackaging accomplished? These last two questions return us to the flyer at the conference. Can we not view the contest itself as just another way to "resell" the nation? Here, I'm referring to the post-Cold War cultural exchange industry-a network of international organizations that focuses on national exchange,

The imaginary manager or illusions in the public management of culture in France

Abstract: (1995). The imaginary manager or illusions in the public management of culture in France. The European Journal of Cultural Policy: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 187-197.

“Now You See It …”: The Dynamics of Presence and Absence in Psychoanalysis

Abstract: “Lacan.” We will be a long time assimilating the far-ranging theoretical innovations in psychoanalysis that are associated with his name. Exploiting the richness of Freud’s text in ways little anticipated even by Freud’s closest adherents, Lacan reconceives the most basic psychoanalytic concepts, including those of the unconscious itself and the process of repression. The effect of these innovations is to recalibrate the analytic microscope along the lines of Lacan’s three cardinal categories of imaginary, symbolic, and real. On the one hand, Lacan defines the Freudian ego as a precipitate of the imaginary. During the “mirror phase,” the psychically formative period between the ages of six months and two years, the contours of the infantile ego are laid down in identification with the perceptual unity of the body image. In this way, Lacan rediscovers the profound appropriateness of the term “narcissism” and opens up a whole series of new problematics around the function of perception and the meaning of the object relation in psychoanalysis. On the other hand, Lacan draws upon the structuralist conception of language as a diacritical system to provide a new understanding of the nature and destiny of unconscious desire, that of “the unconscious structured like a language.” Lacan thus stakes out a provocative claim, yet one that becomes increasingly plausible when we reread Freud with an eye to the way in which the workings of the unconscious are revealed over and again to turn around plays on words and phonemic linkages. As a grand system of differences, the structure of language comprises an immense and precisely articulated web, intractable to perceptual representation, in which the desire of the subject unknown to the ego finds its circuit toward expression. The first two registers of imaginary and symbolic are triangulated by a third, that of the real, by which Lacan points enigmatically toward an unencompassable horizon that remains unthinkable and unknowable. The real forever outstrips everything figured by the imaginary or signified by the symbolic. As much an expression of the ineffable ground of the subject’s own being as that of the world beyond it, the real escapes all representation, even as its indeterminate force may be encountered in the experience of the uncanny or evidenced in the effects of the trauma.

The imaginary institution of adult education: A reassessment of the field’s collective identity

Abstract: This paper draws upon central concepts from the psychoanalytic tradition, and the work of several theorists working in that tradition—Copjec, Lacan, Laclau & Mouffe, Lefort, and Zizek—to explain the identity crisis confronting the institution of adult education and outline a potential course of action for adult educators.