Stephan Flores

This account draws not only upon Derrida, Freud, and Lacan, but also on very helpful summaries and critiques of others, including Madan Sarup's An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism.

Post-Structuralist Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice

Derrida suggests that we conceive of the play of différance before thinking of or as prior to such oppositions as absence/presence or subject/object; this différance "holds us in a relation to what exceeds . . . the alternative of presence or absence. A certain alterity--Freud gives it a metaphysical name, the unconscious" ("Différance" 152).

If we move to Lacan's reading of Freud, we find the self articulated as or through the discourse of the Other (via unconscious activity that indicates the difference within consciousness between consciousness and itself). Lacan offers a way to envision the social and linguistic construction of the self: We become social by appropriating language, or rather, it (also) appropriates or constitutes us as subjects (selves). The individual and society appear in opposition but should not be dichotomized: social discourses inhabit each subject (self).

But such discourses work largely through unconscious activity that remains untranslatable; we can only diagnose and infer the structuring process of this language-like activity from the perspectives of "consciousness"--again, these are unconscious processes that Lacan compares to the structuring activity of language. This relation and this figure (linguistic metaphor/comparision) are particularly apt for literary studies, especially in terms of the analyst/critic's interpretation of the analysand's narrative/story and the attendant disguises/displacements of meanings (repression). Language is the condition for unconscious activity, producing its figurative detours and deferrals of signification (for example, via metaphoric condensations of meaning and metonymic chains of part for whole associations).

The Oedipus complex and its resolution mark a transition for a child into a cultural arena where he (she?) becomes self-aware, conscious of an identity and a position or name in relation to family and others--ultimately a place within culture and its laws, discourses, and organization, but also a position disrupted by possibilities that seem to exceed and to challenge predominant ways of naming and knowing (for example, the rule/Name-of-the-Father, illusion of 'phallic' power, authority figures who supposedly have the power to name and to recognize one).

Hence, for Lacan the Subject ('self') is always split by that which is Other, which the Subject experiences as something lacking/missing, which in turn creates desire (compare this to the Derridean move to supplement lack on the part of the signifier/signifying). Desire is not primarily literal or only sexual: it describes a struggle for wholeness, a pursuit of fullness of meaning and being. The Subject projects desire onto an(Other), who also tends to see him/herself in the Subject. The unconscious is that which the Subject does not recognize to be himself and which he experiences as other from himself. Thus the way that the Subject (reader/critic/writer/text?) projects upon and views an Other will yield clues concerning his or her relationship to unconscious wishes and desires (lack). The unconscious is thus often in the place of the Other, the place where the subject does not recognize herself. Unconsciousness emerges as otherness within consciousness. Instead of the rational, autonomous assertion of the unified Cartesian self--"I think, therefore I am"(cogito ergo sum) --Lacan announces that "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think," or "I think where I cannot say I am."

Our largely unwitting dependence upon others (texts too) for self-recognition can become threatening, prompting aggressive self-assertion or a pursuit of Mastery over others even as we may also long poignantly for full intersubjectivity, for complete understanding and union with others (a wish-fulfillment that we could identify with Dr. Spock's Vulcan mind-meld).

As Hegel argued, desire is directed towards another's desire, another (desiring and desired) Subject. Desire reveals our desire to be desired, to be valued and recognized by another, perhaps by the way another's desire will be seen to confirm or to subtitute metaphorically for our own (for us). Desire proceeds from unconscious activity and the lack that it generates (or by which it is comprised and construed, its condition for being). We may demand recognition/love/meaning from others (texts), but we can never be certain that others recognize or speak to us in particular, though we try metaphorically and metonymically to compensate for such lack; desire is insatiable, and we may feel subordinated to the symbolic order and activity of language, as it produces desires for particular meanings that continue to elude us, alienating us from ourselves and others even as our relation to others informs and creates our desires.

Finally, all of the arguments above suggest that as we read literature, we locate meaning in the text as Other, which we then hope to master through our interpretation. Interpretation supposes "if not a conception of the unconscious itself, then at least some mechanism of mystification or repression in terms of which it would make sense to seek a latent meaning behind a manifest one" (Jameson, The Political Unconscious 60). A conventional "Freudian" reader would then supply the answer to the text that has evidenced its "sexual frustration and repression." But a Lacanian reading recognizes that what one discovers within the discourse of the other--the unconscious--is a discovery of what is actively reading within oneself, just as, for example, Freud read his own unconscious reading him within the hysteric's discourse. In effect, the text reads the reader who unconsciously repeats its structure and thereby dismantles distinctions between subject/object, master/slave, reader and that which is read.

The text's untranslatability, its silence, is what it won't tell and what the reader cannot tell himself. The structure of such narrative is transferential, with reading presented as the repetition of a love story "addressed to and directed toward the knowledge of the Other" (Felman, "Turning the Screw of Interpretation" 159). To attempt to master such knowledge is to blind oneself (like Oedipus?), to repress the divisions within meaning (self,unconscious), and to disguise the will to power as a will to knowledge.