Psychoanalysis k – Sam Franz – rks seniors Cover Letter
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Psychoanalysis K - Sam - Wake 2016 RKS
Structuralism33.No Link – Framing Lacan as structuralist ignores Lacan’s endorsement of the contingency of tropeLundberg ’12 (Christian, Associate Prof. of Rhetoric @ UNC Chapel Hill, “Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric,” University of Alabama Press, November, 2012, pp. 90-91) These criticisms are incisive in their diagnosis of structuralism, but the question remains if criticisms of structuralism are applicable to Lacan’s psychoanalysis. So, the nexus question: is Lacan’s conception of economy structuralist? Lacan’s conception of economy maintains some of the tenor of the concept of structure, in that it seeks to describe persistent regularities in the life of the subject that exert substantial regulatory force. However, Lacan’s conception of economy is premised on the failure of unicity or on the idea that the structuring functions of the sign fail in scripting the Real. In structure’s place, a Lacanian economy sees the contingent but highly regularized rhetorical functions of trope as emerging from the failing of structure: because trope emerges at the limits of speech as a result of failed unicity, trope cannot be an expression of unicity but of the turning or indirection that inheres in employments of signifiers. Lacan’s concept of economy also interrupts the tendency of structuralist accounts to elide contingency: if, as I argued earlier, trope emerges as a post hoc account of the burdens language use imposes on the subject, and of the empirical effects of this burden, an economic account differs from a structuralist explanation because the contingent nature and empirical life of the signifier are the genesis of the “structuring” function, as opposed to an epiphenomenon of structure. As a result, economy confronts structure with the necessity of grounding the functions of discourse in the interchange between rhetorically (that is, tropologically) constituted structuring functions and contingent localized rhetorical (that is, situational) effects. This is an extension of the basic logic of the Borromean knot, which reveals, more than anything, that the regularities in the Symbolic are dependent on their imaginary instantiation in the concrete modes of discourse and social relation that configure the relationship between subjects. Download 169.86 Kb. Share with your friends:
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