You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics, edited by Willy Apollon and Richard Feldstein, is an anthology of recent work by Willy Apollon, Elizabeth J. Bellamy, Danielle Bergeron, Hanjo Berressem, Elizabeth Bronfen, Lucie Cantin, Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, Maire Jaanus, Juliet Flower MacCannell, Catherine Portugues, Ellie Ragland, Judith Roof, Peter Widmer, and Slavoj Žižek.
Their essays represent what Feldstein calls a “second phase” of Lacanian studies, ushered in by the groundbreaking work of Slavoj Žižek and Juliet Flower MacCannell in the field of cultural studies. Although Feldstein credits MacCannell and Žižek primarily with applying Lacan's theories to questions of race, gender, and class, their influence is apparent in this collection less in the thematic concerns of its authors than in their preoccupation with the jouissance at stake in political discourse, and its consequences for the positioning of the subject in the aftermath of the Enlightenment. Against the apparent reversibility of legislative “equality,” psychoanalysis insists upon the fundamental disproportion between the subject's jouissance and the law that pretends to uphold it, the phallic signifier that represents all subjects “equally,” and thus inadequately. The particular focus of Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics, as the title suggests, is the interplay between politics and aesthetics, or the role of representation in upholding the authority of the signifier and denying or filling the lack in the Other.
Willy Apollon's dense introduction frames the theoretical stakes of the collection by positing that “politics makes a promise it cannot keep.” In spite of its stated dedication to the “pursuit of happiness,” the post-Enlightenment discourse of liberalism is incapable of responding to the subject's particular relation to jouissance. In the negotiation between the “common good” and personal satisfaction or private ownership, “liberal discourse would have us believe that there is a gap capable of being improved